Tollef Fog Heen's blog

So.. Karianne and I was on a vacation in Venice. Really nice, we got to see the whole city of Venice as we criss-crossed across it for some days. We both got fairly tired with a bit of sore feet as well, but it was well worth it. The city is pedestrian (and boat) only, no cars, and though there didn't seem to be any rules against bikes, we didn't see many. I guess it doesn't make much sense, with bridges and really narrow alleyways, though.

We ate a ton of pizza, shopped 'till we dropped and generally had a good time. We also met up with Stine, a friend of ours studying there this year. Just before we left for Venice, I got a mail from David Welton, a Debian Developer living in Venice, so we managed to meet up and both exchange GPG fingerprints and have a drink. (Spritz, a local custom, but fairly good, not horrible like local customs often are.)

A small, short trip to Verona fit into our plans, though I only just dare say we were there, as we more or less ran through the place, being in a bit of a hurry. The whole vacation was nice, it will still take a little while to digest, but I had a good time, and so did Karianne. Travel home was tiresome, as usual.

Today, I've been catching up with mail, doing a bit of project work and trying to be productive at Samfundet, unfortunately without success. Got home not too late after having skipped dancing, something I regret a bit now. Trying to get firefox to understand that it should use Norwegian rather than English is far less fun than dancing.

It's been a while since I've actually blogged about my life. Not too surprising, given that a lot of stuff is happening at the moment, and I'm struggling to keep up with myself.

Karianne and I are getting closer and closer. It feels so good. We are talking about buying somewhere to live together, in Oslo, next year, so we'll have to start looking at some point. Will be nice and fun and I'm looking forward to the process.

As I wrote, I'm very busy -- busy with Canonical and Ubuntu, busy with Hardware.no, busy with random other projects (including a art project for a guy whom I worked for in a class this spring) and, as always, Samfundet. I try to make sure I see people, not just Karianne, but others as well, though it's sometimes hard to fit people into the schedule.

I'm really looking forward to the vacation in Venice with Karianne next week -- I've never been to Italy before. Also, my body craves for a vacation now.

When I came back from Oslo last night and took in my mail, I discovered that a shop had the fairly new Sony P150 at a bargain. As I had also gotten a fairly big tax return, I decided to buy it. It takes really nice pictures and is just as fast as the P100, which I played with earlier.

Now I just need to get an extra battery and a big chunk of memory.

My back bike wheel has gotten more and more uneven lately, and it sometimes felt like it was moving so much sideways that I was actually moving in small ellipsises rather than a straight line. Yesterday, I finally dropped by the bike shop and to my joy, it was just the tire coming apart rather than the wheel itself being broken. So I bought a new tire. This morning, I replaced the old one, and it was pure joy when I set off for the university, filling up the tire with a bit more air on the way.

Now I just want a new front tire as well..

I have, somehow, managed to catch up a bit with my life over the last few days. I got enough sleep yesterday, which helped, then I managed to write a few pages on my paper, so that is coming along. I also wrote up most of the PGP introductory talk I'm holding tomorrow. My R-tree code also seems to work now. Yay!

Karianne is quite tired and down at the moment, her main gripe being the Algorithms and Data Structures course. I think it will work itself out, but it takes a while to learn the ropes, and it's not an easy course.

I'm really looking forward to the vacation in Venice in about two weeks, it'll be fun and interesting to see Italy, as neither of us have been there before.

It seems like the new Spamassassin 3 has some serious problems relating to memory usage:

7122 root      15   0  660m 332m 4692 D  0.0 43.8   8:18.64 spamd
7123 nobody    15   0  287m 257m 4692 D  0.0 34.0   0:17.01 spamd

As my server "only" has 768MB memory, this causes some problems, in fact, it uses the full 512MB of swap it also has.

This has happened three times in the last hour, and is now getting unbearable.

Julien Danjou seems to be looking for "a viable file transfer protocol with encryption support" and mentions that HTTPS isn't a file transfer protocol. I disagree -- if you combine HTTPS and DAV, you have a fairly ok file transfer protocol, which gets rid of a lot of the problems surrounding FTP. Though, you are still stuck with the problem of the user your web server is running as will own all your files. It should be possible to fix, either by doing some apache magic or by using a DAV server which setuid()s to the user doing the access.