Advogato blog for tigert

1 Nov 2001

Thu, 1 Nov 2001 13:15:24 GMT

Whoa

It's been a while since I updated this.

14 Nov 2000

Tue, 14 Nov 2000 23:56:05 GMT

Airports.. pieces of no man's land

It's time for diary writing again.. seems like these waiting times at the airport are very productive for diary creation :)

I had an early flight from Helsinki to Stockholm, got to the airport before 7am. The good thing about that is there was not much queueing to check-in (even though I only took the certified-for-cabin -sized bag with me this time) Before I had a backpack with me, but looks like those are not very nice in the customs - they seem to get too much attention or something, and one ends up checked way too often. This nice wheel-and-a-handle thing is much more convenient in that sense.

For some reason an American Airlines security guy wanted to talk with me.. Maybe it is because my tickets had been purchased from the States or something. He asked me if I had packed my stuff myself and all that stuff you already know.. Of course it is nice to see that they do care about our safety :)

I am about to board the Chicago plane in about twenty minutes.. I have been waiting for this flight: 9.5 hours of (hopefully) sleep! I might as well read some of my largish (70MB!) inbox .. Lots of mail backlog to clear up. The last week has been a horrors for me to get all the stuff done for COMDEX, and I didnt have much time to rest before the flight. Sounds like a few days off after the show. That's the plan atleast.

Hmm.. looks promising, I am starting to yawn and the boarding should start very soon!

..and on the air again.. This time it's the American Airlines flight from Chicago to Las Vegas, landing will be in another one and a half hours, so there is plenty of time to write some diary stuff and other things.. I might as well compile my first kernel in 28000 feet! I actually managed to get some sleep during the previous 9.5 hour connection, which is good. I dont even want to know about the jetlag, better get some sleep at the hotel so I can do stuff at the booth during the week.

It will be fun to see the Helix Code folks again, it's been a while since the last visit and it is a lot cooler to talk with people in person instead of over irc or email. Seems like the remote working stuff is going pretty well though, but I have noticed it still makes a lot of sense to have phonecalls and meet in person every now and then. The bandwidth of IRC is not enough, one can get stuff done, but you dont hear the talk what happens in the cubicles, you dont see the naked monkeys on Peters cube, you dont smell the Bertucci's pizza, you dont poison yourself with the PopTarts (eek!) and you have no idea what you can do with Cozmo.com. (Hi Chris! :)

I noticed that in COMDEX the Helix Code booth is about 10 meters away from the SOT booth. The (finnish) acronym SOT stands for "Finnish Software Engineering" if I remember correctly. They make a localized version of Redhat for Finland and Eastern-European countries. (Yeah, original.. Though Turbolinux seems to be doing pretty well in that business in Asia..) I wonder if they have any of the finnish staff around, since they do have US offices too. That remains to be seen :) Sometimes it's a small world, even in COMDEX..

Ok, starting the final approach soon, so I'll wrap this up for now. I should be seeing Larry at the gate, where we were planning to take a cab together to the hotel. Going to write more stuff once I get this submitted first.

5 Nov 2000

Sun, 5 Nov 2000 18:25:37 GMT

Oh what a rainy day

We went to this "happy family together" -dinner thingy with my wife, and on the way there I saw something remotely familiar on the ad stand by the road. Now I admit I get a lot of inspiration by looking at the works of good artists, and it is probably something everyone is doing, but still this was pretty amusing.. :-)

27 Sep 2000

Wed, 27 Sep 2000 22:49:17 GMT

Today was a productive day

I did at least 1324452 little chart images for Jody to be included in Guppi, the chart tool for Gnumeric and Gnome. Yes, now it is time to sleep. All the saving of the PNG files has exhausted me %-)

Oh, yes, the network is back up again and works. So tigert.gimp.org works too.

... gotta hit the sack now.

22 Sep 2000

Fri, 22 Sep 2000 19:19:19 GMT

Oh my..

Our kind network provider decided to move their offices and the services will be down for the weekend. So it's modem time if I want some TCP/IP.. Yes, this also means tigert.gimp.org is down.

Things like this just show me how easily one takes high speed net access and all this technology for granted, even though a few years ago nothing like this existed. It is scary sometimes.

I think I am going to go outside this weekend. Time to take some photos and to enjoy the nice and colourful autumn nature with my wife.

Yes, I intend to come back too, dont worry :)

6 Sep 2000

Wed, 6 Sep 2000 14:52:47 GMT

Waiting at the airport..

I am sitting at London Heathrow airport waiting for a connecting flight to Boston.. The first flight was delayed for over 2 hours because of a technical failure in the air conditioning/pressure system.. Finally after trying to repair it for a while the tech staff decided they need to change the plane. Duh. On the other hand it is good that they take security and mainteinance seriously :)

I shot some photos while wandering bored around the airport.. I wish Advogato supported linking of images somehow.. Maybe raph doesnt want to have us fill the harddisk with random holiday photos, but I wish I could even link an image from a remote server.. On the other hand that would allow the use of Web Bugs(tm) to track you, dear readers (are there any? Hello? :) and I wouldnt even think of committing such a horrible crime! But nevertheless, I think it would be nice to have a possibility to add an image to the diary every now and then. Hm.. Of course linking to images via a hyperlink would work.. I need to think about this.

Ok, they are starting to board the plane finally, gotta get in the big aluminium bird!

. . .

..and finally at Helix Code. After a nice cab-ride from the airport I arrived to the office and met the hard workers who were still hacking. We decided we were hungry and went off to Kendall Square to get some protein units. The first chinese restaurant was closed, but the second one was open. I remember eating shrimps and chicken, but I was really tired.. (the time was around 5 am in Finland at that time) So off to bed. The "barracks" turned out to be an excellent place to stay, very nice apartment with a nice, comfortable bed.. YummyzZzZZZ....

. . .

Ok, now I feel good! Got some nice sleep and it's a beautiful morning, the sun is shining through the windows and I am sitting in the living room writing my diary and waiting for the other guys to wake up.. One tends to wake up in strange times when changing timezones :)

30 Aug 2000

Wed, 30 Aug 2000 20:33:33 GMT

Back to stuff!

I had a nice holiday and it's time to get back to work. My friend ettore greeted me with a icon request list yesterday, and I have been hacking on them. Lots of thinking on how to do good and intuitive (the word starts to sound like a cliché to me..) icons.. I like making icons but some of them are comparable to real mini-artwork, when I think about the creative process. Lots of sweat and hard thinking. Maybe I should start printing them and framing into tiny little wooden frames and hanging them in my wall.. :)

I played with gphoto and my digicam, creating a nice hack-kludge webcam, go see if you want here. The good part is I run it from my laptop, so having it with me, I can "broadcast" from anywhere - I just need a net connection. There is a drawback though, I dont know what the camera likes to be scripted and taking photos every N seconds for extended periods of time. Thus I only update once per minute or so and it is running only occasionally. I dont even consider linking the webcam page from my frontpage.. It is a fun hack anyway, and if you are lucky, you can spot me hacking with Gimp :)

I also got around and installed the latest Gimp-print plugin. The results are cool. I dont need to print anything from windows anymore, the quality is awesome already. I cant wait to get raph's cool hacks into it, then it will be clearly superior to the windows drivers. It is excellent even already. Way to go!

11 May 2000

Thu, 11 May 2000 04:13:21 GMT

Uhm. Another day of work fame

New screenshots in the Evolution page

US keyboard is not exactly ideal for HTML since the < >'s are in completely braindead places for me ;P

Good nightzZzZZzzZ..

14 Apr 2000

Fri, 14 Apr 2000 20:32:09 GMT

Another friday, a week is over

I tried the USB stuff with 2.3.99pre-something kernel, and it worked fine. However the kernel crashed when I copied the linux source tree to keep a fresh copy before applying the ac-patch.

I then decided to go back to stable kernel, but I needed the USB for my mouse and Wacom. (no. it doesnt work in Gimp yet. You can use the tablet as a generic mouse without pressure etc. A serial version works fine. Xinput support for the usb version is on the works though..) Well the non-fun part is the backport USB driver for 2.2.x doesnt like my tablet at all. The backport driver is 0.2 I think and 2.3.99 kernel has version 0.5. The USB trackball works fine but the wacom just goes into a weird state, unplugging the tablet fixes it. It spews this to kern.log:

Apr 12 21:03:39 fun112 kernel: usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status
3, frame# 1114
Apr 12 21:03:39 fun112 kernel: usb-uhci-debug.h:
uhci_show_td d49a1de0 (149A1DE0) 
Apr 12 21:03:39 fun112 kernel: usb-uhci-debug.h: MaxLen=07
DT0 EndPt=1 Dev=3, PID=69( IN  ) (buf=0a0ae400)
Apr 12 21:03:39 fun112 kernel: usb-uhci-debug.h: Len=07 e3
SPD IOC Stalled Babble

I wonder what it is. On the other hand, it is pointless to wonder, the current driver works fine. I just wish the backport was updated at some point. Or I just need to play with the devel kernel again.. Gotta take backups :)

Anyway, sleep time. Good night and happy hacking people!

7 Apr 2000

Fri, 7 Apr 2000 21:48:32 GMT

Ack

I got a broken NIC. That is why my site was downlast night and this morning.. I first thought that the network was down but I found out my old tired SMC ultra was not feeling too well.

fix-a-fix

I took a Tulip card from the other box and got my connection working again, then decided to stick the SMC to the other box, and it worked. Go figure.

I got Redhat 6.2 in a shrink wrap box. They have a sticker of the most important Linux commands that you can stick to your monitor or keyboard. Handy. The box also contained a little book consisting of one page ads of all kinds of commercial software packages. Umm. I dont know what to think. We just need more free software. But dont write a napster client, please : )

I heard Redhat 6.2 does not start inetd at all unless you need it. Jonathan said that they turned a lot of services off by default. This is very good. I might consider having a look at it for a change - it's been a long time of debian lately. Not that I am not happy with it, it is also great.

Raph, I now have an Epson. Send me the Stuff. : )