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.

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.

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 Atat rk International Airport at 16:20 (+0300). I’ll return on July 13 at 17:15 (+0300), again with KLM (flight KL 1616), and land on Schiphol at 19:55 (+0200). In Istanbul I will be staying in the Saint Sophia Hotel in Sultanahmet. I’m looking forward to it, although it doesn’t feel like holidays to me yet. I should have an Internet connection over there, and probably Jaiku via cell phone will work fine too. So I will keep you up-to-date. It is also clear that I will be skipping DebConf this year. This is unfortunate, because I wanted to work with the Debian/Ruby team to advance some of our goals. However, I’m happy to catch at least one free software conference.

Not 28 links, but 28 years. :) I know, I know… I haven’t written for a long time. I promise to pick it up soon. See Jaiku for more recent ramblings of mine. By the way, congrats Steve!

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. :-)

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 :-).

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.

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.