Madrid: hasta luego

My stay in Madrid has come to an end and I'm currently sitting at Ralf Treinen's place in Paris. I had a pretty good time in Madrid. Basically, I just did the usual stuff (i.e., too much Debian, too little work for my research) but there are a number of nice guys in the group I was working in and we had lots of fun.

Earlier this week, we went to Teo's place who has this massive swimming pool. He recently organized a BBQ, which was good as well, with lots of Sangria... A few weeks ago, Diego (at whose place I stayed), Alvaro and his cute girlfried Yaiza went bowling. It was really good fun and it turned out that Diego is a real master, scoring several strikes after each other!

Now that summer is coming, a number of people are leaving for other places. Israel went to Canada for three months a few weeks ago, Gregorio left for the UK a few days ago and my stay is over too. Overall I had a pretty good time, even though I'm not particularly happen that I didn't manage to go to the beach once even though I was in Spain for three months...

The last time I was here at Ralf's place in Paris was just before DebConf1 in Bordeaux in 2001, which feels like eons ago. Anyway, I'm heading out to take a look at Notre Dame.

Madrid

I'm in Madrid now. On Friday afternoon, I returned to Cambridge from Vienna. Unfortunately, I couldn't start packing straight away because I had to work on a paper which was due Friday night. At about midnight my co-author noticed that the deadline had been extended until Wednesday so I went to sleep. The next day I finished packing and then started moving everything into my office at the university. Unfortunately, that took much longer than expected and I missed my bus to the airport. Turbo boost (aka taxi) to rescue and I was at the airport in time.

I'm really slowly getting fed up with moving and need to settle down. It's just so much work, and that even though I don't own terribly much. I wonder how other people cope... in the last five years, I've lived in London, Innsbruck, Vienna, Melbourne, Cambridge and now Madrid. Hmm.

Anyway, Madrid is fun. I'm sure I'm going to enjoy my time here. The people in the group I work with at the university are incredibly smart and friendly. Last night, Gregorio (my main contact at the university), Diego (the guy I'm staying with) and I went out for dinner... nice food and Sangria! What more do you want? The place I'm staying at is nice... Diego is friendly, we have wireless, a fairly big apartment and there's a balcony where I can see myself sitting with my laptop working on stuff and sipping Sangria... I don't know yet how I'll cope with the commute given that I've always lived very close to work (5 minutes per foot in Cambridge was about all I needed for everything) but I'm sure I'll find something to do. It will also be a really interesting experience to life in a country where you don't speak the language.

Oz, Cambridge, Vienna, Madrid

So I watched this Australian movie (Somersault) the other day and the cute accent reminded me again how much I miss the country. It has almost been 2.5 years since I left and I'd really like to visit again. Maybe I should try to make it to LCA next year. In a related note, I'm looking for Rob Weir who has mysteriously disappeared from the Internet. Does anyone know what's up with him?

As much as I like Cambridge, staying at the same place for 2.5 years obviously doesn't work. ;) Next week I'll therefore go to Vienna for some "holidays" – the first thing I did was to sign myself up for a talk... if anyone wants to hear me babbling about quality in free software on Monday, check out the Debienna site. Right after my return from Vienna I'll go to Spain where I'll spend three months working in the Libre Software Engineering research group around Jesus Barahona (a Debian developer) and Gregorio Robles. I'll actually work on my PhD for a change during that time and do cool quantitative work to support the qualitative studies I've done so far.

Obviously, instead of packing, I spent the last few days and weeks hacking on Debian stuff, in particular making sure it works on the MIPS and ARM devices I support and which I cannot take with me to Madrid. So we finally have 2.6 kernels for MIPS in the archive now and debian-installer will move to it tomorrow. I've also compiled the whole archive on MIPS with GCC 4.1 but a more detailed report on that is forthcoming.

P.S. In terms of Spanish movies, I can highly recommend The Lovers of the Arctic Circle and Talk to Her.

Time

Yesterday I went to Austria to visit friends and family for a few days. I started going through some of my old stuff, throwing away some of it and scanning material that's still of interest. While doing so, I came across the invoice for the first computer I bought myself, just a little bit more than 10 years ago. It was a Pentium 90 with 32 MB RAM and a 1 GB hard drive. It had all kind of expensive components because I wanted to run NEXTSTEP (which only supported high-end hardware) and so the machine cost a fortune. In fact, for the price of the 17" screen alone you could get a powerful system these days. Coincidentally, I was just playing with my wifi AP/router the other day, a device with 32 MB RAM, 8 MB flash and a 200 MHz MIPS CPU that I got for under 50 bucks... However, this is not a rant about the speed of change in the computer industry. This is all well and good, and I definitely enjoy having a laptop with a gig of RAM.

Instead, it's more about observations of time. I still remember when 2001 was years away and we were all looking forward to it (you know, we'd finally have flying cars, thinking machines and all that stuff); I also remember celebrating the millennium. Now, when I see stuff from 2001, 2002 or even 2003, it feels old. But what really freaks me out is when I have to write down a date starting with 19... I actually have to check it twice to see whether I really got it right and I feel so retro adding stuff that old... time's a strange thing.

Moi

I finally got some pictures from the MRI experiment I participated in last year:

Oslo, teaching

After returning from Sri Lanka, I had two days before heading off to Oslo where I gave some lectures at the University of Oslo. Upon arrival at the airport, I had plenty of time to get to the university. Unfortunately, the train was massively delayed and time was running shorter and shorter. The lectures took place in the same place as Debian Conference two years ago, which made it easy to find the way, and I arrived in time. The lectures went fairly well; however, teaching at the university is quite different to giving a talk at a free software event. While you can assume in the latter case that people will be vaguely interested in what you're saying, some (many?) students are just sitting there because they have to.

No giraffes in Kenya

As we all know, Sri Lanka is famous for giraffes rather than elephants, so Chamindra presented the official Sri Lankan giraffe to me:

Looking for a Giraffe

My brother and his family were in Innsbruck for the wedding and they got out some old stuff from us for their daughter. When I saw her playing with a toy horse, I recognized it and promptly traded it for a penguin. A neighbour made this cute horse for me and according to my mum I had a giraffe too... unfortunately, we don't know where it is.

Just Married

Last weekend I went to Innsbruck to attend the wedding of my sister, Katrin, and Jeremy. They originally had a civil wedding in the States a few months ago but planned to do a church wedding in Austria. The wedding was quite nice. The ceremony was a bit too religious (doh) for me, but considering it was a church wedding it was actually pretty reasonable. When we left the church, it was a scene like in a movie; it had rained previously but when we opened the door, there was suddenly sunshine!

The wedding was followed by the usual dinner. Katrin's friend planned a few nice activities. They read a passage from the Little Princess in which he talks to the fox about friendship and being tamed and that you're responsible for friends your whole life. Then, they had two set of postcards: one type was used to put on balloons in the hope that those who'll find them will post them. I'm not allowed to talk about the other set about because it wouldn't be a surprise anymore; but suffice to say that it was a good idea.

Katrin and Jeremy went to Italy for a few days before they'll return to the States on Saturday. I'm back in Cambridge already. It's pretty funny that all of us are in different countries now. My brother has been living in Luxembourg for a few years, and I've been around... but we always assumed my sister would stay in Austria...

New camera

Last week I got the new camera I ordered, a Canon S1 IS. A friend took a photo of me which I quite like:

Back in Cambridge; Swimming, London, JEB, Netgear

A few days ago I went swimming at the Parkside swimming pool. I really like swimming and wanted to go to the swimming pool since I moved here but somehow never got around to it (but hey, I've only lived here for one and a half years). Anyone from the Cambridge crowd up for going swimming every once in a while?

On Friday, I went to London for a meeting with Fotango. Afterwards, I met up with James Bromberger, which was really nice. I've mostly been doing researchy type of stuff recently... working on papers, reading some papers and books and so. It's quite scary that I've been back in Cambridge for a month again after my little conference tour around Europe. In fact, I haven't written about the last one I attended yet. After returning from Spain, I went to Genova in Italy for an academic conference on free software and open source. Unfortunately, it overlapped with Debian Conference but I really had to go to the academic conference because I was presented a paper and my PhD project there. My PhD proposal was very well received and I got some good feedback. Anyway, I'm actually on my way to Austria right now but I'll only be there for a few days and then go back to my research.

Well, maybe... Yesterday I received the Netgear WGT634U access point I bought and I've been playing around with it. It's a MIPS based machine with 32 MB memory and 8 MB flash, running Linux. It has USB and I intend to connect an external hard drive to it and run a full Debian system on it. This should give me a good excuse to hack on debian-installer again...

Innsbruck, friends and family

After LinuxTag, I went to Innsbruck to spend some days with friends and family. I got a lift from someone and we talked about various things on the way back. It was really a nice conversation. When I arrived, I had a few relatively busy days... my grandma wanted to cook for me on Sunday, I had to see my uncle, my friends, etc... even though I was quite busy, I had a really good time. I don't really like to be in Innsbruck during winter, but visiting during summer is really nice... I even went back to my old high school to thank some teachers. They really appreciated this, as I assume that few pupils care to go back.

Not weird at all(tm)

Conferences and summer plans

My plans for this summer are finally getting together, even though many details still need to be sorted out. Interestingly, the beginning of July is completely packaged while relatively little seems to be happening in August and September. At the end of June, just before term ends, I'll head to Karlsruhe for LinuxTag. From there, I'll be going to my parent's place in Innsbruck to visit friends and family (and have all my regular medical check-ups since I have better health insurance in Austria than in the UK).

My original plan was to stay there for a week before I have to go to Castellón in Spain where I'll be teaching at the Libre Software Summer School. However, I've been talking to some researchers in Italy recently and they invited me to give a talk at the University of Trento. Since it's only a few hours from Innsbruck, I agreed to go there for a day. I was also supposed to be giving a guest lecture on quality management at a free software Master's course in Bologna but we never managed to sort out the details. As it turns out, the day after my talk in Trento would be good for them, so it seems I'll be going there as well.

In a similar fashion, my situation in Spain got a little bit more complicated^Wexciting. Since I have a few days between my lecture in Castellón and my presentation at the First International Conference on Open Source Systems in Genova, Italy, my original plan was to simply stay in Spain for a few days and relax at the beach. However, then I found out that there's a free software conference exactly during that time. And unlike last year, the conference will be hosted directly at the coast. So I'll give a talk there, have a chance to catch up with my Catalan friends and spend the rest of the time at the beach. Bonus! It also seems I'll be able to go to Debian Conference for the last two or three days.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what I'll do from mid July to mid August and from the end of August to the end of September. Maybe I should just stay in Cambridge like I did last year, but for some reason I'm pondering going somewhere else to work with other researchers or something like that. Any exciting offers anyone? :)

Punting, Bowling, Chinese input, UTF-8

Today I went bowling with some friends from the department. Even though I quite like bowling, it has been over three years since I last went. I managed to win the first game (but none of us were terribly great so that doesn't mean much) but then got third in the second one… a really nice afternoon. Last Saturday we went punting on the Cam when the weather was really beautiful.

Tonight I played around with SCIM (Smart Common Input Method) and the simplified Chinese (pinyin) input method. It's pretty simple to install and use… you basically enter pinyin and then get to choose from a number of characters. Playing around with this prompted me into looking at moving to UTF-8 again. I'm sure that everyone else has done that already, but I haven't had a big need for it until now and my last attempt failed miserably. As it turns out, it was just a font problem which I have now more or less solved. Now I'll have to convert all my existing documents and see what other issues I'll run into…

GLLUG meeting, sore throat

I went to London today to give a talk about my research on quality in free software projects at the Greater London Linux User Group. Apparently the attendance was quite high compared to recent meetings, and I hope the people enjoyed my talk. While my talk went reasonably well, I was unfortunately not in the best shape. When I left China, I was feeling quite healthy but after arriving in Europe my joints started to ache and I developed a sore throat. I'm not quite sure why this has happened but maybe it was because of the air conditioning on the airplane. I spent most of Friday in the bed (catching up on e-mail and sleeping) and left the pub after the GLLUG meeting early, but I'm still not feeling quite well.

Beijing, formal hall, Chinese food, parents

I arrived in Beijing today. Alex Schmehl was on the same plane and we took a taxi to the hotel. Even though I had been warned that the weather would be cold and that there would be snow, there is no snow at all and the temperature is quite comfortable as well. The hotel is pretty amazing. It's a five star hotel and we have executive rooms which are really huge and have Internet and a fax machine. The hotel also has a swimming pool and fitness center so I went swimming for a while. Afterwards I took a hot, relaxing bath. We're currently waiting for Andreas Tille who should be arriving soon, and then we'll hopefully grab some food.

The last two weeks have been fairly eventful. On Monday almost two weeks ago a friend from work invited me to formal hall (i.e. a dinner) at his college. I wasn't sure whether I should go but then I went along and it was a really nice evening. The food was also excellent. I wanted Mexican food for about two months but never did anything about it and then they served Mexican food at the formal. The following day, a few colleagues from work went to a Chinese friend who cooked for us (together with her mum who was visiting). Again, great food, but I ate way too much on both days. On Wednesday night, my parents arrived to visit me for a few days. I showed them around the colleges, the university library and a few other places, and we had dinner at a Greek restaurant. Overall I had a pretty good time. Last week I went to formal hall again with a group of people from the institute.

And now I'm hungry again. I'm really looking forward to the Chinese food!

Moving to a desktop PC

For the last 4.5 years, I exclusively used laptops as my primary workstation on which I stored all my data (usually with the aid of a PC on which I'd keep my media collection and backups). I like this because I have all my data with me all the time and can work when travelling. On the other hand, using a laptop constantly isn't terribly ergonomic so I have been thinking for a while whether I should get a desktop (or an external USB keyboard for my laptop but I couldn't get used to the particular keyboard I bought). A few weeks ago, I found a spare monitor in my department and moved it into my office (with permission of IT staff). Today, I put a PC from home into my office to use as a desktop system. Another reason I love laptops is that their keyboards with touchpads are so much faster and easier to use than mice, but surprisingly enough I didn't find using a mouse awkward today. The good thing is that I don't have to carry my laptop to work every day anymore…

… however, I have no idea how I will handle my data. So far, everything has been on my laptop. While I had other machines, it was clear that the laptop was the primary machine with all my stuff on it. Now that I have a desktop at work which I regularly use, I have the problem of keeping the data in sync somehow, or just logging in remotely to my laptop at home. Ideally, I'd just follow Joey Hess and put everything in SVN, and while I'm increasingly putting my files into SVN, I don't think I'll go the whole way. In particular, I'm worried about how to handle my mail setup. I don't quite see the benefits of keeping my mail archives in SVN and offlineimap probably doesn't work with the way I handle my mail.

Furthermore, I finally (after a year of being here) got around to configuring my system to print to the network printer via Samba. I made some minor efforts before which completely failed. I've been told that CUPS is easy, but believe me, it's not. I finally found a solution which just uses smbclient directly in /etc/printcap together with a magicfilter which does the right thing.

Eternal Sunshine

I watched the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the other day, a really good movie. The technology they used in the movie to erase memories was very crude, but the movie raises lots of interesting questions.

Yesterday, I mostly geeked around, shuffling around stuff on my MIPS machine to create a dual-boot setup for both little and big endian. I tested Thiemo's new 2.6.10rc3 kernel packages for MIPS and did various debian-installer tests on Cobalt. I also managed to leave the house to do some grocery shopping and to buy a ticket to China.

Today I played around with Software Suspend on my laptop. Someone sent me a message reporting success with swsusp2 on his nc4000 so I built a kernel with the swsusp2 patches in order to test it myself. It worked without any problems and I updated my Debian on nc4000 page accordingly. I spent the afternoon hacking on the NM web pages again. While I made some user visible improvements, most changes are related to internal Front Desk and DAM functionality. I also made some minor changes to the GPG key signing coordination page. Later, I read another chapter of the chemistry textbook I borrowed the other day.

NM, DPL, crypto, bio

I've been fairly productive during the last few days. I read a number of New Maintainer reports and made various changes to the NM web pages. I started with some improvements regarding usability and clarity, but while I was working on it I noticed lots of code duplication in existing code which I then promptly got rid of. Over the last few days, I also worked on a number of DPL related TODO items. Both my personal and my DPL mailbox seem fairly sane right now.

I also had a chance to review the patch again which Wesley Terpstra submitted against initrd-tools. The patch adds support for encrypted root filesystems using dm-crypt. Since I'm interested in this functionality, I reviewed and tested the patch a few weeks ago. Yesterday, I finally got around to testing it once more and applied it in SVN. I intend to use encrypted filesystems on all my important machines so it's good to have crypto root working now with initrd.

Finally, I updated the biography on my homepage. (Nah, I'm not bored; it really needed an update.)