Older blog entries for zeenix (starting at number 97)

The fate of the geeky kid

Turns out that the chopper they are selling at the verkkokauppa is a Chinese made copy of the original thing so it didn't last for even an hour. I returned it the next day. OTOH, the shocking tanks arrived within two days and now everyone in the office is fond of it. I have come to know of two shops in Helsinki that sells kits for many kinds of cool stuff, including RC helicopters and aeroplanes. Although according to Karoliina, a chopper is much more hard to control than an aeroplan but I am much more attracted to things that are capable of hovering. The only problem with these shops is that they are only open 9-5 like many other shops in finland. I wonder how these people are able to make money when they are open at a time when everyone is busy at their work. The country really sucks in some ways.

Regarding GOD

On one hand, there are people who think that this idea has a lot of potential and it's definitely worth a try but on the other hand there are people who think it's simply funny and stupid. I heard that thomas already has a project by (very astonishingly) the exact same name. I asked him to read my previous blog and tell me if our GOD is the same but so far he haven't commented. At least, Stefan and Michael Dominic thinks good about the idea and we intend to have a small discussion on it over a cup of coffee or something.

Yannick assigned two trainees to me to work with me on the video-whale but unfortunately both of them had to leave the company soon enough. However one of them named Sandeep thought of working on it as his final year project. His professor was reluctant to accept it as such due to the fact that the project is not theoretical enough. Recently, when i gave it a thought, i realized that video-whale can be a practical implication of this project and i suggested that to Sandeep. This morning he told me that he likes the idea and agrees with me that GOD would be much better idea to work on as a final year project. So seems we'll have at least one person on board having enough motivation and time to continue to work on the project. :)

As I mentioned last time, there will be two challenges:

1. Wrapping of essential GStreamer API to D-Bus
2. Making secure remote D-Bus possible

I can easily imagine how #1 can be accomplished since it would require more time than brains but i am still puzzled regarding #2. Implementing a new transport for D-Bus is hairy as you can't just implement some custom transport mechanism object and ask D-Bus to use that. Someone of #dbus suggested that i can probably combine ssh's built-in port forwarding feature with the TCP transport of D-Bus. But this solution wouldn't work out of the box either since D-Bus daemons don't listen on TCP by default because of obvious security concerns. Any have any ideas on this?

The first break-up of my life

Two weeks back when tania visited me, I realized that we have big problems, especially the huge language barrier. So I finally decided to break the relationship before it's too late. Although i wanted to remain a good friend of hers but seems thats not something she would like since she stopped talking to me as soon as i suggested the idea of being 'just friends' from now on. I must say that it was (and is) an extremely painful experience to say something like this to a person who is very much in love with you.

Awakes the geeky kid within

Some days back, someone on #maemo referred to the new virtual bluetooth keyboard. I read about the invention of this new technology some years back and had been waiting to see it hit the market and finally it's there. However, i am not too anxious to try it out so I'll wait till it becomes affordable. Once on thinkgeek, i started to browse the other products until i found the Micro R/C Helicopter. I was more than ready to hit the "Add to Cart" button until i saw the big note at the end of the page: "..we are unable to export this item outside of the USA due to charger voltage incompatibility." Quite a disappointment! But then i found The Ultimately Sadistic Office Gadget and since it was available for the whole world, i couldn't resist and ordered it. I think some of my friends here would find it as addictive as I would. I was also able to find other nice geeky toys but i think I'll buy them some other day when i have plenty of money to spare.

I was still upset about why i wasn't able to get the chopper and shared this with a Finnish friend on IRC. I was so happy when he told me that the same product is available in verkkokauppa (a famous computer shop here). So tomorrow morning, I am going to buy this cool toy. :P Lets see how long does these obsessions last.

Gstreamer On-Demand (GOD?)

Some days ago an idea hit me. The more I gave it a thought, the more possibilities came to mind and the problems related to those possibilities. Here is a short summary of the stream of thoughts: How about an on-demand gstreamer pipeline creator, yes a remote server that the client connects to and gives it a pipeline description in the form of xml and the server constructs the pipeline from the received xml and plays it. WOW! sounds interesting, would be great to have the client-side inside the Gstreamer editor. Oh wait! this would be very nice for the 770 experiments too: You create the pipeline using Gstreamer editor on the desktop machine and then just hit the deploy button and tada the pipeline plays on your 770. I don't know of others but I think this feature would make my life easier.

OK, seems it's not a bad idea after-all so lets think about how: how would the client and server communicate? what would be the medium and how many kinds of requests can the client make? etc etc. xml-rpc is what came to mind at first but then what about the security? I wouldn't want a random guy from some random country to play mp3s on my 770, would i? How about D-Bus? It is completely secure since atm it doesn't support communication between any remote communication out of the box.

That led me think of an easy and simple way to implement a secure transport for D-Bus. Fortunately, I was able to come-up with one: There is already a library called libssh and I have already tried it and it works (TM). The client-end uses libssh to connect to the remote machine over ssh, launches a particular application and then that launched application acts as a remote DBus proxy. I am not at all an expert on D-Bus but fortunately at least one of my friend is so I intend to discuss about this idea with him (and maybe other D-Bus devels). It would be nice if this ssh-based DBus transport idea turns out to be worth implementing since I am quite inclined towards implementing GOD (it's a good name isn't it? ;)) using D-Bus. Just a moment ago, another part of this great idea was revealed to me: Just wrap the GstPipeline API to DBus and call it the GOD. :) Suggestions and Criticism more than welcome but don't dare criticize when i actually start doing it. :)

Has the hacker died?:

Those who know me, must have observed that since the last one year or so (after I moved to Finland) I have not really been contributing anything significant (if at all) to the free (software) world. As I gave this issue a serious thought this weekend, I found out that there are several reasons (ordered by significance):

1. Laziness

2. Since now i am entirely on my own, I have to spare time for things like cooking and being a perfectionist i try to do it the best i can.

3. There were no night-clubs or bars in pk, so the weekend was mostly spent home, either relaxing or hacking. However, here i can always use the weekends to go out and get drunk.

4. Most of my time is spent in front of a computer in the office, mostly coding so it's a bit hard to force myself to do the same thing in the evening.

5. My headaches have recently taken more serious and painful shape. Last two days, I spent in quite agony as I was having pain at the back on my one eye at one particular spot. I think this is because one of my eye is much weaker than the other one and seems it has become more weaker as i have not been wearing glasses for some months and had been staring at the computer screen for hours. Tomorrow i have an appointment with the doctor for getting an eye-sight checkup and I'll get myself glass ASAP. I hope that solves this problem at least.

Learning Suomi:

I have finally managed to get into a Finnish language class at our office. So far, it seems I am the worse of all the other students. Nevertheless, I have learnt some words and sentences and today i was able to bug a cup of tea talking only in Finnish but soon had to switch to English when i realized i don't know how to say "The pot is empty" in Finnish. :)

The real face of Musharraf:

I wish I could read enough Finnish to be able to read the newspaper so I could know whats happening around the world. Recently, I had a long chat with my best friend Waheed. He told me about the murder of Nawab Akbar Bugti by the Pakistani Army. Here is the story in short:

The situation of the province of Baluchistan had always been going worse as the poverty increased everyday there. Baluchistan have been and still is providing the supply of natural gas to the whole country for several decades now and in return the people in there never get anything from it. Some years back, when the situation got desperate and nobody gave a damn, some of the people in the province turned towards violence and started to attack the gas pipelines. Soon this evolved into a full-fledged armed movement against the government when the government still didn't do anything real. Bugti had always been a voice for the rights of the people of Baluchistan so it was very natural for him to become part of this movement. In the beginning, it seemed the government is trying to solve the problem through diplomatic means but soon there came the news that he had been killed in an operation against the rebels. According to my mother (who is more happy on his death than anyone else), the press was first going in his favour but then they started to portray him as a ruthless insane killer, who committed his first murder when he was 15. I wouldn't think he was a bad person even if he really did commit this murder as I know that in those areas, the police and law only exist symbolically and revenge is the only law that exists there.

The government had always been telling the masses that it's actually the Tribal Leaders or Lords (Bugti was one of them) of Baluchistan are the ones who are the real culprits behind the poverty of the province as they take all the money government gives to the Province. Now if this was true, why would the Lords be so unhappy and why on earth they would give their lives for their cause? Pakistan was created to be a federation and in a federation, there are no provinces but rather very independent states who have the right to choose who to sell their resources/products on and at what price. Now if the Musharraf was/is the least concerned about all the people of Pakistan and especially that of Baluchistan, the least he can do is to "suggest" to give all the provinces the freedom that they deserve. Since he obviously never talks about it and looks at the freedom fighters as traitors and rebels, he quite obviously represents the bigger province and the military of Pakistan, who had and still are the ones who own Pakistan.

So Christian, do you still like Musharraf? By the way, my fear of dogs has almost died-out so you can't say that is the real reason i hate Musharraf anymore. :)

Ramadan begins

Somebody mentioned the (un)holly month of Ramadan has begun. I am so happy that this time I'll be saved from starvation again in the free country. Zaheer! Come-on man! how can refraining from food purify your soul? I really used to believe in all this but now that my mind is free of religious brainwashing, I find this all simply hilarious. Talking about the religions, this small funny video of 5 minutes effectively summarizes what religions are all about

The wonders of Nokia

Now that i applied as a Nokia employee and that the Nokia HR did it's job, I got the work-permit within a week this time. If it astonishes you how something that took five months previously was made possible on such short notice then I must tell you that a colleague of ours was given a work-permit within an hour when he applied for the second time. The work-permit is back-dated so all my work that i did after August 2, didn't get counted as illegal.

Another visit from my beloved:

So I received another visit from my sweet girl-friend this weekend. Although we really love each other, I must admit that we both are very different people. E.g she is very religious and also a Czarist. I hope our disagreements doesn't ruin our relationship.

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).