Tollef Fog Heen's blog

GUADEC is over and I'm currently sitting on the train back home. It's been a good conference, meeting new and old people. The talks were ok-ish, but I realize that the real reason I go to conferences is the people. Chatting about both technical and non-technical issues is something I learn a lot from. In addition to the DDs there, the Skolelinux people, random GNOME/Ximian/Novell/RedHat hackers, I had the pleasure of meeting Bdale's family.

At conferences, I have a tendency to run into Matthew Garrett, and I did this time as well. He helped me get ACPI working again, even though we didn'tmange to fix it properly. (Using a couple of patches off "the kernel bugzilla":bugzilla.kernel.org.) I fiddled around with it on the train and it seems the ACPI controller doesn't like to have its interrupt method (level or edge) fiddled with while restoring, so I just added it to the mask of reserved interrupts. It now seems to work just fine, suspend - resume - suspend works, and I think my network card works after resume. Yay, yay, yay!

I haven't blogged in my diary for some days, I haven't had the time or taken the effort when I've gotten back from work or being out with Karianne. I've had a good but exhausting week, mostly courtesy of work. We were out DDR-ing on Thursday, and I briefly visited Arcon at Blindern on Friday, saying "Hi" to Karianne before heading home and starting to pack.

Saturday morning, I took the train to Kristiansand. Nice trip, fairly uneventful. I finished "The Da Vinci Code" on the way -- a very nice and interesting crime novel. Also, I begun hacking a bit on the Debian packaging of Rekall, but there's still lots of work left there.

When I arrived at the train station, I called Sonja, who is coordinating the housing at GUADEC, and she drove down and picked me up. I got a small tour on campus and also in the gym where we're staying for the first night. Dropped off my luggage. As I got back on campus, I nearly ran into Matthew Garrett, so we ended up sitting about updating each other on what had happened lately, and he helped me with a few problems with my laptop, namely the broken ACPI stuff. My laptop is now able to suspend, resume, suspend, resume. Yay.

Matthew, Scott (James Remnant) and I went out eating, fairly good food, but a bit too little of it. Walked back to the college where a bunch of people were waiting. Took the bus to the school, organized things a bit, then started on the first fire-watch. Nothing much has happened, and I've been able to hack a bit, both on Rekall and on my IMAP folder status thingy, which might end up evolving into a MUA.

Most of today was spent helping webdeal with one of their Opteron servers. They are more used to Intel hardware and *BSD, while said machine runs Linux. They have had some performance problems with another one, so I helped them tune this one a bit, and it ended up with fairly nice performance.

After some food, I went to the server room and continued to work on the server, now reinstalling it with Debian (we had done the tests in a Debian chroot inside a Mandrake installation, since that was the CD I had available). Unfortunately, I had to cross-install using the already existing installation as the Woody CD didn't find the RAID controller. It worked fairly well, but during this process the whole circuit breaker decided that the rack had overloaded it, so it threw itself and the whole rack went quite silent quite fast. After a few phone calls and running about, I managed to get it all running again, just a few systems needed a manual fsck.

Got the system installed and left the server room, tired but happy.

A rack losing its power and then all the UPSes failing makes a hell of a lot of noise before becoming very, very quiet. And then it makes a lot of noise when you make the power come back.

Note to others: Do not, I repeat, do not attach a full rack of servers to one 10 amp circuit, and do not attach the UPS-es to each other so you'll be sure to overload the whole shebang.

Yeah, and fix stuff, don't document workarounds when the fix is easy.

This hasn't been the most productive of days, I've been doing a little registrar work and cleanups, but not very much. A bit tired after last night. Apart from the registrar work, I've written a draft requirements spec for a project, which will be quite interesting once it goes live.

Finally got around to signing all the keys from Debconf 4. I ran into a couple of problems, some related to the tool I'm using, gpgmailsign (which, after what I've understood, works fairly similarly to Keybuk's signkey ), some related to the fact that some people don't have any encryption keys connected to their key at all, which is in theory fine, but I really don't want to diverge from my usual way of signing keys. Another problem which popped up was GPG messing up (no valid OpenPGP data found), missing key on keyserver, etc. If you're still missing my signature from Debconf, drop me a mail and I'll see what I can do.

Woke up by my alarm clock at about 08:30. A bit tired after yesterday, since I ended up going to sleep a bit after I intended to. I blame "The Da Vinci Code", a really nice and interesting book. Went to work fairly quickly and skipped breakfast (since we have such excellent lunches at work, and I really don't do breakfasts, I've found out). After work, I went to Bodil and Eirik's where we first made some dinner. After dinner, the fire alarm in the whole building went off, so we went outside. After we had discovered it wasn't a real fire, I turned the bells of and reset the whole system.

We then played a role-playing game called Romance in which the players are debutants in a 1600-century Spanish setting and you are to find the love of your life and manage to marry her (or him). Very fun, and it was nice to play again. I don't remember the last time I played at all, I think it's about six or seven years ago. Karianne was the game master, and she did quite well. It took a while to get used to playing, since the exact words you use are important, you say the words your player utters, not just "I ask him about foo". Still fun.

Biked home afterwards, a really nice 35 minute trip in the somewhat, but not really cold summer night. I had some very nice views of Oslo on my way, and it was good to be out really biking again, just going to work and back again is a bit too short.

All in all, a quite full day.

Today was just spent doing registrar work. Tedious work where you have to get it exactly right, else you get the application refused (though, with an explanation). All the domains we administer should now be in order, but I believe I'll need at least another day to clean out the last small problems. We are going to change ISP in a few weeks, which means lots of work if the DNS isn't set up properly. (Or rather, it means even more lots of work if the DNS isn't set up properly.)

As always, we discussed around a bit and I begun helping out another guy with a broken file system, but I didn't get around to actually fixing it, so I'll have to look into that tomorrow or so.

My Japanese name is Nakamura(center of the village) Shun (fast person).

(By way of "Magni":http://www.livejournal.com/users/magnio/64641.html, courtesy of "Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator":http://rumandmonkey.com/widgets/toys/namegen/)

The weekend was spent being lazy, mostly. Karianne and I started off trying to edit some video on Friday, but most of the old equipment which I had managed to lay my hands on was disassembled, and I didn't manage to assemble it in time. Shame, but we'll give it another try on Wednesday.

Saturday, we slept in for a long time. It was so nice to be able to sleep a bit again. We were to go to a shrimp-eating party Saturday evening, with my father and Vigdis. Gro (an old friend of my father's, and the mother of one of my friends) took us with her to the party. It ended up being a very nice party with lots of food and fun people.

Sunday, we slept a bit more before going back to Oslo again. Once there, we slept even more and ate a bit of food. Slow, slow day, which I found most excellent. As I had borrowed Steinar's camera for about a week, we went to his place and gave it back. I found it quite nice to go for a walk in the evening like that, but I think Karianne got a bit tired, as it is a fair distance to walk.

Today, Monday, it rained dogs and cats, so we both took the subway downtown, I going into the office, while Karianne headed off for IKEA. After work, I got dragged down to the local pub with a few workmates, so we had a few beers there before I had to go to my little sister's for some dinner. Anja dropped me a text message a bit before I left, wondering if I could pick up a corkscrew. It took a while, but I managed, arriving fashionably late (I'm an academic), meeting up with Karianne just outside the door.

Anja had made some great food, and we had a nice time before we had to go back home; Karianne to Bodil's and I to my father's. To cap off the night, we ended up having discussions for a while, probably a bit too late for Vigdis. Nice evening.

Friday, I managed to actually get some work done. Anders brought back one of the servers from the server room on Thursday, and the reason for it being broken was one of the coolers having come loose. The cpu was fairly burnt, and after a short while, I gave up getting it to work. Left work early to meet up with Karianne.

Monday, I've been mostly in a board meeting. We discussed for some hours, slowly getting through the list of items we were to process. Due to an oversight, we had to cut the meeting short, so we'll continue on Wednesday. Will be fun, I guess..

The rest of the day, I spent doing registrar stuff, going through the huge pile of mess that is our current set of domains. It'll be good once it's cleaned up, but right now, it's a huge pile of work, just waiting for me to go through it tomorrow.

"Manoj":http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj/ writes a bit about "appliances versus tools":http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj/software/manoj.2004.06.17.golden_gryphon . He's saying what I've been trying to say about user interfaces for a long time: A bit simplified, you can divide the "cost" of using an UI into two parts: One initial cost, which is what it takes to learn the interfaces, and one running cost, which is how much it costs to use an interface after you've learnt it. Of course, this is a bit simplified, since learning a tool is not binary, but I still think the comparison holds.

For tools which you use seldom, you care a lot about the initial cost, since you will incur that many times as you have to re-learn the user interfaces. An example would be an ATM. For a complex tool, such as my use of a computer, the running cost is what matters. If I have to spend a week to learn a tool I'm going to use a lot, it's worth it.

However, as Manoj points out, this is not only a result of complexity: Both ATMs and general purpose computers are complex beasts, and an axe is a lot simpler than a refrigerator (mechanically speaking). The HCI term "affordance" doesn't quite cut it either, as it is more about how easy an interface is to learn. On the other hand, an axe affords a lot of things, that is, it doesn't give you much guidance on how to use it. A refrigerator door affords opening, it's one of the few things you can do with it.

The last two days are a little blurry, but I think I have them somewhat separated. I left work early yesterday to see Karianne, and we walked around downtown Oslo to buy some textile fabrics for the LARP in August. It was very nice to see her again, I've missed her a lot. We met up with Bodil and went to eat some food. Afterwards, it was the weekly LARP beer. We stayed for a while and Ragnhild (Hutchy) and I ended up writing a LARP howto ; that is: how to become a LARP player. Walked home with Bodil and Karianne afterwards, where we had a good time playing with the ferrets and watching simpsons on DVD

Today, we were at the NUUG barbecue, which was fun. Meeting new and old people, then walking home with Karianne afterwards. It was nice and refreshing. The weather has also been nice lately. My father was still up when we came home, so we sat around and talked for a little while before going to bed.

Yesterday, I was mostly working on domain and registrar stuff. Fairly simple stuff, but it takes a lot of work to get everything working properly and the infrastructure set up. It seems like most parts are coming to the right place, even though it feels like I'm doing nothing at work for the time being. I think I'm fairly efficient, but most of my work goes into making others be able to get their work done, which is a good thing, but it's still fairly frustrating for me, as it feels bad getting paid for doing "nothing".

Today, I started out with a general assembly in Opera Software. Then, I got to work; I nearly got into the office before I had other work to do and ended up in some discussion or another. We had a small emergency when Anders plugged a computer into the non-crossed uplink port on the switch as well as the uplink itself. Everything died and we used about thirty minutes to track down the problem. Then, it was lunch, and after that, Stein Magnus came in and we went out and discussed some work he'll be doing for us this summer.

Got back in, then headed off for the server room where we moved a few computers out of one of the racks and into the next one. Went fairly ok. I also debugged why mju (actually, she's called "my", since that's the Norwegian spelling) didn't seem to come up properly after a boot. It seems like 2.4 and 2.6 number the network interfaces differently. Anders picked up alfa and took a taxi back to the office while I headed off for the NUUG barbecue, which was nice.

It's so good to be back in Oslo. When biking to work the other day, I thought of Oslo as a parallell to Ankh-Morphork. It's smelly, chaotic and feels utterly weird when one's used to Trondheim's traffic. Still, it's fun, I love biking downtown in Oslo.

Getting to work and seeing everybody again is good, even though I sometimes am really, really tired of working there. The systems are slowly getting into place again and we have fun arguments all the time. I'm looking forward to this summer.

Karianne just arrived in Oslo; she was a bit disappointed I didn't meet her at the bus station, but I had decided to stay home and try to get some rest. Tomorrow will be a long and fun day, so I'd better be a bit awake and sharp.

I've been meaning to blog about what I've been doing each day at work, since it will make my life a lot better at the end of the weeks and end of the summer. Of course, I haven't done so far, but I'm trying to start now.

Last Friday was my first day of work this summer. Most of the day was spent trying to set myself up, getting DHCP working, saying "Hi" to everybody and so on.

Yesterday, Monday, was spent in meetings. We met about what we're going to do this summer, the future direction of the company and so on, and so on. Not too much fun, but still fairly needed to do. We're going to have both a board meeting and a shareholder's meeting the first Monday.

Today, we got access cards to the new server room, which was good. Talked a bit with everybody, and we have a huge bunch of work to do, both work to be done, and it also seems like there's a shadow hanging over us, something which we have to fix and talk about. It sucks and will take time, but it's absolutely necessary.

Worked a bit on registrar stuff as well, which was good to get started on. There's a bunch of work there as well, and a nice, big backlog to start with. Will be fun tomorrow.

Last night, I went to bed a bit late. Since I was going to pack before heading off to Oslo today, I decided to not sleep much. My alarm clock helped me at that. Woke up, packed, packed, packed. I managed to bring a huge amount of stuff down south, I just hope I've managed to pack the important things and forget the unimportant ones.

The train trip was fairly uneventful, and it was nice having power there, so I could hack and play around the whole trip. My father met me at the train station and drove home, just pausing by the workplace to drop off my computer.

Once home, I had some cake and after that beer. We ended up staying up and discussing life, the universe and everything. It was nice talking to my dad again, it's been a while. Not really missing Karianne yet, though I'm looking forward to her coming to Oslo next week.

e'm back in Trondheim now. The plane trip was long and fairly uneventful. I slept a bit, but not too much. I almost missed Karianne and Magni, who were waiting for me at the airport. It was nice to see them both again, and especially Karianne. I've missed her a lot.

Got home and ate some food before we went to bed. We also talked a lot and I unpacked a lot of my stuff into the living room, which Karianne had cleaned up while I was gone.

My Peace Lily was a sad sight, lots of leaves hanging down and it looked more or less dead. (This was due to a misunderstanding, so Karianne hadn't watered them while I was away.) After a few days of care it became a lot happier and is now more or less back to its normal self again.

Monday was mostly spent resting and talking with Karianne. We bought a new backpack for her (her birthday present) and she found a good one which seemed both sturdy and comfortable. On our way home, we bought a couple of milkshakes which were closer to slushy ice cream than milkshakes. We bought some chicken and food on the way home to my place and ate that before going to bed.

Tuesday, it was my birthday, so I got lots of "congratulations" messages on IRC, email, SMS and so on. Very nice. We ate dinner at Magni and Anders' place in the afternoon and stayed until a little after twelve before going home again. A very nice evening.

Wednesday, I bought train tickets to Oslo. Karianne and I played around with her swords a bit and made scabbards for them so I'll have less of a chance to damage them when going to Oslo. Also picked up yiwaz again, which is now in good shape again. Very, very nice. As a final bonus, I found out I passed my Physics course today, so I won't have to think about that this summer.

The last few days have been going slowly and have been spent together with Karianne. We've had a good time, and my body is recovering fast from the long flight and the semester. I'm looking forward to getting to Oslo again.

I find myself blogging a lot on paper lately. Though blogging, being a short form of the word weblogging, it then becomes an oxymoron, and they're not available to anybody before I get around to typing them in.

I really don't know the reason for this trend of mine, but I have a few guesses: The first and foremost is that my laptop is kinda broken with all the ACPI problems and stability problems with the motherboard. (And that IBM claims otherwise.) Another reason is the instant-on capability of paper. I just pick up my notebook and a pen or pencil and start writing. My laptop doesn't do that at the moment, since I broke ACPI when upgrading to 2.6. Those two reasons means paper is less fiddly when it comes to writing down thoughts just there.

I hope me seeing it as fiddly doesn't mean I'm getting bored of computers, which would be a disaster as they are quite a big part of my life. To test this theory, I'll fix all the outstanding issues (like ACPI sleep states) once I get the motherboard fixed. Of course, it still doesn't address the issues of a laptop being more or less useless outdoors or the severly limited battery life. Because of the sucky battery life, and the weight of my current laptop, I wish for a new one, either an IBM X40, the HP 4010 or one of the smaller Fujitsu Lifebooks. All should have around ten hours with an extra battery pack clipped on. Of course, I won't buy one until the current one is worn out.

Each time you fly from somewhere to somewhere else, the crew go through the same procedure before take-off: Turn off all radio receivers and transmitters during the whole flight, and during take-off and landing, please turn off all electronic equipment.

The call for turning off transmitters, I can understand, though why you should turn off receivers, I am not sure. The call to turn off stuff like CD players and such is just silly; yes, they contain a small electromotor which will emit a bit of noise, but if the navigational systems of the plane are that suspecible to jamming and malfunction, I am really, really scared of flying.

The problem of having a rule like the one above is that you make those who know the factors involved question your judgement and make them ignore other rules which might actually matter.

Last day, which is kind of sad. I will be missing all the wonderful people I've met again, and those I met for the first time. We were out eating yesterday, at an Arab place and am going there again tonight. It will be fun. The days are floating together now, yesterday was spent "shopping". (I didn't spend any money.) So will tomorrow, and I should find some postcards then.

Today, I was at the FISL, it was a good conference, but I'm so tired so I had trouble following everything. Met a bunch of interesting people, among those Wietse Venema, the author of Postfix. Now, I mainly want to get back home to Karianne, Norwegian food and my own bed. Not to mention being able to talk a language somebody understand; my Portuguese is kind-of flaky.

It's been a while since I blogged last time, time is passing so fast down here.

I didn't sleep properly between Friday at noon and Sunday night (Brazilian time, so, something like Monday morning European time). Really plays games with your head, not sleeping much, only nap, nap, nap, nap.

It's been fantastic to be back and meeting old people again and making new friendships. Also, getting a face and filling out a person from what one percieves on IRC is interesting. The talks have been good and well spaced, so we have had time for hacking and chatting as well.

I've been busy with hacking and talking about dpkg and apache, as well as thinking about my talk with Matt Taggart and multiarch in general. People seem to kind-of like the idea of multiarch, but are a bit reluctant to actively support the idea.

The conference is now at the end, and people are packing up the computers and have started to leave. It's a bit sad, and I'll be missing all the cool and fun people.

I'm also missing Karianne a lot, though we chat on IRC much. The time zone difference makes it a little bit harder, but not that much. It's more that I miss actually seeing her and the hugging and kissing and being near her, which are things that IRC doesn't do too well.

My laptop has been acting up all the time, but I was lucky enough to borrow Mako's keyboard (actually, I got it from somebody else, and Mako didn't know, and I didn't know that it was his, but he found it and things were fine).

I'll be around for a few more days, and see a bit more than the insides of a conference center. Will be fun and interesting, I hope.

Last night, we were out eating, some fairly traditional food and drinking. It was really fun, I got a bunch of caipirinha, which seems to be lime, lots of sugar and loads of vodka or something. Quite good, and goes to your head. Ended up playing cards until six in the morning.