Paul's Journal

I safely arrived in Istanbul yesterday. The trip went well, only it took some effort to get into the country. There was a huge queue at the passport checkpoint which was advancing very slowly. Then, when I finally was at the desk, the guy told me to get a visa first. Right, this is not Shengen, there is all this complicated stuff. So, I got in line for a visa. At the visa desk, the lady told me I could only pay in cash, in particular Euros and US dollars, nothing else. For the Netherlands, the Visa is € 10, which I left at home on purpose. So, I was directed to the ATM, where I got Turkish Lires, hoping they would suffice too, and they did. Back in the queue for the passport checkpoint, got through quickly. Next, the baggage. Because everyone is stuck at the passport checkpoint so long, almost nobody removes their baggage from the band. So, when 6 flights are assigned to that band your baggage will be dropped on, it will take a looong time. Also, it seems sometimes suitcases “drop off” in the corners of the band and moved to “some location”. When Amsterdam dropped of the board, I was worried, but I found my suitcase at “the location”. Finally we boarded the shuttle to the hotel and arrived there over 2,5 hour later. We had a nice walk and very good dinner (not for Sjoerd though). Just to prove I’m really here (info):

Now, on to some sight-seeing!

I am in the process of packing my stuff for my holidays. Tomorrow, I will fly to Istanbul to attend GUADEC 2008. Because GUADEC does not start before the 7th, it will give me some time to roam around Istanbul itself and do some sightseeing, probably with some of the Collabora guys.

I’m flying on July 3 at 12:00 (+0200) from Schiphol with KLM (flight KL 1615) and arrive at Istanbul Atatürk International Airport at 16:20 (+0300). I’ll return on July 13 at 17:15 (+0300), again with KLM (flight KL 1616), and land on Schiphol at 19:55 (+0200). In Istanbul I will be staying in the Saint Sophia Hotel in Sultanahmet.

I’m looking forward to it, although it doesn’t feel like holidays to me yet. I should have an Internet connection over there, and probably Jaiku via cell phone will work fine too. So I will keep you up-to-date.

It is also clear that I will be skipping DebConf this year. This is unfortunate, because I wanted to work with the Debian/Ruby team to advance some of our goals. However, I’m happy to catch at least one free software conference.

Not 28 links, but 28 years. :)

I know, I know… I haven’t written for a long time. I promise to pick it up soon. See Jaiku for more recent ramblings of mine.

By the way, congrats Steve!

I skipped a year, but… how can I skip this big(ger) gathering of Debian and GNOME people!

Last weekend I have decided to just try some of this micro-blogging and lifestreaming stuff. I have always been quite conscious about my own (online) presence and that of others due to long term Jabber usage. The presence-awareness helps me to somehow stay more connected to people on a kind of general level than previously was possible. By the way, this is just because I like to, not because it is a forced, mandatory thing. Concerning micro-blogging. This is a perfect solution for me! I don’t have to think of a title and just can share a thought for whoever is interested whenever.

Anyway, I ended up subscribing to Jaiku. It has a richer feature set than Twitter and it seems more things are “done right” to me. I especially like the comments and channels. I have added a Jaiku Stream Badge to my webpage so I am also trackable there.

Let’s see if I can keep it up. :-)

As Wouter also mentions, I too noticed it is the top-something season again. However, more interesting to me and maybe others is to ascertain some of my personal top items of the year 2007 for some arbitrarily chosen categories:

Book: Legends of Dune. I know that this comprises three books, but I read it as one in one go.

Location: Lisboa. My first real conference location, very nice city.

Movie: The Fountain. Beautiful, artistic, emotional, quiescent, thought invoking.

Music: Always a hard category, going to split this up a bit:

• Artist: Sigur Ros. I knew them for quite some time, I have no idea why I didn’t really get into it before this year.
• Album: Shpongle – Nothing Lasts… But Nothing is Lost. Diverse, energetic, really nice.
• Track: Can not choose between Breakfast – The Sunlight (melodic, euphoric) and Clint Mansell – Death Is the Road to Awe (emotional, powerful).
• Set: Three favourites here for different reasons: XiJaro – Sunset Excitement 094, Menno de Jong – A State of Trance 300 (part 2), Menno de Jong – Intuition Sessions CD Release Party.

Party: Intuition Summer Event. Absolutely awesome weather, location, people, atmosphere and music.

Series: Six Feet Under. Still my most appreciated all-round series. This year I watched most of it again.

Yesterday after dinner we spontaneously ended up having a XO play night. I liked the interface and the things it could do, the complete difference with a normal notebook, the creeping into a child’s mind a bit.

It was funny to notice that being older and experienced, things that probably are intuitive to children, are not/no longer intuitive to me anymore. This fact alone shows how “being used to” and experience are a large part of things one consider intuitive. I notice this also when people are trying to use GNOME when they are used to Windows: they find this difficult, but of course most of them are already “hard wired” to Windows. The reverse holds for me: due to not using Windows often at all, I keep losing the aptitude for it and it seems to be a hard system to use from my perspective. Fortunately for us all, “getting used to” is the specialty of the brain.

Some information in the work department is past due. It has been over four months since I started my new job and I feel quite settled in. I attended two events in the past six weeks that resulted in some material that I could use to finally finish the missing parts of my website at work which I overhauled yesterday.

SIREN 2007

On 30 October, 2007, I attended SIREN 2007 to present my poster. The event was quite nice. However, since the scope had been broadened from Computer Science to ICT in general, the audience had little prior knowledge about the research area my poster was about. Anyway, it was nice to meet some people in the field and spend a day in Delft.

IPA Fall Days 2007

I spent the last week of November in Willibrordhaeghe, the conference hotel where the IPA Fall Days were held. I enjoyed this week very much. There were some good talks which also showed me what was happening on the other side of the fence. An Open Session was held where PhD could tell something about their work. I created some slides using the SIREN poster for my talk in this session.

The hotel was slightly cold, it was one of very small number of negative points of this event. Not that the organisers can be held responsible, the hotel was just badly insulated. The food was good, especially the lunches. The dinners were a bit all of the same, but I could vary, being the flexitarian. This however really confused the waiters. (Are you vegetarian or not?!) I also enjoyed meeting more of my PhD colleagues, playing various games and our endless discussions. Of course I made some pictures, just for memory sake. I’m quite confident I will attend the Spring Days. :)

From Debian I downloaded, installed and toyed around with Liquidsoap. It took me a few moments to understand the language, but once I did, I got very enthusiastic about it. I always wanted something more than just streaming a set for my friends now and then and this tool allows me to created a quite contrived webradio setup. More about that later…

To Debian unstable I finally uploaded Camping, a small Ruby web framework for MCV type applications. It is in NEW now. I’ve been writing (or at least started writing) quite a few apps based on Camping the past few months. Primarily because it is fun, but also because I like its flexibility and strength very much (see also some examples). Once Camping is in Debian, I’d like to put more Camping apps out in the open.

I have ordered my new MacBook today. The model silently got an update yesterday and that was what I was waiting for.

While my “old” PowerBook (4 years old) is still working fine, it has a broken hinge and unexplainable display-startup problems. Combined with the fact that it always connected to all my peripheral devices, external drives and a second screen, it is less then ideal to just pick it up and go. (Although we have XRandr 1.2 now, the whole desktop environment is not integrated with these features yet).

Moreover, because I somehow ended up in a 5 year cycle of needing a computer system update and something portable at the same time, I always bought a heavy laptop. This time, I want to break this cycle, and buy a light, portable laptop and maybe later some workstation. And why Apple or a MacBook… well, I have good experiences with it, well-designed and thought-through, and if you look for portable laptops, < 1000 €, with a 12-14” screen, quality hardware and good specs, the MacBook is on of the few options that is left, actually.