Older blog entries for eskil (starting at number 75)

Went out with pepper, Jo, yakk, and other assorted Eazel personnel - in exciting Mountain View. Ah well, as long as the company is good, it's ok that the area sucks cold puke.

Next day (saturday) I first wathched 5 hours of Red Dwarf on the Tivo (till my brain rotted), then went to a concert thingy with yakk and the neighbours. We went to see this dork. It was about as bad as suspected, but also as amusing as expected. The following band was a sad bunch of loser hippies who played crap music. The last band was called CIA (think it was Causing Is Awesome). First I feared it was going to be some poncey neo-gothic dweebs, but they actually played real well and had a good knack for live performance - but there was a shitload of religious crap mixed into the show, and I couldn't tell if it was sarcastic or if they actually meant it, hope it was the first.

Today was also mostly spent in front of the tivo recovering from PR3, now it's time to check out the last bug.

And as usual, goverment stuff works out in the last minute. I got my H1B approved, so I'll neither get one month of ballscratching TV watching vacation nor will I have to go to Denmark before guadec - crap...

Fede nyheder, vores holdleder er blever "forfremmet" til leder af den ny gruppe "fremtids projekter" - dvs han suttede for meget som leder og da man ikke rigtig kan fyre sådan en uden at det ser skidt ud, sætter man ham til at lede sig selv og et par fantasivenner.

Så nu har jeg atter en fornuftig chef og det har allerede på en uge sat en del tryk på udviklingen - fede tider' her igen.

Begge unger er nu hjemme, lad os se om de kan holde hytten ren eller om jeg skal til at flytte sammen med min nyeste kollega.

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

Well, PR3 crunch was done. robey, Robin and I had a terrible time trying to figure out what was up with the linking of rpm4. Basically, if we built the rpm rpm ourselves (which caused it not to link with both db1 and db3, but only db1), nautilus with installer stuff worked fine on RH70. If we used the stock Redhat rpm's we always got "Cannot open in DB3 format" because the binaries ended up linking with db3 last (the loader insert db3) - great horror.

But otherwise the RH70 stuff still works, except that the rpm output has changed (and --percent still doesn't work), so the view and cli tool cannot parse the rpm output and therefore always reports packages as having failed.

This is the worst jetlag I've ever had - saturday I go to bed at 8, get up at 21. sunday I go to bed at 14, get up at midnight, monday I go to bed at 19, get up at 3. Now it's 4 and I've just slept 5 hours on the couch at Eazel. This is going to suck.

So other then going to bed at weird hours and working, nothing news since last time. Oh yeah, did take harper to his drivers test (so he could use my car). Unfortunately, on of the brakelights must have died while I was in .dk, so he couldn't take the test - doh.

Tror trolden er blevet bange og ked af det eller såen. Hun har i hvert fald muget ud i badeværelset (tiltrængt) og har ikke rigtigt nærmet sig siden jeg kom hjem. Selvfølgelig har der heller ikke været megen chance for det med de sovetider jeg holder mig.

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

Oh man the burn is bad at eazel. I've got over a hundred hour of bugs still open and like 72 hours to do them - *whine*. I don't think I'll have all of them done, but I'm going to try.

rpm4 on rh7 is still being a pain in the arse, today Robey and I again played the game of figuring out why the automated build created binaries that could not open the rpm databases, whereas the eazel-hacking build can. Apparently the buildserver has a newer version of glibc, which (just for the fuck of it) loads libdb-3 (after libc!), just to make sure you have no clue in hell as to what is going on.

And ofcourse there was a api change between rpm 4.0 and rpm 4.0.2... obviously.

Back from vacation - three weeks in Denmark, not a bad thing. I'm not going to babble about what I was doing, as people who want to know already know.

Came back wednesday around 20 o'clock, long tedious flight, with extra five hours in CDG, the reason was long and in french. Took a cab to the apt. and a fiery argument with the cabby who wanted 50$ for the trip even though he forgot to turn on the meter. I was baffled and extremely annoyed, so I reverted to the use-long-complex-danish-words and mingled in a few sentences about the normal charge being 35$ and if he would mind giving me a receipt in case I paid 50$ plus give me his name and yadayada. So he accepted the 35$ and fucked off - idiot.

I crashed to bed immediately, and slept till about four, after which I was 50/50 awake/asleep. I finially got up around 8 and left for work. I was taking caltrain (since Car was parked at work), so I didn't get there till around 11 o'clock (three weeks of decent public transport spoiled me).

The workday was mostly figuring out how fucked I am wrt the next milestone and dele^H^H^H^Hreading three weeks of irrelevant email. At 20 I sort of began to lose consciousness, and at 21 I decided to take a nap before driving home - so at 1 I woke up at the office, duh. Drove home and watched whatever Farscape and B5 the TiVo had saved for me. Went to bed around 7...

Didn't get up till 15 today, spend the next few hours cleaning up after the kids had spend three weeks trashing the place. This is the last time I'm cleaning up after them, this was simply too gross. I don't ever again want to come home and find rotting pie on the kitches counter, a chesthigh pile of dirty dishes, pink-carbonated-sugar-water spillage in the living room and tons of various trash all around - most impressive.

After that I went for food and finished with a pint of Pilsner at the kilowatt, then back for some more brainreconstitution in front of the telly. Now I guess I should actually begin to emit some code.

Dagens oprydning var så slem, at jeg meddelte ungerne, at hvis de ikke opper sig over de næste uger, så er jeg den der er skredet. Lejekontrakten er med os alle tre, så hvis jeg skrider, kan de også blive sagt op. Hvis jeg alligevel skal arbejde hjemmefra mens jeg venter på mit nye visa, har jeg også god mulighed for at kigge på lejligheder.

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

Helixcode apparently do not appreciate gob. They sent an email during the 10th (while I was somewhere between CDG and SFO) that they'd commit a gnome-pilot patch that would remove the gob dependency unless I complained. Obviously, I did not, so they comitted. So now I'm rolling that commit back out. I can partly see their argument against gob (it being a preprocessor etc yadayada), but frankly, anything is prettier and then gtk+ code, so they should rather use their efforts at making ORBit c++ compatible so I could rewrite gnome-pilot in c++.

T-2

What can I say, I'm a bastard who hasn't updated his diary in almost a month. You'll endure it.

Well, Bjerregaard went home (lucky bastard), it was a good little visit and I'm still amazed of the amount of cd's he managed to buy. I think he survived SF, but must have missed Kbh - pretty early after he got home, I got an email sent around 8am, explaining how he just left louises (again ; lucky bastard). But in two days time, I can join in on the fun - yay!

What else has happened since then ; went barhopping in chinatown last saturday, that are some seedy bars in that area. So when you're sitting there sipping your crap beer, and this rather ugly but rather provocative dressed woman (I think) approaches you and asks if you're having a nice time or you'd like to have a nicer, what can you say, other then "no thanks, I'll stick to the beer - less health risk - but thanks...", lovely place.

I've been harassing the kids I live with into acknowledging that some cleaning action is needed to keep the den-o-filth inhabitable, it looks like it is helping. It is almost like at grønjordskollegiet, except in this case they're technically older.

My visa situation is still not good. My current visa/work permit expires 25/01, which leaves me with ca. 14 works days left (after vacation). So unless the H1B is approved while I'm in Denmark (and it starts snowing in Mountain View), I'll probably end up not working all of February. So you'll see me flipping burgers somewhere to make the rent, and running out the back door everytime the police drives by.

Oh ja, det mest utrolige er sket - trolden scorede en eller anden nørd der var på besøg fra den der landmasse med kænguruer og kaniner. Og så havde vi århundredets mest røvsyge firmajulefrokost (det her er nok den mest tamme december jeg har haft i mange år) - eneste redning var den flaske ålborg ildvand bjerregaard havde bragt mig. Enkelte personer sammenlignede det dog med vinduespuds oa., de ved ikke hvad der er godt for dem.

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

Robey and I have begun the big libeazelinstall rewrite. It's progressing slowly but surely.

I have come to realise, that while the gtkobject model holds a lot of small niceties, that it can no longer even reach c++. In gnome-pilot I had begun to use GOB to do my object building, simple slick and sweet. In nautilus we're stuck cutting and pasting vast amounts of code, spending 20 minutes just to whack a basic object together, 20 more minutes to make a function virtual, 20 minutes to create the signals and then 1-3 hours fixing cut'n'paste bugs.

Wonderfull...

Now is where I could immerse myself in a long c/c++ discussion or I could just not. Let's suffice to say that I after playing with libsigc++, I've become ready to go back to c++ (unless someone writes a GOB2000/Cfront for gtkobjects).

ja7, alt pænt jeg har sagt om gtkobjekt tager jeg i mig igen (næsten alt pænt, det har stadigvæk enkelte ok ting), c++ er bare nemmere i længden, og de sprøde ting fra gtkobjekt fik vi jo for det meste banket ind i neppen med tiden.

Additionally, management keeps finding ways of screwing us in various small devious ways.

I'll be back next year.

The pain - having Bjerregaard around is just plain old wonderfull, except for the pounding in my head,

Went to the Alex Paterson (of orb) and Juno Reactor gig at some place called "Justice League". Paterson rocked pretty hard even though he more or less just turned lp's. Juno was pretty ok, although too much drum stuff imho. The place itself was not fantastic, don't think I'll be frequenting that joint except for other good musical events.

After the gig, we went by a liquer shop, picked up some sixpacks of snabelvand, and went back to the den-of-filth to quench our thirst and tell tales of old days...

We're going to skip the Vegas drive, and opt for the oldstyle slouching around. We actually began that yesterday, Monday night we went to a bar called Noc Noc for beer & chat. Their theme is Giger on LSD, defintely a nice place, although I was a bit annoyed over the low tables. Next morning, we went for breakfast at the local diner (mmm, coffee and omelet). The plan was ofcourse that I'd fuck off to work, but we just cruised over to Tower Records, shopped cd's and dvd's till we dropped and went back home. At this time, it was too late for me to go to work, since I'd have to drive back in time for the forementioned gig, so instead we stared tv while I did something that vaguely resembled work from the couch - all in all a good day.

Som sædvaneligt har jeg mængder af ubesvaret post - hav tålmodighed folkens, jeg kæmper mig igennem det. Nu har jeg fået bekræftet, at det ikke bare er mig. Den gode Hr. Torben finder også at mine sloffer trænger til et hurtigt kursus i hvodden-man-gør-rent samt et liv. Nu må jeg så se om jeg gidder at begynder at opdrage på dem, eller om der bare skal indføres grønjordsregler og køkkenhøvdings diktatur.

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off). </ul>

Oh yeah, the new tivo works fine... (this doesn't really belong in the life part of the diary). It now autorecords the daily farscape and B5 episodes, stores them on the harddrive and I can watch them when I want to, sweeet. The coolest feature is watching a tv that is actually being played, pause it (while it's broadcasted), go make a cup of coffee, resume and then ff through commercials is just sweeet.

Other then that, not much exciting lately, other then it's friday night, 21 o'clock and I'm at work - so sad.

Måtte lege lommepsykolog for trolden forleden pga. skidt formuleret kommentar fra hendes chef. På den ene side giver jeg hende ret i, at hun blev skidt behandlet, på den anden side var det evt. pga. lav selvsikkerhed. Som nogen nok ved, så har jeg før skulle hjælpe en med skidt selvsikkerhed, men det var en som jeg holdt af, hvorimod det her er, ked af at sige det, er et halvtilfældigt bekendtskab som jeg nu tilfældigvis bor og arbejder sammen med, så jeg vil egentlig helst ikke skulle beskæftige mig med det.

Noksagt, nu vil jeg se at blive færdig, køre op til SF og se om min nabo er på stamværtshuset.

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

Doing some serious bugfixing in the installer, hope to have it done soon, so I can begin on the bigass job of redesigned libeazelinstall.

Hrmf, yesterday, Steph and I made a Fry's run and picked up a Tivo, I decided that I've had enough of american commercials, plus I want my daily B5 without having to be home at 16 o'clock. Got home and plugged it in (we have too many things attached to the telly already, and we're still short of one dvd player).

It didn't work ... Turned it own and it showed the intro screen and then just sat there. So we had to go back this morning to get a replacement. Fry's equal oppurtunity employment policy must involve only hiring retards, the people at Fry's are in general really weird and apparently also happen to be really dumb.

While grabbing a new one, we noted that half the Tivo boxes had "Defect Item Returned" stickers on them, what the fuck?! Do they just tape the box back together and dump it with the other boxes on sale ?!

So we finally found one that didn't have a "defect item" sticker and didn't look too battered. Must try again tonight.

And apparently, vicious thinks I'll pick him up in SJO tonight... It'd be fun to not pick him up, except that'll mean not having a good reason for drinking.

The pain of PR2 is now over, www.eazel.com now holds the PR2 release, I can return to normal.

It got a bit gruesome in the end, especially the last night where a load of us were sitting rooting out the last bugs/testing till 6 in the morning where the release shipped. But now the pain is over.

I have managed some fun though, last week was halloween, that was pretty funny. My neighbors had a smash of a halloween party, pictures here. The asian guy next to me is Andrew, my primary comrade in drinking these days. Halloween night itself was just the Castro being filled with wierd people. They had blocked of a rather big part of Market street, and there was just a sea of people dressed up (and a few boring people like me, who weren't). This wasn't the tv halloween of annoying kids that I thought it would be, this was slightly more festive.

This saturday, Steph had her birhtday party, which was held in the tiki style. So there was vast amounts of booze and drinks with annoying stuff sticking up and poking your nose (and you can choke on those small plastic mermaids btw.). But the party was fun, and the aftermath was severe, but the place is now clean.

Other then that, it's a bit difficult to recall what actually has happened since then, it's mostly been work, interrupted by getting home, sleeping some hours and then hauling my arse back to work.

Now we'll have to hope that the PR2 release is good enough to make it worth the pain it was.

Og de gode nyheder er ; billetter til .dk er købt, skulle gerne ankomme til Københavnstrup d. 21/12 og skride igen d. 10/01. Andre gode nyheder, jeg får besøg omkring d. 19 af el stygge torben bjerregaard hamselv. Så holder jeg nogle dage fri omkring min fire dages thanksgiving weekend og så ræser vi til Las Vegas eller såen noget.

Nu skal jeg vist sove lidt mere.... og ja, nu hvor smerten er ovre vil jeg prøve at skrive her lidt tiere.

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

In case you didn't get it, PR2 was my main object of hacking these past weeks.

Robey and I have concluded that doing dep check stuff through rpm is a pain and we can do the stuff so muchmore swiftly and with a better user experience if we skip it and do all dep stuff ourselves. So thats the post pr2 plan.

As Max (of Sam and Max) put it "it's dark and greasy and smelly under there". Thats whats under the hood of my car. But my left headlight and left front turnlights were dead, and after twice driving with only one headlight and no left front turnlights I decided to leap into action. So this morning I cruised by the Honda shop and bought the nessecary parts. Now apparently, a headlight isn't just a bulb you can replace, but a complete lightfixture for which they charge you loads of money. The turnlights are just bulbs though. So it was a total of 20$ (!!).

So after the parking lot emptied out here at Eazel, I started experimenting with The Stuff Under The Hood.

Now my fingers are greasy but I have all my lights in fine working condition.

If I get elected to the board (yeah right), I will recommend sensitivity training for everyone who is subscribing to the g-h list. Or at least one long deep breath before pressing send (or should that be sendMailNow ?)

I think that about concludes my propaganda. Now start figuring out who else to vote on.

None what so ever, well, almost, went eating & drinking with assorted eazel people last night. Arlo knows the good places to wine&dine.

Steph is now working at Eazel (congrats!), so I guess that makes the apt in SF the official Eazel SF Office.

Og en af de første ting hun bemærkede var 'følgelig hvordan folk sviner hinanden til udenfor arbejdstid... Mmmm, tilsvining af kolleger...

Og forresten har en af personagerne fra biksen prøvet at køre den danske sektion af min dagbog igennem et oversætter. Men der' vist tilpas meget slang og andet hø i disse skriblerier, til at det ingen mening gav. Hah!

(summary for the danish impaired : fuck off).

Much nautilus bootstrap installer work. It's a mixture of fixing small libeazelinstall oddities, but mostly making the bootstrap installer use the info given by the lib, and acting just a bit sane (or at least manage to install nautilus).

I have now completely lost track of the flow in the program...

Need to do gnome-pilot hacking as soon as the pr2 madness is over.