Tollef Fog Heen's blog

I woke up, at least I think so. It's a bit hard to remember, considering it is getting close to 48 hours since. Friday was mostly spent trying to pack. I can't remember such inefficency. At some point, I decided it was enough packing. Ate a late lunch with Karianne, then we went DDR-ing. It was fun, and I managed a lot better than last time, even though it was a tad harder than I managed at times.

Went back home, where I made pasta for dinner. Quite good. Knut Auvor dropped by and lent a book on GUI design. Karianne stayed until about two o'clock and we had a really good time. Saying goodbye took a while, even though it's just a week.

I worked a bit on various small projects (like compiling and finding music for stepmania). Took the bus to the airport at 0450, and saw the very, very beautiful sunrise on the way to the bus stop. Managed a nap on the bus. The plane didn't leave until more than an hour after I arrived at the airport, so I read a bit while waiting. The plane trip to Amsterdam was crowded and uneventful. (It helped that I slept most of the way.)

Went through most of the shops at Sciphol and also verified that they are open on next Sunday, when I return. Apart from browsing the shops, I didn't do much; listened to music and read a bit more, almost finishing "Nightwatch" by Terry Pratchett.

The plane to Sao Paulo, was big and fairly comfortable. I could have been spared of 16-or-so year olds, but you don't get to pick your travelmates. Watching movies in the backs of plane seats suck, and they are made for people 15 cm shorter than I am. My neck hurts now.

I flew with KLM and am fairly satistified with them. Nice stewrdesses, good and decent amounts of food. If I get to choose next time, they have a plus in my book at least. Managed to nap a bit as well.

The night was spent in Sao Paulo airport, a fascinatingingly boring place at night. Played some stepmania and slept a bit. The combination of no external light and me being tired made me end this log entry as we took off from Sao Paulo.

(Sorry if any of this doesn't make too much sense; I'm a bit drunk now and therefore unable to spell anything correctly) Woke up, went to have an exam in software architecture. It went fairly well, though I'm never to sure until I get the results back. Afterwards, I went downtown with Agnes (and Bjørn Ove) and ate some ice cream there. Went back to Samfndet afterwards, when I phoned IBM. It seemed they thought they had fixed the problem. I was a bit sceptic (they claimed it was a foreign RAM chip which was the problem). Picked up my laptop out at IBM's place and was unable to reproduce the problem there.

Got to Samfundet, with my mother calling along the way, then biking back home (still, phone in my hand). She was fine, and I told her I was likewise. Went up to Karianne's for a few pancakes (I also began fixing my laptop, which had suffered a severe root partition failure. After hanging about with her for a while, I biked down to the local microbrewery. Had a few beers there with a bunch of ITK-ers. Ended up convincing Gunhild she had to go to Samfundet for a few more beers. We ended up walking over to her place and talking for an hour or two before I biked home, trying to kill myself twice in the process. First, the chain wasn't fastened to the crank and the driving apparatus, so I managed to fall on by back. On my back home, my bike slipped and I hit the ground... Luckily not too hard, though.

Got home at closer to 0400, then went to bed, hoping for Karianne to have a decent exam in a few hours.

It's been a few days since I blogged.. mostly because I forget before I go to bed, so I'm catching up again now.

Last Saturday, I had an exam in the System Administration course. Enough work to do, but quite interesting nonetheless. Played transport tycoon for most of the rest of the day. Ate dinner at Sesam together with Øyvind (oyving) and Lars (larseie), ended up hanging about at PVV until ten o'clock or so, discussing old computer games with the two of them and Stig (Hemmer).

Sunday morning, Thomas came down and we went to "The Village", a middle age village a group of people is rebuilding about halfway to Røros. Ingunn (Khi) was also there. Nice trip, and we had a lot of fun in the village, fixing up stuff. (Moved a table, secured the covers we had around a disassembled house, began fixing up some rusted oven parts which had been left out last winter.) Karianne came home in the evening and we had a nice meal before going to bed.

Monday, I slept long and picked up Karianne's notes for her Data structures & Algorithms class (she had lent them away) and booted vawad with a new kernel and on UPS. Nothing much happened, I think.

Tuesday, I was out drinking beer with Stine. Karianne couldn't sleep, so I went to her place at about 0300. She managed to sleep a bit after a while, but was really, really tired on Wednesday. I ate dinner with Øystein and Ingvild which was nice, and Ingvild gave me a haircut. Went to a meeting about the LARP in August (Blodrand), had a couple of beers before heading home. Some of the others are going to fix up clothing on Saturday, so Ingunn borrowed my sewing machine. Went up to Karianne's, where she had really, really cleaned and tidied the place. She was also a lot better, though tired. Stayed around there for a couple of hours before heading home. Also, I called IBM at some point during Wednesday and discovered they had sent my mainboard to Bergen instead of Trondheim. Hopefully, I'll have yiwaz back before leaving for Brazil, it sounded like I should have her back today when I talked to the IBM technician.

Got a bit too little sleep, like I always do before exams, probably just a bit tense. Will be interesting to see how it goes. Anyhow, it's summer vacation in less than six hours.

Woke up, decided I was too tired, so I went back to sleep. Repeat a few times. Woke up, this time for real and finished the book in system administration. Ended up wasting most of the day in front of the computer playing transport tycoon. In the afternoon, I continued hacking glibc, multiarch stuff is now working, including the amd64 build, so we'll really soon move on.

I'm tired and actually looking forward to the exam tomorrow. Also, I'm missing Karianne, though it helps to talk with her on ICQ and such. Love you, girl.

This has been mostly just another day. Woke up, fooled around on IRC for a while, ate some breakfast, managed to read a bit. Talked mostly about multiarch stuff. Anders (akai) came over and managed to make me not go to DDR, since he didn't want to. We ended up going to Stein Magnus' instead, then heading off for Samfundet for some dinner (and beer). Moved on to the local microbrewery for more beer before I headed home. A bit sleepy and tired now.

Mostly just another day. Woke up at about 0930, ate some breakfast. Karianne left for Molde today, so she got down to my place and I walked her to the bus. Got home, and Tore and Kristian (Barek) came over and picked up Hanne's old sofa and her fridge, so now I have plenty of space in my living room again.

Went to a Q&A session in the system administration class, it wasn't too eventful, but it's better to be safe than sorry. Went down to Samfundet afterwards, talked a bit with people and such, and there was a meeting where we decided to build a new building on the land behind the house, which is really, really good. People have been talking about doing that for about fifty years, so it was about time..

Drunk a few beers to celebrate and talked with Øystein and Magne. Interesting enough discussions. Got home, hacked around a bit on IRC and worked a bit on multiarch, including uploading a new glibc, which decided to disappear.

Woke up, ate breakfast, as usual. Since I had gotten the receipt for my laptop, I decided to head off to the service centre. Of course, they weren't interested in it there, but started diagnosing it. It's a warranty repair, so it's free for me. Took the bus back again and headed up to PVV. There, I made a summary of the different options I have for a non-technical subject this fall, and I have absolutely no idea what to choose. That took most of the time I had before I was to meet up with Anders (anchr) for a project meeting. It was fairly productive and I got a bit of direction and have started thinking.

Afterwards, I headed up to Karianne's. We went food shopping and ordered a pizza which we just had time to consume before I had to head off again for yet another meeting, this time at Samfundet. Discussed data structures and such for the work system for UKA05. Ended up hacking multiarch stuff until too late in the night; tormodg was nice enough to drive me home, so I didn't have to walk.

Multiarch is really coming into shape now, even though we're just doing stuff on i386 so far. Glibc is a huge package and I've restarted hacking it, but it's possible to overcome the difficulties and it will work out well in the end. Found and fixed a few bugs in libogg and libvorbis; we have a bunch of work to do for fixing all the libs in the archive.

Most of yesterday was spent hacking glibc. It's slowly getting there, even though it's a lot of work, and the debug cycles often takes a few hours. It's kinda fun, though, since because it's hard it gets satisfying once it works. It's not just a technical experience and challenge, but also a social one. Having to explain how this is to work, check it against reality, adjust the plans and so come up with a working solution.

Karianne and I were at Bjørn Ove's (and Agnes') for a great dinner. It was very, very nice. Karianne was very tired so she took the bus home and I biked up as well, just passing by home to grab my stuff. I got a bit scared, but she managed to calm down and get in control again. We watched a movie afterwards; "The thing called love". Nice movie, but I was very tired so I think I need to see the film once more.

Woke up at about 09:30. We headed down to the fortress for a small picnic; the weather was still nice then. Talked a little with the different people there, even though I don't know most of them. Karianne and I headed down to my place to unload most of the picnic equipment (and since her shoes were painful, she borrowed a pair of mine. At bit too bit, but at least her feet stopped hurting so much).

We watched the citizen parade and happened to meet Bjørn Ove and Agnes today as well, and got invited over to theirs for some hot chocolate. (It rained and was windy, else ice cream would have been more proper.) Agnes drove us home afterwards, and Karianne and I slept a bit and talked before she had to go home at some point, being tired and wanting to spend a little time at her own place.

I ended up using most of the night hacking glibc, cleaning it up fairly nicely. I also discussed a bit on IRC with Keybuk and maswan on how to make libtool work together with multiarch, and it seems like we found a fairly sane solution (which to be fair requires /etc/ld.so.conf to include /lib/$(gcc -dumpmachine) and /usr/$(gcc -dumpmachine)/lib, but that's something I can live with, at least for a while.

Tired, but fairly happy that multiarch is moving forward now.

Like Magni, I suck at blogging regularly. It doesn't get better when Karianne stays here, since then I don't want to sit in front of the computer when heading for bed. I wonder how to solve this in some reasonable way.

Yesterday, I hacked glibc, ate pizza with a bunch of fellow geeks (and discussed my fall project with Anders). Karianne and I went to see "Troy" afterwards. Went home and slept.

Today, not too much happened. Fixed up my machine a bit, wiring up the four front USB ports and replacing my Plextor CD-ROM (SCSI) with a Plextor DVD-ROM (IDE) (since the x86_64 kernel seems to have trouble when transferring large amounts of data through my SCSI card). I checked out some parts for swords and DDR mats, but found very little. Went up to Karianne's afterward, and we looked around for a piece of furniture for my living room (a "sjenk" (which Magni later told me is called sideboard in English.), I have no idea what that is in English)

Went back and made some dinner. Agnes came over and we talked for a while, which was nice. She had to leave before we could sew anything, though. I made holes in two soles for Karianne and ate some ice cream before leaving at about ten o'clock.

Went home and hacked a bit more on glibc, it seems to fail in strange ways because the _errno glibc 2.0 compat symbol is gone, and I have no idea how to track it down. It also helps that each recompile takes a few hours..

Woke up due to my alarm clock. Restarted a glibc compile before heading off for the exam a little bit late. It didn't go too well, but I'll pass, unless something really bad creeps up.

Had a few beers with Ingvild afterwards, it was really, really nice, then went up to Karianne's since we were going to babysit Kristoffer (sp?), one of Håkons kids. It went easy enough. Walked back to Karianne's before biking home, bringing one of her swords with me, so we can train on Saturday.

Hung about on IRC for a while, fixing up glibc a bit more before managing to get in touch with Bjørn-Ove and therefor heading off to the local microbrewery for some beer. Nice, met Gustav and Magne there as well. bgrotan invited Karianne and me for dinner on Sunday afterwards, so I guess we'll be heading up there then.

Got back home, fixed another glibc bug, new build. IRCed a bit before hitting the sack.

For some random reason, I logged into my "Yahoo Groups":http://groups.yahoo.com account today. I saw my mail was set as "soft bouncing". Hmm, weird, I thought. Of course, it was my greylisting that had eaten a few messages. Yes, eaten. For some reason, it seems Yahoo doesn't retry delivering mails which gets refused by a 4xx response, they just drop them. Ugly and stupid. I've now whitelisted yahoo.com in my mail setup, but that's just because I want to get mails from said lists.

They have intentionally broken SMTP standards, something which really, really disappoints me; I thought they were one of the honorable companies, but apparently not.

Woke up fairly early, but didn't start to study until a bit later. Multitasked through most of the day hacking on multiarch glibc while reading physics and redoing the assignments from through the semester. Not very fun, but it's over tomorrow, after the exam. I also had a bit long meeting at work, which was productive, but took double the time I intended.

Had a simple, but good dinner with Karianne before she left for a meeting. The evening was spent on IRC, fixing some bugs in dpkg, cleaning up email, disassembling and reassembling my laptop after I had discovered some really nice file system corruption. Ugh, I have to call IBM tomorrow and schedule to have it repaired, hopefully before Debconf4.

Not looking forward to tomorrow's exam, but it'll be good once it's over.

Friday morning, Karianne and I took the bus to Molde where we stayed for the weekend, returning on Monday. It was nice meeting her parents and family, and we went well along. I managed to read most of the System Administration book I had brought along. It was quite a lot better than I had anticipated, with short example stories and various viewpoints on a lot of cases one will meet. I didn't get to do any physics, though, which is a bit bad, since I have the exam on Thursday. We didn't really do much in Molde; we were downtown and jumped at her aunt's trampoline, we looked at the view from one of the mountains and we ate food and talked. Nice, relaxing weekend.

Today, I've been trying to study and do physics assignments, but it's been slow and I've done a lot of other stuff. I'll have to concentrate better tomorrow, I guess. Karianne made some good spaghetti for dinner and had bought strawberries for dessert. They were excellent, and we were surprised one could find that fine berries this early in the season. In the evening, we went DDR-ing. I sucked, mostly because it was a bit since I had played. A bit tired and sleepy in the evening, and I'm looking forward to finishing the physics exam.

I've been missing two features for pyblosxom, one is a "fake category" concept, so I can feed Planet Debian not just stuff from my tech and tech/Debian categories, but also stuff from the other categories. In fact, I just want to exclude the diary, since it's probably boring for most people.

So, inspired by aj's fakecat for blosxom, I did mostly the same for pyblosxom. The code is in my plugins directory, as fakecat

(The other feature I'm missing is the ability to file entries in multiple categories, but that's for another day.)

You would think making a macro or shortcut for moving the currently marked message to another folder (namely, my "spam" folder) would be easy? No, it's not. The documentation for the API is non-existent and there are close to zero samples around. If somebody has a javascript snippet that moves a message to another folder, using Mozilla Mail (or Thunderbird, that shouldn't matter), I'd appreciate it a lot.

Apart from that, thunderbird actually quite nice to work with now. I've installed a bunch of extensions so quoted text is shaded and such, which helped a bit.

Yay, it took a little, and why this is not an option somewhere in the options panel, I don't know. To check for mail in all IMAP folders, add the following to ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/default/<random crap>/prefs.js

// Check for new mail in ALL imap folders
user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);

(Thanks to whoevers' blog I found that it. I've lost the link already.)

Tuesday was spent hacking the Experts in Team project. We presented it today. I am tired and exhausted from the project. Our presentation sucked (though Karianne claims otherwise), and I'd like not to hear anything about the project for a while. We're going to have a "process exam" tomorrow, I'm not sure what that really is.

Went home and ate some ice-cream with Karianne afterwards, then fell asleep on the sofa. Woke up, went to Samfundet for the last meeting of the semester. Wrote up a bit about the work system project for UKA05 and broke vawad a bit. Repaired her afterwards, it was just my mail delivery that broke.

Tired and want to sleep. Tomorrow will be a long day, I think. Gotta clean up and catch up with the last week's mail and stuff.

Today, I've mostly been converting mail. Not just a few mails, nono. I am moving away from gnus as my single mail user agent (MUA for short) and instead opting for using IMAP to access my mail. Of course, I want to carry all my legacy mail with me. Yes, all of it. All the 3-4GB and somewhere between 500 000 and 1 million messages. So, I'm now through my inboxes and have begun some of my list folders. It takes a while, but is fairly easy work.

Set up maildrop for filtering my mail today. It was easy once I managed to wrap my head around it, and the syntax is fairly nice. I wrote up a presentation for the software architecture course, actually a presentation we are not to hold. I've been playing with Mozilla Thunderbird for most of today and it seems fairly ok for a graphical MUA, but I'm not sure whether I'll use that or go for evolution.

Met up with Karianne at IKEA around six, we picked up some small things before going to my place. Ate pancakes, and it started raining. I continued moving mail, and we had a mostly-slow evening, except for Karianne being exhausted. She had been riding earlier in the day, and managed to miss the bus stop en route to IKEA, so she had to walk a bit there as well. I'm also a bit tired and will see how much sleep I can catch before the probably tiresome day tomorrow.

Why does Thunderbird default to using a cleartext connection to the IMAP server? I'm actually a bit surprised it even has it as an option. Cleartext authentication might have been ok ten years ago, but it's not ok today.

This caused my second password change this week.

More or less the whole weekend has been spent staring at a computer screen. I've managed to mostly finish the Experts in Team project, which is really good (it's even better if you consider we're going to have a presentation of it on Wednesday). I had to rip it quite a bit apart, but it's in fairly good shape now. I just need it to stay well for another week or so.

Friday, I was at the early lecture, then headed back home. I thought the EiT project group was to meet a noon, but evidently, we weren't. Went shopping a little bit: I was looking for a new keyboard, but couldn't find any I liked. (USB, small-sized, good to write on, not too expensive.) I bought the ticket for Brazil as well.

I got a phone call from Øystein Thursday night, and he's got a job now, which is really good. So he, Ingvild, Karianne and some friends of him were out, drinking beer on Friday. Karianne and I went to the geek pizza at Peppes afterwards before heading off for Samfundet and a concert there. I felt a bit out of shape and was tired and sleepy, but the concert was good. Biked home afterwards, together with Ingvild and Øystein, whom we had met up with at Samfundet.

Saturday, I worked on the project. Truls asked me a bit about the Software Architecture project, but I couldn't find any time then. On Sunday, when I had time, he hadn't time, of course. In addition, my email reorganization project is moving forward. I had everything moved into nnfolder (mbox, basically) sometime on Saturday, and continued to move everything to Maildir. Moving a million (or so) mails takes a while. Karianne came down and she made some dinner. We had a nice evening, even though the both of us were working on various projects.

Sunday, I fixed a few bugs in dpkg, continued to work on my mail project, looked a bit around for some tool to convert iCal files to HTML (but couldn't really find anything) and worked a bit more on both the Software Architechture project and the Experts in Team project. I am so tired of those projects and actually looking forward to my exams. It was nice having Karianne around here on Sunday as well, and I think I got her to rest a bit, which she needs.

I'm getting tired of not finishing my projects. Hopefully, it should be a bit better after this week, and I'm looking forward to a weekend in Molde with Karianne. I am actually considering not bringing my laptop along, but we'll see.