Although I have a lot to post it has been quiet on this journal. The main reason is that I wanted to wait with new posts until I had the new Hobix package ready. In the Debian/Ruby Extras team I have been working on the package and it’s getting along nicely. The new Hobix release features support for trackbacks, comments, tags, publishing via a webapp and has some more plugins out-of-the-box.

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.

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.

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 :-).

Early Rising Simon, I have been following the early riser program for 8 months now. I wrote about my experience some time ago. It still is working well for me, although I had a little trouble with it when I moved to Edinburgh. However, my headaches warn me and make sure I stay in the program. GNOME It has been quite a meme to bash GNOME the last few weeks. Since bashing generally doesn’t help the motivation of any hackers and people working hard to accomplish a goal, I want to rebuke it a bit. Two and a half years ago I got my PowerBook. After five years of using a Pentium-233 with 64MB I suddenly had some CPU power. Since my old environment (WindowMaker) was broken on PPC at the moment, I decided to go with GNOME. Coming from WindowMaker it really felt like things were done quite differently, but being open-minded I tried to let it all go. The thing is, do I really want to configure everything? I liked configuring a lot back then, it was like an addiction. Now that I have gotten used to GNOME (let’s call it The GNOME way™), it just feels bothersome, getting in my way. When I encounter a GNOME desktop I immediately can work with it and don’t feel the need to redo the complete setup. When I look back, the only things I really want to change are the programs I use, the information I see and the way I control it all. This basic stuff I easily can do with launchers, applets and keybindings. Also have I been observing and helping some new users. And somehow I still keep reaching the moment that I can hear myself say, “Ow, hehe, yeah… that doesn’t work quite right yet. Just open a terminal (eek!) and edit this and that file.” So, we are not there yet. For me GNOME offers innovation, sufficient configurability, and an efficient do-not-get-in-my-way workspace. The change from WindowMaker to GNOME has been to me as my switch from Windows to Linux, a thing I ventured into open-minded and worked out quite well. Won’t this result into a dull monoculture of desktop setups? Maybe so, but I don’t have to be different in every way just to make the statement that I am different. OK guys, bash away now… oh, and thanks GNOME people!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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(Heriot-Watt) 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.

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…

So, what’s with all the broken laptop hard disks?! I have two laptops running almost all day (one as a cheap simple server with built-in UPS) and one as workstation. But in the last, say, 2 years I had to replace the 2.5” (laptop) hard disk drives 4 times! Since laptop HDDs cost a lot more per megabyte than normal 3.5” drives, this was becoming an expensive issue for me. So, I geared up S.M.A.R.T on both machines and did some investigating. The major issue seems to be the load/unload system that is integrated into more and more of these drives nowadays. The heads will automatically be retracted (parked) after some idle time to decrease the risk of shock damage and reduce power consumption. However, this seems to be a bad combination with Linux. I have not done any research into the specific implementation of the journaled file systems that I use (ext3, XFS), but it can something to do with it. It seems the heads of almost all laptop disks I encounter are continuously unloaded and loaded instead of around 5 times per hour. It seems a hard disk drive is made to allow for 300.000 load/unload cycles, after that the mechanism wears of so that inaccurate moving can occur and the platters can be damaged because of a small miss. Now, my drives had 650.000, 1.2000.000 and 900.000 before bad sectors and completely erratic behaviour start to occur, but this was within a year. My most recent broken drive had about 3 load cycles per minute, this means 180 per hour. With things going bad at 600.000, the disk thus had a lifetime of 3333 hours (138 days). This is ridiculously short. So I’ve turned APM of all my drives off (hdparm -B254). Better a small risk of bad sectors when dropping my laptop than having to replace my disk within the year. Also note that my brand new Western Digital disk has spent 14.000 of its load cycles within the first 15 hours that I was busy with installing Debian and recovering backups! If someone has more information about this, please let me know.

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…