sailing in search of fresh waters

I've had a long, quiet time on this blog over the past few years while I've been frantically helping Jolla to launch their self-named product: the Jolla. I've enjoyed (almost) every day I've been there: they really are a great bunch of people and the work has been plentiful and challenging.

But as the saying goes, "this too shall pass". Nothing lasts forever, and it's time for a change: after this week, I will be taking a break from Jolla to get some fresh perspective.

On the bright side, maybe I'll have some more time for writing now :)

If anyone is interested in getting a hold of a C++/Qt/QML/Linux expert with a focus on performance, expertise on mobile, and a wide range of knowledge across other areas who loves open source, please let me know.

relocation...

It's been a few years since I last moved house, although that was a small hop. Just across the hallway from my previous flat. I figured it was about time to move countries again, so I said goodbye to folks, closed all my accounts, and have finally made the move I've been planning for a long time now: to Norway.

I'm just about starting to get settled in here, I have my fødelsnummer and other paperwork mostly sorted out and am generally loving things. I guess I might have to start writing in Norwegian sometime in the future for practice, but perhaps that's something for another blog.

As a result of all this, my work situation is changing a bit, but not too much, thankfully. I've been forced to start my own company (my second in my lifetime, actually), but thankfully I'll keep working along with the great folks at Collabora - just with a little more freedom for adventure, should I so wish it.

Oh, and I nearly got married while my parents were visiting. But the paperwork didn't quite arrive in time.

That's about all the life updates for now... ;)

travelbug

subtitle: "why can't I stay in one country for more than three months this year".

On the one hand, it's great to see people I haven't seen forever - or for a very long time, and new places... but on the other hand... I really don't like the travelling part of travelling. Ironic, given how much of it I'm doing this year!

I've been to Norway to spend some of summer with Kamilla's family.

I've gone to Australia to spend some time with my family - plus the first real time off I've had in a while (which was lovely, I went to the beach, even though it's technically winter there, and went swimming).

I returned, after all this, back to the UK for a day, before flying out to Helsinki for work. It's been good fun. I've got to meet some great fellow Collaborans (I'd have linked to Siraj's blog, but I can't seem to find one that looks recent.. Hi Siraj! :)), and a lot of other cool people.


Helsinki is quite a nice place. I'm enjoying my time here. But I am looking forward to going home. :)

travelling through life

I recently got back from Sydney, Australia. That's travelling that I'd like to talk about, but this post isn't the place for that. On my return trip, I bought a book: I shall wear midnight, by Terry Pratchett. A Discworld novel. One part of the author's note in the conclusion in particular once again reminds me what a wonderful man Mr. Pratchett is, and I would like to share that quote:

It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.

Terry Pratchett
Wiltshire
27 May 2010

Thanks for another great read, Terry. I admire you, not just for your literary talents, but for your perception.

If you have never read any of Terry's books, I strongly advise that you stop procrastinating and start reading. Now.

Dear Blogger

Please stop doing things like randomly adding meta tags to my blog posts that I don't add, and then refuse to save my posts.

Please don't excessively convert htmlentities (< is already converted, you don't need to convert it *yet again* when I switch from HTML back to compose mode)

And a feature request: let me use more horizontal width of my blog while using the awesome themes you provide.

Thanks,
A user

*EDIT* and another wtf. I typed & l t ; in compose mode, and you converted it to >.

STOP SECOND GUESSING ME. If I'm writing HTML in plain text, LEAVE IT IN PLAIN TEXT.

Oslo!

If you know me better, you'll know that I don't like to travel all that much. Unfortunately for me, this is a cruel irony given both that my family lives in Australia and I live in Europe nowdays - and more relevantly - that I like Norway a lot, amongst many reasons thanks to my significant other, who is Norwegian.

We tend to visit a few times a year, in particular, spending a few months there over summer - and this year is no exception.

This time, though, we decided to do something new. Believe it or not, despite having visited Norway maybe ten times or so in the past few years, I've never been to Oslo. Kamilla hasn't been there much either. So with that in mind, and the possibility to say hi to a few great people at the Oslo Qt office, we headed south for a few days.

It wasn't a pleasant trip down there, unfortunately, as NSB (the train operator) managed to screw things up pretty badly. We were delayed for around 1.5-2 hours total after the train broke down, eventually they gave up on fixing it and sent for some busses - 3 hours nonstop on a bus when you haven't eaten since breakfast is a little rough, but, we made it in the end.

(never, have I stared so long at railways as this day. :))

(off for a wander..)

We weren't there for too long, just a few days - but we got to see some nice sights wandering around on foot, I got to experience trams for the first time (and I must say, I love them), and of course, got to say hi to some great and friendly people from Qt along the way.

(In particular, I'd like to say a huge thanks to Benjamin - for both putting us up (and putting up with us ;) during our time in Oslo, to Andreas - for being a cool guy, and every inch as insane in real life as on IRC - to Thiago and Thomas for an afternoon (and night) of interesting chatter - to Bradley for finally saying hi in person after occasional chats on IRC for far too long - and to everyone else I waved at, said hi to, and otherwise distracted)

(awesome walk is awesome!)

All in all, I'm quite impressed with Oslo. It didn't really strike me as being just a city, it felt more like a town which just happened to house a few hundred thousand more people than usual. I'm not sure whether this is just great design on the part of the city or due to the geography, but the greenery everywhere, water (see above) and relative lack of noise and good public transport all helped.

(last day, shortly before heading to the airport)

I'm not a fan of cities, but I actually enjoyed my time there. :)

(myself, and our gracious host, Benjamin, after a bit of a wander

 up to the dam supplying Oslo with something like 80% of their water..)

Remote working and me

I've been a bit quiet lately, so I suppose it's about time to talk about what I've been up to.

There's been a lot of work (with fantastic people on fun stuff!), unfortunately that isn't something I can talk a lot about yet - hopefully more in the near future.

I've also been forcing myself to adjust to remote work, this isn't something I've done before, and considering my nature to flit from one thing to another fairly uncontrollably, I was initially worried at how I'd manage this, but I've now been doing it for over a month and so far so good.

I won't say it's not been an interesting ride, one of the strangest things seems to be my sleep pattern which seems to naturally not revolve around a single period of sleep at night: last night I finally went to bed at around 4am and woke up sometime around 11. But that's been varying hugely.

I guess I really am a night owl, or just really strange, but I've also been feeling *a lot* better of myself while operating like this, so hey, I guess I'm doing something right.

We now resume your normal service...

Just a quick note to say that we're pretty much back to normal. I've finished restoring all the posts that didn't import properly (the comments I've left for another day, as they're not so straightforward), and fixed the various planet URLs I'm syndicated to.

It's been a pain in the ass to have to migrate everything off a self-hosted, old, crappy desktop+server to a real server and then to blogger, but thank god I'll not have to do this again.

A better place

My grandmother died last night. I'm at a bit of a loss for words at the moment, I really don't know what to think or say. I'm lucky in that it's the first loss I've had in my family for quite some time, and I won't pretend that I was particularly close to her...

For most of my life, we lived on separate continents, though we met a few times and talked on the phone. Later in life, when I finally had the physical chance to make contact with her more regularly, I didn't, because it was still 'too far', and I had various issues about her state as she suffered from dementia, etc.

Unfortunately, it has now gone from being 'too far' to 'too late'.

I suppose given her condition for the past few years, she's better off now, and I am thankful for that, but at the same time I can't help but feel a sense of emptiness and regret for not reaching out when I should have, and having let that opportunity slip.

Nan, please know that you always were, and always will be in my heart, and I will treasure the small time we had together forever.

I hope you found that better place.

Blogging challenges

After many a year of trying my hardest to be independent, and maintaining my own blog, I've decided that enough is enough.. Frankly, I'm mostly tired of having to make it all look pretty, as well as fill it full of words - so I've just decided to focus on the more important side of that, and stuck everything in blogger.

Some of the content (and all of the comments) refused to import, but I'll keep trying on them.

In the meantime, welcome back, and I hope you enjoy your regular, scheduled posting from me (as if..) - but more seriously, I will be posting a lot more often, I think.

The week in review...

So, lots has been happening, leaving me with not so much time to both get things done, and blog about my not getting things done... time to rectify that this weekend, we hope.

I had two chumps come in to put two new doors in as part of the kitchen renovation, and they did an absolutely "stellar" job, including leaving a hole in the wall, using white painted wood when we wanted unpainted wood, and generally making a fucking mess.

I've just about managed to clean up the hole in the wall with judicious use of "husfix rapid" which they were kind enough to give us, but I'm really not happy with the 7000KR (~Ãrn mynamespace.two()
except:
return "there was an error processing your request (:"

... of course, that's not gonna work.

Queue some hours (days, actually) - of reading, searching, trying exotic tricks like the (apparantly old) knee module, trying __import__() magic, and other various hacks - before finally stumbling across this gem:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/211100/pythons-import-doesnt-work-as-expected

Namely:
def my_import(name):
mod = __import__(name)
components = name.split('.')
for comp in components[1:]:
mod = getattr(mod, comp)
return mod

So, now I have:
try:
mname = "lc." + str(one)
mod = my_import(mname)

if two == False:
two = "index"

f = getattr(mod, two)
return f()

except:
return "Sorry, I wasn't able to process your request."

Great stuff!

Quickie before bed

Despite the (potentially suspicious) title, this blog posting is about nothing saucy, just me writing up a quick entry before bed.

Honest!

Conspire's in-place search now works just a tiny bit better (the "forwards" button actually *does* something), and it also provides visual feedback when there are no matching text entries, which should also be helpful... I find it much easier to use at least.

GMS also had it's second (first real) commit from me today, the skeletal web end of things is now in there, which is good.

On freenode, it seems like an (eventual) project after GMS may be re-templating and doing various work on the website. Rar...

More cupboard doors on the kitchen, which makes me a happy chappie. Just three to go now, and we're done with the annoying part - although we also have two new ones to put on which is probably going to suck.

I swear, I'm never redecorating for a year after this. Oh, well, except after I finish the staircase.... :(

On fridges and computers

So, a third post in a day - this one about the Real World(tm).

Today.

I was incredibly tired after last nights Marathon Bug Hunt Session with Namegduf, which happily resulted in fixing the Bug To End All Bugs (aka, I link anope and my network falls apart occasionally), however I yawned a lot, logged into my laptop, yawned a lot more, and proceeded to bug christel on IRC(! see, I told you you'd get a mention) about defocus and other goodly freenode bits, etc ..err, osv. :)

(I'm really enjoying my time on freenode, although I wish I had a bit more to devote to it at the moment...)

, so I soldiered on steadily, squashing a few work related issues before finding out that we had a launch happening today, which I thought was tomorrow.

Fantastic.

Thankfully that went off largely without a hitch, despite taking most of my afternoon away.

Then, it suddenly poured down rain on the kitchen cupboard doors we'd left outside after painting.

Fuck. Talk about one thing after another.

Fast forward, it's evening time, and Kamilla and her mother arrive back home, from "picking the kitchen doors up", with -- a laptop and a fridge.

Lesson learned: never let two women go to town shopping together!

Anyway, I got to set it up, it's a nice Toshiba, and was quite inexpensive too. Given my shit experiences with HP, I think I'll be buying Toshiba next time.

The fridge was heavy.

Taking the old leaking one outside was even more heavy.

I can't wait to be back home sometimes. :)

Catchup

So, I say I'm going to use this more, and then I run off from the internet for a while and nothing gets put here. Fantastic!

In the spirit of trying to actually use this again, here's what the past few months of my life have comprised of:

1) Going and visiting my family in Australia, my place of birth. I stayed there all of June.
2) Going to England in early July.
3) Staying overnight
4) Waking up, going to the airport, catching a plane to Norway
5) Staying in Norway, while catching up on most of what I missed while I was in Australia...

5) is the important point. What did I miss out on, you ask?

1) InspIRCd. It was largely neglected during this time, in fact, the build was broken for a week or so.
2) ChatSpike (I was hardly online)
3) Atheme (There were bugs in the CS conversion, oops)
4) My real life
5) ... You get the picture

So, what have I been doing since I got back?

Well, Insp extbans are now sexy. I'll devote a seperate post to them. I'm now on the Conspire dev team, which is proving to be quite fun, I've added a few things I like in IRC clients already.. I'm also working on GMS (group management system) for freenode, and trying to get rid of my backlog of stuff to do at work... all good fun.

Oh, and I'm renovating a kitchen, in case that wasn't enough for you.

If this isn't purgatory, I don't know what is. :-)

Random note

People post: I forgot to mention that peavey now has a bouncing baby boy, who also seems to be heading well on the way to being a hacker.

Grats to peavey and his wife for their new arrival, and a wish of good health to all three from us