Holland

Was excellent. I had a great time. The party for my aunt and uncle was very successful. It was held at the castle in Doorn where Wilhelm II of Germany lived after being exiled. There were tours of the castle, and a lovely meal.

Wilhelm II's last home in Doorn

Guests enjoy a nice meal

As you can see, we had some lovely uncharacteristic (for Holland) weather for the party, which was great. The previous day it poured buckets.

My sister and I visited Amsterdam the next day, and saw the Uit Markt, which was pretty fun. We saw a strange "low rider" bike show. I had no idea that people were at all interested in low rider bicycles; I thought the design was only really popular for choppers. They certainly look uncomfortable for any serious kind of cycling, but it was interesting nonetheless.

A low rider cycle at the Uit Markt

Later in the week, we went to Bergen and Bergen aan Zee. Despite the name, there are no "real" mountains at Bergen (unlike the one in Norway). We went for a nice cycle through the dunes to the beach, which was fun.

Hills in Holland? That's unpossible! Actually, they're dunes

My sister and I enjoy some pannenkoeken in Bergen

The beach was nice, the water was a bit cold but there were some people swimming. It wasn't too busy either, since quite a few schools are already back in session.

A stroll along the beach at Bergen aan Zee

On the way back, I ended up going through Toronto instead of Montreal due to some flight screwups. Since it was Lufthansa/Air Canada, I got to see what they're calling the "new" Terminal 1. It's fancy, but it looks like there's a lot of wasted space, and a beer sets you back $9.23 CDN. I didn't really care that much, since I was tired and I just wanted a beer, but geaawd, that's almost as bad as Norway. At least it's better than the old Terminal 1. That place sucked.

The "new" Terminal 1. Fanciness

Calgary

So now I'm in Calgary, which is rather different from Holland. Oddly, there were a bunch of Dutch people on the plane from Toronto to Calgary, and I spent almost the entire flight speaking Dutch with a nice woman from Amsterdam. When we landed, I got off the plane and one of Calgary's airport hospitality people said "howdy" to me. That was a bit of a shock.

It's been fun so far though; last night I got royally shitfaced with a bunch of friends at Bottlescrew Bill's, a nice pub with a great selection of beers, including a number of Unibroue beers. Then I slept until 3 today. Now that's what I call a vacation.

Work

I'm still revising my work report. Ugh. But it's the last one! And I hope this one will actually be useful to some people at Niti, so it doesn't feel quite like the sham it usually is.

I tried to install ExchangeItEvolution on my laptop today, but the stupid dependencies for evolution-dev are broken in DebianUnstable right now. At least for PowerPC. Geaaawd, I hate Debian sometimes. apt is great when it works. Unfortunately, I find that it rarely actually works well enough to make it as useful as everybody says it is.

Laptop

While we're on the subject of my laptop, I'll do a little ranting. This last trip was the first time I've taken my laptop on a trip since installing Linux. I discovered that I get way less time on battery than I used to with OS X. I could easily get 2.5 to 3 hours of active use in OS X, now I'm lucky to get 1.5 hours. And the GNOME battery applet has an annoying habit of showing around 35% power left, and then dropping suddenly to 0% (at which point it suspends the laptop). I don't know whether the battery really is almost fully discharged, or whether the GNOME battery applet is just lying, but I suspect the latter.

It's not like I'm not trying, either: I have cpufreqd installed, and pmud, and the whole deal, but it doesn't seem to help much. I guess I'll try some new profiles for cpufreqd, maybe to force it down to 500MHz (from 700MHz) when it's on battery or something, because I don't care too much about the speed, and the auto-adjust profile I have right now seems to run it at full speed almost all the time.

However, I do like having Linux + GNOME on my laptop. I like it more than OS X, which is saying something for the Linux desktop, because people often tout OS X as some kind of "gold standard" in interface design.

September 09, 2004 (link)

Vulcan

On Monday, my friends and I went to Vulcan, Alberta. It's a tiny little town, probably not more than 2000 people. They had the name long before Star Trek started up, but about 10 years ago they decided to milk it to get all the trekkies they could to go there and spend money on worthless Star Trek crap. It works.

My friends Thap, Spif and Mel give the Enterprise a once over

While in Vulcan, I also met some nice young ladies.

My new girlfriends

Plus, we saw the first Vulcan-Klingon couple!

Spif and Mel: pioneers in love!

Work

Well, I don't know if I can really call it "work" since I'm not working at Niti right now. But whatever. After building a few Debian dev packages by hand, I was able to get evolution-dev installed on my laptop, and then build ExchangeItEvolution. It does work ok on PowerPC, but there are 34 failures for the WvMAPI unit tests on PPC, so it's kind of surprising that calendar entries and contacts show up at all :) In any case, I'm cooking up a patch to fix it.

All this simply because I'm bored...

Life

School starts on Monday. Ugh. I'm heading to Winnipeg briefly before then, to see my mum who's working there for the next 8 months. I've never been, so it should be interesting. I'm flying on Sept. 10th (tomorrow) and Sept. 12th, narrowly avoiding any flights on Sept. 11th. It didn't even occur to me when I booked the flights, and I'm not really one for superstition, but it's kind of quirky.

September 15, 2004 (link)

Wireless

I love wireless. The people downstairs, or the neighbours, or somebody around here, has an open AP. I was thinking of shelling out $80 or whatever at Future Shop for an AP myself, but pretty much everywhere I live there seems to be an open one, so screw it.

Thank you, random people who leave your APs open! Since I appreciate them so much when I come across them, I might actually purposely leave mine open if I were to get one. I'd definitely change the password from the default 'admin', but unless somebody was eating up tons of my bandwith or otherwise bothering me, why not? Maybe I'm just too innocent :)

School

Started yesterday. My classes mostly seem ok, except for my French class, which looks like it might be way too easy since most people don't understand a word of French, even though it's a course for people who have high school French (which is what I have, plus some time in Holland where I did school partly in French). Speaks volumes for our French program in Canada. I don't think I've ever met a single person who only took high school French (not immersion) and can actually speak it to any extent. I guess it's tough in anglophone Canada, since there's no daily need, but I think the classes could also be a lot better. Just watch Europeans teach languages; they know how it's done.

Real time (aka "trains") looks fun though. They had an unannounced tutorial today to explain how to actually boot your code, etc. It would have been nice if they'd posted it on the newsgroup yesterday, but at least the course staff seem pretty competent, and they go fast enough that it's not boring (AFAICT).

September 17, 2004 (link)

Microsoft

So, I went to a Microsoft recruitement meeting today. Don't worry, I was only there for the free food. I believe the contract I signed with Niti might even prevent me from working there, considering a lot of Microsoft's products compete directly with Niti's.

Anyway, the food was good; there was tons of pizza, more than enough. And they let you get food before they started talking, which I thought was better than the last Niti info night I attended, where there was a presentation and then a mad rush for the food, which was insufficient in quantity. No beer though, since it was in the CECS ("sex") building, so we do have them beat there :) Normally I don't really care or think about these things, but I figured some people were probably planning a Niti info night right now, so I might as well bring it up.

After the food came the presentation. The first bit wasn't all that exciting; they described the available positions, which were basically Niti's equivalent of Human Cannonball, Evil Death Ray, and then a "Program Manager" position. The funny thing was that the two Program Managers present couldn't even really describe the position, but it sounded like they went to lots of meetings.

It started to get scary, though, when they started to pimp all the benefits. It was at that point that I realised that they were promoting a lifestyle as much as they were promoting the jobs. Sure, there's a certain "lifestyle" to Niti, but not like this. I realised all the Microsoft people there looked the same; GAP clothes, highlighted hair, and hard-wired smiles. They talked about the company gym, company store (where yes, you can buy computer goods, but also clothing) and company discount card. All these things encourage employees to live in the same way. It just seemed eery, somehow.

HTML

I hate it. As you may or may not know, the new JobMine system at Waterloo requires students to do their résumés in HTML. I think this is is idiotic, because if there's one document people want to look good, it's their résumé, and with HTML, you don't know what browser will be used to view it, so you don't know how it'll look. You can spend lots of time and energy making sure it works in a bunch of different browsers (which I have now done) but that's seems like a waste, especially when you already had a perfectly good LaTeX résumé, from which a perfectly good PDF could be generated.

Say what you want about PDF viewers, but at least they're not the total disaster that web browsers are, and at least the one that's pretty much guaranteed to render PDFs properly (acroread) is available on most platforms, even if it is hella-ugly. Anyway, I gained a new appreciation for web developers today; the number of crazy stupid things I had to do to my W3C valid HTML to make my résumé look good in IE and Mozilla was outrageous. I had to put a <font> tag inside every <li> to make the first item in a list inside a table line up with the other cells in the row. Why <font> tags affect alignment in Mozilla I have no idea. It's not like this is complex stuff, either. Just some tables and some lists, that's all I'm asking! And I haven't even tried it in Safari or Konqueror yet, so I bet there's more fun to come!

September 23, 2004 (link)

"Trains"

Also known as real-time. It's been fun so far. Mag and I have been cracking it up a bit, and our first assignment is pretty much done, 2 days ahead of schedule! Of course, it's not very impressive. It just boots and talks to a 1980s-style orange-text WYSE serial console. You can then enter commands to start a train moving, change the direction of a switch, make a train honk its horn, etc. But it does run on "bare metal," sans OS, which is kinda cool.

The next assignment will be to write a real kernel. Should be interesting.

JobMine

If you don't like rants, you might want to skip this part.

I've now actually used the new JobMine system for what it's designed for, namely finding jobs. Boy does it suck. You can search through all the currently-posted jobs. Great. But for some idiotic reason, the links to the job descriptions are some JavaScript doohickeys that can't be opened in new windows or tabs. And back doesn't work, because the whole thing uses POST (not necessarily bad) and answering yes to the "Do you want to re-POST the data?" question doesn't work, again for some unknown reason.

So, this means that you can't go through the list of jobs in the search results and look at the interesting ones, because as soon as you click on one, you have to go back to the search page and start again. And you can't open jobs in new windows or tabs. I suspect that it's for these reasons that there's this thing called the "short list." What you can do while looking at search results is add jobs to the short list, without disrupting the search. (Although it does take a while and pop up a stupid JavaScript window telling you that the job was successfully added to the list -- just tell me if it fails, that's all I care about!) But, this means that you have to decide whether you're interested in a job based on the job title (eg. "Software Developer") and the company name, because that's all you can see on the search page. So this means that when you're finally done searching, you have a huge "short" list.

Going through the short list has the same problems as going through the search results (i.e. no tabs, back is broken) but at least at the bottom of every job description there's a link to go back to the short list. Now, when you decide that you're not really interested in a job on the short list, you can remove it. But, not only does it pop up a JavaScript window asking if you really want to remove it (which is fair enough, I suppose), it doesn't actually do it until you leave the short list, at which point it asks you again. WTF? I already said yes, dammit!

Grrr. I can't believe I partially funded this piece of crap. It takes so long to do anything with the stupid thing.

Ok. I'm done now. Deap breaths. Calm ocean. Gentle breeze. I'll be ok.

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