Tollef Fog Heen's blog

Today is Friday, and I haven't blogged for a few days, been busy packing, travelling and so on. I kinda hate to blog a few days late, since I then miss out on events and so on. Will have to try, though.

Wednesday, I woke up and began packing. At some point, my father called, and I discovered I had misread the time my train left, so I got a bit stressed out. Managed to get a fairly cheap ticket, even so, and chose a "comfort" ticket, which meant free tea, coffee, papers and most importantly: a wall socket for my laptop. Managed to get a lot of work done.

Because of me misreading on the ticket, Karianne had a chance to drop by before I left, which was good. I think I have packed everything I need to as well as having cleaned my apartment.

I got home fairly late, at about 23:45. Had a nice chat with my father before he went to bed at approximately 01:00. I ended up sitting around checking mail and such, and at some point, Karianne showed up. She had gone to bed a few hours before, but couldn't sleep. We talked for a little while, and I think I napped a bit in my chair. She then went back to sleep and so did I a little later, my body tired, but then a little more awake.

Got up at about nine, had some breakfast and went to work. It was nice seeing people again, and we had a bunch of fairly good discussions. I also met two new people who are going to help out with selling advertisements on the web site. They seemed like a nice bunch of people. Upgraded a few kernels on the servers, installed a new Opteron box, so I got a bit of work done. Face-to-face meetings are so much more productive when it comes to working out solutions and agreeing than just emailing each other. I also discussed a bit about what I'm going to work on in the summer, and as usual, I'll end up being busy.

One of the servers I installed a new kernel on didn't boot, so I went to the server room on my way home and discovered that it was stuck on a "missing keyboard" prompt. Fiddling with the BIOS didn't help. I have no idea why server motherboards still come with that as even an option.

Got home, my father had bought shrimps for an evening meal, and Stein (Kroghdal) came over. He's an interesting guy to talk to, and for once I was the one explaining things to him and not the other way around (since we talked a bit about how we do things at NTNU compared to UiO, where he's a professor). I picked up my laptop at some point to see if Karianne was online, which she was, more or less waiting for me to come online so she could go to bed. We talked a little bit, then Stein left, then talked a bit more, then my father went to bed, and we continued talking until I suddenly passed out from lack of sleep. I woke up at 03:30 and saw a disappointed Karianne in the logs.. Sent her both a message on ICQ as well as a short mail with an apology before going to bed, properly this time.

Woke up at eight o'clock on today, lay around for a while in order to try to catch some more sleep, but without luck. Breakfasted, packed up and then went to Hemsedal with my father. Playing around with the GPS, a nice car-powered power supply and such in the car.. gpsdrive is a cool piece of software, but I need to get a decent set of maps.

Up until now, I have been most satistified with my laptop. It's light enough, fast enough and has a decent screen. Lately, two problems have begun to prop up: The first is the AC adapter being broken. Actually, it's not the adapter, it's the the plug in the computer itself. I have actually managed to wear that more or less out. A quick visit to IBM should fix that, though. The second problem has to do with heat. Either, the newer 2.6 kernels are really, really funky when it comes to power management, or the CPU has turned old and grumpy and decided to get a bit hotter. Of course that gives me fair amount of problems, since the system then locks up intermittently, loses keystrokes and so on. I wonder what to do about this, since the system gets increasingly unuseable for me, and my laptop is turning from something I really, really enjoy working with into some sort of monster I have to fight instead.

This is written while on my way en route from Oslo to Hemsedal, where my father has his cabin. (He is driving, so don't worry about me blogging while driving, I don't even have a driving license.) About three minutes after we started driving, dad said "oh, we forgot to bring any CDs". I looked at the CD player in the car. No sound inputs, of course. How silly: I have a fair amount of music on my laptop, but I can't use it in the car, just because of a design defiency in the car's CD player.

My mind started wandering, and a little later, I decided that what was missing wasn't a mini-jack connector to the stereo, it was a proper bus. The car should have an USB (or bluetooth or something else, fairly nice and cheap) interface. Not just for audio (which would be nice, the stereo would just show up as a sound card to the laptop), but also for getting stats such as speed, direction, fuel comsumption and any other data the car is registering.

Of course, since people who design cars aren't open-source people and don't think in terms of open systems communicating through well-defined and nice protocols, everything I have described here are just wild dreams. Would be cool if they came true, though.