My New T-shirt

Handmade. Here's the comic and here's the technology.

Balcony BBQ

Thought it got a bit colder in the evening and the sun wasn't shining anymore the will to grill something outside wasn't gone. The stationary grill was still covered with snow and seemed to be in ruins so we used couple of disposable ones. On a dorm's balcony.

And then we built an empty beer bottles pyramid. Here it is with two Portuguese girls:


We should do it again tomorrow.

Snowing Again

Internet Explorer is the biggest pain in the ass of every web designer. Fuckin' hate it!

Svanstein

New owner seem to be investing money into the place. It looks much better than it used to be previous years thanks to renovation. I hope this one won't go bankrupt like the previous owners did.

Saving your ass by signing a petition blaming your teacher for incompetence just because you can't solve some assignment isn't that nice, don't you think so? If you don't understand a shit it might not be just teacher's fault. I managed to pass this course last year and no, I wasn't familiar with the subject before. So don't call me an exception. And I'm not gonna solve or sign anything.

Insomnia can be productive sometimes. I couldn't sleep last night at all. To many ideas were going through my head. I felt sleepy for awhile but I couldn't fall asleep. So I went to computer and programmed a client for the XML-interface for the project I've made earlier. Seems like my teammates don't have that much left to do. I wish I could dedicate tasks and get some result out of it. But I have to deal with what I have and most of the time I have to take "if you want it to be done, do it yourself" approach.

Exactly!

Ylläs

Ylläs was pretty crowded this Easter. But thanks to the herd instinct still left in humans I didn't have to wait in 100 meters long queue every time I was taking a ride up. Nobody was entering from the other side of the lift at all! And people were just waiting in line because there were people waiting in line. I see no other reason.


I've visited a home zoo there. I wanted to steal one of these cute little creatures so much!


Ostriches wanted to peck me all the time.


Reindeers wanted to gore me.


And I ate bear, reindeer and moose meat.

Postcrossing

After a year break I'm back to postcrossing again.

Windows Mobile 6

My hp iPAQ hx2410 is running WM6 now! Pretty cool, huh? It's not officially supported but its warranty expired couple of years ago anyways so I had nothing to loose. It worked perfectly fine with WM5 and the latest firmware from hx2790 but for some unknown reason it didn't want to connect to my university's wireless network which uses PEAP authentication. I didn't want to go back to WM2003SE so I gave WM6 a chance. And it works! It works quite fast and no bugs were noticed so far.

b0r1ng

Blah blah blah...

Home, Sweet Home

Yes. We made it back. We made it back by the same '89 Ford Escort. Here are some photos: http://flickr.com/photos/siansaparo/sets/72157604065024062/. Comments and descriptions later.

Oh yeah!

Amsterdam is so fucking great! And yes, we made it. We made it through Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and Netherlands and finally we are in Amsterdam. We were laughed at and called insane but we made it by '89 Ford Escort. :D The way back is left but I hope it will be as easy as here.

Road Trip

Yay! Despite everything we're going! Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Bremen, Amsterdam, The Hague and Oslo on the way back are waiting! Let's hope Daniel's shitmobile will take us there and back safely.

Job

Happiness isn't about money but it's hard to be happy without any money. Being a sponger sitting on parents' shoulders brings me some money but it definitely isn't making me happy. I do need a job. But what I can have at the moment is a minimal wage general worker position, web-master with just one client, the one who can offer only a minimal wage general worker position besides web-site support, and an unpaid trainee position at lab as they claim they don't have sufficient funding to pay trainees though I think they just don't take trainees seriously. Though I've showed my skills and knowledge last year and they seemed to be impressed. Maybe they really don't have enough funding.

But anyways it's all in my hands. And I know appreciation will come sooner or later but I have to work really hard to prove that I am worth it. All I need is an opportunity. Summer is coming and a summer job is an excellent opportunity. All I need is to find one. So once again I'm sending applications to companies all around hoping for the best. Lab would be the last resort but this time I want something more.

OMFG!!!

New Addicton

It might sound weird but caviar with banana tastes really great! Unfortunately the only place you can get the banana one is Sweden but I'm lucky to live 30 km from the border.

Unexpected Income

It's nice to get wage especially when you don't expect it. Not much though but better than nothing. And I thought I'm not working there anymore. The breakup was kinda weird and I didn't know what to think. But it turned out that I actually have work. And I will have at least for awhile. It won't bring much income and I won't make my living but it will let me be at least a little bit less thrifty.

Twenty

I am not a teenager anymore. And now I can buy any booze from Alko I want. Earlier the strongest booze they could sell me was wine. Nothing else changed.

Buses

Buses do suck. Though free ticket provided by school in any case is cheaper than gasoline burned while driving 30 km there and back but today I thought that the comfort and time saved might be actually worth it. I copied couple of episodes of House to my PDA to kill some time in a bus on my way to school today but was unable to watch them because Salmela's buses' engines produce way louder sound than my PDA can produce through the headphones. And they are shaking. And the seats are way too narrow. And I've waited 30 minutes for it after school and have spent 45 minutes inside the bus. Such a waste of time!

Nice Weather

I can't believe my eyes. It's sunny outside! Dark season is over!

Kallinkangas

Everyone had a hangover after Friday's party but only Alex wasn't able to go with us. So Masha, Ovidiu and me went to Kallinkangas to have some fun in the snow. Ovidiu borrowed Esa's snowboard and broke one of its bindings the day before. He tried to ride it anyways and broke another one. The rented board's binding didn't last for long either and there was nothing left of his wish to snowboard so he rented skis and giving up snowboarding once and for all.

Here's the video I filmed:


And here are some photos:

Keep Trying

I didn't feel like blogging about it and I still don't but somehow I feel I have to write about it. The job interview went fine. Actually it went quite good as I was confident and I knew that I have the skills and I have nothing to be afraid of. The interviewer seemed to have quite a good impression about my background and me in general but he wasn't the one to decide. He tried to reach CEO several times but he wasn't picking the phone so I was told to wait until the next week. I waited. On Monday I got an email saying that unfortunately they can't hire me at the moment. So the only thing I have left to do is just to keep trying.

The Mana World Buddy List

Something I've been busy with lately. I hope I'll finish it before I loose all the interest. The buddy list looks like this:


And it has a nice tray icon and notifications:



There are still few features to be implemented. I hope it'll find its users when it's ready.

MacBook Air

I'm gonna drown in my own saliva soon.

You Wanna Piss On Me?

I am not a perv, not yet a woman. I couldn't resist typing that. I am not dreaming about golden showers but this Brithey's song just sounds way too disturbing. And it has been playing in my head all day long! I'd better listen some Kraftwerk. Simple lyrics, catchy melodies. The best way to give your brain some rest. Giving it some sleep would be a nice thing to do also and surely it will get some rest this way but it's not sending proper signals yet so I guess it's ok. Well, it can switch off itself if it needs so I'll just let it take care of itself.

Compiz Fusion

I am not a fan of eye candy and my relatively old computer isn't either so I didn't bother to install it earlier. I don't get any kicks out of using bleeding edge software but when it's available in the official distribution repository why not to try it? So I did. I've been making some screenshots of Compiz earlier which can be found here. And here are some of the nice features you get using Compiz Fusion.



You can switch between the windows this way.




Or this way. Or in many other ways available.




The cube can be made transparent with its reflection beneath.
It's useless to take screenshots of other effects. They should be seen live or at least on video. On YouTube there are plenty of such videos.

Esa

Taking a nap in Kemi airport.

Svalbard

The homeland of panserbjørne. Beware of bears.



Applies to the whole Svalbard.

Panssarikarhu

I want to be penserbjørn. Panssarikarhu. It's way better than Pupukarhu. I want to possess an incredible strength and be way more valiant and brave.

4 am

I ran out of cocoa powder. This is no good.

Up And Running

It wasn't very hard to deploy a web, NFS and mail server on FreeBSD. Loads of documentation helped a lot and the system is way less scarier than I thought. Lars advised me to take a look at OpenBSD as it supports more architectures, doesn't allow BLOBs and non-free software and has better track record for performance and security as he says. I have no reason to doubt that so I gave it a try. It was a bit more pain in the ass but I still managed. The only thing I couldn't do is to compile Python 2.5 from ports tree. Python 2.4 compiled just fine. Now it's serving two accounts and two domain names. It's kind of useless as I don't have proper hardware and fast enough internet connection but I'm considering renting a virtual dedicated server. The next step will be to set up a mail list software and interbreed it with GnuPG.

Fuck!

I was within a hairbreadth of smashing my PDA against the wall. I typed quite a long post and accidently pressed back instead of space bar on the screen keyboard. They are like couple of millimeters away from each other and it's not the first time I'm losing posts this way. I need to find some proper blogging software or start using email to post as Internet Explorer really sucks. Especially the mobile one.

Polish?

I was talking to some chick in bar last night. She left and came with a friend.
- My friend doesn't believe that you're English.
- Well, I'm not.
Friend:
- Where are you from?
- Russia.
- Oh, nice, I don't know that many Polish people!
- WTF?

Boxing Day

I should move away from here. I should. I am sick and tired of this. The country itself is forcing me to eat out. Shops are closed once again and I didn't get prepared at all. It's humiliation of human right to get food! It's a conspiracy between the government and public catering! And most likely they share the profit! It's not enough for them to close the shops at six or nine. It's not enough to force them to stay closed on Sundays. The shops are closed today after four just because it's some religious holiday. I'm atheist and I want to go shopping but I can't. It's not fair. I have no food and I an hungry. Seems like I'll have to go get some burger or pizza once again. I miss shops being open 24/7 where you can buy strong booze at 3 am being just 18. This will never happen in Finland. Stupid Finnish laws.

Merry Christmas

Being Orthodox makes this Christmas nothing significant for me and being brought up in Russia with its Soviet past makes even Orthodox Christmas nothing significant either. Communists didn't like the fact that people believed in god and celebrated Christmas but they couldn't eliminate the holiday completely so they just replaced it. Basically, it's the same thing just on a different day and without any religion being behind it. Christmas tree is called New Year tree, Russian version of Santa Claus comes on the New Year night instead of Christmas eve. People give presents, eat a lot and celebrate pretty much the same way.

But living in a country where Christmas is one of the most important holidays makes me follow the local traditions and celebrate with everybody the way they do it. So we went to Ylläs last Saturday and came back today. I'm back with a bottle of Glen Parker Single Malt Scotch Whisky, a bottle of Absolut Disco Limited Edition Vodka, Leatherman Multi-Tool and 800 grams of Fazer chocolate sweets. Nice. I'll have something to do before the school starts in the middle of January. :)

On Sunday I went to slopes to snowboard and it was no good. Lack of snow felt even in Ylläs. Slopes were icy and hard. I hope this spring it will be better.

Esa & Ovidiu

Wednesday. Around 4 am. Ruxi's place.

Deluge

I changed my BitTorrent client from Azureus to Deluge and I am quite happy about that. Python with GTK works way faster than Java with SWT and loads my poor little CPU way less. The features are sufficient, it has everything you might need from a BitTorrent client. I was surprised that Deluge installed by yum from Fedora repository didn't work. It started few times successfully but most of the time it didn't start at all or was just showing empty windows and not responding. Removing the package and building it from the source helped.

Courses

I'm done with Embedded Systems Project and Advanced Java Programming. Java was piece of cake to make and Embedded Systems Project's product didn't quite work but at least we tried. Digital Filtering and Advanced Finnish are left and I'm on a holiday till next year.

FreeBSD

I tried it few years ago and I didn't like it that much then. It was a bit different from Linux I am used to and quite unfriendly. I gave it another try and seems like it's staying. It's up and running and running quite well. I can even feel the vibes of real Unix heritage and reliability. Just took some time and patience to read the handbook and everything became pretty clear. I was surprised how easy it was to rebuild the whole base system including kernel from cvs just by few commands. Gentoo Linux is built from sources also but it's not as easy and I didn't like it that much. I'm more into rpm-based. Maybe because of my lazy nature though having little troubles might be too boring sometimes. Deploying a mail server will make me busy for awhile as I tried once on my Linux box and I didn't succeed. Everything seemed right but I still couldn't receive mail. I guess I screwed up MX record in DynDNS making the entry pointing to an IP address. This time I'll take my previous mistakes into consideration.

Teamwork Sucks. Sometimes.

I couldn't believe my eyes when teacher showed us presentations timetable in which each person was assigned with a separate time to hold a project presentation. "Do we have to make separate presentations?" I asked the teacher. "Yes, you do" he answered. Then I couldn't believe my ears but it was true. What about the team work? Team spirit? This is something they praise so much in this school. "Lerning by doing" is considered the most efficient method and the "doing" part is supposed to be done in teams and everybody's graded on everybody's performance and everybody is learning and everybody is happy.

But not this time. And I'm quite happy about it. I'd prefer to be graded for my skills and my own contribution as there are freeriders and they will always be. I know it will be different in real working life when work is carried out in teams but the level of teammates' skills will be surely way higher than here in school. Sometimes it seems that most of the students aren't that interested but I doubt that non-interested person will pursue a career in the field he's not interested or not good in. I'm really wondering sometimes why did they even start studying here. But it's their business. Not mine. But why should I suffer?

Loafing Again

Another Sunday and once again I'm sitting at home alone and loafing. Though watching Mythbusters can be considered self-development but it's more entertaining than educating. I remember school course of physics quite well anyway and physics is what all those myths are about. I'd better read something. Or eat. Or eat and then read.

Liver, I'm Sorry

Forgive me, liver, for Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. I hope I didn't hurt you that badly. I promise it won't happen tonight. I'm not going to drink and I'm not going out.

Finnish Independence Day

Saturday

Me, Masha and some Asian dude.

Ounasvaara

Winter came and we went to Rovaniemi to snowboard in Ounasvaara. It wasn't that impressive but it's the most available one. Pullinki is closed and I'm not sure whether it will be opened this season at all. Ylläs is too far and Kalli is shit. It would be way better if I wouldn't have to drive almost two hours there and almost two hours back on the road full of police cameras but without any light on most part of it but it's the bast I can have right now. This Christmas I'll spend in Ylläs.

Password Generator

Instead of finding ready solution I made one myself. Just for fun because I was bored. Yes, I have life and I did have it today. Just took a little break for awhile. It's pretty simple but platform-independent. Written in Java. Grab the jar if you need. If double clicking it doesn't work try java -jar PassGen.jar in console.

Wishlist

When I'm gonna have some spare hundred thousands euros or somebody would like to donate some hundred thousands euros to me I'm definitely gonna buy all these or the up-to-date versions if these become old. I hope it won't take me too long to become a billionaire. :)

i-Mate Ultimate 7150

Quite an advanced communicator with 520MHz processor inside, VGA screen, QWERTY keyboard, two cameras, FM radio, TV out and WiMAX and HSDPA support. For all these features I can even stand Windows Mobile 6 it is running.

MacBook Pro

Thin and stylish with 2.6Ghz dual-core processor and 2GB of memory on board running Unix-based operating system which heavily borrows from BSD with all the standard Unix facilities available from the command line interface. Isn't it every geeks's dream?

Canon EOS 40D

Photography is something I've always wanted to pursue but I've never had a proper camera for that. I used to have Canon PowerShot S30 which wasn't that bad and had manual and several semi-automatic modes and even could take RAW pictures but this one is a way better anyway.

Sony PlayStation 3

I'm not that much into gaming and I've never been but I wouldn't mind having such to kill time sometimes or play some media. I can also install Linux which is officially supported.

BMW M6 Convertible

The quickest BMW ever produced with more than 500 horse powers under the hood with programmable engine power, gear transmission speed as well as Dynamic Stability Control and Electronic Damping Control. Who wouldn't want such?

Permanently here. Will be updated when I figure out something else.

Yoghurt And Spoons

Lack of clean spoons almost saved me from eating 400 grams of delicious gooseberry yoghurt this late. It didn't work mainly because I decided that I can actually wash one for such an occasion and I did. If I hadn't had any spoons at all or if I hadn't bought any yoghurt today this problem wouldn't have existed. But it does exist and I have something to do with it. One option is to throw away all my dishes but eating out might eventually become a problem. Another option is to throw away all the yoghurt I have but this is definitely something impossible. So I just shouldn't have bought it but I did buy. I even ate it already. No regrets. They don't work. I'll just have to deal with 360 extra calories in my body.

Farewell, Auto-Helander

I was officially told that there's no job for me in Auto-Helander anymore and I was told not to bother anyone asking for it. If there's anything I should contact Seppo who is kind of my new boss. I've been working for NTR-Finland for awhile already and nothing actually is gonna change for now. I just can't be sure that there will be a job for me after my schedule will change the next period. Part-time is not an option in NTR but this semester I had Monday and Friday completely free so I had a chance to work at least twice a week. But I'm afraid it's not gonna last for long. I really hope there will be some project for me in lab next February as I was promised. I don't wanna go back to sponger state.

Being Minority Again

I haven't felt this way since my first year in Finland. Those days I've been hanging out mainly with Finns and I didn't speak Finnish at all. And as soon as there was more than one Finn around I was completely left out of conversation cause they were speaking Finnish and only Finnish.

Russians do the same. Germans do the same. Everybody does. But I know how bad it feels. I remember those days I spent on Malta. 99% Germans, 1% Polish and me. That's why nowadays when I notice Ruxi being left out I just start "dubbing" Russian speech, translating what people are saying right after them, or just start having a conversation in English with her.

Today we picked Andrei from Haparanda who came to visit Ruxi. It was him, Ruxi, Ovidiu and me. We bought some beers and huge family kebab pizza from Sweden and went to Ruxi's place. I was bored the whole evening and there was nobody willing to translate Romanian to me. I hope it won't be this way the whole week he's here.

P.S. I'm neither pissed at you guys nor upset. Don't worry.

Another Boring Sunday

It turned out the only thing I left my apartment for today was to eat out. I was hoping to take a walk in the forest or at least somewhere around but after eating nobody shared my wish anymore so I just had to walk back home as I don’t find it very exciting to have a walk alone. I need somebody to share the excitement about the snowflakes falling from the sky and sparkling on the ground, about the crackle fresh snow makes when you walk on it, about the wind and the frosty feeling on your face. I hate vegetating at home.

Smarty Template Engine

Instead of reinventing the wheel I decided to check the existing solutions and came across Smarty, a free web template engine written in PHP. It is exactly the framework I had in mind and already started to develop myself so I just switched to it.

Basically web-development can be divided into two parts: actual programming (database access, data processing etc.) and web-design (interface, data presentation, page make up etc.). Program code generates the content and template engine is responsible for its presentation. This way separation of concerns can be easily achieved.

Features available are quite impressive:

• Caching
• Compiling
• Variable modifiers
• Template functions
• Control structures
• Loops
• Filters
• Resources
• Plug-ins
• Add-ons
• Debugging
  

Everything you might need developing templates. This is how it works. This chunk of code I wrote is outputting the parsed feed posts:

{foreach from=$posts key=id item=post}
 <h1>
 {$post.title}<br />
 {if $lang == 'en'}
  {atom_convert_date date=$post.published}
 {else}
  {rss_convert_date date=$post.pubdate}
 {/if}
 </h1>
 <div class="post">
  {if $lang == "en"}
   {$post.atom_content}
  {else}
   {$post.description}
  {/if}
  <div class="comments">
   {if $lang == "en"}
    <a href="{$post.link}" target="_blank">
    {blogger_comments_number comments=$post.replies_title}
    </a>
   {else}
    <a href="{$post.link}" target="_blank">
    Комментарии
    </a>
   {/if}
  </div>
 </div>
{/foreach}

Variable $posts is assigned with parsed feed object which can be either parsed RSS feed of my Russian blog or parsed Atom feed of my English blog. I defined three custom template functions: atom_convert_date, rss_convert_date and blogger_comments_number to parse the dates and number of comments supplied in the feeds. The code is included to the page skeleton using {include file=$include} statement where $include variable indicates whether parsed feed or just text should be included. The whole page is generated the following way:

$template = new DmitryFi();

$template->assign('lang', $lang);
$template->assign('title', $title);
$template->assign('feed', $feed);
$template->assign('balloon', 'Have a job to offer?<br/>Check my <a href="/cv.xhtml">CV</a>!');
$template->assign('label', $label);

if($posts = @fetch_rss($feed['url']))
{
 $template->assign('include', 'feed.tpl');
 $template->assign('posts', $posts->items);
}
else
{
 $template->assign('include', 'text.tpl');
 $template->assign('text', 'Unable to parse the feed. Please try again later.');
}

$template->display(TEMPLATE.'.tpl');

The result is compiled and stored increasing the performance significantly next time the page is requested.

Alko Strike

The only source of alcohol in Finland is on strike. I guess we have three options left. Here they are:

• Go to Sweeden to Systembolaget
• Be contenet with beer and cider
• Quit drinking and partying

The cheapest one is the last one but are we gonna be able to cope with this depressing environment with the main antidote being taken away?

New Layout

Here it is! Welcome the new layout! I've rewritten the style sheet from scratch taking a different approach this time and improved the layout fixing some minor bugs and making some stuff simpler. I got tired of Family Guy and switched to South Park. And I like blue color much more than red. PHP source code and template engine are next to be improved and enhanced.

Snowing

I had to dig it out twice today.

Jokela Massacre

I thought this happens just in States. Obviously not. This text was in guy's YouTube profile:

Sturmgeist89
Name: Pekka-Eric Auvinen
Age: 18
Male from Finland.

I am a cynical existentialist, antihuman humanist, antisocial socialdarwinist, realistic idealist and godlike atheist.

SI VIS PACEM, PARA BELLUM! JUSTITIA SUUM CUIQUE DISTRIBUIT! SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!

I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.

You might ask yourselves, why did I do this and what do I want. Well, most of you are too arrogant and closed-minded to understand... You will proprably say me that I am"insane", "crazy", "psychopath", "criminal" or crap like that. No, the truth is that I am just an animl, a human, an individual, a dissident.

I have had enough. I don't want to be part of this fucked up society. Like some other wise people have said in the past, human race is not worth fighting for or saving... only worth killing. But... When my enemies will run and hide in fear when mentioning my name... When the gangsters of the corrupted governments have been shot in the streets... When the rule of idioracy and the democratic system has been replaced with justice... When intelligent people are finally free and rule the society instead of the idiocratic rule of majority... In that great day of deliverance, you will know what I want.

Long live the revolution... revolution against the system, which enslaves not only the majority of weak-minded masses but also the small minority of strong-minded and intelligent individuals! If we want to live in a different world, we must act. We must rise against the enslaving, corrupted and totalitarian regimes and overthrow the tyrants, gangsters and the rule of idiocracy. I can't alone change much but hopefully my actions will inspire all the intelligent people of the world and start some sort of revolution against the current systems. The system discriminating naturality and justice, is my enemy. The people living in the world of delusion and supporting this system are my enemies.

I am ready to die for a cause I know is right, just and true... even if I would lose or the battle would be only remembered as evil... I will rather fight and die than live a long and unhappy life.

And remember that this is my war, my ideas and my plans. Don't blame anyone else for my actions than myself. Don't blame my parents or my friends. I told nobody about my plans and I always kept them inside my mind only. Don't blame the movies I see, the music I hear, the games I play or the books I read. No, they had nothing to do with this. This is my war: one man war against humanity, governments and weak-minded masses of the world! No mercy for the scum of the earth! HUMANITY IS OVERRATED! It's time to put NATURAL SELECTION & SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST back on tracks!

Mum, WiFi, Insomnia

Mum has non-malignant growth and went through some surgery already and receives some treatment now. Nothing good about that but at least it's much better than malignant growth which was suspected which tends to relapse and is the way more dangerous and quite fatal.

And I finally got that Lappia certificate from IT support and installed to my Windows Mobile based PDA. I had some difficulties installing it as Windows Mobile didn't want to open files with .crt extension. Changing it to .cer helped. I configured PEAP and now I have wireless network all around the school.

Once again I cannot sleep. I shouldn't have taken that nap after school. I slept for about two hours and now don't feel sleepy at all. I should stop taking naps. They make no good to my day regimen.

Mio DigiWalker C220

I've been driving around with this gadget for awhile and my verdict is that it sucks. The device itself is not that bad but without proper maps it's just a useless piece of crap. The maps seem to be quite out of date. It doesn't have a roundabout built couple of years ago and it takes me to roads which don't exist for something like 5 years already. There's no update available and it won't be in the nearest future as the producer claims that the maps are from the January of this year. Definitely not.

Pedestrian Crossing

Just a regular pedestrian crossing on one of the streets of Kemi ending with a ditch and a light pole. Very practical. We also have a roundabout with missing roads which they didn't have money to build. I should take a picture of that one also.

Huttunen

This is Huttunen and me next to him with weird hair and face expression. I used to rent him and now he's for sale. The more I look at this picture the more I want to buy him. This horse-buying fever is contagious! Damn it.

Saturday

Thursday high, Friday drunk. What's gonna be tonight? Luckily, Alko, the only source of alcohol in Finland thanks to the state monopoly, is closed today due to some very special day for Finns during which they should visit the graves of the dead. What is that to do with shops? I have no idea myself. But we're in Finland where everything being closed doesn't surprise me anymore.

RFID Timer

Competitor passes the first reader, ID is read, first board tells the second one to start counting time. Competitor passes the second reader, ID is read, second boards tells the PC the time and ID which are stored in database. Pretty simple.

School Stuff

Embedded Systems and Real-Time Programming are done and surely passed with a quite high grade I think. Let's see when they are gonna put them in WinhaWille. Statistics and Coding Theory is passed also without any troubles. I think so. Embedded Systems Project continues as well as Advanced Java which I'm still participating but usually not present at as my software is ready since September and just requires proper documentation and presentation. Now we continue Digital Signal Processing by starting Digital Filtering course. Seems quite interesting. At least we have computers in a classroom, not just pen and paper.

Comments Number

I switched from RSS to Atom and modified Magpie's parser source code a little bit as it doesn't actually support many Atom features and link title is one of them. This attribute is just being ignored but this is the place where Blogger Atom feeds have number of comments stored. Three lines of code, and some small modifications to the page code and voilà, number of comments are seen on the page. The date is in different format now incomprehensible for regular humans but it's not a big deal parsing it.

Can It Get Even Worse? Surely It Can!

Today I told my mum that I’m sick of my job and I’m thinking about quitting and turning into a sponger for awhile until a better opportunity will crop up but she told me really bad news. I think this is the worst one I was ever told. Nobody ever died in my family except my great-grandmother when I was seven which I don’t remember that well and my father’s aunt last spring which I wasn’t close to at all. And my mum told me that doctors suspect she has cancer and asked me not to quit this job until I have another one because it’s gonna take hell a lot of money and being a sponger is not an option right now. I was driving home from work and I couldn’t stop tears coming. I started to really fear for her and I still do. She’s gonna know for sure on the 6th of November. I hope everything is gonna be alright with her.

Friday

The rest are in my album at Flickr.

Finnish Advertisement

Click to zoom.

Tuna Junkie

And I still can't quit tuna. For three days I've been eating tuna tortillas which are absolutely amazingly delicious and I will eat them tomorrow. My condition scares me. How to treat tuna addiction? What if I get an overdose and die? I don't wanna be a tuna junkie! Somebody save me!

Easy Geotagging

This week I'm going around Lapland with a truck, GPS-navigator and Seppo picking old car accumulators which we put in special containers and send to Germany for recycling. I've been going around, watching landscapes, maps on GPS-navigator and thinking a lot cause it's the only useful to do while going from one place to another as it takes most of the time. I was thinking it would be nice to have a camera with me as there's really something to take pictures of. It might be boring but still picturesque. Omg, I know such a word! And I was thinking about geotagging, placing the pictures on map where they've been taken, particularly about that on on Flickr. And I was thinking that using a GPS-navigator I can put them on a map quite precisely. And suddenly a wonderful idea came to me!

Alex has a camera with Wi-Fi which is quite useless. He never uses Wi-Fi. Why not to make a camera with GPS? I would surely use it. It could store coordinates in EXIF and services like Flickr could place the photos on a map automatically. Travelers would love it. I guess. At least I would love it for sure. Make the community love the product or create a community around it and it will be successful. You can easily keep track of places you've visited and remember what you've seen there.

I shared the idea with Ruxi. She needs something for Business Enterprise Project. I hope when she's gonna go to Hawaii she's gonna take me with her.

Somebody To Blame

It didn't actually quite work out. Instead of feeling cozy and safe in a caterpillar's cocoon I had some kind of claustrophobic attack and just couldn't breath. It's all YOUR fault!

I'm Being Avoided

One just doesn't answer. The other just went to sleep as soon as I said "hi". Fuck it. I don't care. I'll wrap myself into a warm blanket tight enough to feel myself a caterpillar turning into a butterfly and dissolve in my own little caterpillar world where the only thing I care is about is how wonderful will I be when I'll be free the next morning being a butterfly.

Orbital

— Mum, I wanna pierce my nipples.
— Go on, do it.

It was last May in Thailand where we went together. I was quite surprised to get such an answer cause she was totally disapproving my both ears being pierced though last summer when I was visiting my home town she wasn't complaining that much. I had the idea to pierce my nipples for awhile until I saw an orbital ear piercing and completely fallen in love with it from the first sight. Now I want this one.

I Want

I want to blog about something significant but my head is thoughtless and empty. I want my heart to burst with feelings but it's just beating in a regular rhythm. I want my belly to disappear but I can't quit eating. I want to cycle more but I can't quit driving a car. I want to draw but I just can't. I want so much but I can't so much. My life is sad.

28 Hour Day

Could be the perfect one for me.


http://xkcd.com/320/

Ballmer Peak

If I come from a night club and start programming it means I'm on the Ballmer Peak. =)

http://xkcd.com/323/

Pidgin-Audacious

This is how it looks like.


Don't get confused by Winamp skin. It is Audacious.

Less Dirty Using Dbus

Unfortunately, Audacious doesn't support dbus yet which will be supported in the upcoming 1.4. That's why audtool has to be used.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import dbus
import time
import commands

try:
   purpleObject = dbus.SessionBus().get_object("im.pidgin.purple.PurpleService", \
   "/im/pidgin/purple/PurpleObject")
   purple = dbus.Interface(purpleObject, \
   "im.pidgin.purple.PurpleInterface")
except dbus.exceptions.DBusException:
   print "Unable to connect to Pidgin! Make sure it is running."
   exit(1)

class Track:
   __message = ""
   def setMessage(self, message):
         currentStatus = purple.PurpleSavedstatusGetCurrent()
         currentStatusType = purple.PurpleSavedstatusGetType(currentStatus)
         currentStatusId = purple.PurplePrimitiveGetIdFromType(currentStatusType)
         accounts = purple.PurpleAccountsGetAllActive()
         saved = purple.PurpleSavedstatusNew("", currentStatusType)
         purple.PurpleSavedstatusSetMessage(saved, message)
         purple.PurpleSavedstatusActivate(saved)

   def update(self):
      if commands.getoutput('audtool playback-status') == 'playing':
         artist = commands.getoutput('audtool current-song-tuple-data performer')
         title = commands.getoutput('audtool current-song-tuple-data track_name')
         message = artist + " - " + title
      else:
         message = ""
      if self.__message != message:
         self.__message = message
         self.setMessage(message)

track = Track()

while True:
   time.sleep(1)
   track.update()

Hail Tuna & Pidgin

Yes, tuna! My tuna posts made Ruxi buy tuna which she hates and eat it. Tuna helps me to influence people.

Btw, do you know a way to put track title from Audacious to Pidgin status message? I do! Quick and dirty but works for me.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
import time
import commands

def update():
   status = commands.getoutput('audtool playback-status')
   if status == 'playing':
      artist = commands.getoutput('audtool current-song-tuple-data performer')
      title = commands.getoutput('audtool current-song-tuple-data track_name')
      os.system('purple-remote "setstatus?status=available&message=' \
      + artist + ' - ' + title + '"')
   else:
      os.system('purple-remote "setstatus?status=available&message="')

while True:
   time.sleep(5)
   update()

Tuna Again

Omg! I'm turning into a tuna junkie! I'm eating tuna again. There's something really weird going on with me. I have to refill my supplies.

Tuna

This morning I had a terrible craving for tuna. It's so not me. I hardly ever eat in the morning. A cup of coffee and I'm done. I feel too sick for anything else. But this morning after sleeping for only five hours I made two toasts, opened a can of tuna and put its contents on the toasts. And ate them with great pleasure. What's going on with me?

Here It Is

I Did It!

I was too focused on the problem of rising the oscillator frequency and making both serial interface and LCD screen work that I completely forgot that I can just lower the baud rate of the RFID scanner. I did and now it works perfectly fine! Video is coming soon.

Some Complaints

I'm completely stuck with the board I'm working with, microcontroller's internal oscillator, serial interface with RFID scanner connected to it and external memory interface with LCD display. It's either scanner or display because if I make oscillator frequency 1 MHz the serial interface error rate for the baud rate I need is too high and 8 MHz is just the right frequency for the serial interface but LCD is too slow for that and doesn't work at all, even with the wait state enabled. And the problem is that I need them both! And the worst thing is that in response to my questions I was just sent to read the fucking data sheet with my questions remaining unanswered. I hate such method of teaching. I agree that it's good to figure out stuff yourself without getting ready solutions but there should be a certain limit for that. I don't want to give up but I doubt that I'm gonna figure out some solution myself this time.

CarFix

The work they've done is definitely not worth 160€ spent but it was worth to make sure that our car care is the best in the area. So I took the Opel to Keminmaa to CarFix, to our main competitors. They make customers pay through the nose! One hundred sixty euros for washing, polishing and basic inside cleaning! No engine or textile washing included. And they didn't even do what they were supposed to! We do car care starting from 96€ for the basic program which is much more than they did.


So what did I get for 160€? Seats covered with dust and hair. Their vacuum cleaner never touched them. They take additional 70€ for washing the textile but for those 60€ for inside cleaning they could at least vacuum them! Not in CarFix. They didn't open the trunk either which is still covered with dust. Ten minutes worth customer's satisfaction. Not in CarFix. So for 60€ they washed the rugs, vacuumed under them and left some stains on the panels. Is it worth 60€? I don't think so.

The frame under the doors was quite dirty before and became even worse. It was covered with stains and they added quite a thick layer of polishing dust. It's hard not to notice such so they just didn't bother to clean it. All the gaps outside are filled with dust and polishing paste leftovers. They didn't bother to clean them either. Bumpers seems untouched and it's still dirty around the gas tank cover. Too low to bend to wash and polish probably. The windows weren't just left dirty. They were covered with stains after polishing and waxing. They didn't bother to clean even them. Is it worth 100€? I don't think so.

New Stuff

New challenges. Pure hardware, no operating systems. Seems to be fun!

New shoes. Not planned but bought anyways. Luckily I like them because usually I start to feel sorry after a spontaneous purchase especially when I'm being pushed. But this was completely my decision.

New rush on my chest. What the hell is this? Maybe I'm panicking without a reason as it's quite small and not that bothering but anyways I'm seeing doctor in a couple of weeks. I guess it's a good idea to ask though I don't expect much of Finnish health care as I got disappointed several times already.

New acquaintances thanks to last Saturday. Seems like it's worth coming to party to Tornio some other day again.

New courses. New project.