Older blog entries for zeenix (starting at number 93)

The wonders of Finnish Government

So my greatest fears came to reality and after five months of processing on my application, the Finnish government denied me extension to my work-permit. They rejected my application on the grounds that I am unemployed and hence can't afford my stay in Finland anymore. They assumed this after calling my previous employer, who just told them that i don't work there anymore and even sent them this information in written. He is such a good guy that he never bothered to inform me of this. Neither did the police bothered to ask me if I have a new job or not. When i went to the police station, I asked the woman there if i need to submit the information about my new job if my employer has changed and she made it something very optional for me. After that whenever i used to call them to query the status of my application, they used to tell me to wait for the mail they will send me. I didn't get any mail until 24-08. When i opened the mail, i was astonished to see that the date of appointment they had given me was 16-08. After some examination of the letter and envelope, I found out that they have put the wrong address on the envelope so it went to the wrong place and it seemed to have been sent back by the nice guy living at that address. When the HR person from my company contacted the police about this matter, they had a completely different story about this.

Anyway! Now i have submitted a new application and submitted another 100e. They have promised to speed things up as much as possible this time but i can't imagine a bureaucracy doing something like this in less than a week. The funniest part of the story is that now until they make the decision, I can live in Finland but I can't work so I am on an unpaid vacation until at least a week.

Regarding iwmmxt:

Thanks to koen, now i have an ipaq with iwmmxt-enabled kernel+user-space on my ipaq. I also found recently that gcc does provide intrinsics for iwmmxt if you compile it for xscale. Another thanks to nchip (Rikku Voipio), who created an iwmmxt foreign toolchain for scratchbox on my request. Now, I think I should use this unpaid vaccation for something useful.

Oh my god! I almost forgot all about blogging but i kept on feeling there is something missing in life. :) Anyway, i recieved another visit from my sweet girl-friend, Tania. This time I had the phone with a nice camera so i took some pictures and recorded some nice videos too. She left home this morning and the house looks very very empy today. However, she promised to pay me a visit in two weeks.

We were supposed to leave for Stockholm on the cruise during the weekend but the guards stopped me from going since i didn't have a passport, which has been kept by the finnish authorities for months now since i commited the sinn of applying for the extension of my work-permit. Now I am going to a police station in a remote place tomorrow morning to 'be notified of the decision made on my request' and I have no way of knowing what that decision is. I hope it's a good news.

She came and she conquered:

On Friday evening, the Russian girl-friend of my friend Jussi paid a visit to Helsinki. Along came her beautiful sister-in-law, Tatyana (nicknamed Tanya). Although me and Tanya had been in communication through sms but I thought it can't possibly work because of her poor English and my complete incompetence in Russian language but to my surprise, it worked pretty well. I don't know about other Russian women but she turned out to be very different from Finnish women. E.g she didn't try to complicate things for us at all and expressed her feelings very bluntly. Moreover, it was quite impressive, how she was able to communicate with me so effectively with only a few words of English. She also taught me a few words of Russian language. So in crux she is now officially my girlfriend. This morning she left for St. Petersburg and now i won't see her for 4 weeks. :(

iwmmxt and me:

At my previous job, I was planning on writing iwmmxt optimizations for liboil just before i was fired. Since I am by nature obsessive, the idea got stuck to my mind. Unfortunately i didn't have any iwmmxt-enabled hardware either at my home or my office so i decided to get myself a hx4700 from huuto.net (kind of a Finnish ebay) and on Friday evening i bought it for 300e (along with a blue-tooth GPS module). I thought I'll be experimenting with it all weekend but the whole weekend was taken by Tania, so I didn't get even the time to think about it. I think i should first implement the iwmmxt-intrinsics for gcc and use that in liboil since that seems to be the way of liboil.

Clustering the 770s:

Last night an idea hit me! How about if we put a clustering-capable (mosix?) kernel on the 770? I have very little experience with clustering and most of the memories of that experience have vaporized with the passage of time but this is how i imagined the scenario: In a not so distant future when everyone have a 770 of his/her own, a person walks into a hot-spot, he/she connects to the WLAN and is given a choice to join the cluster formed by all the other 770s on the same network, if the person agrees, he hits ok and yay! another node is added to the cluster and everyone enjoys a processing power much greater than the one they had paid for. So all clustering experts out there! is this idea any practical at all? Please send me an email about your opinion on this.

Dating again:

I have a date in an hour (4th date of my life) and I'll be dating another girl the next weekend but i won't hope for much from any of the two girls because of the past experiences but I'll keep things to myself this time until something worth mentioning happens. :)

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.