Paul's Web Pages

Ph.D. finished, new job

Paul van Tilburg — 2012-01-08T00:00:00+01:00

I have defended my thesis with success on 27 October, 2011. For archival reasons, I have moved my Ph.D. website from the university site, as my account will be removed this year at some point.

What are you doing next? A question often asked to a Ph.D. student. My answer is Mozcode, my sole proprietor company that develops custom made software and/or uses free & open source software components to design, build and deploy software solutions according to your wishes.

Ph.D. defence

Paul van Tilburg — 2011-08-22T00:00:00+02:00

Because the defence date is quickly getting nearer, I have put up a page with related information. I will keep updating the page up until the moment is there!

Also Giving up on Ruby Packaging

Paul van Tilburg — 2011-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

I have just sent a mail to the Debian/Ruby Extras mailing list stating that I will also give up most of my Ruby packaging efforts and reduce my involvement in the team. I am following Lucas Nussbaum in his decision. Although our reasons are slightly different, I subscribe most of what he says in his blog post. Besides that, I haven’t done much Ruby programming in the past years, making me lose the motivation for the huge load of packages I am responsible for and thus subconsciously perceive that as a burden, as I feel guilty not having/making time to work on them.

So, what does this mean? I will handover (co)maintainership of over 50 libraries. Many of which have dead upstream, unfortunately. Also will I be looking for someone to take over the administrative tasks of heading the team such as mailing list moderation and Alioth repository access. I will keep maintaining some programs that I still use, such as Camping, and am approachable for (mentor) uploads.

Meanwhile I will continue my work on my PhD thesis, which is progressing well and should lead to my defence (hopefully) somewhere around September this year. That said, I will try to keep tinkering with Ruby and other F/OSS projects. Oh, and also to get more motivated and some inspiration…

10 Years of Spacelabs

Paul van Tilburg — 2010-11-21T00:00:00+01:00

A few months ago I realised it has been 10 years already since Spacelabs ¹ was founded. Today we will celebrate that with a reunion and probably reminisce about past projects, events and experiences. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to accompany this with a post.

The past

Spacelabs was founded to create something that sits in between research and consumer appliances. Since we are associated to the Electro-Optical Communication group these things often had to do with bandwidth. For example, showing the ease of use of plastic optical fiber or participate in GPRS/UMTS trials. However, due to the loose structure of Spacelabs, we ventured into many other projects of our own such a information system-enabled fridge with a barcode reader, a dynamic DNS system, etc. At some point we got our own Internet connection with an accompanying subnet. It has been fun and rewarding to learn how to setup and run a mini ISP.

Spacelabs doesn’t have any formal structure: when you are on the mailing list, you are a member. There are no regular meetings, no hierarchy, no obligations. So in some ways, we are a group that is much like a free/open source software community. I think that this approach has provided us the drive to work both on projects during our free time as well as our own ideas.

I feel that Spacelabs has contributed so much to my life. It might not be the typical study association, but it was a big supplement to my studies, it was fun and it was completely ours. Not only did it teach me many, many technical things—from networks to program languages to software design—but it also gave me experiences on other levels, such as very attuned group work and responsibilities for key systems.

The future

Soon, everyone connected to Spacelabs will have finished their Master’s or PhD (in my case) and nobody will be left to continue the project. Although this is a bit sad, I think we can be proud of what we have accomplished, learnt and experienced. I will miss our location high in the “Potentiaal/E-hoog” building overlooking Eindhoven, and our being together as a group. We are however not gone yet, there is still a lot to plan and to work on if we want to rescue the huge amount of servers and services that we have accumulated over the years if we were to leave…

¹ Yes, the website is very much from the past.

Continue Posting?

Paul van Tilburg — 2010-04-05T00:00:00+02:00

What is this? A real journal post after all this time? Yes, apparently! Some of you have noticed (and mentioned) that I stopped posting halfway my trip to Iceland. I got so backlogged on the pictures already that I had no time and motivation to continue posting. I might write some summary post about the trip later. This journal did not really die during my time in Iceland, it has been quite dead since April 2008. I think there are three reasons for this:

A lack of motivation to really sit and write something (but how long does it take, really?)
Me joining the microblog “hype”. This was apparently already over two years ago.
Moving to another house and discarding my old laptop in the process. This made my journal/blog software unaccessible.

I have restored the software on my current laptop now. We’ll see how it goes. ;)

Exploring Reykjavík

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-06-23T00:00:00+02:00

I’ve been here for over 2 weeks now and I feel like I’ve gotten used to the place. I am a bit behind with the journal posts but on the other hand always quite up-to-date with the pictures. The following describes event from Thursday June 6 until Tuesday June 16.

Sunsets

Sunsets are different everywhere. On Thursday we took a trip to the tip of the isle on which Reykjavík is located to a separate town called Seltjarnarnes. Since we were there around sunset, I took some (quite colourful) pictures.

2009-06-11: Sunset near Seltjarnarnes

Later in the week, when Arnar left for a workshop in Dublin, I took the bicycle out for a ride. It was nice to get some exercise again, Reykjavík being considerably hilly. When I arrived at the university around midnight, I noticed that Willard was just arriving. We had some tea, met other people that were hanging around and viewed the sun set from the roof of the building.

2009-06-14: Bike trip to the RU and back

Master and Bachelor Graduation

Reykjavík University, being a rather small university (there is also the University of Iceland here), does the graduation ceremony in one go. So, I went with some friends of Arnar to attend his graduation on Saturday. Well, this was quite different from the one I had. This ceremony is for 420 (!) candidates at once, while mine was more personal. However, they make a big event out of this which speeches and musical intermezzos while mine was rather bare in that respect.

From 2009-06-13: Graduation Ceremony

After the ceremony there was a reception for all students followed by a party at Arnar’s. This party ended with hanging around in the kitchen for two hours, talking and laughing. This formula is the so-called “kitchen party” which seems to be an Icelandic thing.

Work

I ended my work here in Iceland on Tuesday with a lunch and meeting with Anna and Luca. We discussed our previous work and a way to supplement the results to be able to make it into a journal paper. The discussion was productive and we decided on a plan, so I’ll start with this somewhere in July when I return from my holidays!

Working in Reykjavík

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

So, I have been here in Reykjavík for a while, working, exploring, eating, sleeping. I must say, some things are totally different from everything I am used to (especially the surroundings, nature) and other things are very familiar (if not to NL, then to Scotland).

Work

I have been working at the Reykjavík University, a private university coexisting next to the University of Iceland. It is located across the street of a big mall which turns out to be very convenient for lunch and instant-need purposes. The Computer Science school has a “theory day” on the 19th and I will giving a talk which I am preparing now.

Leisure

Although I have been here for just a few things, I have engaged in many activities already. First of all there was the very nice hike to the waterfall Glymur. It has shown me a glimpse of the adventure and nature that Iceland can offer.

2009-06-09: Hiking to Glymur

2009-06-10: Stroll through Reykjavík

Besides that, the infinitely long days seems to induce a very relaxed, free view on planning. Having dinner at 23:15, going for a hike at 20:00, visiting the cinema at 22:30. This makes every work day still feel like a holiday.

Jaiku, Twitter, Luonica, Ping.fm

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

More than a year ago I tried out Jaiku and it worked quite well despite some of its glitches. Although the number of journal posts plummeted, I’ve been able to keep up the microblogging. I’ve noticed in the past year that others preferred Twitter and/or identi.ca, but I didn’t want to join all these networks and duplicate my microblogs and all the hassle that came with it. This week I’ve registered myself on ping.fm, so I can post to more services (my Twitter, my Jaiku) simultaneously. Meanwhile Christian had set up a local (test) Laconica service, which available as of yesterday as Luonica on http://ica.luon.net/ (for all Luon users). Obviously, I have also added Luonica to my publish list.

Iceland, Here I Come!

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

I am all set for my trip to Iceland! (Well, except for the actual packing of stuff.) The purpose of the trip is a work visit and holiday combined. In the first week (maybe extended to 9 days), I will be working at the Reykjavik University on some process algebra things and possible present my past work. During my time there I can stay at the appartment of Arnar, whom I’ve met when he was attending our university for his Master’s. Thanks for providing me with accomodation and congrats with obtaining your Master’s degree! When my days at the RU are over, I will explore, tour, hike around the island with him and some of his friends. Very much looking forward to that!

Some travel information for Sunday June 7 (travelling with Iceland Air):

09:45	Leaving by foot/bus/train to the airport
14:00	Departure from Schiphol with flight FI503 (UTC+0200)
15:00	Arrive at Keflavik Airport (UTC+0000)

I will be returning on Sunday June 28:

16:30	Departure from Keflavik Airport with flight FI504 (UTC+0000)
21:30	Arrive at Schiphol (UTC+0200)

I will attempt to keep you all updated via this journal and/or the usual microblogging sources: Twitter / Jaiku / Luonica.

Post-FOSDEM 2009

Paul van Tilburg — 2009-02-16T00:00:00+01:00

I have attended FOSDEM again this year. Most of all, it was nice to see everyone again, especially the Collabora crew. Besides having fun while hanging out with them again, I must say FOSDEM was quite a motivation boost too!

I feel motivated again to work on Ruby packaging. The whole RubyGem mess and other less-specific Ruby-related messes keep draining my motivation. This feels very conflicting, since I like the language very much. The upcoming transition to Ruby 1.9.1 will be quite a challenge and I hope that we can finally work out a nice, actual Ruby policy for Squeeze.

A few days ago I have also joined the pkg-gstreamer team, mainly to work on Elisa packaging. Elisa is a nice-looking media center application that I am using on my HTPC. Debian’s experimental suite now contains an up-to-date version of Elisa, try it out if you want.

Elisa 0.5.27

So, why is Elisa not in unstable yet. Well, Elisa has a plugin system which also features auto-updates. While this is very nice on platforms such as Windows, it is not really nice for Debian. I have been working to get this updating disabled by default. Once I am sure (hopefully by the time 0.5.28 gets released) that it is in order, I wil upload it to unstable.

Meanwhile I am planning to work on some Elisa plugins to add some features that I feel are missing. First of all I need webradio a la Rhythmbox in there. Then something to watch TV: a MythTV frontend-plugin, via UPnp, or whatever works. Finally it might be nice to have to have a plugin to setup video-conferencing using Telepathy. I’m quite sure some of these things are lying around somewhere, more about that later.

Preparing for GUADEC

Paul van Tilburg — 2008-07-02T00:00:00+02:00

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.

28 today!

Paul van Tilburg — 2008-04-17T00:00:00+02:00

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!

Trying Jaiku

Paul van Tilburg — 2008-02-13T00:00:00+01:00

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. :-)

And There Goes 2007

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-12-31T00:00:00+01:00

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.

XO Play Night

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-12-30T00:00:00+01:00

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.

Work Update

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-12-11T00:00:00+01:00

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. :)

On Its Way

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

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.

Writing About Writing

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-10-25T00:00:00+02:00

Again some writing about writing, since it has been over a month again. Somehow I think of lots of things to write but end up not writing them. Maybe I should attempt to write smaller things. I will try this.

Getting Rid of Titles

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

I propose that we get rid of names and titles, especially journal post titles. There are these annoying moments when you clearly know what you want to write but you can’t think of a fitting title, so you just don’t write it down and it is forgotten. It’s the inverse of the writer’s block, I think. It is similar to having a clear idea about a piece of code, a line of code, a function or a program in your mind, but you just can’t think of any suitable variable, function or program name. Designation by “brain-concept” would be far more preferable. Maybe that’s something to think about for the future. This concludes my excuse for not writing much the past few months.

Now that I at least have a title for this post, I might as well abuse it. Here are some things that I have been busy with the past few weeks:

Creating a poster for the SIREN (Scientific ICT Research Netherlands) 2007 event showing what my PhD project is all about. When it is finished I’ll link it from my university page.
Reading up on and toying with concepts related to my PhD project.
Continuing work on my paper based on my master’s thesis.
Assisting and tutoring students that are involved in two teaching related activities.
Working on LaTeX packages for typesetting process algebra and drawing graphs, transition systems in particular. I know that for the latter there are already some alternatives available, but I found the interfaces to be either overly complicated or too general.
Hacking on Camping/Photos. The first release should be ready soon. :)
Toying with the new Xorg 7.3 release and the related ATI driver updates with dynamic on-the-fly output (re)configuring.

Off to CONCUR 2007

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-09-02T00:00:00+02:00

I had some posts planned, but didn’t get around to it. I’m off to Lisbon for CONCUR 2007 now. I’m flying with TAP (flight TP661) at 18:05. I’ll be back next Saturday (September 8)!

Work Has Started

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-08-15T00:00:00+02:00

Two weeks ago I started my new job at the Formal Methods research group of the Department of Mathematics of Computer Science at the Eindhoven University of Technology. So, what have I been up to until now?

Well, as you can imagine it takes some time to settle down. I got a room with two other PhD students. I have installed my new (and fast!) computer with Debian Sid and am very happy about it. I have created my academic website using Webgen (like I do with all my sites), attempting to have it look the same as the main university site. I think I have succeeded. Next to the settling down I have been meeting all the people of our group and reading a lot of papers in my future area of research.

What will I be doing the next few weeks then? For the moment I’ll continue to do a lot of reading. My research is in the area of the automata theory and the process algebra and ways to combine them. Besides reading up on that I will be continuing upon my master project and try to get the result published. Also, my first conference has been planned! Yay! From September 2 till September 8 I will be in Lisbon to attend the CONCUR 2007 conference and also have a look around town, of course.

Next Stop: PhD

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-07-05T00:00:00+02:00

Just graduated… and now what? Well, I had the opportunity to choose among several options: a PhD position at the TU/e, a PhD position at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, or pursue a job at Google. After much consideration, I have chosen the first option. I found it to be impossible to decide based on the research assignment or the people I would work with, so I looked at more personal and practical reasons which led me to my current decision.

I will start my job on August 1, 2007 and hope to finish the PhD in 2011. My research will involve working on project MoCaP, Models of Computation: Automata and Process, in which we try to achieve a better integration of the concurrency theory with the classical theory of automata. The thought behind the project is to make undergraduate computer scientists more aware of concurrency theory.

Master Project Finished

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-06-06T00:00:00+02:00

Yesterday, I have completed my master project with a presentation of my work and a defence of my thesis. I got awarded a 9 (out of 10) for my entire project. It is a result that I am very happy with and am very proud of. This result will allow me to get my Master of Science degree with honours on June 19, after the exam committee has checked everything. Note that the diploma will be handed out not on June 19, but on August 28, because I am on my holiday and at Debconf in Edinburgh the next two weeks.

Thanks everyone for attending my presentation, joining the “celebration lunch” afterwards, and all the encouraging words and kudos. :-)

Master Project Take 2 and 3

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

I just realised that I forgot to post about take 2, so I’ll combine it with this post about take 3. The past five months I’ve been busy with examining the effect of restriction on CCS with parallelism. We decided to do this in two steps. First (take 2) we considered interleaving of actions, and then (take 3) we added communication. The case with only interleaving of actions went smoothly; it worked out as a nice extension of the case without parallelism. However, when we looked at the case with interleaving and communication, it started to become troubling. I ran into all kind of complications and the risk of failure I described in a previous post seemed to come true. However, I think we managed quite well to catch a large part of the problems and describe them, and also offer possible solutions. In the end, I’m quite happy of the result.

So, today I can present the final version of my Master’s Thesis: “Finite Equational Bases for CCS with Restriction”. Yay! I have just submitted it for reproduction. The final presentation of my project will take place June 5, 2007 at 10:00 in the main building of the university, HG 6.29. If you’re interested and are able to attend, consider yourself invited. I want to thank Bas Luttik for his large amount of feedback, clear explanations and guidance, without him the project wouldn’t have worked out as well as it did now.

Almost finished, 6 days remaining…

Schedule Spring 2007

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-04-06T00:00:00+02:00

Since Spring is well underway, I wanted to post a sort of schedule summary of my activities in the following three months. First of all, I have registered and booked the flight for Debconf 7, yay! I can stay with friends of mine that I know from the time I worked in Edinburgh. I want to thank Krzysztof for this offer, it saves a lot of money and it will be nice to catch up.

Besides Debconf, there are also several nice parties and events this spring, and of course the completion of my master project.

2007-04-19: Finish my Master Project paper
2007-05-16: Finish my Master thesis
2007-05-17: A State of Trance 300 celebration outdoor
2007-06-01: Master Project presentation (date not definite)
2007-06-12 — 2007-06-26: Attend Debconf7, holiday in Edinburgh
2007-07-19: Official graduation date (ceremony postponed till 2007-08-28)
2007-07-07: Intuition Summer event!

And after that,… who knows? It probably should involve some work in the summer and maybe an ad-hoc holiday. I’m looking at several options: maybe do a PhD, maybe working for Google or maybe something completely different. More about that later.

Trance Energy 2007

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-03-02T00:00:00+01:00

After wanting to go for 7 years, it is finally happening: I’m attending Trance Energy tomorrow! Yay! Trance has been commercialised a lot in the past four years, but it is going underground again and it is losing it’s populair appeal, which is a good thing IMO.

My tentative schedule:

 22:00 Menno de Jong \o/
 23:15 Mark Norman
 00:30 Markus Schulz
 01:45 Joop versus Leon Bolier
 02:00 Rank 1
 03:15 Gareth Emery
 04:30-7:00 unplanned!

I’ll probably meet up will all the Intuition guys and girls over there. It’s going to be one hell of a party! I’ll write again next week, when I’m alive again. :-)

Space Efficient Algorithms

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-03-01T00:00:00+01:00

Last Tuesday I finished my paper about Space Efficient Algorithms and Histograms that will comprise most of the grade of my last remaining Master course, Advanced Algorithms. While I’ve been mostly enjoying writing this paper, I am glad it is finished for several reasons, one of them being able to do other things than just working on it and another is that it allows me to focus fully on my Master Project which is starting to progress nicely. (More about this later.)

FOSDEM 2007

Due to the amount of time I needed to work on the paper, the need to save money (I really would like to go to Debconf7) and that the scheduled talks didn’t seem to interest me that much, I decided to break with tradition and not to go to FOSDEM this year.

Just before FOSDEM, however, it seemed that lots of the people I would have liked to meet did go. While that was a pity, I hope to meet them in three months at Debconf7.

Toothpaste

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-02-07T00:00:00+01:00

… It’s funny how a toothpaste tube can be almost empty for weeks! …

Lost Posts

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-12-07T00:00:00+01:00

I have posted two lost posts in the past few weeks which are filed at the time of their drafting/note-taking.

The @ Book

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-12-01T00:00:00+01:00

I read The @ Book by Patrik Sneyd from ascii64 last Wednesday. It tells the story of the @ (at-sign) and elaborates on all kinds of (sometimes seemingly un)related topics such as spam, software patents, Michelangelo, morse code, etc. using either symbolic images or short texts.

This booklet with a really nice layout is a refreshing read during a break. @:)

Bachelor of Science

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-11-29T00:00:00+01:00

After finishing Hypermedia and History of Computing in October I was ready to meet the requirements of the bachelor’s exam. I passed it on November 14 and received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science last Monday.

While before the BaMa (Bachelor Master) system was introduced this 3-year milestone might have meant nothing at all, so it feels kind of odd that I have finished a study now. I’ve updated my CV. I hope I can do this again soon, namely when I’ll finish my Master of Science…

Armin Only

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-11-03T00:00:00+01:00

Yay! I got my tickets for the Armin Only event. Tracking Armin van Buuren for over 7 years now, I finally go to one of his bigger events that features him in the mix (mostly solo) for over 9 hours combined with side shows, live performances, special effects etc.

I wonder how it compares to the nice and more intimate small-scale Intuition parties that Menno de Jong throws.

Hypermedia

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

This weekend I was finally able to finish (after 7 days of full-time labour) the assignment of my last pending bachelor course: Hypermedia Structures and Systems. The assignment of this purely on-line course consisted of the conversion of a linear document to a hypertext one. This meant splitting the document in dozens of nodes and then going through each of them (iteratively) and linking them together using several techniques while keeping useful guidelines in mind.

While discussing this assignment with Bas we decided it would be nice to build the site using Webgen. Webgen is good at transforming nodes that just contain text (with a bit of Textile markup) to nice XHTML 1.1 valid pages. We also extended Webgen with a few plug-ins: one to create links to nodes without having to mention the paths but just using unique identifiers. That way we were sure the links were also always pointing to the right page. The other plug-in we wrote was to be able to do bibliography stuff a la LaTeX.

I am quite satisfied with the result, which will be graded this week. ;)

Atanasoff

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-10-03T00:00:00+02:00

There was no real known reason why our essay for the course History of Computing was overdue, but Bas and I finally managed to finish it yesterday. Almost two years we have been postponing writing it, slowly collecting and reading more material, but after a few weekends of hard work, it is done:

John Vincent Atanasoff: The Inventor of the Digital Computer (copyrighted under CC SharedAlike 2.5)

The essay tries to acknowledge Atanasoff’s accomplishments, the ABC, and ideas that we still find in our computers today (binary system, regenerative memory, separation of calculation and memory and calculation by electronics and logic). Without these ideas and the derivations that found its way into the ENIAC, the world would’ve been a different place for sure.

I was surprised by the increased amount of work it requires to write a work covering a historical topic. For each sentence you write down, you either have to do a lot of research, you have to make sure it is objective or if it is not objective you have to find a source backing up what you are stating. This way, writing 1,5 pages on an average Saturday is a lot, comparing to writing a report about some practical assignment, which is fairly easy and straightforward. Even more so since our topic is surrounded by controversy.

Ankoraŭ Unu Esperantpostaĵo

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-21T00:00:00+02:00

Ĝi estas antaŭ longtempo ke mi skribis Esperante en mia taglibro. Mi provos skribi ĉi tion postaĵon sen uzi la vortaron.

Hieraŭ mi iomete babilis kun Bram pri Esperanto kaj la formigo de la vortoj. Mi pensas ke tio estas interesa subjekto ĉar mi retrovis ke eblas pri formigas vortojn, ĉiuj ne (facile) estas tradukeblaj en la plej multjaj lingvoj. Mi ankaŭ trovas ke kelkfoje ĝi estas malfacilega pri traduki vortoj, ĉiuj havas artajn formojn. Ekzemple la nederlanda vorto: “knikkerdeknikken”. La traduko donita par Bram estas: “kapjesantekapjesi”. Tio estas bonega tradukoj, mi pensas. :)

La esperantlisto

La lastajn monatojn mi vidis pli multan aktivecon en la retpoŝtlisto de la nederlanda esperantkursanoj. Kio min mirigas estas la kelko junaj infanoj ĉiuj nur havas 13 anojn kaj volas lerni la Esperanta lingvon kaj sekvi la kurson de Wil. Mi ŝatas ĝin kaj mi esperas ke ili finiĝos la kurson. Ankaŭ en la listo estas argumentato ke estas bona ĉiam infanoj lernas Esperanton kiam ili ankoraŭ estas junaj. Kiam ili konas esperanto kvazaÅ basan lingvon, estas kredebla ke estas pli facila pri lerni aliajn lingvon kiel la franka, la angla, la hispana, ktp. Mi havas tamen nenion ideon kiel tiaaĵo povus farita…

Master Project - Take 1

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

Today I have effectively started with my Master Project! I have been been at it for a few days already in the past weeks though, but now I’m sitting on my own spot working on some proofs.

So, what am I actually doing? Well that’s still hard to put in words yet and it also requires some process algebra and general math prior knowledge, but I’ll try.

My graduation supervisor is Bas Luttik and in July he co-published a paper on defining a finite equational base (a set of equations from which all others can be derived) for a specific process algebra called CCS. This paper used a specific subset of CCS, namely without restriction (hiding) and relabelling. Restriction is an operator of the process algebra to block certain actions of happening, relabelling is an operator to replace actions by other actions.

Take 1 of my project is to try to consider this algebra with restriction and finding a new equational base and proof that either it works or it can not be done. This is a risky assignment because it can lead to: we have tried but haven’t gotten either results. The short period to come will entail considering CCS with restriction but without concurrency to drastically reduce the cases to be considered. If we succeed, we’ll continue with CCS with restriction and concurrency. If we do not succeed it’s quite possible we’ll change my project assignment.

More to come!

Roundtrip NL

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-02T00:00:00+02:00

Another lost story: Saturday, September 2, Admar, Bram and I decided to go on a roundtrip tour through the Netherlands. It was the last weekend that Admar and I were able to use our “OV-studentenkaart” (a public transport card allowing free travel through the entire Netherlands either during working days or weekends). On the way I made some pictures of stations we stopped to transfer trains or visit the city.

Our roundtrip tour:

Breda (departure at 8:20)
Den Haag (transfer to train to Amsterdam)
Amsterdam Sloterdijk (transfer to train to Den Helder)
Den Helder (lunch, transfer to bus to Den Oever)
Den Oever (transfer to bus to Harlingen)
Harlingen (transfer to train to Leeuwarden)
Leeuwarden (visit city centre, good to be back, transfer to train to Groningen)
Groningen (transfer train to Winschoten)
Groningen (visit city centre, dinner, transfer to train to Zwolle)
Zwolle (transfer to train to Utrecht)
Utrecht (transfer to train to Eindhoven)
Eindhoven (arrival at 23:20)

I started out on the Friday before by travelling from Eindhoven to Breda, so that makes a nice and perfect round. It was really fun to do: travelling over 700 km by public transport in 14 hours. Yes, we haven’t encountered any delays. It would have been nice to visit Limburg too, but there was no time left. Though, I finally did reach Den Helder and the Afsluitdijk which we never came around to doing in the eight years to date.

Holiday 2006

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-08-01T00:00:00+02:00

In July I have been on a holiday for two weeks with some of my friends: Lotte, Sjoerd, Bram, Admar and Henrieke. We decided to spend our holiday in the centre of Bretagne, France. During this holiday I have kept a small journal of the things we saw and did to help preserve some memories about it. See also my holiday photos. Anyway, here is a summary of the holiday journal:

Saturday, July 08

Left at 7:20, arrived at 18:30 in Lamballe to pick up Admar from the train. Arrived at our rented house-on-the-hill in Perret at 20:30. Nice weather for travelling, a bit clouded, 22°.

Sunday, July 09

Did some shopping in Gouarec with Henrieke. Visit the “Tour de France” that passed by in Gouarec in the afternoon. Made dinner and read a lot. Weather improved in the afternoon, 26°, very sunny.

Monday, July 10

Read a book while Admar, Sjoerd and Lotte were doing more shopping. Hiked around in the area following the yellow trail to “Les Forges”. Again the weather improved in the afternoon, 24°, sunny.

Tuesday, July 11

Finally found a bigger store to do some large-scale shopping. Celebrated the 8th anniversary of Utopia. Drove to the lake “Lac de Guerlédan” in the afternoon and chilled on the beach at Beau Rivage. A bit cloudy day, but still 25°.

Wednesday, July 12

Left at 10:00 and visited Carnac with it’s prehistoric menhirs. Scenic route back home in the afternoon. It was a hot day, 27° degrees but fortunately still a bit cloudy.

Thursday, July 13

Another resting day. Read while other did some shopping, played Settlers of Catan the entire afternoon. In the evening walked the other way around to “Les Forges”. It was a nice day, 25° and clear.

Friday, July 14

Visted the Beau Rivage beach again, rented canoes and paddled around on the lake. Visited Gouarec and Mûr for 14 juillet festivites but couldn’t find any. Watched “Carcasonne” fireworks at home. Another nice day, 26° and clear.

Saturday, July 15

Did some shopping with Bram and Henrieke in the morning. Another resting day, hanging and chilling in our garden. Had a bit of a headache. Warm and clear day, 28°.

Sunday, July 16

Left for a day at the beach at the north coast of Bretagne at 10:00. Landed at St. Quay at 12:00. Took a nice walk with Sjoerd in afternoon along the coast line. Dinner at a “crèperie” in St. Quintin.

Monday, July 17

Rest of the group went to Mûr to buy postal cards and get some touristic information of the lake area. Spent the afternoon planning the following days, reading and chilling. It was a warm day, clear and 30°.

Tuesday, July 18

Left early at 9:30 to visit the forest of Arthur in the morning. Travelled to Lizio to visit the Insectarium. It was a very hot day, 35°.

Wednesday, July 19

Left early again to drive to Rochefort-en-Terre. Visited the village and then the “Parc de Prehistorique”. Afterwards some shopping in Pontivy on the way back. It was a clouded day, had our first rain during our park visit.

Thursday, July 20

Left very early at 9:00 to rent mountain bikes. In the morning we followed route 6 and 7 back to “La Croix Rouge” (with a very steep ascent at the end). Then, in the afternoon, we finished route 7 through the higher lands alongside the valley. In the evening went out for dinner at “Le Blé d’Or”, a crèperie-pizzaria in Mûr. It was a partially clouded day but still quite hot for cycling, 30°.

Friday, July 21

Cleaning up and packing most of the things we had brought with us. Visit the abbey of Bon Repos and the village of Rostrenen that we had passed by many times. Another nice day, 28° and a bit foggy and clouded.

Saturday, July 22

Awake at 6:00, cleaned up the remaining part of the house, packed the rest, and left at 7:30. Returned home around 19:30. Partially clouded day, a bit foggy in the morning, perfect for travelling, 25°.

Journal Alive Again

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-07-01T00:00:00+02:00

After replacing the laptop disk of my “server” that was failing yet again, my journal is alive again. I already had to replace the disk in November 2005. Of course, I cannot expect it to run for more than 7 months.

Anyway, holiday is near! I will leave for France (Perret, Bretagne) with friends and will really be gone for two weeks. I will leave July 8 and return on July 22. I am looking forward to this, especially because this is going to be my first real “external” holiday in 3 years.

Study

The study is going smoothly. I have almost finished my exams and the ones I have done so far went quite well. I had to change my planning though, since I was asking too much of myself. A feasible, less ambitious planning will get the job done much better than an overfull, too ambitious plan (4 courses, 4 assignment and 10 hours of work per week). While everybody is probably consciously aware of this, including me, I had to learn it the hard way.

After my holiday I plan to finish the pending thee assignments that I have been postponing for years and then, September 1, start with my 6 month Master project. I hope to finish the project and get my MSc somewhere in April 2007, so near… :)

Debian/Ruby

I noticed that the Debian Python team beat us to it with the rigorous policy changes. The Debian/Ruby Extras team has been planning quite some changes for a few months but actually haven’t gotten around to discussing about it and doing some real proposals. Meanwhile the team grown in numbers of members and packages and everything is running smoothly (except of course for some issues concerning the current policy). I hope to activate that process in or just after the summer holidays.

Gaia Contemplation

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-04-23T00:00:00+02:00

For the course Big History (taking history a little further back than just written history) I have been reading up on Lovelock’s Gaia Theory. Despite the existing criticism on that theory it still made me wonder… Given that life on Earth seems to exists for at least 3 billion years and that it is increasing in complexity (Fred Spier). Also given that to increase this complexity the biosphere has made an uncountable large number of optimisation attempts in this period, most of which we have no knowledge about. It occurred to me that as our human history is nothing on the scale of this process, we as species must be just such an attempt. Now that puts doing the almost biweekly laundry in a completely different perspective.

Packing and Goodbyes

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-02-22T00:00:00+01:00

Today is the last day of my stay here in Edinburgh. I have already packed most of my things and am saying goodbye at work and at home today. I have almost finalised my internship report which I hopefully will finish this afternoon. With that finished, my work here is done.

Tomorrow at 7:00 I will take the bus to the airport, check-in and depart at 9:25 (EasyJet flight 6921) and arrive at 12:00 on Schiphol Airport.

I want to thank everyone for the great time I had here. Fairouz Kamareddine and Rob Nederpelt for arranging this internship, their supervision and guidance. My colleagues Manuel and Krzysztof for the productive and fun times we had. My “lunch friends”: Gonzalo, Manuel, Simone, Laurent, and more for the many laughs and discussions during lunch. My parents and friends for visiting me here and being interested in all my stories.

I am ready to go home and would like to. But I also would like to stay here as well. Maybe, in the future I will be back… MathLang is not finished just yet :-).

Almost Returning

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-02-11T00:00:00+01:00

My internships seems to have passed in an instance. I have been here in Edinburgh for almost three months already and it is time to prepare my return. It still feels kind of strange that everything happened so fast, though my arrival on December 1st 2005 seems ages ago.

Two weeks ago I came down with a cold. I have found it to be a rather strange cold. The symptoms were not always there, just sometimes. I had (all mixed) headaches, fever (during a cold?), losing of salt taste, losing my voice, sleeping badly, coughing without reason, sneezing and it took almost 10 days to recover which is kind of long for my doing IMO. People that I seem to have infected though, have “normal” cold symptoms.

Visitors

As mentioned in a previous post I have received some visitors here. First my parents and then my friends came over. Together we have seen a lot. My aim was to show them as much of what I have been experiencing the past two months in the short period that they were here. I hope I was successful and all enjoyed themselves, at least I have.

The photos of when my parents were here and when my friends arrived are available in my Edinburgh album. However, during the visit of my friends, Christian made photos with a far better camera and I have put them in a separate sub-album (see also his own album).

London

Last weekend I also visited my friends in London. I can’t just be in the UK for three months and not visit them and join a party. So, I planned the trip, bought flight and party tickets. Just before arrival I lost my voice. When I finally met my friends, I couldn’t talk to them at all. At the KnowWhere party it was even impossible to say anything. It was a funny experience to transfer things I wanted to say to them or order drinks using my mobile and T9 input in the SMS application. The party was great, but it completely wrecked my rhythm and prolonged my recovery.

Report

Last week I started working on my internship report, since the end is near. I have about 10 days left to finish it and it is still a lot of work. I’ve found it to be quite a challenge still, to say exactly what you want to say without cluttering it and in the right order so that it is understandable. Considering that I have written many many reports for my study in the past, I still want to make this one the best.

Short Holiday

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-01-18T00:00:00+01:00

Although my work on the project here has been progressing quickly and I’m still enthusiastic about it, it is time for a break. I will have a small holiday of roughly two weeks starting tomorrow in which first my parents and then my friends will visit me. I’m looking forward to seeing them and showing them all the nice/strange/great/beautiful things I’ve seen here in the short period that they are here.

Fire Alarm

I finally had an experience with the infamous fire alarm of the Halls. My colleagues already found it a bit strange that it hadn’t happened to me yet. Last Friday at 0:30 I was about to get some sleep when it happened. I got dressed and left the Hall and stood with dozens of other inhabitants in the rain on the grass until the fire department came to check. After 30 minutes they told us what had happened: some guy had been smoking in the lounge (thanks a lot). I mean, everyone knows that fire detectors on the halls and in the lounges are more sensitive than the ones in the rooms!

Bike Troubles

I’m finally getting used to biking in the area: how cars react to you, how pedestrians react to you, the cycling on the left. I am no longer dependant on the bus service. I did my shopping by bike last Saturday and also went to the city centre. I went by the Bike Station to get my steer up, but it was impossible. Then I cycled up to the castle, but my chain snapped. I went back and they fixed it. Then I cycled up again, witnessed the yet again beautiful sunset and was about to cycle home but my front derriere was broken. So I went back again, and they helped me again. It is a great crew!

So… I will not be at the computer for some time and thus not write here. (Debian-wise I am waiting for some Debian/Ruby packages to get through the New queue anyway, so it’s not stalling me.) I will write again somewhere in February.

Exploring By Bike

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-01-09T00:00:00+01:00

To complement my survival gear I bought a bike last Saturday. I have already noticed it gives me more freedom than just using public transport here and I just can not live without cycling. In the heart of Edinburgh, in the catacombs of the Waverly station one can find the Bike Station. This is a place kept by volunteers that takes in and recycles bikes, patches them up and resells them again. On certain days you can also take your bike there and use their tools and assistance to fix it. I find this and the way they are promoting cycling in the area a great initiative (and believe me, it is really necessary)! So I bought the cheapest second-hand bike they had: a 15-gear mountain bike without any features. This is of course because I will only be here for two months and it works just fine.

There is a route from the city centre almost straight to the campus alongside the Union Canal (10km long route). It brings you through different kinds of nature but also different looking parts of Edinburgh.

Half-way on the trip back I cycled over the Slateford Aqueduct which is really narrow. It’s almost impossible for two people with bikes to pass one and another when going in opposite directions. Besides that, the aqueduct is quite long, high and gives a nice view over Slateford.

On Sunday I took the scenic route from the campus to Balerno and then to the city centre. There I tried to reach Arthur’s Seat in Hollyrood Park, but I took a wrong turn and had no energy to go all the way down and up again. So I turned around and cycled back using the Union Canal route. All and all it was a nice trip, about 40km long and I still can feel my bottom and muscles after 6 weeks of no cycling at all. Pictures of this trip are available on my Edinburgh album (photo 101 until 121).

Technical

On a more technical note, we have been moving from CVS to Subversion at work. This is nice because it allows us to do a good repository restructuring. Also did it give me the opportunity to try out SVK, which I’ve found to work well. It allows me to stay in the familiar CVS/Subversion world while not having to dive into whole new systems or command interfaces for which, at the moment, I do not have the time nor feel the need.

I hope I can help Florian Ragwitz with svk-buildpackage, because I now still need a Subversion check-out next to my SVK local branch just to build packages. By means of this combination I’ve just been able to build and upload 5 new Ruby libraries (under Debian/Ruby Extras’ team maintenance): libbreakpoint-ruby, libcairo-ruby, libcmd-ruby (oops, it seems I’ve forgotten to file the ITP?), libdaemonize-ruby and libsvg-ruby.

Hogmanay 2005>06

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-01-02T00:00:00+01:00

The Hogmanay celebration in Edinburgh started on December 29. This was coincidentally on the same day as my meeting with Steve Kemp, a fellow Debian developer. We had a nice chat and a huge and tasteful hot chocolate in a coffee shop on Nicolson Street. After our meet we ran into the Torchlight procession, Edinburgh’s Hogmanay first event. There seemed to be no end to the procession. I was cold, my feet were hurting, so I caught a bus home and missed out on the fireworks.

New Year’s Eve

On New Year’s Eve I took the last bus to the city centre (around 21:00). It was still raining a bit, but fortunately it had completely cleared up once I got out of the bus. There, I witnessed the start of the Royal Bank Street Party (consisting of concerts, a carnival, attractions, etc.), which meant thousands, ten thousands of people gathering to enter the party. This party was held in a closed down perimeter covering Princes Street and other adjacent streets. Since I had no ticket I made a walk around the perimeter to get a glimpse of the party itself but also to see what else was going on in the centre. It turned out that there were lots of ticket-less people who were partying in pubs or just singing and dancing on the streets.

At 23:30, lots of people (including me) gathered on the North Bridge to wait for the 0:00 moment. At midnight loud yelling rose from the centre evolving into a load roar as if legions of men were sent to war and the Seven Hills Fireworks were set of. Everyone was cheering, jumping in the arms of strangers and wishing everyone a good and happy new year. It was an amazing thing to experience and be part of :), I hope that I can come back for it once more.

A happy and good new year everyone!

Christmas 2005

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-12-28T00:00:00+01:00

Two days before Christmas I was invited by my colleague, Krzysztof, and his wife to come over to their place during Christmas to have a (Polish-style) Christmas supper/lunch. This meant that I didn’t have to be home alone on campus for Christmas, just hacking a bit, slumbering and watching some movies/series.

The trip to their home involved quite a walk from the university campus through villages and alongside the Water of Leith, but it was perfect weather to do so (in contrary to the weather on the second day of Christmas). We had a nice supper and I want to thank them for the invitation and the meal.

Work Progress

I feel I have made a lot of progress since the last time I reported. In the past week I have been able to implement a big part of the MathLang checker and create a lot of output generators useful for debugging such as a debugging library for printing data structures, an ASCII tree (a la the output of the tree command) representation of the AST and an AST-DOT-file generator which in turn can be transformed to many formats. I have worked it all out for a simple example that I have just added to my MACS site.

Making Progress

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-12-22T00:00:00+01:00

It’s been a while since I have posted. There was nothing specific to report really, besides the fact that our team (during these holiday weeks consisting only of Krzysztof and me) is making quite some process on the MathLang-Core suite.

It’s clear by now that the paper only poses an intuitive understanding of the system and that the semantics and details still have to be worked out. So, while pioneering the system, I have reworked almost any part of my implementation twice already.

Last Saturday I went to the ocean to have look there and made some pictures. Note that during my stay here I will continuously supplement the Edinburgh album with photos without posting about it everytime (fortunately :)).

VPN

I’ve been successful in setting up a VPN connection with the Spacelabs network yesterday using the openvpn system, which seems to work nicely (and simple!). Instead of being behind a NATing router/firewall with a nasty web proxy that sometimes throws IE-style “Page not found” pages at me and a not so well working SMTP relay, I’m completely free again. That is, being virtually present on the Spacelabs network and thus the Internet.

Debian/Ruby

It’s nice to see more Ruby related remarks/posts on Planet Debian. That said, I would like to (ab)use the opportunity to advertise the Debian/Ruby Extras team that is set up for making a team effort of maintaining Ruby libraries and apps (not the core/interpreter). The Subversion infrastructure, build system, documentation and tools have matured a little now, but we still (always probably) could use more help in this area and also the Ruby policy and other issues.

For more information, we normally have our discussions on the #debian-ruby channel (on the FreeNode IRC network).

So What Is MathLang

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-12-12T00:00:00+01:00

The past few days I have been accumulating knowledge. I have encountered quite some new concepts and stuff they use here, but also old knowledge had to be refreshed. I have looked again at XML technologies as W3c XML Schema, RelaxNG, XSLT and XML in general. I had to dive into OCaml since that’s the main language used here. Fortunately I can make use of my past Haskell experience there. So now I have yet a new language to add to my used-programming-languages list.

I have used my webspace provided by MACS to set up a page about all my internship work related stuff. It gave me another opportunity to make use of webgen again, what a great tool! Simple text files in a directory structure are converted to a site with such ease. A title, menu and navigation bar, all done automatically and it’s all static HTML in a nice XHTML 1.1 compliant package.

MathLang

I have read all the available presentations and papers on MathLang that I could find. At the TU/e I was taught the Weak-Type Theory by professor Nederpelt (which is a basis for this mathematical language), so I have some background in this area. I’ve tried to write a page about what MathLang is. I’ll probably have to improve the descriptions and make the whole thing clearer.

The Plan

My first task will be to write a MathLang-Core concrete syntax compiler that can generate the still to be defined XML format. The AST used in this compiling process should also be prepared so that the MathLang type checker can run on it. Once the compiling to XML is done, I might be able to use XSLT to transform it back to the original syntax, hence proving the equivalence of the two syntaxes. For monitoring my progress, see my online log.

Exploring The Campus

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-12-07T00:00:00+01:00

I wasn’t able to do anything meaningful the first days of my stay. On Friday I had a meeting with Fairouz Kamareddine to talk about what I should do in preparation of my assignment (which will be fully determined next Friday) and what the team is already working on with respect to MathLang.

Shopping

In the weekend I went shopping in a large supermarket (the here infamous ASDA) together with Xiaobin, one of the Chinese guys I live with. I hadn’t realised until that moment that I had to buy some stuff I already had at home, just so that I could drink and eat: mugs, pans, bins, glasses, forks, knives… I hope somehow that I am able to take it home with me, it wasn’t exactly very cheap.

After the shopping frenzy we went to the city centre together which was very busy with people shopping for Christmas. I bought a second power plug converter (type C to G) so I don’t have to leave all my stuff in my room unplugged just so that I can power my laptop at the university and have to set the time on my alarm clock when I return home.

Walking

On Sunday I cleaned up and rested a bit. During the afternoon I got a bit cold and went out for a large walk around and over the campus. During the walk I’ve made some pictures which are available on my Edinburgh album, which I hope to keep filling with pictures the next few months. I’ll probably have to split it up and improve the gallery, but this is what I have for now.

Cycling

Since I have arrived I haven’t seen any bicycles! Zero, zip, nada! People either walk or take the bus. I sure am going to miss cycling. Even if I can get my hands on a bike, it’s probably not safe to use it since the entire traffic system here is not accustomed to take you into account riding on such a thing.

Arrival In Edinburgh

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-12-07T00:00:00+01:00

The flight to Edinburgh went just fine. I believe it’s my first time flying 10 minutes ahead of schedule because everyone was already in the plane. I left on 12:35 CET, landed on 12:35 GMT, so no time lost :). After arriving I was dying for something to eat (which I took with me in my coat but it wasn’t really reachable in the plane). So I ate, got some money and took a taxi to the Heriot-Watt University campus.

The university campus

I got dropped off on the campus at the main reception. There I was able to store my luggage and I was kindly directed to the Mountbatten building, home of the school of MACS. There I met Fairouz Kamareddine and two of my direct colleagues: Manuel Maarek and Krzysztof Retel. Fairouz quickly arranged that I got registered as a HW student, got my MACS account, the accommodation, etc.

With keys, luggage and instructions I took off to the Lord Thomson Hall to find my room. At 17:00 I was completely settled in already. I met my (all Chinese) four kitchmates (yes, it’s a strange word) and went back to the university refectory for dinner. My room is a quite small, at least, smaller than I am used to (about half the area), but it has a bathroom (with shower), gets cleaned weekly and all the heating is included… so I am not complaining.

I must say that the people on campus are very nice. I can ask anyone if I need to know something and I always get help or a kind reply. There are really a lot of foreign students here (about 25%) who all share the same fate.

Leaving

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-11-30T00:00:00+01:00

I’m getting ready for my departure to Edinburgh, everything is arranged. I will leave for my parents this afternoon. They will bring me to the airport tomorrow around 9:00. My flight (number 6922) is at 12:25 (CET) and will arrive at Edinburgh Airport on 13:00 (GMT). There, I will take a taxi to the campus, meet the people I will be working with and get my room (which should have a permanent Internet connection). Last night I had a good dinner of soup, lots of pancakes and dessert with my flatmates. Afterwards friends and my brother visited for a last cup of tea and the traditional finishing bite at the kebab place. Thanks for stopping by guys! I hope to be able to report frequently about what’s happening and what I am doing if time allows me too, stay tuned…

Internship

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-10-26T00:00:00+02:00

I have fixed my Hobix setup, so I can write again. There was some problem/incompatibility with the new Ruby 1.8.3 in sid concerning the YAML implementation.

A lot has happened in the past 7 weeks so I don’t know really where to start. I think I’ll start with the current hot item in my life: the internship that I am arranging. I’m planning to visit Scotland, Edinburgh in particular. There, at the Heriot-Watt University I will work on MathLang under the supervision of Fairouz Kamareddine (in Scotland) and Rob Nederpelt (here at the TU/e). MathLang is a mathematical language that will provide support for checking well-formedness and allow for better formalisation while also being usable in the digital world. What my exact assignment will be, I do not know yet, I will hear the specifics soon. For now I know that it has something to do with LaTeX, TeXmacs and Guile GNOME implementation-wise.

I really am excited about going there for three months already, but there is still a lot of stuff to arrange, both financially and formally. I received an extra scholarship today from a faculty institute which helps a lot in the financial department. Now, if I could just have all the form stuff done, I am ready for the local long-term holiday arranging kinda stuff :). Stay tuned…

Sleep Rhythm Revisited

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-09-07T00:00:00+02:00

A year ago I wrote something about my sleep rhythm problem and the migraines I get due to it sometimes. Well, it seems that I have successfully fixed that problem. Exactly three months ago I started following Steve Pavlina’s Early Riser program (part 2) and all headaches are gone. The first time I read about it was in one of Ian Murdock’s posts.

The first week was hard but then it has been quite easy (this may depend on the level of discipline). I chose 7:30 as my wake up time since it allows me to go to bed late sometimes but isn’t that late in the morning. I can still get to my lectures or other appointments on time with ease.

A few remarks about the program, experiences and things/research I read¹:

It is really important to go to bed when you are sleepy. This may look simple, but it is not. It’s easy to get entangled in something exciting (TV show, coding, music) just when you ought to get some sleep, so you’ll miss the first melatonin wave.
When the alarm goes off, don’t allow yourself to linger in bed just for a few moments, it is disastrous. Get out!
It is impossible to catch up sleep and bad to try it as well, just let it correct itself.
It is even more impossible to sleep ahead, the it confuses the body much more than it does good.
Did I mention that one should go to bed when one is sleepy?
Sometimes, mostly due to social circumstances, it just gets much later then you would’ve wanted to. Getting out of bed at 7:30 with only 4 hours of sleep is possible, but sleeping a bit longer is better in this case. Just don’t over due it.
The body knows quite well when sleep is required but not when waking up would be a good thing.
For me, the key thing is keeping the rhythm in the weekends. I’ve found out that in the past the weekend always distorts the rhythm and it takes until Thursday to get it right and then it’s almost weekend again.
Power naps are really not that bad. They don’t make you look like an old person, they’re great for purging incoming headaches or stress/brain load.

The program may look fragile, but after some weeks it isn’t really. It feels a bit like having all the time in the world without having to stretch each day with 4 hours or should I say, 24 hours ought to be enough for everybody. ;-)

¹ I really wished I would’ve bookmarked the research, but that is too late now and I am too lazy to trace it all back at the moment.

Yet Another Holiday Has Passed

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-08-29T00:00:00+02:00

It seems that I haven’t written for almost a month already, time really did go fast this time. So, I have started at university again today, holiday is most definitely over. This must have been the holiday that went completely by me ever, what holiday? So, what have I been doing these past two months then?

Work

As mentioned in an earlier post I have been working at Spacelabs for a few weeks. We were able to almost finish VideBabilo until the point that we’d have to think about protocol. Also the DV Router D-BUS service kind of works. It would be nice to move this to GStreamer 0.10 in the future though. How finished are we really? Well, documentation is lacking and there are some problems with the embedded video and the much hated thread(s)(violations).

Study

Not as I hoped but as I expected I didn’t get around much to do some stuff for my study. However, I have finished the planning for the coming year and got the approval. I now know for sure that my Bachelor program is OK and that I will get my Bachelor degree this year. Also will I be finishing all my Master subjects for the end of this academic year and hopefully will have completed an internship.

This trimester I have one Master course, some assignments to finish and will have to look for internships, if possible abroad, in the area of Computer Science and Engineering/Formal methods & verification.

(If you have/know of any available internships for me, please let me know. :-))

LaTeX

Here at the department of Mathematics and Computer Science we use a specific notation for doing mathematical derivations. It’s called a “flag proof” (vlaggenbewijs). It places assumptions and variable introductions in flags and uses flag poles to signify the scope of the assumption/introduction. Certain proof rules hold for the derivation system, for example, closing a flag leads to the introduction of an implication. Since the first grade I always found this system to be much clearer than the more regular notations.

When I had to work out lecture notes last year, I searched for a LaTeX package for this notation. I got one via via, but it was really crappy one, just a bunch of macros jumbled together. So I decided to dive deeper than normal in LaTeX styles and packages and wrote a cleaner version with more features (style customization, multi-page-spanning, etc.) called “flagderiv”. I want to thank Mark, professor Nederpelt and others for their feedback and ideas, also David Carlisle for his help. A few days ago version 0.10 got accepted in CTAN, yay!

Debian/Ruby

With the announcement of the libruby-extras package to bundle some libraries that are small and nice, but not part of standard lib, stuff (slowly) started to happen. I am glad a team is forming now and tools are being developed. This may be a very good thing for Debian/Ruby quality. So my plans for the coming few weeks are to improve the ruby-pkg-tools package, transform my ITPed libs to use the CDBS class from the tools, make them all consistent, upload them and start working on new Debian Ruby policy drafts to fill in the blanks. I hope Esteban can add documentation generation to the class and that Antonio can construct a dh-make-ruby so that the result of it all will make Ruby library and application packaging a piece of cake, less error-prone and messy.

Working, Cooking

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-07-31T00:00:00+02:00

I haven’t written for a while, I have been busy with working and well… cooking, eating and watching movies with friends.

Cooking

Bram was left parentless the past two weeks, so he had to do some real cooking for the first time in his life. We set up cook-shifts in our group of friends (Admar, Bas, Bram, Christian and me) to provide everyone with a nice dinner every evening and transfer some of our cooking experience to Bram. Since Bram is a vegetarian, it was a learning experience for us all. Fortunately, it all worked out really well, we made (among other things):

Lasagna bolognese
Pesto wraps
Chili sen carne
Curry something

Working

Work has progressed very nicely the past two weeks. Our (Bram and me) task is to build a DV conferencing application for the desktop. Yes, this means streaming and receiving 30Mb/s full-duplex. The first building block we have created is a D-BUS service that can startup, pause and stop programs or GStreamer pipelines (depends on what is available at that moment) to route DV data from DV/RTP, TCP, FireWire bus etc. to the screen, back to the FireWire bus. Also a command line tool was created to control the router process.

Next is to make a GNOME2 GUI tool to create a nicer interface for the router called VideBabilo. I have made a small mock-up, the implementation be done next week (that is, if we get that far).

Note that this will still just dial/connect to a host, since there is not protocol yet. We plan to add this later, possible by means of XMPP (Jabber). This protocol probably will handle: inviting to a conference, rejecting calls, ending a call, etc. First peer-to-peer (like GnomeMeeting) and then talking to multiple people.

Holiday And Work

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-07-06T00:00:00+02:00

Yesterday, my summer holiday officially started, and… it will be a busy one! Starting next Monday (July 11) I’ll have an almost full-time job (80%, Fridays off) at Spacelabs till the end of the summer holiday. I don’t have any specifics on what it is going to be about just yet, so I’ll write about this later.

With Friday free, I can finish some pending assignments (for the courses Linux, History of Computing , Process Algebra with Timing and Hypermedia) and prepare for the exams that I will (have to) take at the end of August (Software Testing and Real-Time Architectures).

Also, I hope (yes it is a bit ambitious) to work on some running projects in the evenings/weekends: Miriapodo, LEDR, a GOAT! author tool in GTK+, Debian Ruby (project and packages), a rewrite of Ildus (in Ruby, DBMS agnostic and targeted at PowerDNS).

Power Outage

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-07-02T00:00:00+02:00

The building where most of our Luon Network (luon.net) servers (except for home gateways of course) are located, is scheduled for a power outage between 8:00 and 17:00 CEST today. This is due to law-abiding checks and maintenance of the electrical infrastructure of one of the buildings of the university in which all servers are placed.

Since Luon provides me with most of my service I need during the day, I am without: Jabber, mail, mailinglists (archives), CVS and subversion access, Trac, MOO/MUD, IPv6, shell access, some of luon.net’s additional Debian package repositories and some development setups. What am I going to do?!

Update: It’s down now, I hope all servers come back by themselves once power is restored :).

Planet Luon

Bram and I have set up Planet Luon (which isn’t reachable at the moment for obvious reasons) for the now already existing 4 journals of Luon users. We hope to get more members for it, that would be nice.

I also hope that we or someone else can help improve the Planet Planet software a bit. It is strange that with all the XML back-end technologies it uses, to transform it to HTML 4.01 transitional, a recommended standard around 1999. It will be a challenge to get the result valid XHTML 1.1.

Grandma 80

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-06-13T00:00:00+02:00

My grandma turned 80 today! I hope to reach that age someday, until then a lot of stuff to do and learn.

Gefeliciteerd oma! En nog vele jaren…

Exams and holiday

It is time for the final run. The coming two weeks are the exam weeks. However, for me, most of the past trimester’s subjects grading is done by means of assignments, so that makes the holiday very near. :)

This year’s holiday seems to be filled with work (on Spacelabs? on Google’s Summer of Code?) and catching up with left-over subjects. I still got some assignments that I have to finish that I have kept postponing from the beginning of this academic year. Oh well, let’s see how far I get….

Leaving For GUADEC 2005

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-05-27T00:00:00+02:00

I am almost ready to leave for GUADEC. Everything is packed and ready to go. I and others will take the train at 13:01 in Eindhoven and travel via Venlo to Duisburg. There we will take a rental car to Stuttgart and stay in the Youth Hostel Stuttgart. The second part of our group will join us on Saturday and we will stay there until Tuesday evening and then return to the Netherlands. See you there, if you’re there!

Wide screen

My Dell 24050FPW 24" widescreen arrived a weekend ago! I got it at a considerable discount, and am already very happy with it: bright, beautiful colors, fast and high contrast. I extended my PowerBook desktop with it using the MergedFB feature of my Radeon (so pseudo-Xinerama with XVideo support on both heads).

I still use it via D-SUB/VGA but when X(org) is fixed soon, I hope to switch to DVI. We’ll see about that after GUADEC. I hope to post entries with pictures from there as well, if I manage.

25th birthday

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-04-17T00:00:00+02:00

With the help of the Hobix people and others I have fixed my Hobix setup that has been broken for a month, so I can write entries again! I’ve added all these fixes to the prelimary Debian packages of Hobix¹ and feel it’s almost ready for release into the Debian archive.

My birthday went quietly today, being 25 years old now, it really feels I’m getting somewhere. I had my parents and brother for a visit and went out eating, feeling very stuffed afterwards :). But it was good.

I did some thinking and planning and these are the tasks that are ahead for the coming months:

Visit GUADEC if possible.
Rearrange the setup in my room, add some bookshelves.
Do a thorough cleanup of the (hidden) paper mess in my room.
Help the setup of the Debian Ruby Maintainers team/group.
Finish those already one year pending essays and projects.
Finish and release GOAT!.
Finish and release Miriapodo².
What did I forget…

¹ Available using the deb-line:

deb http://luon.net/debian experimental main

² More on this in later entries when I feel it’s more ready.

Banana Republic

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-03-07T00:00:00+01:00

I too live in a Banana republic, I almost feel ashamed to consider myself a European. Really sad news…

So…

LaCie Disk

Paul van Tilburg — 2005-03-04T00:00:00+01:00

The LaCie disk I had ordered, arrived last weekend and besides some testing I finally got to use it today. I had to go with the Firewire option because my PowerBook still has USB 1.1 only and well… 1MB/s just doesn’t cut it for me and FireWire is nice.

Using FireWire 800 with a PowerMac G5 I was able to reach 45MB/s average. On my PowerBook using plain FireWire (400) I have been able to get 22MB/s sustained. Since my laptop harddisk can’t go any faster, I am quite satisfied. :)

The whole thing was a nice test for my 2.6.10 kernel too. I have partitioned the disk with one partition for Video and Music storage and one for backups (24 homedir backups ought to be enough for everybody). I plugged in the LaCie disk, all USB storages devices I have and got a nice result presented by nautilus with the help of Gnome Volume Manager and HAL.

I’m still having a bit of problems though. Sometimes the SBP2 subsystem seems to act up and the disk becomes unreachable:

Mar 4 21:54:30 power kernel: ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command Mar 4 21:54:30 power kernel: 0×2a 00 04 18 ae 60 00 00 f8 00

Turning if on and off or letting it timeout helps, but that’s not A Real Solution™. So I’ll still have to figure this out and fix it.

UK trip

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-12-04T00:00:00+01:00

I thought it was time to escape the daily routine again, right in the start of the trimester, right before the holidays. So, I’ve booked my flights past weekend. The global plan and time-tables:

Thursday 9th December

Leave for Eindhoven Airport at 19:00 CET.
Flight FR9274 (RyanAir) from Eindhoven Airport to London Stansted at 21:35 CET.
Arrival at London Stansted at 21:35 GMT.

Friday 10th December

Visit Trance Generation at 22:00 GMT till 6:00 (7:00 ?) GMT. I’m looking forward to hearing Lange and Smith & Pledger. Before that, I’ll possibly roam London a bit.

Saturday 11th December

Weekend :)

Sunday 12th December

Leave for London Stansted at 10:30 GMT.
Flight 3885 (EasyJet) from London Stansted to Amsterdam Schiphol at 13:15 GMT.
Arrival at Amsterdam Schiphol at 15:25 CET.
Back home at 18:00 CET.

I’m looking forward to return to London. I was there twice a few years ago. It’s also nice to finally meet some friends, whom I’ve met via the Trance AirWaves channel, now the station is gone. London here I come!

Trimester 4.2

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-11-27T00:00:00+01:00

With trimester 4.1 (4th year, 1st trimester) finished, it is almost time to start the next already. The exams went fairly well, but have yet to see what became of all them and the assignments and projects. I’ve chosen these as my Master subjects for the next trimester (although the first three are obligatory):

I’ve also got some 3rd year subjects I’ll have to retry (yet again):

And these are subjects that I started last trimester/year, which I will be finishing next trimester too:

History of Computing (write essay)
Hypermedia Structures and Systems (do final assignment)

Hrm, still a lot… but I am going to enjoy this trimester, it’s more in the formal but also practical corner. Anyway, first a long weekend, time to get some free software stuff done.

Trance AirWaves R.I.P.

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-11-23T00:00:00+01:00

As of Thursday 23rd November 0:00, Trance AirWaves has closed down due to money issues, which came as very unexpected news to most of us. A station always broadcasting excellent and diverse trance continuously, Linux powered and with an OGG stream available for a while, will leave behind a gap. With a lot of live DJs and an very alive community, this channel I came across accidently two years ago will be a loss to me and others.

I want to thank Nige, Kuffdam, Dave, Malc, Sapphire and Mike for the great effort they’ve put into the station, making it so large as it was. I also want to thank the sponsors and my favourite live DJs (Wicked Neo, Mat-Lock, Luke Terry, Mike Mackay, Viframa, Science Deal, Rob Pain, Mike Shiver, Dan Hill, Al Redmond, Markus Schulz, Suzy Solar, Ben Los, DJ TimeOK and Dan Hill) for their sets over the past two years.

I also sincerely hope to continue to see/speak the people (Adam, Sphynx, Trancers, Trancebrat, Hixx, KrissO, LXJ, R5A, Taste, Andi-C, DJ Ellipse, Greggo, Jaiz, Lil-B, Repent, RSTrax, Scouse, Tricks, Bex, Gibbo and Gloom) that made it a great community on other IRC channels or by other online means and want to thank them for the fun, weird, enthusiastic, hilaric and sad times we had.

And so it ends… R.I.P. Trance Airwaves…

Exam weeks

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-11-18T00:00:00+01:00

I haven’t written for weeks yet again. It’s has been such busy days, finishing projects, writing essays, etc. With only two exams left, it’s calming down now, and the Monday after the last exam, it’s starting all over again! :-) I have rejected a job for next trimester that I was asked for. With far less subjects (five) than in the past trimester (eight), I hope I can put some more time in Debian, RPA and other things I’ve planned.

GOAT!

The most interesting and time-consuming project in the past trimester was GOAT!, our Goal-Based Object-oriented Interactive Teacher. It allowed me and other to program Ruby all day long, using the IOWA framework. Final results: a rule-based intelligent-agent, that guides you through a hypertext course by hiding links to pieces you are not ready for and showing them later on, providing navigational help, tests to measure your knowledge level and suggestions to useful parts to read. Hereby I want to thank Kirk Haines, IOWA’s author, for his assistance, speed, insights and work that made our project a success.

HCC days

I visited the HCC days (largest computer stuff fair in the Netherlands) last weekend and bought mostly small stuff. Besides that, some friends and I acquired an IBM Netfinity 5000 (details) and are getting the second CPU next week :) It’s a nice machine, already named cube, and am confident we can put the thing to good use.

Homecoming

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

Spoiler alert! (only when following the links).

Last night (rather late :) ) I finished reading the last book of the Homecoming Saga series, Earthborn, because the story kept occupying my mind and interfered with my concentration. Or, at least, my sleep rhythm. I even think I liked this more than the Ender series. Then again, except for the “Cardish” touch, it is so different, it may be called incomparable.

I couldn’t help but notice the interesting theories about human nature in all the books, and I still wonder… which parts of these theories are really fiction and which are researched rather thoroughly?

I’d have to ask him once.

GOAT!

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-10-16T00:00:00+02:00

I have been working on GOAT! — Goal-based Object-oriented Adaptive Teacher the whole week (besides lectures and stuff). This was again for the Intelligent Systems course. It is the reincarnation of our Ruby Tutor project which was dropped earlier as a possible idea.

For the HTML page/templating framework, I have been using Iowa, a Ruby object based framework. I must say, once you’ve understood how it works, it is really nice! A HTML page together with its code (separate files though) together form a page class, that is instantiated and kept in a session for every user visiting. It allows you to think of a page as the object with which the user’s agent interacts, keeping a state (by means of instance variables). It also allows you do Ruby like iterations in HTML:

@item.name

simulating itemList.each { |item| ... }. Note that <ul/> is transformed by Iowa, since UL it is a subclass of a more generic repeater (you can always use <repeat/>).

I also would like to thank the author (Kirk Haines) for writing this piece of software and helping me out a lot of times. I think Iowa has a somewhat steep learning curve at first, but it gets better after a while I hope we can fix this by providing information regarding where the hard parts are, where more examples are needed, and so on.

Esperanto stuff

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-10-10T00:00:00+02:00

The following text is in Esperanto for variation purposes. Try to follow it, if you can, or just ignore it all together.

Paroli

Lastan ĵaŭdon mi parolis Esperanto unuafoje kun Maarteno. Ĝi estis amuza kaj mi ankaŭ lernis multaĵojn. Dum la parolo mi sensis iomete estas problemo, kiam vi ne(longe) scias vortojn, sed denove estas bona en Esperanto, ĉar oni povas konstrui vortojn alimaniere. Ankaŭ estas tre amuze pri bicikli tra Eindhoveno kaj babili en Esperanto, kiam neniu povas komprenis vin! Mi ŝatas ĝin sed ankaŭ estas iom bedaŭrinde, ĉu ne? Kiam vi povas lerni Esperanto (certe kiam vi povas legis tion iomete), vi povas sekvi la retkurson:

(vizitu ankaŭ UniLang, kiam vi interesiĝas por lingvojn)

Emmeno

Mi denove vizitis amikojn en Groningeno kaj Emmeno ĉi tie semajnofinon. Ĝi estis tre amuza kaj hejmeca. Mi neniam estis en Groningeno, sed estas bela. Groningeno ankaŭ similas Leeuwardeno iomete, sed tamen estas alia urbo! Mi revenos ĉi tie!

Monato

Mi recivis la internacian magazinon Monato hieraŭ. Mi pensas estas bonega magazino. Ĝi estas de Belgio (Antverpeno) kaj havas iujn interesajn artikulojn. Ĉi tie monaton estas artikulo pri libera programaro, estas interesa pri vidi la Esperantan opiono/vidpunkton de tion. Mi ne ankoraŭ scias, ĉu mi abonas ĝin…

Hmm… kiel oni povas fari i18n por Hobikso… ?

Ruby Tutor cancelled

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-10-02T00:00:00+02:00

The plan to program a Ruby Tutor as I earlier posted last week has been cancelled. It seems that the purpose of the project for the Intelligent Systems course wasn’t clear enough to us.

Since I (we) have no time at all this trimester for such a large project and the major imperative to do implement is now gone, I don’t think it’ll ever happen. Sorry!

Ruby Tutor

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-25T00:00:00+02:00

For the Intelligent Systems course, we have to write an intelligent agent as a project. We came up with the idea to write a Ruby Programming Language Tutor. The agent should learn someone without programming or at least OOP knowledge the Ruby language. The agent does this by giving the student interactive lessons consisting of small explanations, examples and exercises on a certain topic. I’ve posted our idea to the Ruby Talk mailinglist, got some reactions so far, but would’ve liked to have more. Well, maybe that will happen when I post more concrete ideas, providing we’ll go with this idea anyway.

Fixing computers

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-25T00:00:00+02:00

I did my monthly computer-fixing round for families with Windows PCs again. It consumed a big part of this Saturday. I got it all working again, but I don’t feel it’s still a hobby. Even when all those people would run OS X, or Linux (which would make it a lot more pleasurable for me), there still would be some maintenance. There is a market there, but it’s not something for me.

Earthfall

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-25T00:00:00+02:00

I’m completely caught up in Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming series. I’m reading book 4, Earthfall (spoiler alert!), at the moment. Still amazed how the guy can set up such a story and the personalities and transfer feelings of disgust, anger and utter astonishment to me. Only one book left after this. Why, o why, can’t series just not end?

Sleep Rhythm

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-24T00:00:00+02:00

What a week that was! So full, busy, etc. I really got to get my sleep rhythm on track; that holiday 2:00 — 11:00 scheme doesn’t work for “normal” weeks, you know! For the Hacker’s Hut course, we delivered the result of our assingment today. The report tells the story and displays the results of our warbiking expiriment on the university’s terrain. A pity the open networks we found were too silent at that moment to get on them.

Bad weekend

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

I’ve had a bad weekend. Headaches, problems, busy, etc. I was able to spend some free time working on Aribigi though. I am still trying to get the annoying SEGV out and have reworked the event model based on some discussion on Spacelabs last Friday.

Also I’ve changed the webserver of the machine running this website, source, to Apache 2. I think it is/feels a bit faster (the worker model at least) and is much more flexible. Setting up SSL support was a hassle though. Next to IPv6 support, this also allowed me to set up a DAV SVN repository for anonymous check outs. This is just to try it out before creating the Luon Network SVN repository. I also switched from using no DNS server (thus using /etc/hosts) to using PowerDNS aka pdns on my internal (wireless) network. I like PowerDNS already; it has several backends, out of which the LDAP one is the most interesting. It seems I’ll have to rewrite the whole Ildus system in Ruby and adapt it to this standardised LDAP scheme (see also RFC 1297), so I can drop DNSSyncd (a daemon syncing LDAP with a bind server via zone files.) and hook Ildusd (the Ildus Luon DynDNS Update Service daemon) directly to LDAP which is directly connected to PowerDNS.

I was surprised to notice that source has the highest maximum uptime of the entire TU/e IP range, according to Netcraft. I haven’t done much for it really, it just lies here. Still waiting until it crashes so I can replace the HDD and kernel.

SEP essay

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-17T00:00:00+02:00

We, Dippsoft, finally managed to deliver our essay for the Software Engineering Project 2003/2004. We started somewhere halfway November 2003 and yesterday, we have finished our final (extra) assignment. I am so glad that it is over and am looking forward to our closing dinner next week! :-)

Patents

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-15T00:00:00+02:00

It’s those patents again! I can’t believe it’s happing over and over again. I had a totally unproductive day, nothing to say really… Oh yeah, GNOME 2.8 is out (on time)!

Migraine

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-11T00:00:00+02:00

I had such a migraine yesterday. I think it was a build-up of the pressure of the entire week and some sleep shortage. It occurs to me now that I have to make a very efficient and steady week planning to be able to finish this trimester at all. Even so, it might not be possible to finish everything I had planned at all. Well, time will tell.

I’ve cleaned up my bookmarks this week! Yes, very interesting, huh… I had a lot of bookmarks I didn’t use anymore and missed a lot of pages I should visit more regularly. Since I write a journal, I’ve taken more interests in other journals or weblogs. So, I’ve added and start reading these pages:

If I have missed your page (which is entirely possible) and it is very interesting, let me know!

A new month, a new year

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-09-04T00:00:00+02:00

A clean slate, a new month and a new academic year. Althought the academic officially starts a September 6, my university thought ahead and started a week earlier. This also means we’ll stop a week earlier, can’t wait already. :) The trimester started as I expected, it is busy already. Now it’s just the trick to make working on all assignments and reading stuff a regular thing and all will go well. I haven’t had any lecture from Software Architecting yet (the subject I will follow with some relucatance), but all the other subjects seem nice and fun. Last Thursday and Friday I took the time to watch some movies (finally). I watched Jackie Brown and The Last Samurai on those days respectively. I always enjoy those Quinten Tarantino movies, they’re so different, got more real conversations and details. I also enjoyed watching The Last Samurai. I finally saw the pictures that suited the beautiful soundtrack I bought a few weeks ago. It’s such a strong combination, but I guess.. noone perceives this as I do though. Time for bed… a lot of assignments to finish tomorrow!

Holiday's end

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-08-28T00:00:00+02:00

I can’t believe it’s already here! Where have those nine weeks gone!? This is the last weekend of my holiday but I’m as fully rested as I can be. I have read a lot, listened to a lot of music and finally managed to work a bit on some projects I had planned for the holiday. This site was a rather unexpected project, but it turned out to be fun too.

I haven’t written for a while. I have been working almost continously on Aribigi since Sunday, except for Thrusday (taking a break) and Friday (fixing my fscking bicycle yet again!). I have updated the screenshot again to reflect a more current state. It is starting to become something nice and useful very slowly; we are getting there.

Nijmegen

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-08-22T00:00:00+02:00

It has been a while since I wrote here. I went to visit my aunt, uncle and nephews in Nijmegen last Thursday for three days. I installed Debian GNU/Linux sarge on the computer of my nephew, Freek. It went quite okay, but one notices that some stuff is not ready for the average user yet. I got GNOME set up okay on this PII-233/320M/80G box and it runs very nice too (I expected some slowness because of the CPU, but this is not the case)!

I also resumed my work on Aribigi today. Mainly I’ve been creating the user interface, mostly by hand. I don’t feel much for Glade except for dialog creation or UI designing. I borrowed some ideas from Gossip because I think it’s stilly to try to reinvent the wheel when there has been so many discussions on what would be intuitive. What I’ve done so far is visible in this screenshot. I’ve set up an development site for Aribigi and added some useful text already. It’s time to cut this short and resume coding :).

Bachelor/master

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-08-17T00:00:00+02:00

I had a meeting with the study advisor today to clear the bachelor/master confusion up. Since some of my 3rd year subjects are still pending results, I can’t start my Master CSE yet, but I’ll switch as soon as I have enough ECTS points. But first I’ll have to get by Bachelor, for which besides the pending results, I still need to finish 4 subjects. It seems it’s going to be a hell of a year. These are the Master subjects I have selected for trimester 4.1:

Software Architecting
Information Security
Intelligent Systems
Program and Modal Logic
The Linux Operating System
Complexity (retry this 3rd year subject)

and these are the subjects that started last year, which I will be finishing next trimester too:

History of Computing (write essay)
Hypermedia Structures and Systems (do final assignment)
Software Engineering Project (finish this 3rd year project)

I am also going to tutor/give:

Compilers (practicum only)
OGO 2.1 (tutor)

I fixed my bicycle today… finally! The front tire is brand new! It wasn’t that much work anyway, I have no idea why I kept postponing it. It’s funny to notice how close everything is to where I live, but despite that a bike is still preferable.

Emmen

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-08-15T00:00:00+02:00

I travelled to Emmen last Friday to spend some (holiday) time with friends living over there (Wouter, Lise and Maarten). Next to some chilling, talking and resting also had some time for games (Triviant, Scorched 3D) and geeky stuff. We completely transformed the network infrastructure to use DHCP, have a more logical IP numbering and tweaked the modem to use SIP Spoofing which is all nice and clean.

Tomorrow I’m returning again, a short but good stay, I must say. During the 3+ hour trip I’ll have time to work on Aribigi and read my book that arrived at the bookstore last Friday (Orson Scott Card – The call of earth).

I completely missed that Linux 2.6.8 and 2.6.8.1 (what a strange version, can’t get used to it) were released. Although it was due some time ago, I’m happy to update to it to get rid of that IPv6 bug.

Fotopia3

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-08-08T00:00:00+02:00

Finally, after postponing it two times, Fotopia 3 took place today. We went to Rotterdam for the architecture theme and made two walks taking us to parks, special buildings and bridges throughout the city centre. For the results see this page. Note that I am still missing 10 photos. We had a great day, very good weather and a nice dinner to close the meeting.

I started writing/building my Photography section (unavailable at the moment). I have some ideas about how to put it all into pages but am not fully satisfied yet. "

Visiting Michiel

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-08-04T00:00:00+02:00

Michiel visted me in Eindhoven today. We talked about our plans for Aribigi and decided to start with a prototype (with simple backend) first. I guess you are going to hear more from that soon. We also did some shopping, had a drink on the `Markt’ and dinner with Christian and Admar. Just a very nice day…

My CD (Hans Zimmer – The Last Samurai finally arrived today, so I am going to rip that to OGG Vorbis immediately. So the Opus and book orders are left.

Not much to say, really

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-08-02T00:00:00+02:00

Wow, this was a very uneventful day. Besides waiting for varius stuff I ordered with Apple , vPierre (bookstore), Bol.com and Opus , just did some reading and worked on the essay for the SE project . I had dinner with friends was nice and enjoyed the SciFi evening on Veronica. Since Star Trek TNG’s series final was broadcasted, they had to come up with something new. Which is the cult/classic SciFi miniseries V , see also V on ImDB . I haven’t formed an opinion on it yet, though. I’ll let you know.

Just a start

Paul van Tilburg — 2004-08-01T00:00:00+02:00

So, my first entry in this diary. I hope I can keep this up too. I listened to GKGG last night, which was simulcasted by TranceAirWaves, but Galaxy105 really fucked up. At 1am they stopped during Armin’s set and switched to house and then to R&B! Besides that, they we’re talking over all track climaxes and breaks or started a commercial break right on the break of the GG Theme (Blue Fear 2004), how unprofessional. Galaxy, losers! Made first start with my homepage today. After trying Instiki some time ago, I found it was the way to go!