rastplats

The visa problems I mentioned got sorted out, I’ll most likely be flying down on a tourist visa which I can upgrade when I’ve arrived. Given my experiences with visas in the past, I see a couple of major flaws in that scheme but it seems to be my only shot. At least one hurdle less at the moment.

More work on the boring examproject at the university today, creating webbased systems must be the McDonalds of software engineering.. such intense boredom. However, I did get to do some researchwork on description-driven information abstraction which was quite a challenge, hopefully I’ll find some time to write a small article on my work there. The endresult I’m aiming at is an entirely generalized information storage which can be extended arbitrary with finegrained searching without having to write any specific code. Pretty cool stuff.. I’ll spend tomorrow by hacking up a proof of concept of it which will be interesting.

Artwise, I received drawings in the mail today from Jon Burgerman and Mysterious Al for my tsunami relief donations to Wooster Collective which was extremely nice. Now I need to hack up some frames for those and a Jens Grönberg piece which has neglected for too long.

I knew it had been to smooth, shit was bound to happen as it always does. In order for me to get a studentvisa for Australia I need to apply three months prior to travelling. To apply for the visa I need a COE letter from the university.. which I cant get until at most three weeks prior to travelling.. up shit creek. Perhaps it can be solvedby using a tourist visa which I upgrade but that is a bit uncertain at the moment.. Keep your fingers crossed people!

Spent the evening embarking on a top-secret artproject which turned out nice.. details to be revealed soon.

I am one of few in Sweden that dont have a cellular phone and this seems to be a big problem for more or less everyone else (that do own a cellular phone). Every time the subject surface I get told that I should get one, yet no-one can answer the quite innocent question “why?'’. Since my stationary phone is quiet most of the time and only rarely are there any messages on my answering machine, calling me is obviously not the biggest concern.. and since I spend most of my time either at home, where I am extremeley reachable via irc/icq/mail/phone, or at school where any cellular phone would be switched off anyways (and I’m usually reachable using irc/icq/mail), reachability can’t be the reason either. About the only reason I can think of is that people usually justify their own actions with “everyone else does” and often run out of arguments when everyone else doesn’t, the need to be reachable 24 hours a day 7 days a week is one of these areas. Cellular phones doesn’t connect people, it disconnect them from the real world since ringing of the phone takes precedence over practically every other action.. lectures, discussions, movies.. nothing is too sacred to not be interrupted by a phonecall that in 99.999% of the time is an utterly pointless “Ey, whats up..”.

With that said of course I recognize that there are practical applications of cellular phones as with any means of communication. That is beside the point, the point is that personal communication face to face is sacrificed at a too high cost. Another downside with modern cellular phones is that they with few exceptions look like a handheld toystore that has collided with too many lightbulbs.. if you insist on interrupting everyone you should at least do it in style!

Had a very positive meeting with my essay supervisor today, all is going well and my preliminary research got approved. I hope to have formulated my approach by the end of this weekend.. but I know too well about my good intentions.. The rest of the day at school was quite sucky though. The everning was saved by an incredible stream delivered by DJ Jucke behind the wheels of steel, ShoutCAST for president!

Since I’m a nerd and seriously lack social skills, I read quite a lot (not owning a TV increase the reading aswell). In order to gather my thoughts after finishing a book, I’m going to start review the books and post the reviews here.

My plans for the evening was to head off to bed early, quite a few more or less sleepless nights had turned down my bpm-counter to around 12. Like so many times before though, good intentions rarely are good enough.. I ended up chilling with Joel and Andreas watching Commodore64 demos accompanied by a a few beers and didn’t get home until 7AM.. but why sleep when you can hang out with the data homeboys, there’s always “tomorrow night'’.

An entire day spent working in Windows XP with the Visual Studio development suite.. and what Crap it is! I tried porting my makefiles from my development environment in FreeBSD to nmake for my Windows colleagues and every try was rejected with a moronic error message. Whats the point in displaying an error message stating the parsing didnt succeed when you dont report where in the file it failed, remarkably stupid. Since I knew the rules were correct it confused me that they didnt work, little did I know that the solution was going to confuse me even further. Apparently nmake is unable to handle unix linebreaks, converting the file to use dos linebreaks solved the problem.. no offence but didn’t we enter 2005 a few days ago.. no-one told me we were heading to 1985.. how can a software as old that is used as widespread as nmake not handle any linebreak correctly? Or at least tell me what the problem was? Another interesting thing was the so called background Windows Update that I wasn’t supposed to notice (until I have to reboot since the VM is crappy code), it momentarily take focus from the window I’m using (yes, some windows systemcalls only work on the window carrying focus, the word is crap gentlemen). Upon returning focus, of course it was restored to the taskbar instead of the window I was using.. leaving my keystrokes vanishing somewhere in bitheaven. I wonder where the word “Background” entered the engineering process?

The past 15 years has been quite fantastic in terms of computer hardware research, what took 1 day back then can be computed in 10 seconds today.. and still it takes linear time to start any Microsoft product, Word 4 takes equally long to load as Word XP 2003 Ultra Pro Deluxe and yet hardware has changed from an 8Mhz 286 to a 3.8Ghz Pentium4. Viva La UNIX!

I’ve been a member of the board in the tenants owner’s association where I live for about three years now, a three year learning experience. Having worked as a consultant and dealt directly with some of the largest companies in Sweden I know the importance of customer care, what I’ve seen these past years is saddening. The number of contractors that actually deliver what we’ve ordered on time can be represented on one hand (with a few fingers to spare). Practically every company we’ve dealt with these three years have exploited the fact that the boardmembers are doing their work in their spare time (often without any pay) and therefore are less interested in picking a fight. The latest example is ComHem who today announced that they will commence their work in our house within three weeks, a job I personally ordered six months ago and was promised that it would be finished by November 15. Getting screwed by everyone over petty greed is sickening, anything for a few dollars more..

Another interesting detail is the level of incompetence by the poeple who actually live here. At least half of them haven’t realized that the board doesn’t actually own the house with their money, the tenants owner do and its their money. I recieved notice today that I’ll probably become critized on the annual member conference for actually enforcing the rules and thereby not only keeping the boardmeetings strictly legal but also saving the association money.. if only people would read something before speaking.. I’m not asking everyone to read the applicative laws but is grasping the most basic principles to much to ask from people that have invested SEK 500.000 in their apartements? All this ignorance is making me look forward to moving even more..

Spent the rest of the day studying for the exam in realtime programming this thursday which went fairly well. I really look forward to getting this exam over and done with so that I can resume the work on my essay.

The last few weeks of hitting up easy street has come to an end, tomorrow (today) is the first day of the semester which in fact will be nice.. getting restless. Another nice thing is that I received mail from Mysterious Al today, he’ll be sending me a page from his sketchbook as thanks for tsunamidonation I did.. it’s great to see the international solidarity in these times of need. Have you donated yet? If not, please do so now.. Spent some time doing some research on lockfree datastructures as well which may be the best direction for my essay, the only downside is that it’s tricky as shit! All in all, a pretty clean day..

While cleaning the apartement today (which was way overdue) I accidentally found my Rubiks Cube in a dusty drawer. I knew I had one but I didnt remember bringing it when moving here, a pleasant surprise nevertheless. Now I need to read up on cube solving algorithms, making a nerd like me excited is quite easy I guess Less funny was cleaning the bathroom sink drain which had accumulated a fair amount of what in swedish is referred to as ‘’Guck'’. Spent the evening at the movies watching Oceans Twelve which sucked quite bad, as could be expected from a sequel.