rastplats

Woke up this morning to the telephone angrily ringing like a fire alarm.. and it just kept ringing. I had to spend all morning until around 13.00 by clearing up old crap in the tenants-owners association, crap that I wasnt involved in creating but now had to deal with. During the three years that I’ve been a member of the board I’ve never had such a load of crap thrown at me, and this with a mere two weeks left of my period.. I wonder what I’ve done to upset the order of things but clearly I must have made something utterly stupid to deserve this avalanche of shit. The rest of the day was spent washing and cleaning.. very amusing day, not. I did get around to wrapping up the slides for my presentation tomorrow as well, hopefully I’ll get the paper finished any day too.

The software that I’m using to create this blog is getting increasingly frustrating, adding a new post is running in O(n) time-complexity which now adds up to about 10 minutes or so per post. I’ll try to upgrade to the latest version soon but it doesnt seem to remedy this, it seems to be time to roll up the sleeves and get busy. The concept of the software is a true unixnerd killerapp but the lack of a good data structure is getting painful. Time to roll some patches I guess.

Another shitty weekend over and done with (only a few hours left). With saturday evening being the only ray of light I’ll be glad to close the book on this week. The coming week doesnt look all that promising either with the examproject seminar on tuesday and a cruise to Travemünde on thursday through friday which I’m really not in the mood for..

The professor of my institution came by today and delivered some good news, my exam has been approved for admission at the examination seminar at June 10. This means that my B.Sc title is two seminars away now which is somewhat nice. Having nothing to do for the coming six months is however truly sucky.. I guess I have to continue studying but if studies can impact my grant application for my studies abroad (which it probably will) then I’m back at square one. The final version of my essay is however available in the writings section. As soon as I get the slides done I’ll post them as well.

Spent most of the day clearing out the office we’ve been using for the development of our examproject the past months. Off in the evening for a new attempt at yesterdays meeting which finally went down. The reason for the meeting was a conveyance of a fastfood place which resulted in the buyer offering me a free meal when he’s done remodelling.. and on the way out I was promised a free meal at the sellers restaurant down in the southern parts of Malmö. Not a bad day food-wise but I guess I’ll pass up on the last offer, eating alone sucks bad but eating alone at a restaurant sucks incredibly bad.

Since I am a member of the board in our tenants-owerns association I get to deal with vast amounts of shit. At 17:00 this afternoon I had a meeting booked to sign a contract with the new owner of the fastfood place we have in our building. Since I am scheduled in school until 17:00 I had to cut the last hour short rushing through town to get there in time.. for nothing. At 17:10 the seller came telling me that the buyer had cancelled the meeting with a mere 15 minutes notice. The sad thing isn’t that it happened but the fact that this happens all the time. I’ve probably had more meetings cancelled like this the last couple of months than meetings that actually took place. If it wasnt for the fact that I’ll be resigning from the board in about two weeks I’d probably gone postal.. I should take up mountainclimbing, going uphill is the story of my life. If there ever is a gated community where admission is based on intelligence then lock me up and throw away the key.

Spent most of the day at school making slides for the presentation of my dynamic description-driven database that I’ll be holding next tuesday. Being a true disaster at giving presentations I guess I’ll have to spend the weekend working on them aswell.

About three years ago I quit my job after spending three hectic years in the graphic arts industry as a programmer and systems integration consultant. I had a brief but quite successful career, but at the end I was burnt out and decided to return to the university. At the time I was extremely delighted with my decision and my mood as well as health got a boost in the right direction. Now after three more years I seem to be more or less back at the same spot where I left off, walking in circles. I put my life into my career and used to work at least 10 hours per day leaving me very little time to engage in any social activities. That didnt matter much though, I had an identity whenever entering my office. I wrote software that ran workflows at some of the largest catalog productions in Europe aswell as one of the largest newspapers, businesstransactions worth millions was each day (and is to this day) handled by my software. I was expected to not perform well but to excel. I was called in sick or took a vacation it never went unnoticed and I dont think I ever managed a day off without a call from the office. Burning out wasn’t actually ideal but at least being someone felt good. The situation of today is quite the opposite, if I skip a week noone will care nor notice. At most it will render a comment on IRC. If I do really well on an exam or an assignment, instead of credit I’ll get labeled overachiever or just ignored. Being good and pretentious in school at undergraduatue level is of absolutely no use, the only thing it render is that one have to do other peoples work on group assignments.. instead of appreciation you get alienation. The only upside is that I have more free time.. which I’m unable to fill since I actually have fewer social relations and absolutely no hobbies nowadays.. damned if you do, damned if you dont. I really have no idea what I want to do with my life or even where I want to end up, everything I try deteriorate in my hands.. as Bruce Springsteen once said: “it’s a sad man my friend who’s livin’ in his own skin and can’t stand the company”.. I dont however feel sorry for myself which the song where that quote was taken from is about, I merely dislike my situation and hate the fact that I dont know how to solve it..

..that was probably the most personal post I’ve done, Something a little less depressing is that I ordered the BBS Documentary today. Judging by the table of contents on the site it will be a massive tour down memory lane watching it. The only problem is that I have neither a TV nor a DVD player..

Much to my satisfaction (and suprise) the codefreeze was actually honoured so my anticipated round-the-clock hacking got cancelled. It does of course suck that we have a vulnerable system but at least I could end up with only doing a full days work.. Even when I win I end up losing.. For the continued work on the project (after exam) I did develop a row-based concurreny detection algorithm which can do merge and raise exceptions on conflicts without the need for any clientside logic. I haven’t been able to hack it up and test it but it works in theory and should be fairly straightforward to implement in pl/perl or any other suitable procedural language of choice.

Since being indexed by Google and a multitude of other searchengines my compendiums containing solutions to exercises have attracted some attention. To date they have been downloaded about 600 times from hosts all over the world. Not too bad for merely being a means to help me study, I hope they’ve helped someone..

I’ve always considered developing web-applications to be a royal pain but recent activities in the exam-project has forced me to revise my opinion.. it sucks incredibly bad. While being busy implemeting my description-driven dynamic database (the paper is progressing) I’ve kept clear of the rest of the application. Today I learned that there exist data inconsistency at savepoints due to the stateless nature of the web. Since we cant reliably detect a shutdown browser or disconnected session traditional locking in the database or other transaction based solutions will be errorprone. I think I’ve found a way to detect when an UPDATE is using data from a dirty SELECT and how merge and/or detect conflicts. The plan is to use a variation on backwards validation but I’m not sure if I’ve covered all the pitfalls, I’ll have to see tomorrow when I’ll make a serious attempt at hacking it up. The “good'’ news is that I have about 2 days or so to get it at production quality.. lucky me.. not.

This week is about to close shop and thats just as good, it’s been quite shitty from start to finish.. Most of the time was spent finding and fixing bugs in the examproject codebase which is scheduled for total freeze this coming monday. Due to incompetent project management we have a 20.000 LOC system for managing medical journals over the internet that has had neither codereviews nor formal testing.. am I the only one left interesting in producing quality software? Other than that, I handed in my essay titled Unlocking FreeBSD Memory Allocation in which I propose changes to the FreeBSD userspace malloc(3) to enhance allocator performance in multithreaded applications on SMP systems. I’m not at all pleased with the result, I should be able to produce better. I really hope that my supervisor approve the essay for admission to the seminar so I can put it all behind me. If I get the green light I’ll post the paper in my writings section. Other than working on these two projects not much happened this past week. My spare time sucks, having nothing do and noone to do it with probably qualifies me as a class-A loser. I guess I actually was better off when working 10-14 hours every day since I back then didn’t have time to be bored and restless about having nothing to do..

Since the examproject deadline was closing in with a lot of cool features still missing it was time to get down and get busy. Frallan, Kamara and I dug our feet in and had an all-night hackathon starting at 4PM monday afternoon going on until 6AM tuesday morning. My description-driven database was finally fitted with a proper GUI for editing artifacts and fulltext searching, stuff I implemented the logic for in the backend over a month ago. As somewhat expected no credit was given for our work.. rather the opposite. When I after a mere 3 hours sleep returned to the scene of the crime I was immediately met by criticism.. I can for the life of me not figure out the logic of human beings here. (i) There is work to be finished by a certain deadline. (ii) The work doesnt get done. (iii) I spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning up and doing other peoples work to meet the set deadline (usually involving 12-14 hours sitdowns). (iv) I and/or the work I did get flamed and shot down.. If people take such offense in having someone else do their job, why dont they do it themselves in the alloted time in the first place? Working my ass of for no credit of appreciation is getting increasingly frustrating..

I went by Annas grave this afternoon since yesterdays hackathon made a visit on her birthday impossible, not that actual days matter that much anymore. Prioritizing school felt right, Anna wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

It should be a day for celebration since it’s my sisters thirtyfirst birthday today. Instead its quite the opposite since Anna died 15 years ago from cancer. I have accumulated quite a few scars on my body but they’re all nothing compared to the scar thats hidden beneath the skin, the years make it more bearable but the pain wont ever go away.. Happy Birthday Anna, I love you.

The passed weekend turned out mostly work-free which was much needed. Friday and saturday was spent struggling to wrap up a new two-piece canvas using mixed media (spray and markers) for a birthday party saturday night, the result can be seen in the gallery. The party was extremely nice with a lot of cool people and good food. When the party broke up we headed over to Jeriko and chilled at the Art Four Pleasure club which tonight featured live acts accompanied by chicago house.

I grew too tired to wrap up the Autoracer release last night, sorry for the delay.. my schedule has been so overbooked lately that merely keeping up with everything that I need to do is a full-time job. Our examproject at school is scheduled for codefreeze this coming tuesday so I’m hard at work hacking on the description-driven database system.. back to hack..

My eyes are burning from excessive uptime, sleep has been sparse the last few days so this post will be short.. the alarm will go off in a few hours for a new days work. The evening was spent working on a new art project which will be top secret for the time being, more news on that in a few days. Codewise I’ve rolled quite a tasty update to AutoRacer which I’ll release tomorrow. Changes include an improved parser, data resolving at test runtime instead of at parse-time and a new more dynamic design of the resulting testharness which make future improvements easy to add. Tune in tomorrow for more AutoRacer stuff, right now I’ll tune in to the sandman, over and out..

Sometime last year my ISP got bought by Bredbandsbolaget which is probably the second largest or perhaps the largest ISP here in Sweden. Since then I’ve been dreading the moment when they would start fiddling with my connection. The bomb dropped a few weeks back when they decided to upgrade my trusty old 2.5Mbit ADSL to an 8Mbit connection, on paper the transaction seems nice but in reality my once so stable connection has been turned into a reaking pile of dogshit. Not only does is drop connection at least once a day for a few seconds but at peek hours the transfer grinds to a halt leaving me longing for my old connection which had a quality of service like an old Volvo. Another nice touch was that they didnt include neither the IP nor the submask information in their letter but left me to traverse their broken portal looking for my account information. At the time I wondered how people without my degree of nowledge on networks and redundant internet connections would solve the problem, leaving account information needed to connect on a portal which you need to connect to reach is utterly retarded. The answer came last friday when a letter arrived with my account information.. some 4 weeks after the installation? I must admit that I feared the worst but this surpass even my dystopic view of the so called broadband industry. Another interesting question is what I am to do with the bandwidth at the times when it actually works? The only real application needing more than 2Mbit today is to pirate stuff faster.. I run open-source software and dont watch movies.. I guess I’ll have to join some high-volume mailinglists..

What a day.. Yesterday turned out quite well in most respects. I had a meeting with the professor that supervise my essay and he more or less approved it for submission to the seminar in present condition. The only remark he had was the conclusion which was quite expeceted since I havent written it yet, other tha that it was only minor grammar mistakes. My theoretical reasoning was good enough to not need any practical results to be approved but we both agreed on that it would be extremely cool if I got some nice plots of the benchmarks. The good thing is that I now can ditch the practical implementation in case time get sparse. The latest update on the implementation though is that I’ve implemented the lock-free linked list with collapsing nodes and merged it into phkmalloc which now utilize it (although with the locks still in place). My B.Sc degree is now closer than ever..

The night was spent clubbing at the Ministry of Sound club at Slagthuset in Malmö where Axwell, Rasmus Faber and Nick Bridges ripped up the turntables with mad skills. They threw down utter freshness and our small posse was up in smoke.. didnt get in bed until around 7 this morning.. now out for some sushi!

Today I took the decision to drop the course on Linear Algebra due to a too big workload.. this sucks so bad. Between my two exam projects, boardmeetings and other coursework there just isnt any energy left for the quite workintense linear algebra course. I guess it was the more sensible decision but I still hate the feeling of defeat.. For now my aim is to get the exam on time which is my number one priority, I just hope I can appreciate my exam after this. I guess setting up unreasonable goals with the accompanying crashlanding is the story of my life.. sucks..

Codewise I spent saturday chilling with Andreas and hacking on the lock-free linked list which I finished off today. Tomorrow I’ll start merging it into phkmalloc, keep your fingers crossed. If I get some time left I intend to rewrite the AutoRacer parser using a more flexible design so that new classes of rules can be easily added. But.. ENOTIME..