helsinki Well, I have landed in Helsinki nicely, found a nice place at Lauttasaari, which is an island connected to the mainland by a bridge, and I can reach the office in a 20 min walk. Excellent. My job at Nokia has been demanding but mostly very interesting. Of course, there's always the bureaucratic side of working in big organizations, but also I need to apply every single bit of knowledge I gained in the last couple of years, both about management, but also of free/open source software development. If you are bored enough to want to read more about my life and can read Dutch, visit my blog. Let's keep it technical here.

I also finally got the ADSL-connection at home (two weeks ago); they are relatively expensive here, but apparently it's getting better. The first thing I had to do was wait for an gigantic apt-get upgrade, to give my machine the latest Ubuntu/Hoary love (after being offline for more than a month). It turned out that there have been some problems with Evolution; ie. at startup it would only tell me 'floating point exception'. It seems an AMD64-specific problem, which has been fixed by now (the Hoary version of Evolution is quite buggy though). What is amazing is that I can apt-get update my systems almost hourly and find some updates; these Hoary people seem to be locked up in a basement somewhere, receiving electroshocks if they don't deliver updates continually. And that is in fact what Ubuntu means in Etruscian! At least, that is what Dan Brown told me.

In general, AMD64 is a nice platform, but there are these little problems of not being truly mainstream. Thankfully, I can set up a dchroot-environment and install a 32-bit environment in there. I wanted to watch the Dutch TV-news, of course they have it in some Windows media format. So I needed to setup a Firefox in the 32-bit environment, in order to get the mplayer-plugin working (which uses some win32-dll's - amazing these work at all in Linux). Well, it works now, but it's not really up to standards with the normal pain-free Ubuntu standards.

Same for Wine; another amazing piece of software (yes - from and end-user viewpoint there are still many problems, but it's incredible what they've accomplished). I installed Wine in the 32-bit environment, to see if I could get DC++ working. Well, it works pretty well, except that actually downloading something will crash DC++. Hmmm.... The Linux version linuxdcpp is much more buggy, but at least that part works.

And then there's skype which requires 32-bits. Its user-interface could use some love, but it's quite a useful program in general. Too f*cking bad it's not released as free software, they're not making money on the client anyway; or at least make a non-gui libskype that would allow for writing your own GUI, perl-modules, elisp-scripts and plugins for evolution and gaim and friends.

And jhbuild seems to be broken somehow in my setup, such that gettext compilation breaks a linking time with some duplicate __fini found. Argghhh... But the exact same thing happens in my 32-bit environment. What's going on here?!

Well enough of that, time to go out and run, where snow is everywhere, beer is expensive and scantily clad women are very rare.