Tollef Fog Heen's blog

Monday, I picked down one of the banners from the back side of Samfundet; it somewhere between 10 and 15 meters above the ground. It was raining a lot and quite windy, but fun nonetheless.

Tuesday was busy with presentations, counseling (for my project) and so on. I got a bit of work done on my R-tree assignment, though it's not completely finished.

I spent most of today finishing up the project with Espen, which is now in good shape. I sincerely hate battery-powered tools like drills and dremels. They run out of juice when they shouldn't, so I spent a lot more time with getting small M3 (3mm) nuts onto a M3 bar I cut into pieces and my hands are sore. Dropped by Samfundt and flashed all the boards with the latest kernel and ramdisk, and they should now behave properly. Went dancing, which was a bit slow, before heading home for a shower and bed.

I've gotten my hands on small ARM development board with a LCD touchscreen. It's a nice piece of hardware, has serial, ethernet and runs on 5V. I've gotten the toolchain working nicely on another box (since you really don't want to compile anything on a 75MHz ARM box with 16MB RAM). Works fine now, and I'm happy, and I hope the owner will be so as well.

I really want to get my hands on one of those boards permanently -- there's a lot you can do with such a small unit which should be able to run on batteries fairly easily.

Been busy all week, with my first lecture held on Tuesday (it went really well, so I'm happy about that.) Squashing bugs in Ubuntu, usually keeping my bug list at 1-2 bugs, which I consider good. I've also been able to fix a lot of bugs in my packages in Debian. Been sleeping too little, so Karianne is a bit worried about me, but I'm doing fairly fine. Need to sleep and rest a bit in the weekend, but that should be doable.

Karianne went to Oslo today, and as I was about to jump on my bike my front tire went flat. I took the opportunity to call Ingvild, so we talked for a while while I walked home. When I got home, I fixed the tire, will have to take it a bit careful tomorrow until the tire is fixed.

Ended up hanging out on IRC, fixing a bit more bugs until too late in the evening.

Evolution 2.0 does not work properly on AMD64 in Ubuntu. Tracing this bug, I eventually found out it's no fault of Evolution. Neither is it the fault of evolution-data-server, which I had the culprit for a long time. It then looked like the bug was in ORBit, which it wasn't, I was merely confusing myself with debug output.

On returning to evolution-data-server, I eventually found something weird in the file backend. It was, for some reason, unable to open a new libdb database. Weird, I thought. Looked up, and it failed with EINVAL. Googling a bit around, I found out this can be caused by the the usage of the DB_THREAD flag to DB->open. Hacking a bit more around, I found out that evolution at least starts without it. Woo, goodie.

So, how do I make the system support DB_THREAD? Recompile glibc. Of course, enabling NPTL on amd64 causes a whole lot of other failures.

Sigh

Why does Subversion require write access to check out anything of the repository? That's so totally broken.

So, woke up this morning and as I had gotten a piece of paper saying I had a package waiting for me at the post office, I decided to drop by there on my way to the university. When it was my turn, it turned out my package wasn't at the post office at all, since my local "post office" is now my local supermarket. Sigh. I got a bit angry as this is the tenth time or so they have changed what my "local post office" is. (It's been the kiosk at Solsiden, then the main Post Office, then back and forth between those for a while, then for some reason a shop which isn't too far from me, but which I had no idea existed (Bunnpris Møllenberg), then finally the main Post Office.) It wouldn't have been so bad if they still had said where I was going to pick the package up, as they used to.

Got up not too late this morning, ate some food with Karianne before I headed off. Looked around for a decent pair of rain trousers, but they were either too expensive or too big. Went to Samfundet, because I had to finish the Job Application system for UKA. Managed to, just about in time for some dinner with Karianne. ITK meeting, first a lecture session at the university, then a proper meeting at Samfundet.

I had to leave a bit early, as I was going dancing again. My skills were rusty, and I'm not comfortable yet, but it's getting better. Fun, as usual.

Then, I went back to Samfundet, set up the system on one of UKA's servers (after having spent a fair amount of time hacking and cracking (with permission!) my way through the configuration.

I ended up banging my head against PHP stupidity, like renaming of functions (pg_fetch_result is called pg_result in that version of PHP) and missing functions (pg_ping, pg_connection_status), resulting in me ripping away a fair bit of error-checking. I'm considering rewriting the system in Perl or Python or something.

Wednesday was the first day with the new members at ITK at Samfundet. Nice meeting them. I got a bit of work done, working on the new "jobb applying system" for UKA (and Samfundet, and, I think, ISFiT. The old code is horrible, unreadable and broken in various and interesting ways. The new code is a lot better, though it is far from perfect. Got home at 0400, which I was a bit afraid of telling Karianne about, as I promised to not be in bed too late. Was in bed at about 0430. Got up at 0830 and attended my "Management of Large Data Volumes" class. Met up with an old friend of my brother's (and mine, but he's really my brother's friend.) -- he told me about some interesting projects he is working on over a cup of coffee.

Biked back to the university, where I met Karianne on her way out of a building with a large number of computers on a trolley. Evidently, they were being given to some school nearby, and a lot of volunteers had showed up to help moving them there. Anders (akai), Karianne and I walked to Anders' place for dinner and then a movie, Kill Bill 1. Walked home afterwards, with my feet being tired.

Friday, I was a bit late for the smallest class I've ever been to, just four students and the professor (who isn't a professor, but who cares?). We discussed a bit about ITIL, a way of managing IT organizations. Went to Steinar's (Sesse) afterwards, where I started making food for the ITK party. Slept a bit on the couch, as I was really, really tired. At some point, people arrived, party ensued, beer, wine and spirits were consumed. Went to Samfundet afterwards, and people got drunk. Interesting, fun. Home at three or so. Tired, tired, tired.

I had a very interesting beer at the party. It was a beer I bought in Brazil called Malzbier. It was fairly dark and tasted like what you would get if you took Coca Cola and turned it into beer. It tasted a lot of caramel and was very sweet. A most strange kind of beer, but quite good.

Today, Saturday, Karianne and I were in "The Village", the medieval village two hours from Trondheim. It was a day where people who aren't volunteers are invited to see what we are doing there. We had a bit of fun, looking and playing with blunt but otherwise fairly authentic swords, some shows and archery. Karianne's father and her grandfather drove from Molde to this place with some stuff for Karianne and her little sister (a monitor and a motherboard), and some stuff for the Village, namely two wood-burning stoves. Very nice, but fairly heavy.

Got home afterwards, ate som food and sat about, relaxing, sleepy and tired.