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1 year of Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant As announced last year, starting January 2015 I've benefited from a "Flash Grant" kindly awarded to me by the Shuttleworth Foundation. This post reports publicly about how I've used the money to promote Free Software via my own activism, over the period January-December 2015. I'm lucky to have a full-time academic job that provides me with a salary and basic computer hardware. But Free Software not being the only focus of my job, it gets difficult at times to get travel funding to specific Free Software events. So that is what I've mostly used the grant money for: attend Free Software events that I wouldn't have been able to attend otherwise. On grant money I've attended LibrePlanet 2015 (2015-03-19-boston-libreplanet label in the financial reports below), where I've given the talk Distributions and the Free "Cloud", and FSFE's LLW 2015 (2015-04-15-barcelona-fsfe-legal) workshop. Furthermore I've used the grant to reimburse otherwise not reimbursed out of pocket expenses in a trip to San Francisco (2015-11-06-san-francisco-gsoc+osi) that have been otherwise sponsored by Google (to attend the Summer of Code Mentor Summit) and OSI (to attend a F2F meeting of the Board of Directors). Finally, I've used grant money to offer lunch to invited lecturers in my master-level Free Software class at the university (label 2015-foss-class). Actual financial reports are reported below, in ledger format. It should be noted that, contrary to the usual expected 6-month duration of flash grants, I've used only about half the grant amount over a 12-month period; I do not plan to pocket what remains, but rather keep on using it over the next year, reporting again publicly at the end of the period. Also, I did not breakdown further out of pocket expenses, but they invariably stand for public transport tickets and meals. Balance sheet Overall:

         1966,11 EUR  Assets:Funds
        -4052,52 EUR  Equity:Opening balances
         2086,41 EUR  Expenses
           15,90 EUR    Bank:Commissions
          424,00 EUR    Conference:Registration
           56,50 EUR    Teaching:Speaker-invitation
         1590,01 EUR    Travel
          249,02 EUR      Lodgement
          562,51 EUR      Out-of-pocket
          778,48 EUR      Plane
--------------------
                   0

Breakdown by purpose:

• 2015-03-19-boston-libreplanet

          -1265,22 EUR  Assets:Funds
           1265,22 EUR  Expenses
            424,00 EUR    Conference:Registration
            841,22 EUR    Travel
            213,38 EUR      Out-of-pocket
            627,84 EUR      Plane
  --------------------
                     0
  
  

• 2015-04-15-barcelona-fsfe-legal

           -479,66 EUR  Assets:Funds
            479,66 EUR  Expenses:Travel
            249,02 EUR    Lodgement
             80,00 EUR    Out-of-pocket
            150,64 EUR    Plane
  --------------------
                     0
  
  

• 2015-11-06-san-francisco-gsoc+osi

           -269,13 EUR  Assets:Funds
            269,13 EUR  Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket
  --------------------
                     0
  
  

• 2015-foss-class

            -56,50 EUR  Assets:Funds
             56,50 EUR  Expenses:Teaching:Speaker-invitation
  --------------------
                     0
  
  

Journal

2014-12-03 Shuttleworth Foundation flash grant                                    Equity:Opening balances                     -4052,52 EUR    -4052,52 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 4052,52 EUR               0
2014-12-04 bank commissions on incoming transfer                                  Expenses:Bank:Commissions                      15,90 EUR       15,90 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                  -15,90 EUR               0
2014-12-24 plane tickets Paris-Boston round trip to attend LibrePlanet 2015       Expenses:Travel:Plane                         627,84 EUR      627,84 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -627,84 EUR               0
2015-01-02 LibrePlanet 2015 registration + travel fund contribution               Expenses:Conference:Registration              424,00 EUR      424,00 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -424,00 EUR               0
2015-03-02 plane tickets Paris-Barcelona round trip to attend LLW 2015            Expenses:Travel:Plane                         150,64 EUR      150,64 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -150,64 EUR               0
2015-03-19 lunch with invited speaker for lecture about FOSS release management   Expenses:Teaching:Speaker-invitation           28,00 EUR       28,00 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                  -28,00 EUR               0
2015-03-25 lunch with invited speaker for lecture about FOSS business models      Expenses:Teaching:Speaker-invitation           28,50 EUR       28,50 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                  -28,50 EUR               0
2015-04-03 LibrePlanet 2015 out of pocket expenses                                Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket                 213,38 EUR      213,38 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -213,38 EUR               0
2015-04-15 LLW 2015 out of pocket expenses                                        Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket                  80,00 EUR       80,00 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                  -80,00 EUR               0
2015-05-06 hotel in Barcelona for LLW 2015 (3 nights)                             Expenses:Travel:Lodgement                     249,02 EUR      249,02 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -249,02 EUR               0
2015-11-29 OSI F2F Fall 2015 out of pocket expenses                               Expenses:Travel:Out-of-pocket                 269,13 EUR      269,13 EUR
                                                                                  Assets:Funds                                 -269,13 EUR               0

The force re-awakens. Jolla has received financing to continue the development of Sailfish OS. For futher reading, see...
https://blog.jolla.com/jolla-back-business/ People, please consider switching over to the Jolla phone and (hopefully) to the upcoming Jolla tablet. Stop using gated community [1] products [2,3]. The efforts done by Jolla on non-gated mobiled hardware is essential and should be supported by buying those products (i.e., help generating revenue). Providing Jolla with financial support can be one means of helping open-sourcing the Sailfish OS UIX developed by Jolla. I wish everyone reading this a good transition into 2016 and a fine 'Twelfth Night' (German: Rauhn chte) period. light+love from 32c3 [4]
Mike [1] https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7550-opening_event#video
[2] http://www.apple.com/iphone/
[3] http://www.android.com/
[4] https://streaming.media.ccc.de/32c3/

Typical:

1. find new interesting software (feed2tweet)
2. try it out, file two issues:
   • no startup file
   • fails to install through pip
3. itch enough that i need to scratch it and file 3 pull requests to ask for forgiveness:
   • respect filesystem standard locations
   • show an easy way to disable the hashtag list
   • add -n flag to test the software

All fairly trivial, but it allowed me to make a simple cronjob to post my Ikiwiki blog posts straight out to my Twitter account. It's basically abusing my RSS feed to bridge with Twitter: the most boring and annoying part is setting up a new app, pasting the credentials in the config file and then running the thing in a cron job. But in the end, I really ended up spending one more hour at a time when I should be really sleeping, scratching an itch that I didn't have before I started working on this thing in the first place. Coincidentally, I requested to be added to Python Planet, looks like a fun place...

Yesterday we have released CafeOBJ 1.5.5 with a long list of changes, and many more internal changes. Documentation pages have been updated with the latest reference manual (PDF, Html) as well as some new docs on CITP (in Japanese for now) and tutorials. To quote from our README:

CafeOBJ is a new generation algebraic specification and programming language. As a direct successor of OBJ, it inherits all its features (flexible mix-fix syntax, powerful typing system with sub-types, and sophisticated module composition system featuring various kinds of imports, parameterised modules, views for instantiating the parameters, module expressions, etc.) but it also implements new paradigms such as rewriting logic and hidden algebra, as well as their combination.

Changes

• Enhancemets of a family of Bool term inspector commands:
  • binspect [ in : <Modexpr> ] <bool-term> . converts given <bool-term> into abstracted xor-and normal form
  • bshow [ tree grind ] shows abstracted Bool term
  • bresolve [ <num1> [ <num2> all ] ] shows assignments which make abstracted Bool term true
  • bguess imply and or tries with some heuristics to solve the abstracted Bool term
• bug fix in ACZ rewriting
• CITP changes
  • :ctf [ <term> ] accepts constructors with arguments
  • new command :imply to make instantiated lhs of existing equation of the form eq lhs = true a premise of a goal sentence
  • new tactic rd- which is similar to rd but cancels the normalization of the goal sentence if the sentence is not satisfied
• new switch tree horizontal. if on show term tree displays the term tree structure horizontally (default off).

Availability Binary packages for Windows, MacOS, and Linux have been built, and can be found at the CafeOBJ download page. The source code can also be found on the download page, or directly from here: cafeobj-1.5.5.tar.gz. The CafeOBJ Debian package will be updated soon. Macports file has also been updated, please see the above download/install page for details how to add our sources to your macport. Bug reports If you find a bug, have suggestions, or complains, please open an issue at the issue tracker for CafeOBJ. For other inquiries, please use info@cafeobj.org

A new release of BH is now on CRAN. BH provides a large part of the Boost C++ libraries as a set of template headers for use by R, possibly with Rcpp as well as other packages. This release both upgrades the version of Boost to the recently-released upstream version Boost 1.60.0 and also adds Boost Phoenix. A brief summary of changes from the NEWS file is below.

Changes in version 1.60.0-1 (2015-12-24)

• Upgraded to Boost 1.60 installed directly from upstream source
• Added Boost phoenix as discussed in GH ticket #19

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. Comments and suggestions are welcome via the mailing list or the issue tracker at the GitHubGitHub repo.

Edited on 2015-12-30: Typo in titled corrected, it is BH 1.60.0-1

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

An USB3 device of mine stopped working one day. In Windows (its native environment; Linux is not officially supported), there would be a device plugged in sound and then nothing. Nothing in the event log, no indication there was ever a device of any kind in Device Manager. In Linux, after 20 seconds or so, this would come up:

[   71.831659] usb usb2-port1: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?

I bought a new and shorter cable. The card started working again.

What s more important today for a website than relaying your new blog posts to the social networks, especially Twitter ? Lots of unmaintained or unreliable third-parties web services offer this feature. I tried and was really disappointed using them. Feed2tweet, forked from rss2twitter, now offer a self-hosted, documented, easy-to-read Python application to automatically transfer the new posts in your RSS feed to the social network Twitter. Have a look at the official documentation on Readthedocs in order to install, configure and use Feed2tweet. It is as easy as creating a Twitter app, then writing a feed2tweet.ini file with the following lines:

[twitter]
consumer_key=ml9jaiBnf3pmU9uIrKNIxAr3v
consumer_secret=8Cmljklzerkhfer4hlj3ljl2hfvc123rezrfsdctpokaelzerp
access_token=213416590-jgJnrJG5gz132nzerl5zerwi0ahmnwkfJFN9nr3j
access_token_secret=3janlPMqDKlunJ4Hnr90k2bnfk3jfnwkFjeriFZERj32Z
Une erreur est survenue ; le flux est probablement indisponible. Veuillez r essayer plus tard.
uri: https://www.mycoolwebsite.com/rss
[hashtaglist]
several_words_hashtags_list: severalwordshashtaglist.txt

Then just launch feed2tweet:

$ feed2tweet -c /path/to/feed2tweet.ini

The first version 0.1 is now available from Github. If it helps you, Github stars are appreciated :)

After a long contemplation about what I want to do with my life and just as long a negotiation, I have accepted a job offer at BMW and will be moving from Latvia to Ulm, Germany in January 2016. It is going to be a big change and a big shake-up in my life, but the change should be for the better, eventually. I am going to move there using my car, loading a single car load of essential stuff and leaving the rest behind. My cat will be amond the essentials, so I have already started training him for car rides. The cat is not thrilled about it. I'll be renting out my current apartment - I wish to find someone that I know to rent to, but if noone comes up, then I'll have to give it to a renting company to rent out for me. There should be little change for my online activities, but this means that I will be less available for parties in Riga for the forseable future. Wish me luck!

In a world far away, in the dark Land of Digitos only populated by machines and computers, the evil Mister Woo was ruling over all. Over time, this terrible dictator was becoming a horrendous fire-eyed giant, walking the whole day by vibrating the heavy steps into his Kingdom, leaving behind him a trail of smoke and terror. Mr. Woo always wore a long, shabby and dirty top hat that had once been white, so old and ragged that he could not even keep it up straight on his head. Throughout the Land of Digitos, the inhabitants computers were scattered, each <Read more >

I spent much of my Debian time in the last few weeks triaging and fixing bugs in initramfs-tools. All of the important bugs should be fixed, except for two where I needed more information from the submitter. Due to the scope of these changes and potential for regressions, I've made a release candidate, version 0.121~rc2, rather than a full release. This is now available in experimental, and I would appreciate real-world testing feedback in the next few weeks. (If you're wondering what happened to rc1, that had 'unstable' as the distribution, which I didn't notice until after pushing the tag.) From the release announcement, the major changes are:

• Split initramfs-tools binary package into core and automation hooks, to allow for coinstallation of the core with other initramfs builders
• Fail at build-time if busybox is wanted but not found
• Rewrite build-time block device sysfs lookup to be generic
• Include modules for all components of a multi-disk device
• Use blkid to resolve LABEL=, UUID=, PARTLABEL= and PARTUUID= block device IDs at boot time, and do this much later
• Change file copying to distinguish executables from other file types and to preserve symlinks
• Run panic scripts just before dropping to a shell

Thanks to Andy Whitcroft, Boris Egorov, Laurent Bigonville, Roger Leigh, Roger Shimizu and Salvatore Bonaccorso for their patches which I applied in this version.

the upload of perl 5.22 to unstable some days ago provided ample opportunity to fix some new RC bugs. here's the list of my work:

• #768687 src:libdata-hal-perl: "libdata-hal-perl: FTBFS: test suite broken by newer liburi-namespacemap-perl versions"
  add patch from new upstream's git repo (pkg-perl)
• #787912 src:libdata-dump-streamer-perl: "libdata-dump-streamer-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #789142 src:libdata-hal-perl: "libdata-hal-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22 (Module::Build)"
  upload with explicit build dependency on Module::Build (pkg-perl)
• #791520 libmojomojo-perl: "libmojomojo-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
  close bug in the BTS, already fixed since months (pkg-perl)
• #801659 libxml-compile-dumper-perl: "libxml-compile-dumper-perl: depends on libdata-dump-streamer-perl, broken by perl 5.22"
  close as the dependency is fixed (pkg-perl)
• #808284 libalien-wxwidgets-perl: "libalien-wxwidgets-perl: Broken dependencies in binary package after BinNMU"
  fix wxwidgets version detection logic (pkg-perl)
• #808310 libchemistry-formula-perl: "libchemistry-formula-perl: bogus dependency on perlapi-5.20.2"
  fix perl library paths in debian/rules, NMU
• #808327 wmanager: "wmanager: Depends on virtual package "perl5" which will is gone with perl/5.22"
  sponsor maintainer upload
• #808395 src:libprelude: "libprelude: FTBFS everywhere"
  add patch to handle swig changes, NMU
• #808412 src:ippl: "ippl: Depends on virtual package "perl5-base" which is gone with perl/5.22"
  drop perl5-base dependency, NMU with maintainer's permission
• #808454 src:libdata-faker-perl: "libdata-faker-perl: FTBFS under some locales (eg. fr_CH.UTF-8)"
  set C locale for tests (pkg-perl)
• #808473 liblemonldap-ng-manager-perl: "liblemonldap-ng-manager-perl: manager unaccessible without doc symlink in /var/lib/lemonldap-ng"
  upload package prepared by Xavier Guimard (pkg-perl)
• #808474 liblemonldap-ng-manager-perl: "liblemonldap-ng-manager-perl: Manager shows garbage where the menu is supposed to be"
  upload package prepared by Xavier Guimard (pkg-perl)
• #808480 libdevel-bt-perl: "libdevel-bt-perl: FTBFS on mips*: test failures"
  add (build)dep on perl-debug (pkg-perl)
• #808489 src:acm: "acm: FTBFS: Type of arg 1 to dbmclose must be hash (not constant item) at ./create-tables-5 (perl 5.22?)"
  send patch to BTS
• #808507 uwsgi-plugin-mono: "uwsgi-plugin-mono: Please refresh architectures list for current Mono in Unstable"
  sponsor upload for jonas
• #808825 libperl-apireference-perl: "libperl-apireference-perl: FTBFS: missing support for Perl 5.22.1"
  add support for 5.22.1 (pkg-perl)
• #809006 libnet-cups-perl: "libnet-cups-perl: empty package"
  add patch to fix broken version check in Makefile.PL (pkg-perl)

the upload of perl 5.22 to unstable some days ago provided ample opportunity to fix some new RC bugs. here's the list of my work:

• #768687 src:libdata-hal-perl: "libdata-hal-perl: FTBFS: test suite broken by newer liburi-namespacemap-perl versions"
  add patch from new upstream's git repo (pkg-perl)
• #787912 src:libdata-dump-streamer-perl: "libdata-dump-streamer-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #789142 src:libdata-hal-perl: "libdata-hal-perl: FTBFS with perl 5.22 (Module::Build)"
  upload with explicit build dependency on Module::Build (pkg-perl)
• #791520 libmojomojo-perl: "libmojomojo-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
  close bug in the BTS, already fixed since months (pkg-perl)
• #801659 libxml-compile-dumper-perl: "libxml-compile-dumper-perl: depends on libdata-dump-streamer-perl, broken by perl 5.22"
  close as the dependency is fixed (pkg-perl)
• #808284 libalien-wxwidgets-perl: "libalien-wxwidgets-perl: Broken dependencies in binary package after BinNMU"
  fix wxwidgets version detection logic (pkg-perl)
• #808310 libchemistry-formula-perl: "libchemistry-formula-perl: bogus dependency on perlapi-5.20.2"
  fix perl library paths in debian/rules, NMU
• #808327 wmanager: "wmanager: Depends on virtual package "perl5" which will is gone with perl/5.22"
  sponsor maintainer upload
• #808395 src:libprelude: "libprelude: FTBFS everywhere"
  add patch to handle swig changes, NMU
• #808412 src:ippl: "ippl: Depends on virtual package "perl5-base" which is gone with perl/5.22"
  drop perl5-base dependency, NMU with maintainer's permission
• #808454 src:libdata-faker-perl: "libdata-faker-perl: FTBFS under some locales (eg. fr_CH.UTF-8)"
  set C locale for tests (pkg-perl)
• #808473 liblemonldap-ng-manager-perl: "liblemonldap-ng-manager-perl: manager unaccessible without doc symlink in /var/lib/lemonldap-ng"
  upload package prepared by Xavier Guimard (pkg-perl)
• #808474 liblemonldap-ng-manager-perl: "liblemonldap-ng-manager-perl: Manager shows garbage where the menu is supposed to be"
  upload package prepared by Xavier Guimard (pkg-perl)
• #808480 libdevel-bt-perl: "libdevel-bt-perl: FTBFS on mips*: test failures"
  add (build)dep on perl-debug (pkg-perl)
• #808489 src:acm: "acm: FTBFS: Type of arg 1 to dbmclose must be hash (not constant item) at ./create-tables-5 (perl 5.22?)"
  send patch to BTS
• #808507 uwsgi-plugin-mono: "uwsgi-plugin-mono: Please refresh architectures list for current Mono in Unstable"
  sponsor upload for jonas
• #808825 libperl-apireference-perl: "libperl-apireference-perl: FTBFS: missing support for Perl 5.22.1"
  add support for 5.22.1 (pkg-perl)
• #809006 libnet-cups-perl: "libnet-cups-perl: empty package"
  add patch to fix broken version check in Makefile.PL (pkg-perl)

I've ordered my tickets and my hotel room, so it's clear; I'm going to FOSDEM 2016! I'll be having a talk in the Open Media devroom (H.2214), Saturday 17:00, about my new project, Nageru. (Actually, it's sort of a launch as well, since the source code isn't out yet.) So, what is Nageru, might you ask? Well it has to do with video. And it's made for 2016, not 1996, so it uses your GPU via Movit, also released at FOSDEM two years ago. For the rest, come see my talk :-)

I have to agree with John Burnside on that statement, after having recently moved house again rediscovering our book collection has been a salve for an otherwise exhausting undertaking. I returned to Cambridge four years ago, initially on my own and then subsequently the family moved down to be with me.

We rented a house but, with two growing teenagers, the accommodation was becoming a little crowded. Melodie and I decided the relocation was permanent and started looking for our own property, eventually finding something to our liking in Cottenham village.

Melodie took the opportunity to have the house cleaned and decorated while empty because of overlapping time with our rental property. This meant we had to be a little careful while moving in as there was still wet paint in places.

Moving weekend was made bearable by Steve, Jonathan and Jo lending a hand especially on the trips to Yorkshire to retrieve, amongst other things, the aforementioned book collection. We were also fortunate to have Andy and Jane doing many other important jobs around the place while the rest of us were messing about in vans.

The seemingly obligatory trip to IKEA to acquire furniture was made much more fun by trying to park a luton van which was only possible because Steve and Jonathan helped me. Though it turns out IKEA ship mattresses rolled up so tight they can be moved in an estate car so taking the van was unnecessary.

Having moved in it seems like every weekend is filled with a never ending "todo" list of jobs. From clearing gutters to building a desk in the study. Eight weeks on and the list seems to be slowly shrinking meaning I can even do some lower priority things like the server rack which was actually a fun project.


The holidays this year afforded me some time to finish the boys bedrooms. They both got loft beds with a substantial area underneath. This allows them both to have double beds along with a desk and plenty of storage. Completing the rooms required the construction of some flat pack furniture which rather than simply do myself I supervised the boys doing it themselves.

Teaching them by letting them get on with it was a surprisingly effective and both of them got the hang of the construction method pretty quickly. There was only a couple of errors from which they learned immediately and did not repeat (draw bottoms having a finished side and front becomes back when you are constructing upside down)

The house is starting to feel like home and soon all the problems will fade from memory while the good will remain. Certainly our first holiday season has been comfortable here and I look forward to many more re-reading our books.

It was a shock to be back in Finland after five years. The country had gone bad. I was born in Finland, and lived here all my life, until January, 2010. I then moved abroad for five years, with my then-girlfriend, now wife. We lived in New Zealand, Scotland, and England. In October 2014 we came back, because my next job happened to be in Finland. When we came back, I found that the country had changed, or I had lost my rose-coloured glasses. The Finland I left was a place where equality and solidarity were assumed, though not universal. The country I came back to turned out to be racist, scared, and quickly abandoning everything that used to be examples of why the country is a good place to live. Some of the change has, possibly, only happened during 2015 and the refugee crisis in Europe, but the change started earlier. Examples:

• Racist behaviour and violence is commonplace. Those who do not look like the natives are insulted, threatened with physical violence, and sometimes experience it.
• Political violence is becoming commonplace. Refugee centers are burnt down, sometimes with people inside. Government ministers are attacked, albeit by throwing a drink on them.
• Politicians get away with saying and doing clearly racist things, up to and including celebrating neo-nazism.
• The government spends a lot of effort trying to break any power the labour unions have, so that the employers get to do what they want. The whole stabilising system of negotating between government, employer, and labour organisations is being torn down, and labour is being stripped of any power.
• Prominent cabinet ministers talk condescendingly about science, universities, and cut down educational funding. Universities should concentrate on being R&D factories for business, forget about advancing civilisation, or the humanities, or the arts. Unless it's the type of arts that becomes best-selling games.

Now, it is clear that Finland was never the kind of idyllic utopia that I thought it was, back when I was young. The older I get, the clearer it is that I was naive. The change over five years is still quite remarkable. I can't ever go back home. Now, I am sometimes ashamed of being Finnish.

I don't often do retrospectives, but this year has been an unusual one for me, as I moved to Finland almost six months ago. The topic has come up in conversation a lot over the past few months, so when people ask me what I think I can give some simple answers without too much thought. Here's a brief summary. There are some obvious changes:

The Traffic

The traffic drives on the right-hand side of the roads, which took a bit of getting used to, but isn't a huge surprise as I've travelled in Europe in the past. There aren't so many countries that drive on the left after all so most people probably wouldn't even notice this as odd. When it comes to traffic one thing nice about Helsinki is that most junctions are "zebra crossings". Sure they don't have flashing lights, but they have shaded areas, and pedestrians have right of way. As for transport the city of Helsinki has local trains, trams, buses and taxis. The trams and buses all use the same card for payment so transport is integrated very well. I buy a time-based card, spending about 50 for a month of unlimited travel. If you prefer you may add euros to your card and pay for distinct journeys - but that works out more expensive if you travel twice, or more, a day.

The Money

Finland uses the Euro these days, having switched from the Finnish markka in 2002. Enough said. Costs are largely in line with what I'd expect: Cigarettes are cheap, beer is expensive. Some things are very expensive, some things are very cheap. Largely the expensive things are those that are imported. It is a very small country after all.

The Language

Finnish is .. complex. But I've not struggled too much. Mostly I can buy what I want without difficulty. There are weird exceptions though for example I went out to buy soup one day and had to return carrying only shame and disappointment: I can't read the language on the tins and what I thought was soup turned out to be a can of chopped tomatoes. Food is good though, and available easily (!!). The only significant surprise when it comes to shopping is that loose goods must be weighed yourself. You pick up a bunch of bananas, take it to the scales, press the button that has a picture of a banana on it, and it prints out a label you attach to them - at the till the cashier will scan the label and charge you. If you forget, or don't know how to do it they'll tut and complain. In daily life I use two phrases frequently and they are sufficient for communcation:

• "minua haluan ... kahvi kakku olut"
  • "I want ... coffee cake beer".
• "kiitos"
  • "Thanks"

Usually people speak to me in English, which is a little annoying as it means I'm not learning as much as I could. But that said over the past few months I've had proper conversations entirely in Finnish with shop-keepers, and similar. So I'm getting better.

The Culture

Finnish people are friendly, but terse. That's the reputation. The Finnish people are alcoholics, and have high rates of suicide. Also the reputation. Finally we know that the Finnish people consume more coffee than the rest of the world. All those things are true, but they're not enough by far to describe the people. Obviously they're all different, and we have a lot of people from other parts of the world here too - Russians, Asians, Somalians. So culture is complex .. but markedly different than in the UK. I could write more about this, but I think for the moment I'll just draw a line under culture and say that I'm enjoying the interactions with people here, and while many things are slightly "off", it's not bad. Just different. Also saunas are fun. I've never had any qualms about being naked with strangers, so I don't really understand why Americans, and others, find this so difficult/surprising. But yeah, saunas are great. Things that Finland is known for internationally: The invention of the molotov cocktail, rally-driving, hockey, world's strongest man, Moomins, Tom of Finland, Salmiakki.

The Weather

Not too hot. Not too cold. But that's largely because I'm one of those "hot" people who doesn't really get cold even at the best of times. My ideal temperatures are about 13 C. My wife prefers 15 C, or more. We don't fight any more. Mostly. Winter is apparently full of snow, but this year has been poor. We had the first snowfall yesterday, here in Helsinki, and we woke this morning a blanket of snow about two inches high. It looks pretty. The biggest thing about weather in Finland is the constant darkness in winter, and the constant sun in Summer. In Summer there were like 22 hours of sunlight a day which made sleeping hard when we moved into our flat - with no curtains. In winter it feels like there is 20 minutes of sunlight a day. It's not that bad here in the south, although I think it is something like five hours and less in the north. I've never had any real issues with depression, or similar: People have good days and bad days, I'd generally be "OK" or "great". In the darkness? I've been grumpy at colleagues, I've made bad choices, I've lapsed attention. I'm not sure I can blame it on the weather, or my reaction to the weather, but I know I've not been as "happy" as I "should". It requires effort to be enthusiastic in a way I've never experienced before. Thankfully once I (slowly) realized this I took action and I think I'm good now. Unlike the UK the buildings here are relatively modern. I think that's the biggest contributing factor to how houses are "warm". Houses have all been built in the last 50-100 years, so you have proper insulation. Even though it might be very very cold outdoors indoors you can be naked without heating. Try that in the UK and you might freeze in some of the older leakier houses! You do have to laugh, though, when people point out "the oldest pub" in the city though. Where I come from if I pub isn't 500+ years old you wouldn't give it a seconds thought - places like The Golden Fleece, etc.

I could write more. I probably should. But it has been an interesting year, and although there are things I miss about the UK, and Edinburgh specifically, I have no regrets. I'm glad I came. What triggered this post? I said "Some things are universal" to my wife, when I saw a child riding a bicycle they'd obviously just received for Christmas. Her reaction "No Finnish person would buy a bicycle at Christmas - they'd expect too much snow!". So perhaps it was another immigrant family. Christmas bicycles universal, or not, it doesn't really matter.

Review: The Outskirter's Secret, by Rosemary Kirstein

Series:	Steerswomen #2
Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	1992, 2001
Printing:	2001
ISBN:	0-345-46105-3
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	389

This is a direct sequel to The Steerswoman, and I don't recommend starting here. I read this novel as part of The Steerswoman's Road omnibus, which is the edition reflected in the metadata (except for the page count, which is just this novel). There are a few plot constructs that occur depressingly often in SFF and almost always annoy me. One is books where nearly all of the book is just a journey from one place to another, without much interesting landscape along the way. Subtract additional points if the land is hostile and there are constant worries about food. Another is illness, or being unable to trust one's senses, or, worse, both. Somehow, this book manages to do both of those things and was still thoroughly enjoyable. This is exceptionally rare. After the conclusions reached in the previous book, Rowan and Bel are even more determined to reach the origin of the jewels on Bel's belt and gather more information. This means travel into the Outskirts, where Rowan has never been (and where people from the Inner Land almost never go). It also means close contact with Bel's people, who have an entirely different set of social rituals and who are notoriously prickly. Nearly all of The Outskirter's Secret is travel through the Outskirts while navigating Outskirter society, politics, and customs. It's anthropological fiction of a sort, particularly given the inquisitive and analytical mindset that Rowan brings to anything new. Anthropological SFF is another one of those things that normally leaves me cold, but which totally worked for me in this book. I rarely remember being this engaged in, or caring this much about, the customs and traditions of an invented and relatively primitive culture. Partly this is because Rowan's mindset continues to be fascinating and contagious. I kind of want to compare this series to Neal Stephenson's Anathem, but where Stephenson's novel was about the practice of organized science, the Steerswomen series is about the individual scholar and scientist. This could go badly in the hands of a lesser author, but Kirstein brilliantly balances analysis and theories with Rowan's child-like wonder in learning, peculiar and determined ethics, and emotional growth. She isn't a disinterested observer or an engineer with a wrench. She lets the world change her, works hard at finding her place and her own strength, and engages with it emotionally as much as she does intellectually. She's a wonderfully compelling character. Another significant factor to this book's success is the slow and deliberate way Kirstein mixes world-building revelations with the day-to-day struggles of the characters. There's much more to that than just the target of Rowan's investigations, and far more complexity and significance to the Outskirters than showed in first appearances. The world is also set up in a way that lets the readers guess various details before the characters, with their more limited knowledge, can work out: another tricky technique that Kirstein gets almost perfect. I never wanted to shake the characters for being dumb; usually, both Rowan and Bel leap to correct conclusions just shortly after the reader, and long before the reader is tired of following their thought processes. There was only one bit of world-building that took Rowan most of the book to figure out despite being obvious to me early in this novel, and I think that one was fair. She didn't have anywhere near enough information to work it out. Bel continues to be wonderful in numerous ways. But even better, Kirstein introduces us to Bel's people and highlights both similarities and differences. It's an excellent job of building a complex culture that feels human: varied, tradition-laden, practical, but also well-adapted to their environment and situation, and far more sophisticated than they might appear. I'm normally a hard sell for this sort of thing, but Kirstein got me thoroughly invested. One scene late in this novel where a tribe welcomes a newcomer is masterful and probably my favorite single moment of the series so far. Once again, unfortunately, the conclusion is a bit less than satisfying. The characters come away knowing more, planning more, but still with numerous unanswered questions. This is not a series that's in a hurry to get to major plot payoffs. Instead, it's a series that takes a close look at the cultures, relationships, emotions, and lives that it touches, and describes them in deft and engaging ways. The Outskirter's Secret is even better than The Steerswoman. Recommended. I bought the third and fourth books while only a little ways into this one and am eager to read them. Followed by The Lost Steersman. Rating: 9 out of 10

If you ve ever lusted for a Trust your technolust. poster like the one seen in background of the climactic sequence in the 1995 film Hackers, you re in luck. Just print this PDF template (also an SVG) onto a piece of yellow US letter paper. Although I m not even the first person I know to reproduce the poster, I did spend some time making sure that I got the typeface, kerning, wordspacing, and placement on the page just right. I figured I would share.