Older blog entries for zeenix (starting at number 89)

Adventure of Catalonia:

So I was in Catalonia the last week for attending GUADEC. The real fun in such events is that you finally get the chance to actually meet all the people you have been working and chatting for years. The biggest problem in Spain was language. I had a really tough time getting to the GNOME village the first night but i was so happy to find some fellow gnomes on the railway station. Me and Christian paid for the a week of wifi usage but it never worked for us but no worries as after our first night in the village we never needed to use it as we were having parties till late night every day. :) The coolest party was that arranged by fluendo guys. Juhan Dahlin seems turned out to be a very naughty kid. At fluendo party, he started to snatch and swap ID badges of people. So in the end, everyone was looking for his/her badge.

Many of the presentations were nice and informative but many were equally boring. No! i won't say which ones were boring. :) Since i volunteered for some tasks, i was given a nice red t-shirt. Some nice guy took a picture of it but it turned out to be so dark that you can barely recognize anyone in it. :( All the pictures are under the "GUADEC2006" tag on flickr and I managed to find some of mine and i am providing the link here (so my dear fans don't have to search all over again for them :)) :

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=179687318&size=l
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=179041478&size=l
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=179009040&size=l
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jav/179763644/

I spent the last three nights in Barcelona, first one at a big night club with Wim, Jemmi, and Tim. Since Christian never joins the late-night fun, I ended-up at Wim's place in the morning. We had party the second night as well but i decided to go back earlier with Christian so i can watch a few BSG episodes. We went to a place (i don't remember the name) to get some fast food. In the queue i saw a very hot chick. I asked her where she was from and she said France. Later I realized that she was looking at me too so i went to her and asked if she would like to come with us to watch BSD episodes. Astonishingly she agreed. I came back to our table and told Christian that but he didn't believe me. After eating we went to her table and started to talk and after she finished eating we started to walk towards Christian's apartment. Turned out that she was much fluent at Catalan or Spanish than English and Christian soon realized that she didn't understand what i actually said to her since she asked him several times if we are going back to the apartment. Christian tried to make things work by suggesting that we should first go to a bar but I quickly rejected it immediately thinking of it as an unneeded step since she is already going with us to our apartment. I wish I knew some Catalan so I could know what was going on. After walking a km, she left us saying that she wants to go to a bar to meet some friends.

Joined on the 4th of July:

So yesterday I got back to the land of the blonde and beautiful and today was the first day at Nokia.

From Cardinal to Nokia

Three weeks ago i got a nice job offer from Nokia and after that I was supposed to go through a personality test, which takes a complete day. Since I was employed at Cardinal at that time and I didn't want to lie to my boss, I was wondering what should I tell him about my absence for a complete day. While I was wondering that, my good boss relieved me of this tension by firing me. The reason he told me was that he was getting reports of my inefficiency, but if that was the case then he could have warned me or something.

I told my future boss about this and he tried his best to speed things up for me, which is why i got the contract signed today, normally it might had taken a week or two more. I had been jobless for two weeks and Kela (the social security organization of Finland) doesn't give you anything for only two weeks unemployment. I really wonder where all the money the gov. takes from me goes to.

Anyway, now I am a "Software Design Engineer" at Nokia Multimedia. The job is supposed to be almost the same as it was in Movial but this time I'll get a very nice pay and a free GSM phone and connection (company pays the bill).

GUADEC:

So tomorrow exactly at this hour, I fly to Barcelona. It's a great relief to know that there is Internet provided at the gnome village. I hope my complete lack of Spanish or Catalan language skills doesn't ruin my trip. Let's see how it all goes.

Helsinki is small

Recently, I got reminded that Helsinki is not a big town after-all. I wanted some books on ARM assembly but to my surprise I couldn't find it anywhere, neither the shops nor the libraries. Yesterday I traveled to a far place to reach the so-called Technology library but couldn't find a single book regarding ARM. I already bought "ARM System Developer's Guide" from amazon and seems I'll have to buy everything from amazon from now own. The good book shops in Helsinki can get it for you but it takes two weeks and I figured that the price is still higher than the cost of ordering a book on amazon (including the shipment and other costs).

Life:

Many times i feel like the Marvin (from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") about life. On Sunday morning, Johanna told me that she has realized she doesn't feel enough for me so it's over between her and me.

I don't know whether it's related to my sadness or not that i got a serious inflammation in my throat the same day. I went to the doctor and he gave me some antibiotic and a certificate for a three day's leave from office. I first thought the doctor was wrong that I'll need a three day's rest but now it seems that he was more than correct. However, the antibiotics made me more sick than i was.

GUADEC:

While resting, i was browsing the GUADEC schedule and found out that i was very wrong about the schedule. For some reason, i assumed that it's a 4-days conference, so i had booked my flights on 21st and 29th of June. Now when i called the airberlin office, they told me that they'll be happy to change the dates if i can pay a 300e more. So i asked Quim for help and we agreed to share this extra cost. Now I'll arrive at Barcelona on 23-06 and depart on 03-07. Thanks to Christian, who will let me stay at his house the last two days after the village closes-up.

Shran:

While playing with the bridge filters using my laptop and ensonic's 770, i came across the nasty problem of duplicate packets again. I had this problem since the first day i started to use ethernet bridging. Paul was using the wifi to wired-ethernet bridge on my laptop to connect his laptop to the outside world when he was staying at my place and he reported this problem for the first time. Although i am quite sure that it's an upstream problem but since i am using a kernel-image from an ubuntu package, I filed it on the Ubuntu bugzilla rather than the kernel bugzilla.

At first I thought this bug will block my work on Shran but then i realized that Shran might just be a solution for this if i am correct about whats going on: the bridge between two (or more) ethernet interfaces, just puts every packet it sees on one interface to the other. Suppose there is a bridge between two ethernet interfaces, A and B. If there is a packet on interface A, the bridge puts that packet to interface B. Now the bridge sees the same packet on interface B so it puts that packet back to A. I have no idea if the bridging code in the bridge.ko modules has any capability of sensing that the packet it is seeing on an interface is the one it put there itself. At least, i can't think of any possible way, it can do that. But if this is so then there should be an infinite number of duplicate packets, not just a few.

2nd date of my life:

It seems it really does happen when you least expect it. I was in onnela last weekend as usual where I met Johanna. She is a beautiful and nice girl who is as much attracted towards me as I am towards her (a combination that I thought as impossible). I gave her my email and told her to contact me if she doesn't lose interest. Although because of the past experiences, I thought I'll never hear from her after that but I was still waiting for her email. But wow! two days later I received an email from her. After that we were in communication and last night we had our first date. We intend to go out together once more before she leave for Berlin on Friday.

Wow! already one month since i last blogged.

The poor gentoo user:

Poor ensonic had to wait the whole day for getting gnome2.14 installed on his laptop. After waiting the whole day for all the dependencies to be compiled on his slow laptop, he is still waiting. Since he wanted the build (or installation i have no idea what to call it) to continue and his laptop's fan seems to try to emulate the noise of a helicopter, he had to do this to let us sleep while his laptop keeps up the build during the night. I really don't understand his need for gentoo, it's more a problem on a slow machine than a solution.

The new job:

Good points:

• A nice fixed pay
• A pool table
• Very flexible hours
• Bright prospects of visits abroad

Bad points:

• Have to use and develop on/for windows too

GUADEC this year:

Seems this time i *will* attend GUADEC. Since i have an EU residence permit, i don't have to deal with some stupid clerk at some embassy who doesn't understand that my visit has nothing to do with my employer. I bought the flight tickets last month and was trying to get some place to stay for free since i am low on money. Quim recently told me that they can provide me free meals and stay if i can volunteer for any activity at GUADEC, so i happily volunteered for the 'Infodesk & GUADEC Committee office'. I hope i am charming enough for representing GUADEC/GNOME. :)

Shran:

One thing i have learnt over the last few years on software industry is that the labels and logos are more important the the actual work they represent, if you really want to market your projects. So i have chosen the name 'Shran' for the open-sourced version of my band-width manager project, named after the Commander Shran of the Andorian Imperial Guard. Actually i didn't just choose that name because i like this character but there is also the fact that the logo of the project would be the upper part (only) of the andorians, only showing the two antennas facing opposite directions. This i think nicely represents the project (hint: two antennas ~ two bridged ethernet interfaces). Unfortunately, i am not at all qualified to draw the logo myself. I would appreciate if anyone can help me bring my imagination to reality.

So far i haven't done any actual work because i had been wasting time on trying to make wifi working on my mac-mini. But no more.

Living with a German Trekkie:

As many of us know that ensonic has recently moved to Finland and is staying with me. It's really fun living with him and his craze about Star Trek is far more elevated than mine. I have been borrowing DVDs of TNG from a colleague and we both watch at least two episodes everyday. Since i have all the episode of enterprise, i recently introduced him to it and he seems to like it.

Moreover, he seems to be a very good cook which is a very big +. I have started to envy his girl-friend. :)

From Movial to Cardinal:

I resigned from Movial 3 days ago to join Cardinal. The pay is good and AFAIK, the work will also be quite fun (DVB). I might even write the much awaited DVB plugin(s) for GStreamer after knowing how DVB works.

A Confession:

Alright, alright! i take back every word i said about vlc and mplayer projects. Now everyone should be happy. Although not all of it was wrong but i must confess that the rant as a whole in the previous blog was just stupid.

Visa problems again:

Who wouldn't want to visit Russia if he gets an invitation from a beautiful girl living in St. Petersburg? At least I won't miss this chance so i thought I'll visit st. Petersburg in the coming easter holidays. I thought getting the visa wouldn't be a big problem but it turned out that it is. They require my Finnish visa to expire after 6 months of my visit to Russia and my visa expires in august. I then thought that I'll get my visa extended before then but it turned out that the Finnish authorities will take 4 months in the process. 4 months? Can you believe that? So I explained the situation to Tania but she says that it wont be possible for her to visit Helsinki before May. :(

The Lion and the Jackal:

The user hears that VLC player is a very nice media player that is available for all his favorite OS's, he gets excited, boots into his favorite OS, downloads and installs VLC player and plays his favorite DVD or AVI file into it. Oh cool! The interface is more pleasing to the eye than that of the crappy gst-based totem.. wait.. There is a pause.. no! nothing to worry, thats just OS taking some time to read some crappy bits off the DVD so a few seconds pause in a 1.5 hour movie isn't something big. OK the pause is over now i can see the rest of the movie without any stupid jerks and pauses.. but wait! its didn't play from where it paused.. the user seeks back to watch those seconds he missed. The true greatness of the VLC player is unveiled. Now what caused this 'skip'? I am quite sure the VLC guys are using the system-clock since if they were intelligent people they would know that they must use GStreamer instead of re-inventing wheels for no good reason at all.

Back in the days when we were busy making the video-wall, i had to keep fighting with my boss that we should be using gstreamer and not VLC. Although VLC players had a lot of capabilities that Gstreamer didn't have but in the end it was me who won and not my boss. The reason? simple, VLC is a player while gstreamer is designed to be a generic multimedia framework so people can built anything they want on top of it. The only argument a videolan guy i know provided me for not using gstreamer was: "We don't like the unportability of gstreamer". Now:

1. Which platform people have not ported gstreamer for? One of my colleague told me the other day that he got gstreamer working on windows even.

2. Still there will be plenty of platforms for which gstreamer might not have been ported to but does that imply that you should start to write framework from scratch and then port that to all platforms? Is Gstreamer something carved on a rock, gstreamer's code is not available to public or gstreamer devels don't encourage any contribution?

"A day's life of a Lion is better than a 100 day's life of a jackal" is something i had heard/read a lot in my childhood. So videolan and mplayer guys, the thing is that your ignorance is hurting the whole unix multimedia development community and in the long run it will (mark my words) hurt the users too in the long run. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. :)

Google's interview:

A few days ago, i went through google's interview. I was being asked questions as if i was fresh out of the school and would remember everything i read there and never got to use in the real life. Anyway, they failed me and i don't feel bad about it at all since i would had been subjected to some more non-sense stupid tests if it had continued. I think an employer/company can quite easily get to know if he/she/it should be hiring a particular person or not by looking at his past experience and some simple interview. There is no need for real-time evaluation. If an employer/company doesn't know that, I doubt it's someone/somewhere i belong in/with.

cat < /dev/random > /dev/thoughts:

Ever since I left believing in religion, I had been defending the west and it's ways in every circle I had been part of. Many times, I used to be a victim of laughters and accusations. In the moments of dispair I used to tell myself that I don't belong here and one day I'll live my life happily and freely where i truely belong. Now that i have lived a few months in a 'free country', I find myself in new problems. I never thought life in Finland shall be so lonely and it would be so difficult to make friends and never ever imagined that people calling themselves your friend one day shall not even care to reply to any of your hails the next day and the last but the most painful that people will be scared of you.

I think I better surrender all hopes of making humans better. The only thing that can get better is the overall knowledge and skills of an average human. An average humans shall always remain an average human, his mind shall always remain traped in whatever his society teaches him and he shall not question the status-quo unless he is desperate.

Oh well! Somebody please invent the warp-drive, perhaps i'll have better luck with vulcans, andorians or klingons.

The foolish friend:

"A foolish friend is far more dangerous than wise enemy" is a famous saying in urdu (don't know if the same exists in english or not) that i never doubted upon. The recent events in the islamic world reveals the extreme ignorance of the muslims at large. Wouldn't it had been better if Soviets were able to capture Pakistan and Communism (Marxism to be exact) had become a religion of these people? I would imagine that would had been much better, since Communism have a very sound scientific bases behind it unlike the traditional religion which have nothing but blind faith to offer.

As part of their large-scale sponsorshipt of religious extremism to fight their war against Communist war machines, the filthy capitalists bastards also elevate the image of Muhammad in the islamic world well above that of God (no one will want to kill you if you curse God in pk but many would want to kill you if you curse Muhammad), e.g "The 100", wow! what a book. Muhammad's name tops all. No wait! the author explain, "I am talking about the most _influential_ people not the greatest ones". Bull shit!

Anyway! now that the west chose the foolish friend over the wise enemy and the wise enemy is long dead, who is going to deal with this foolish friend and how?

Life:

Salla did prove to be different since she kept her promise and is in contact. When we met her the first time, she said Paul should meet her sister (Vehka) as she thinks they have a lot in common. So this week i asked Salla for a meetup and to bring her sister with her so she can meet Paul. We met in a bar for a beer and it turned out that Vehka really had atleast a few things in common with Paul (they cycle a lot, are vegetarians and don't like McDonalds etc). It was fun meeting with these cute/nice girls, though it was Paul who was mostly talking in that meeeting, since when Paul starts to talk, there is no end to it. Paul went back home this saturday and now i am living alone again. Nothing to worry about, i am getting used to it now.

This saturday I finally joined the Capoeira club. As I expected, it requires a lot of energy. I think I really need to be in such an activity as my body is going extremely out of shape because of sitting on a chair all day. There is also an oppertunity of meeting beautiful girls. :) Today my whole body is in pain.

Airport extreme and Me

Since paul is no more here, i really need a machine to access the Internet through the ethernet-bridge on my laptop . The most straight forward way was to make the airport extreme of my mac mini working in Linux. First I tried to get the exact branch of Linux (netdev-2.6) through git and as everyone is well aware getting git to work is nothing very straight-forward. After some more hard-work, it turned out that the dscape patch does some i386-specific magic so the kernel won't compile for PPC with the dscape patch included. Great!

Another option (that i wont be very happy about) is to boot into OS X but I failed to make an ad-hoc network between the mac mini and my laptop for some weird reason.

If nothing else works, i think i should just buy a USB wlan adaptor for the mac mini.