July 23, 2004
Off To Germany
Nora and I will be leaving for Germany in an hour. We will be going to Erfurt first, and then to Berlin. The trip will be a mixture of visiting relatives and sightseeing. I will try to write an update or two next week, but I am not sure how well that will work out. If I don't get the chance, I'll update when I get back on Friday. The weather was extremely hot last week, but apparently they had...
Posted on July 23, 2004 11:38 PM
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July 23, 2004
Dido Tour Blog
We have all heard of politicians who keep blogs, and of course some musicians do the same. Soon after Sunday's concert I discovered that Dido also has a blog about her world tour, that is somehow out of the ordinary. Instead of blogging herself, or having members of her tour band blog, she hired a friend of hers to exclusively tour with them, only to take pictures and blog. This leads to longer if somewhat more artificial posts, that are...
Posted on July 23, 2004 04:50 AM
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July 21, 2004
See You When You're 40
I don't usually write songs that are targetted against one single human being, but sometimes people REALLY piss me off. This was Dido right before she started singing See You When You're 40 (lyrics). As the crowd started laughing I had to think of how it must feel to be the person the song was written about. To millions of people he was now known as an immature child, rather than his actual self. And this, of course, reminded me...
Posted on July 21, 2004 03:57 AM
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July 20, 2004
Doug Is Hilarious
Doug Wilson: wait so is solo MT still free? Doug Wilson: btw I keep hyping you up to Dave Blackman Can Sar: anyway MT3.0 is free Doug Wilson: you better live up to it when you get back...
Posted on July 20, 2004 05:23 AM
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July 19, 2004
The Last Concert in Schönbrunn?
The next few days will feature lots of posts on yesterdays Dido concert. I will start it off with some rather sad news on the concerts location. According to the Austrian TV and Radio agency ORF residents of Schloss Schönbrunn (former residence of the Emperor's and now a huge tourist attraction and home to a few people who actually live there) filed a complaint against the concert operators, alleging that the events disturb their daily lives. Dido was not the...
Posted on July 19, 2004 02:57 PM
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July 19, 2004
Weird Threading Bugs & Assembly
Today was spent entirely on coding. I started out with fixing my distributed file reading implementation, which took a few hours. After that it got really difficult, with fixing weird threading bugs where context switching somehow ate up memory, which I was unable to track down, even though I worked on it for hours. There are large parts of the kernel I did not write, so I was unable to figure out what exactly was happening. I then switched to...
Posted on July 19, 2004 02:41 PM
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July 18, 2004
An Evening With Dido
I just came back from a Dido concert with Nora in front of the Schönbrunn palace in Vienna. I am again completely aware of why Dido is probably my favourite musician. It was an astonishing evening of music, that served as the perfect ending to an amazing weekend. If only we had had a camera with us, like everyone else. Much more on the concert and weekend tomorrow; now go and buy or download Life for Rent, sit-back and listen!...
Posted on July 18, 2004 02:51 PM
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July 16, 2004
Stupid Compile Problems
I just spent 3 hours trying to figure out why I was getting compile errors in a file called /usr/include/sys/isa_defs.h that I had NEVER heard of before. It turned out it was caused by me accidentally putting the word www in the first line of a completely unrelated .h file, while trying to open a website (I selected the wrong window). All compile time errors are now fixed again, and I am working on getting networked file reading working, while...
Posted on July 16, 2004 08:06 AM
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July 14, 2004
Can Goes Atom
I am a great fan of RSS, but for the sake of completeness I am now adding an Atom feed to my blog. This way you can subscribe to my blog using Atom enabled newsreaders. I am no expert in syndication and have not really researched the benefits of Atom, but if somebody wants an Atom feed, then they shall have one....
Posted on July 14, 2004 11:48 AM
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July 13, 2004
Under the Tuscan Moon
The first time I heard of Under the Tuscan Sun on the Apple Trailers Website (one of my favorite websites, btw) I thought it was some new Star Wars movie, as Tuscan Raider's are infamous Star Wars creatures. Though none of the usual Star Wars actors were in it, I would not have put this past George Lukas. I then proceeded to watch the trailer and realized that Tuscany is what we call Toskana, a very pretty region in Italy....
Posted on July 13, 2004 03:48 PM
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July 12, 2004
Excellent Nachos News
It turns out that the Synchlist used by the Nachos PostOffice class to store messages uses a linked list, and therefore has no limit on the number of elements. This means that the current implementation reliably transmits packets and doesn't lose them once they are received. I can now implement arbitrary sized messages tomorrow, and probably get file reading working by the end of the day. This is immensely excellent news....
Posted on July 12, 2004 03:00 PM
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July 12, 2004
The First Step
This introduction to sockets is simply amazing. How else would I have learned that on systems with AFS (such as Stanford's Leland), Unix Domain Sockets have to be created in the /tmp directory, otherwise operations on them simply fail with Not a Socket but a File? While reading TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 3 might have helped, my copy of the book was not currently available, and reading through it would have taken too long anyway. Whoever ported Nachos to the Stanford...
Posted on July 12, 2004 02:30 PM
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July 10, 2004
Nachos PostOffice
I spent Thursday and this evening playing around with the provided Nachos Networking classes network.h/cc and post.h/cc, which are based on BSD Sockets. These did not come with the Stanford version of Nachos and took some time to adapt. My real reason for downloading these in the first place, instead of immediately writing my own replacement, is to see how these interact with Nachos threads. Monday I will start rewriting these network basics and will hopefully be able to get...
Posted on July 10, 2004 02:36 PM
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July 10, 2004
Long Line of Cars
If you want to know how spinning your car out of control feels like, read on. After getting an Austrian driver's license, every driver is now required to take part in an secure driving program, that shows you what happens when your wheels start slipping, or you somehow otherwise lose control of your car. All of this happens in a semi-controlled manner, but the first time you hit the brakes while trying to maneuver around an obstacle and your wheels...
Posted on July 10, 2004 02:34 AM
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July 07, 2004
Starting to Code
Coding on my research project started today. My plan is to finish fixing bugs and adding the distributed paging, file operations, and process migration by the and of the month. By that time I should also be done with all outstanding reading (finishing up Solaris Kernel Internals, Distributed Systems, and Computer Networking). Today will mostly consist of getting reaquainted with the code, figuring out what versions of things I currently have, and cleaning things up a bit. SSHing into the...
Posted on July 7, 2004 04:56 AM
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July 06, 2004
Konfabulatory
I just tried out Konfabulator which has gotten a lot of attention because Apple just announced a virtually identically product by the name of Dashboard. This should not be confused with Nat Friedman's program of the same name, which is not at all related. Konfabulator allows the downloading and displaying of so called widgets, some of which come with the program, while others can be downloaded here. Popular widgets includes iTunes Remotes, Battery Charge Displays, Event Listings, Stock Tickers, etc....
Posted on July 6, 2004 08:47 AM
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July 06, 2004
More BlogTalk
Lots of great stuff at BlogTalk today, far more interesting to me than yesterday. If you want to know more, read it at TopicExchange. Ben and Mena Trott, the founder's of Movable Type, gave this morning's keynote, followed by Jane Perrone, deputy editor of politics at the Guardian, who talked about her experience with moving the Guardian, an excellent traditional newspaper, into the online blogging world. The current talk is by Barbara Ganley, a professor of Irish literature at a...
Posted on July 6, 2004 07:24 AM
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July 06, 2004
Here's the About Box
I just added links to an About page (which I will be finishing later today) and Technorati and Orkut profiles. I also revived the RSS and email links, which had accidentally disappeared when redesigning the site. The email link now uses a complicated scrambling, so that spammers cannot get it, without me having to put a stupid NOSPAM into my address, that is easy to remove anyway. This is of course a followup to the previous post, in which I...
Posted on July 6, 2004 05:08 AM
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July 05, 2004
Where is the About Page?
Earlier somebody asked the second panel, why there is no standardized location for About Me pages yet. I disagree with the panelists, who believe that it is mostly due to people's desire for privacy. While there are some Blogger's that use synonyms and/or want to remain anonymous, the majority of bloggers would probably not mind publishing a short description of themselves. The person asking the question mentioned that there are standard for how to provide RSS feeds, blog rolls, etc....
Posted on July 5, 2004 09:03 AM
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July 05, 2004
No More Comment Spam!
I just installed the excellent MT Blacklist that automatically deletes comment and trackback spam (though I have not gotten the latter yet). It also allows you to search previous comments for Spam and delete them. I used this to delete my last 60 comments, which had all arrived while I was in Turkey, in about 5 minutes, while it had recently taken me an hour to delete about 2 dozen comment spams. I can now continue blogging happyily ever after....
Posted on July 5, 2004 08:44 AM
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July 05, 2004
Who are you?
I just read this post by some person here at BlogTalk. I know exactly what you mean. I've been reading many posts by many different people in this room, but have little clue who everybody is....
Posted on July 5, 2004 07:58 AM
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July 05, 2004
BlogTalk: Torill Elvira Mortensen's Keynote
The second keynoter started out with talking about reasons for why people blog. Jörg Kantel, one of todays panelists, says he has no idea. Though this is probably the best answer, since classifying one's own intentions is often nearly impossible, I shall try to answer it anyway. I blog for many reasons: To tell others about what I am up to To keep a record of how I think/feel/write and what I do To remember things of importance To points...
Posted on July 5, 2004 06:52 AM
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July 05, 2004
Power Failure
The power just went out, leaving everyone without wireless access and dependent on batteries. ... Now it's back. I managed to capture a spot with a powerplug and am now recharging my laptop battery. Having a new battery is great though, I was surfing for about 3 hours and still had an hour of battery left, when I but the laptop to sleep....
Posted on July 5, 2004 06:36 AM
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July 05, 2004
Touring Vienna
I used the 90 minute break during BlogTalk to walk around Vienna for a bit. I started off from Schwedenplatz to the Stadtpark and then crossed the Ringstraße walking towards the Stephansdom, using some slightly unusual side streets. I then had lunch at PizzaBizzi which is a great Pizza chain (around 5 different locations), and the one in the Roten Turm Straße is particularly great. I then went towards the Opera, to buy something to drink from a nearby Supermarket...
Posted on July 5, 2004 06:31 AM
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July 05, 2004
Weblog Academics
There is a big emphasis on academic study of weblogs at the conference, which unfortunately, seems quite useless to me. The relative lack of attention of the audience at this time confirms this. Trying to study some of the more abstract aspects of weblogging (e.g. liveness and authenticity) academically doesn't work well, because there is so little there in the first place, authenticity is simply not a rich subject, and picking it apart and trying to analyze it to pieces,...
Posted on July 5, 2004 03:58 AM
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July 05, 2004
Quicker and Common Posting
I feel like I should post short entries on random interesting things, instead of thinking about them for too long and then not posting them. This beautiful design on the CSS Zen Garden is an excellent example. It is very reminiscent of some of the newer Blogger templates, but of course much prettier. If you are using Blogger, you might want to check this out. Of course remember, that all images are property of the respective designers....
Posted on July 5, 2004 03:32 AM
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July 05, 2004
Joycean Metablogging
Often reading blog entries about heavily blogged events is more interesting than the events themselves. I have stumbled upon a good number of blogs that are blogging from BlogTalk, and its almost like a huge stream of thoughts, ideas, and reflections all about the same event, with each blog a substream of that stream... My failed attempt at using Joycean imagery to describe what's going on....
Posted on July 5, 2004 03:13 AM
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July 05, 2004
Terrible Connection
I think it was Loic Le Meur who gave rules for organizing a great conference. Two of these were have good wireless connectivity available, and have lots of power-strips everywhere. While there is power in the fron two rows, this is definitely not enough, and the wireless connection is incredibly flaky right now. I am trying to get work done nonetheless, but a good connection would be great indeed. The current speaker, Jörg Kantel is amazingly hilarious. Though I have...
Posted on July 5, 2004 02:38 AM
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July 05, 2004
BlogTalk: Mark Bernstein's Keynote
Mark Bernstein is currently starting the conference with his keynote on The Social Physics of New Weblog Technologies. Very interesting stuff, very broad in scope, having a bit of difficulty taking notes, because I am busy chatting and browsing around blogs. I am sure that others are meticulously noting the content, as I am writing this. Will be finding it later... The keynote just ended, but the conference router has died, quite sadly. Waitiing until the connection is back, so...
Posted on July 5, 2004 01:46 AM
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July 05, 2004
From Turkey to BlogTalk
I returned from Istanbul yesterday evening to witness the tragic loss of the amazing Portugal to a Greek team with an impeccable defense with a 0:1 (European Cup). I will blog more about my stay in Istanbul later, to focus on a topic of current importance: BlogTalk 2.0. It is still early in the morning, but it seems that almost everyone is here, which is good, since the conference should have started a few minutes ago. We are currently still...
Posted on July 5, 2004 01:11 AM
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