Tollef Fog Heen's blog

Swimming this morning too, like the other days. There will be no swimming tomorrow due to the pool being closed on weekends, which is a shame. Hot tub and breakfast afterwards. I spent most of my morning reviewing specifications. Not very exciting, but work which needed to be done.

I caught up a little bit on the sleep front with a small nap in the afternoon before heading out for dinner. The dinner itself was quite nice. I sat next to Jeff Bailey who required three tries to actually get his vegan food. It was nice talking to everybody and we had great fun afterwards as well. We went out to a not-so-nearby pub and had a small look at the Notre Dame cathedral, though only from the outside. Notre Dame church.

Hung out with some people in the lobby before heading to bed. Amusing and fun, as usual. Sleepy and tired now.

The last day but one. As with the previous days, I went swimming. 30 lengths, but they were heavier than the previous days. I must be getting tired. We were a larger crowd and so had a little bit of traffic management problems, but it all worked out in the end. The hot tub is also quite nice. Breakfast afterwards before heading to work. I wrote a lot of live CD specs and also had good fun discussing some other specs.

In the afternoon, we had an ok dinner followed by Mako dragging Michael Johnson, Colin and I into a whisky BOF, which was nice. We had some very interesting discussions about the installer and conary (rpath's packaging system and more).

I ended up going to bed around midnight, which isn't too bad. Talked a bit with Karianne at different points in the day, but she's on dialup from Molde and so isn't too much around. It will be good to get back home again.

I've gotten well into the habit of getting up at about 0700 and going for a swim. Thirty lengths this time as well, and Daniel Silverstone showed up when I was mostly through. We rounded up by sitting in the hot tub for a little while. Excellent way to start the day.

Later, I got started with my livecd specs and sessions. For one of them, nobody showed up to the BOF, which made my work much harder as I had to think up good solutions all by myself. Adam and I had our shortest session, the "Put language packs on a DVD livefs" on, which took about five minutes, then three times as much to write up.

In the afternoon, we had dinner, which was decent enough, but not very exciting. I miss my own food. Scott and I had some interesting (and semi-insane) discussions about file systems, suspending and the live cd. For fear of being put into a mental hospital, I won't repeat the ideas here.

I also got to play with kprobes, a nice instrumentation technology and got it working well enough to record all open(2) calls. Now I just need to put them into a list and write it back when the probe is rmmod-ed.

This is all quite shiny and I'm happy. I also got to talk a bit with Karianne over the phone, she seems a bit too tired and would really, really, really like to have been here, but other than that quite happy. She also has a bit too much to do with some looming deadlines.

Went swimming this morning too. 30 lenghts, which I reckon is about 500m. Not very far, but way more than I am used to. Most of the spec sessions were for other people than me, so I spent some time reading email and such. After a while, I had a headache and went to bed to sleep for a bit.

In the evening, Colin Watson and I went into Paris and met up with Daniel Stone for dinner. Quite good (much better than the food at the hotel) and with a very interesting dessert at the end: Lemon sorbet in a glass of vodka. Delicious and didn't taste much of vodka at all. It's always nice to see people I haven't seen for a while again and it's good to see that Daniel seems to be quite happy at his new job.

The trip back home itself wasn't too eventful until we got to the airport a bit too late for the last shuttle bus and the taxis didn't want to take us. We ended up walking over to where the shuttle buses were supposed to leave from and waited there for a little while. A couple of Americans showed up and they were apparently going SAS Radisson too. They called the hotel and tried to convince them to send out the shuttle bus, but to no avail. No bus came for us. We ended up grabbing a taxi (actually, two of them since we were five people) and I had a nice chat with them on the way back. Not that they knew much about Linux, but they had at least heard of it.

I got a very, very sweet email from Karianne which I just managed to read before power went out and my network connection dropped.

A long day is just about at its end. I arrived at Charles de Gaulle yesterday. It's a very strange airport which most reminds me of a futuristic movie from the 1960s. Instead of the usual every-long tubes you have to walk through, it has a bunch of satelites where the planes park. Worked well enough. Security was quite strange, since there was nothing hindering us from walking back into the "secure" zone after having picked up the luggage. Outside, however, I saw two soldiers and a policeman. One of the soldiers had a FAMAS, an ugly, bullpup-configuration assault rifle with no trigger guard stopping one from hitting the trigger by accident and walked around with his finger on the trigger. Scary.

I met up with the other people and we were in the elevator on our way back to bed, I threw a joke about having to adjust to the new time zone. Incidentially, I was the only person in the elevator not having flown to a different time zone and it all backfired on me when I woke up at 0530 this morning. I could not sleep for another hour, then slept a bit before waking up at about seven. Went for a swim, which was absolutely great. Daniel Silverstone was there too, so we spent the time between laps chatting. Jeff Bailey was supposed to be there, but didn't show up until I had gotten out of the water and was on my way out.

Breakfast was surprisingly good. I tend to dislike hotel breakfasts since they don't have good, Norwegian bread, the cheese is wrong and the ham is wrong too. This time, I found some nice apple jam, some decent ham and some smoked mackerel.

First half of the day went to doing a small presentation of all the specs. Yes, all 151 of them. The schedule was nice enough, I had a bunch of interesting discussions with various people, so that was nice, but I ended up being a bit grumpy in the end due to lack of food. We ended up getting a quite good dinner, but it took altogether too much time, which was a shame. I also ended up in an interesting discussion about how to get soyuz's publisher to run quicker. It appears that we'll get the build-from-accepted spec implemented and it'll mean building will take a lot less time to get fixes in when it's time-critical, like around CD release time.

I've also talked a fair bit with Karianne, I miss her a lot and am already longing to be back with her. Though, I guess longing once in a while means we appreciate each other when we see each other again.

A bit later than the others, with a bit of manual hacking of debian-cd scripts as well as the publish-release script (so we didn't lose the other arches) and with a great effort from Fabio, Adam and Celso, Dapper for SPARC (with Niagara support) is now out. It got delayed due to the tg3 NIC on the T1000 and the kernel not playing to nicely together.

Saturday, I was supposed to cut wood at my grandfather's. Or so I thought. This was just a way to make sure I didn't make too many other plans for that day since some of my friends (or actually, Ingvild) had decided to hold my stag party then. I was woken up by ferocious ringing at the inner doorbell and got up, grumbling. I guessed it was just somebody who had lost their keys and were on their way back from a party and thought ringing my doorbell was a good idea, but no. Flashes were flashing and people were cheering. At 0700 in the morning.

Well, I figured what was happening pretty quickly and put some clothes on, made a couple of sandwiches (or at least pieces of bread with something on). We drove out of the city, southwards, on the western side of the Oslo fjord. After I while, I guessed they were totally insane and were going to Torp where cheap flights to the rest of the world takes off from, but we weren't. We drove onto a small airfield called Jarlsberg, like the cheese. I was supposed to do a tandem parachute jump, but due to bad weather I didn't get to do it this time. But, I'll be getting a jump later this summer.

So, we drove back to Oslo, this time I shared car with Anne, Mie, Thomas and Rune. Due to a misunderstanding, we had to return the car on the way and continued in a taxi from Skøyen. I had my suspicions on where we were going and they matched: Ringnes, close to Opera where I used to work.

There we attended "Ringnes beer school" which was quite nice and interesting and I started getting beer. That part obviously continued the whole afternoon and evening. Not much new information, but the guide obviously knew her stuff well enough and everybody was having a good time.

From there, we walked to Tåsen and Ingvild's parents's where a barbecue was held. I was still having a good time, but people were at this point trying quite hard to get me to drink faster and more. Food was nice, and there was a small quiz about how well I really knew Karianne. I didn't do too well, but not utterly bad either. When the evening came and it slowly became colder, we walked back to Ingvild's and Øystein's where there was more beer and another quiz, this time I was asked to identify computer parts while blindfolded. I did quite well at that and everybody thought it was hilarious that I used my tongue to count pins and such.

At around 0200, everybody had left and I was put to bed (I think that's the best term to describe it). I didn't feel too bad the morning after, obviously a bit of an headache, but a litre of water and a book helped cure that quite well.

All in all, a very nice party. Lots of friends, both local ones and some who came from Bergen (my brother Kristian) and Trondheim (Magni). Steinar and Svein took a lot of pictures too.

So, yesterday was my birthday, which was nice. Got some books from Karianne, a cake-handling device (aka kakespade) and a tiny penguin from her parents. From Stein, I got one of the discworld books I wanted ("Thud!"). From dad and Vigdis, I got six bottles of exotic beer and a hat for my bunad (or at least a piece of paper saying I'll get a hat). Yay.

Also got lots of congratulation on IRC and such, which was nice.

Since I'm impatient and Robot101 didn't respond within ten minutes of me pinging him on IRC, I'm just posting the result of his request for a hackergotchi.

Above is JPEG, but there's an XCF available too, with full transparency goodness, etc.

Next time, it'd be useful to have a starting image where the head is bit more than 180x230 pixels since doing cropping and resizes and such tend to end with the image not being great.

Also, my space bar is failing and I'll have to call IBM when I get home. I'm actually quite disappointed that I seem to have worn out the space bar in about a year and a half.