Older blog entries for msa (starting at number 10)

Went to the EWMDA-2 workshop in Canterbury. Not much to say, I was sick during the whole trip. Perhaps I am allergic to the MDA initiative?

Didn't see any ghosts either. :(

Went to the UML2003 conference. Held a presentation about difference calculation between two models, and taking the union of several changes done to a base model. The conference was nice, with the panel discussions and invited speakers being the most interesting.

San Francisco was an interesting city as well. Hills up and down, looong streets, neatly laid out in a grid. Weird how the setting changed so quickly. First you're in the tourist area, then in the "better" apartment areas, then Chinatown, Financial centre, shopping centre, and suddenly in some less appealing places. And people were extremely nice, which surprised me. Several people just nodded to me and greeted in passing, which would never happen here (.fi).

It's been a great summer! I went to the University of Twente in Holland to the MDAFA2003 workshop which was really nice. It seems to be a bit of a "thinktank" for modelling-related questions. Friendly and clever people. I also met a relative whom I hadn't seen for ages, and spent a couple of evenings with him and his friend. We've also decided to go to the UML 2003 conference in San Fransisco later this year.

I've moved to a new apartment here in my home town. I'm very happy with it, and after buying a new computer and getting the ADSL line moved in I'm ready to surf again ;)

I'm back! I somehow managed to lose my Advogato password and cookies. Not wanting to create another user, I was a bit lost. But then I got hit by luck: the Mozilla password database.

I had at some point said "remember this id/password", and it actually did know it! So logging in was easy, as long as Mozilla's database was ok. Unhappy with the situation, I naturally wanted to extract the password from Mozilla. Unfortunately (well, you could say smart design), I didn't know how to do this. So, away with cookies, start Mozilla, tcpdump port 80 traffic and let Mozilla log in myself. Password easily extracted from the traffic dump. Schweeet.

So, what has happened? Well, I did graduate. It feels great, I recommend it to everybody :-). Then I've been doing my PhD studies for a couple of months. Without an actual subject, I've been looking yet more into modelling and metamodelling, as well as some other stuff people here at the department are specialised in. That's the theory side, in practice I've been coding some C++, which is less cool, given that salaries here are, naturally, academic... We are writing a paper for the next UML conference. The deadline is pretty soon, so we'll see shortly how things are going...

Hmmm not very active now am I?

We've been working really hard on Civil, it is looking much more playable than before. Which is good. Downsides are there are quite a bit of stuff that is either broken or unimplemented, but we'll get there... Cool news is that Mandrake Cooker picked it up in the contrib section :-)

Personally I'm going to bits and pieces with my thesis.. Working is ok, explaining your work is boring. And I have a deadline. Bah.

Civil has reached version 0.80, woot! This release has debian and redhat packages available, so I hope we will get some feedback, chakie and TheCorruptor have worked really hard to get so far. Unfortunately we almost immediately found a couple of severe bugs, I do hope people won't be too disappointed and instead see that it has a great potential of being a very playable game!

Mantis seems ok for small enough projects, but I really dislike how it doesn' integrate into the SCM at all - one has no idea what commit fixed a certain bug. Also, it doesn't keep a very deep history of the bug's state, only the most recent state.

I've tested the bugtracking system Mantis a bit. It's seems quite good for small enough projects, but some features seem to be missing. I'll say more when I've used it more... The maintainer seems to be active, which is a very good thing.

Civil got some nice gfx by TheCorruptor, very good-looking small infantry figures :). Can't wait to see the cavalry and artillery units! Made the editor faster, and added a primitive undo function.

Had my last exam on Tuesday, and it went quite well. Only things left are a laboratory work (deblurring of images) and the thesis... The course in computer vision has been interesting, even though it's quite basic stuff. But how i hate Matlab! As a programming language, it simply sucks bigtime and forces one to use bad solutions, because of a totally underdeveloped language. Argh!

Work on civil has been nonexistant for me, but others have been a bit active on the AI side. Sweet.

15 May 2002 (updated 15 May 2002 at 14:07 UTC) »

The JVM project is in! Whee! Final stripped executable is around 50 kilobytes, but we can hardly claim it is a complete CLDC virtual machine. In fact it does have several bugs. (Never trust software with a version number ending in ".0". Especially if it is called RedHat.) If the department starts coughing up money, people could be interested in continuing the work... I should probably put up a webpage for it, but now I'm so completely tired of it that a rest is needed.

Not much has happened. Patching up Civil every now and then with various stuff, but I wonder how much the gfx can be made faster without going to insane information keeping. Should start on a layer, but school gets in the way (yay, only 3 courses left!)

The JVM has the deadline tomorrow, and still some documentation should be written. Bah, everybody is fed up with it anyway...

Repository work is as slow as always, although I did make the autoresolution when joining two branches (or updating) to also work on "plain" attributes.

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