Tollef Fog Heen's blog

21:09 -!- biella is now known as dr_biella

Congratulations!

I spent a few hours yesterday cleaning up stuff. The windows are now possible to see through, which is a nice bonus. The balcony is clean again, at least as clean as it gets with just one sponge worn out. Standing half-crouched in the window sill for half an hour made my legs really stiff today, but I guess that's the price I'm paying for nice and mostly-clean windows.

Today, Karianne and I fixed the terrarium the gerbils live in to have a proper wall separating them (made out of about 1cm pine, should take them a bit to get through. I also fixed the balcony door, where the door handle had been more or less unusable for at least a few weeks. A new one was easily installed and seems to work fine. Yay.

All in all, pretty tiring, but also very satisfying when I get the results and everything looks nice and works well.

I've finally gotten around to releasing version 0.2 of the tdb backend for evolution-data-server. The main changes are:

• No longer needs the evolution tree to build, it just needs the library packages
• Some leak fixes, thanks to Ross Burton

Get it from http://err.no/download/e-d-s/evolution-backend-tdb-0.2.tar.gz

A couple of years ago, I stumbled across linuxjewellery, a jewellery store selling small brass BSD daemon statues, Apache feathers and various forms of Debian bracelets, earrings and so on. Apparently, it's either misconfigured or has been taken down now, since the only thing I can see is an empty directory listing:

I hope this is just a temporary thing and they'll come back, since even though I never bought something from them, my Debian swirl necklace is inspired from them.

Inspired (or provoked or whatever) by Joey Hess's blog entry about pymarkdown in pyblosxom. I decided to fix it up a bit (I also had an outstanding request for actually putting some usage instruction in there from February or so).

• Now actually has a license. (GPL)
• Includes a short summary on how to get it working with pyblosxom (and it should work more or less out of the box.

Not many big changes, but it will make it possible to use by more people than just me.

Get it from http://err.no/pymarkdown or my arch repository (tfheen@err.no--2005/pymarkdown--devo--0).

Update: Blah, I suck. I forgot to actually update the checked-out version. Fixed now.

Since I don't have a decent media player at the moment, I'm using my laptop for listening to music. I'm going to a talk by Cory Doctorow tonight, in Oslo. That means 45 minutes on a plane with a bit less than an hour on a bus in each end. Being bored, I've been running iwlist scan periodically. Some fun results I've had:

• ESSID: "privat, hold deg unna" (private, keep out)
• ESSID: "Johnny". Who guesses where in Oslo I saw this?

A little less than half the networks seems to be running unencrypted. The biggest number of APs I've seen at once was 15. Once I got within the city proper, I don't think I've seen less than four or five at any time.

I hope the number of unencrypted networks keeps high. It would be awesomely cool if we could actually get good, working roaming between the different networks so you could sit on the bus and actually use the networks, not just see them.

Update: Make that 19, not 15. No, 20. It seems iwlist scan runs into a bit of trouble then, truncating the output so it just displays the MAC address of the AP.

When travelling back home yesterday, I was bored on the final leg from Amsterdam to Trondheim so I decided to read the KLM in-flight magazine (whatever it's called). This month's issue was about "Online", basically the Internet. A fairly good issue with a decent amount of mostly-correct historical material as well as interesting outlooks on what's to come.

In the good tradition of such articles, a wordlist was included. Among the words was the word "bitleg" used to describe what would usually be described as software piracy. The latter word gives connotations to murder and robbery. Bitlegging doesn't have nearly as negative connotations and describe the issue at hand a lot more calmly and better.

Ubuntu Down Under is over and I am almost home. The wireless network was cut off on Saturday afternoon, then we all went on a bus ride around Sydney so we actually got to see places like the Opera. In the end, the bus dropped us off near a cinema and we all went to see "The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy". I was very happy with the movie, it had the basic story of the first book in it while still being very seeable for people who hadn't read the book too. The special effects were good and not drawn completely out of proportions. So in end: excellent movie. I think I'll try to get Karianne with me to watch it too.

We then had a very nice meal at a nearby restaurant before taking the bus back to the hotel. Thom, Matthew, Fabio and I went to a pub in Kings Cross. Later, a few more people showed up and we had a good time before getting back to the hotel at about three in the morning.

Kings Cross is a strange place. It's Sydney's "Red Light District" so a fair amount of prostitutes, sex clubs, strip clubs and so on. However, unlike for instance Oslo's red light district, the area wasn't deserted or felt unsafe in any way. It was just weird and strange. There was a decent amount of regular bars, such as the bar we went to. Strange area.

My plane left at 1420, but Colin and I decided to go early, so we were at the airport around 1130. Nothing particularly fun happened there and my flight left on schedule. My flight out of Kuala Lumpur, however, was delayed by one hour. I was a bit nervous about the connection in Amsterdam, but it turned out I would end up with two instead of three hours for the transfer, something which is plenty.

Plane trip from KL to Amsterdam was boring, but I got to sleep a lot so I won't complain. Had plenty of space with the seat next to me vacant so even though it was a 12 hour flight it wasn't too bad.

Got a bit on IRC from Amsterdam and shopped a little bit around, but they were out of the blue toblerone (milk chocolate on the surface and white chocolate core). The girl behind the counter told me they might not be getting it again which I would consider a shame. That chocolate is good!

I'm currently approximately above Oslo somewhere and the plane is scheduled to touch down in a little less than an hour. It will be good to get back home to Karianne and my own bed.