A GEEK'S DIARY

Sun, Nov 26

<23:53> Basically finished the polymer simulation. Two nights and an afternoon it took. The hardest/most interesting part was when I realized a one-dimensional array in FORTRAN is actually a row vector - in real life, vectors are usually columns. Naturally there's been hard time taming the NAG libraries and optimizing the engine.

Tonight we had another visit to Eraina (last one was on Friday :-), then on to Mitre. There was Lauri's friend Johanna and some friends of her, somehow the discussions turned into politics because of what these people were studying.. A nice ending for the weekend, though, and there's still a bit of time to work. Yeah right.

Wed, Nov 22

<13:54> A fun bit from today's Relativistic Electrodynamics lecture: At the beginning of the century Rutherford, then a research student at Cavendish, invented a magnetic dipole aerial (absolute shit by today's standards). The research team held a world record of radio transmission distance: from Great St. Mary's to the Observatories, two miles or so. Rutherford considered the invention so significant that he wanted to patent the transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves, but failed to convince investors of its importance. Imagine if he had succeeded. The Cavendish would be filthy rich by now... or perhaps someone would have discovered an alternative?

Mon, Nov 20

<21:20> Lots of physics work these days. What a surprise near the end of term. Incidentally, the computing project is the most fun I've had with physics this year. Must be because of 'instant gratification' from getting apparently awesome results in short time. I hacked the main engine of the polymer entropy simulation last night in a couple of hours. Fortran is not the nicest of languages, but heck, I'm used to high-level toys like Python and PHP (no offense;-). A bit like C actually, but simpler, and probably second only to assembler in speed. Fortunately there's a huge number of libraries for math stuff like linear regression.

Another late night hack was on Saturday night when Rend told that anything would help her with this week's Varsity Science, so I pieced together something about curved spaces and high dimensions. Let's see how much of it will be left on print...

Thu, Nov 16

<19:55> It's the penultimate week of the term, maybe I should REALLY start working. Feeling so lazy all the time, still not recovered from the relaxed atmosphere of the summer work. And how come I feel so lonely with all these friends around? Something wrong with the meditation practice (as if I have any).

Willow started hiccuping a bit, so I decided to add some swap space. And I thought 160MB was a lot of RAM, but apparently when you've got four different unstable browsers leaking memory, not. Funny, the procedure didn't quite have the same old feeling of rebooting etc: just created a suitably sized file, then mkswap'ed the file, and Swapon! it works.

Wed, Nov 15

<18:01> After trying out a plethora of different browsers, the best one so far seems to be Galeon. I know I was supposed to do work today ... .. .

Sat, Nov 11

<04:47> Fun hacking at Lauri's. The PLIP line was a positive surprise: we used a parallel port link for TCP/IP between Willow and Zany. About 50kBps, good enough for Emacs in X. Bluesci should work a bit better now.

Thu, Nov 9

<22:37> The fifth week high just whooshed by and workload keeps accumulating. I just returned from a physics lecture! My DoS, a particle physicist, talked for the Queens' NatSci society about measurement trouble with the verification of electroweak and Higgs theories, and the free wine was a good excuse for attending.

Tue, Nov 7

<23:45> Last night was one of those nights again. Got about an hour of sleep before lectures. But teaching HTML and incompatibility resolutions take time, m'kay?

Mon, Nov 6

<20:05> Strange.. for some reason I haven't mentioned the talk I went to see on Saturday. Vint Cerf, the designer of TCP/IP gave an interesting account on the past, present and future of the Net. Oh, now I remember. I've only just posted the full story to bluesci.

Sun, Nov 5

<00:07> Currently running Linux 2.4.0-test10... lame.. Linus is just being overconfident with his numbering system. prkl. Sound and network don't work so it's pretty useless now. But yes. I just finished a phone call and it says on the display: Last call: 1:55:17. I could have gone there to see her just as well...

Sat, Nov 4

<02:13>
$ Admission to Foundation Scholarship #strange ceremony in Latin at the chapel
$ Foundation dinner #so posh. Fruits & port at old hall afterwards.
$ Dr. Walker showing us the crypt and the tower #k3w1

IMHO pretty superficial stuff. But the crypt and tower were ~nice. Drinks with a couple of guys at my place afterwards.

Fri, Nov 3

<02:11> A great day. Managed to do some solid state problems, sort out my DJ for tomorrow's Foundation Dinner (we'll be wearing gowns so why bother:-), gym exercise went well. In the evening there was a nice Physics Society lecture on q.mech in semiconductors in room temp. Then Lauri and I decided to have some excellent Erainan pizza, so what if we'd had dinner already ;-). I've just found a copy of the CD I 'lost' earlier this year (lent it to a friend... ... ... ... ) which is nice. Check this site for the music.

<18:25> Funny. I just noticed my short summary/article had magically found its way to print, on Varsity. Thanks a lot, Rend. ;-)

Wed, Nov 1

<03:17> Oh wow. Mindfulness of Breathing really did it this Tuesday. I really broke through something. Energies filled my body and I was on the verge of bursting to laughter. Amazing. Then on to Rend's place with Lauri and Don, besides a bit of bluesci haben wir etwas Glühwein getrunken. Which was nice.

<03:22> UF progress to 4 June 2000.

<22:14> Trying to do some work. Thermal supervision in the afternoon was OK, now it's solid state which is quite nice actually. Gotta keep reminding myself why this is useful: it took some s.s. physicists to invent the transistor and the IC.

Also, finished the productivity exercise. Well, at least updated the process, from now on it's only one strip per day. Phew. { geek_factor++; }

<22:19> BTW I admit I was bloody tired this morning. Heck, \sqrt(-1) think I { while(computing_lecture) sleep(); } but otherwise it's been a fine day with some productivity for a \delta.

<22:22> Never mind the weird code fragments. I'm just excited about my UK keyboard, its sensibility with punctuation marks. The Finnish one is horrible for hacking.

Tue, Oct 31

<09:13> My working motivation seems to be gone. In particular, thermodynamics feels truly repulsive. I'm working on a productivity exercise which involves reading all User Friendly cartoons up to date. There's a strip for every day since November 1997, so far I've progressed to January 2000.

Sun, Oct 29

<17:05> A couple of days of 'downtime' which feels just natural after all the work. Then last night I was brought back to life when Rend called. We had some mulled wine (a bit like glögi in Finland:-) and of course discussed the future of bluesci. It was just wonderful.

Fri, Oct 27

<01:42> www.bluesci.com is now more or less official. Just posted my first article. Remember the site is always under substantial development. And no, it's not a huge commercial eBiz despite the dot com. It just sounds better that way. Must admit it's been pretty fast, after all it started on 13/10 when I sent Rend an email about the definition of hackers and crackers. It's been totally k3w1, looking forward for even more. And whatever happens, it's been fun. Now here is a semicolon, there's a hyphen and then a right bracket, what is the symbol they make up together?

Wed, Oct 25

<04:59> Wouldn't exactly use the h-word, but it's related to the blue thing. The three of us (~ && Lauri && Rend) finally got together to discuss the development of the site. There's a lot to do in the future, now we only need a bit of tidying up the appearance et al. But honestly, TeknoHog hates to see R-A. Paju (the physics student) suffer from the extra work. They're just glad the phy.work hasn't really started ... ;-}

Sun, Oct 22

<04:58> More hacking. Getting closer. But the weekdays are coming, there won't be a good hacking night until next weekend. Maybe some day...

Sat, Oct 21

<03:10> Sauna, dinner at Eraina, a pint. Id est Friday. But it gets better than the usual Scandinavian tradition. As I and Lauri were left alone, we started hacking on the bluesci project. Well, he did most of the actual hacking as he knows some PHP. This of course required some Pringles and Pepsi to work out, but we did great progress.

BTW, as I'd been abstaining from caffeine for about a month, I expected weird effects from the liter or so of a cola, but there wasn't much to be noticed. Perhaps it's just a psychological effect..

<03:49> ... that I'm awake at this time of day. But then again, I ain't no psychologist. In the end it makes no difference. It's been fun and I've got no lectures tomorrow so I don't mind.

Thu, Oct 19

<16:46> Had to kill boa (the web server, not an innocent reptile). Testing the 'bluesci' system forced me to go mainstream with Apache, since it uses thatware on PHP and MySQL.

But mainstream is good. Linux is mainstream. It's easier to get things done when there are de facto standards whereby you can exchange stuff between different systems. Now if I could port some quantum mechanics into my head, with all this fancy www biz taking time :-/

Wed, Oct 18

<21:49> Joined Rend at C.U. Radio for a short science/tech talk, including the announcement of our new project. And since she's bought the domain, I might as well make le grande revelation: www.bluesci.com. K3w7 or what? 8-]

Tue, Oct 17

<17:16> Some additional comments on the last few days:

After the ScanSoc party on Friday, then a slightly more civilized dinner with some Finns (how can you stay civilized with Finns?-) on Saturday, and the Sunday night experience, it's been one heck of a weekend. Now that's what I call student life. Perhaps one of the best moments was walking to Cavendish on Monday morning after no sleep. It rained all the morning, even when walking back. There's nothing like a refreshing cold shower.

Mon, Oct 16

<07:39> A taste of life

Some 13 hours ago I went to Clowns Cafe to meet Rend. I just got home.

Discussed business. Perhaps you'll hear later of the new web service for Cambridge people we're creating. This went on until about 11pm when some friends of hers came over, and we joined them for a cruise on a convertible. That was definitely fun, though it was mainly about searching for a petrol station, we couldn't find any one open except somewhere far away... After the ride we found a totally k3w1 domain for the site. Also talked A LOT about *isms and stuff. Which was nice.

Sat, Oct 14

<11:43> Something about last night. Weird things were expected, as it was full moon and Friday 13 October (ten thirteen == birthday of Chris Carter's wife;). After doing my Gym training I joined Reima and Lauri for a talk (Score: +5, Interesting) on modern espionage by Duncan Campbell. After a thorough insight into the X-files of the real world, we were off to Scandinavian Society's squash. Free drinks of course, and lots of new acquaintances, like a certain Norwegian who excelled at talking bullshit. Oh well.

Fri, Oct 13

<00:32> Cut out the cpu hogging of the matrix thing: I had a self-hacked sleep() function, after replacing that with the built-in one, it works perfectly. How silly of me. PRKL. Well, at least I don't have to rewrite it in C!

Thu, Oct 12

<00:51> First steps to coding in FORTRAN. As a part of the physics course, not just for fun. Also did some pure hacking: 'matrix' code for console in Python/curses. The only problem is the lack of color in the module. Trying to update Python: in fact, writing this script with py1.6 but it just happens that the curses module of 1.6 fails.

<23:22> Downloaded Python 2.0 Release Candidate 1 (i.e. gamma). Now the curses works perfectly with colors. Which makes my matrix code quite k<three>w<one>.

Tue, Oct 10

<22:44> The theoretical physics course started today. The guy Terentjev is a gr8 lecturer. Did quite a bit of Lagrangian & Hamiltonian stuff. Also, while we had an hour to spend between lectures, I logged in to Willow from the department. That was fun, until the NT (running "Exceed" X server) started whining about virtual memory and the like.

The Buddhist meditation class started in the evening. Not too many new people around :(. But it was nice to see the regular guys and to meditate with the group.

Mon, Oct 9

<11:48> Report in frozen state, handed in to the department. Looks like it's time to start actual term time work: QM, Thermo, Solid state. Oh yeah, and Computational physics, which I can do equally well at Cavendish or @ /home, so which one should I choose?

Fri, Oct 6

<00:29> Free punch at the PhySoc squash. Yum. Then on to a pub. Decided to withdraw and do some writing. The report should be ready by Monday, and there's more work to come from the actual physics courses which started today. Solid state and thermodynamics (sadistical mechanics;) were OK. Practically everyone hates thermo, so the lecturer, obviously an American, was being particularly zealous about the absol00tly gr8 subject he used to hate as well. I know it would be important for other physics too, but fact is it's

"Boooring" -- Eric Cartman

<12:00> Got the UNIX account on Thor. This means these pages will be mirrored here. However, I'll probably use Willow as much as possible. But Thor will provide the mirror necessary for holidays.

The real reason for the account is the computational physics course. We'll be learning FORTRAN which should be k3w1. Also, ssh with X works from Willow (of course;) so I might do the work at /home instead of spending afternoons at Cavendish. :)

Tue, Oct 3

<20:31> Phew. A nice afternoon at the societies fair, giving out leaflets of the meditation class with Sundara. Also checked out the Yoga society. Later joined Sundara and his community for an excellent Mexican meal made by Juan. Can't remember what it was called but oh.. the chili.. mmm.

Sat, Sep 30

<00:58> $ cd /home; This two-room set is pretty k3w1 compared to previous ones. Plus, at the 3rd, top floor (i.e. penthouse;) physical exercise is guaranteed. It truly feels like home again, also like nothing's changed in the cosy little Cambridge. Just got a vegeburger at Gardie's. Mmm. Oh btw now that I finally got two rooms it may be possible to do intensive processes (which turn the laptop's fan on) and sleep() in true multitasking. Which is nice -19.

Thu, Sep 28

<00:20> Trying to get on with packing. After just having a couple of hours of deep discussions. Why did I have to meet that wonderful person just before I'm off to Britain? :-/

<16:04> At about 2 am I got fed up with packing and started reading a novel I'd bought recently: Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi, by Johanna Sinisalo. Then, at 4:26 I noticed it's finished. Must have been a great book. It's been a long time since I got so immersed into a novel. The narrative style verges on perfection. The story is the most credible/realistic SF I've ever come across. OK, a minor point though: slightly too predictable a plot at some stages. Anyway, warmest recommendations for this book which I noticed mainly because its loose basis in the Finnish song Päivänsäde ja menninkäinen (The sunbeam and the goblin) which I happen to like a lot. My expectations were transcended indeed. (Score: +5, Troll) B-]

Sat, Sep 23

<20:21> Installed some nifty fonts, including M$ Web fonts ;].

<20:23> Oh, btw it's my birthday today. We already did some celebration last night. Didn't drink that much because of someone who abstained from C₂H₅OH altogether, also because we had some profound conversations about physics, philosophy and the like. Which was nice. 8-)

Fri, Sep 22

<20:20> Finished the report, as well as work. A posh lunch offered by the company. Back @cam in one more week!

Mon, Sep 18

<15:29> Finishing off the main project at work. Just a few days left, recalling the joys of writing long reports. Resorted back to 2.2.16, as audio CDs weren't played well.. well well.

<19:03> OK.. I decided to "Get Back" (a gr8 song by the Beatles:) to 2.2.17 simply because of a little bit of hack value and 2 more bogomips for my precious work. And now the audio CDs work again. Hmmm. btw, though xdvi|gs|gv does some terrible dithering with high-color images, I realized it's not a limitation in .ps format - checked with GIMP. 8)

Tue, Sep 5

<21:55> The divine beacon of /. has guided me towards Colonel Dot-Org and 2.2.17. Want a reason? here and there. Looks and sounds like it works another tiny bit better than the previous one. "Out of small things, perfection is made up. And perfection is not a small thing." -- Michelangelo

A new Finnish word I've learned caught during the last few weeks at work: ranestella. There it's been denoting hardware hacking, in the sense of Q&D-ness and lack of comments. But it also carries a hint of doing serious, dirty work, so perhaps it's not apt for software. 8-}

Sun, Sep 3

<23:44> Theremin 1.1

Mon, Aug 28

<19:45> A nice weekend in Southern Finland, shopping at Tampere and nightlife at Helsinki. Didn't mind the actual traveling for a change, having spent much of the summer rather statically at Varkaus.

**** for a truly amazing minimalist psychological thriller called Cube. Just a few tiny flaws apart a perfect film of its kind.

Sun, Aug 20

<01:51> Nice progress with the current 'hack' project at work. Hoping to get back to the main thing soon.

Saw the movie Ed Wood, featuring quite interesting background events of Plan 9. Somehow identified with the director.

Mon, Aug 14

<22:35> The new task goes on pretty well, though it now feels like a weekend of deep thought was wasted today. One of those units already operating in the States needs to be running in a fortnight, so we have to think of a Q&D hack. Oh well. Kinda feels like the Earth crew of Apollo 13 :-}

The weather is nice though. Scorchingly hot indeed. Which is good after days of heavy rain. `It never forgets to rain,' as my late grandfather used to put it.

Mon, Aug 7

<21:29> Arggh, another project supposed to multitask with the gadget thingie. I'm asked to debug a different measuring system, which I kindly accept, it being a real physicist's job to trace errors and reduce noise. I only wish I had paid a bit more attention in the Experimental Methods course.. ;-}

Aside from the work, Yoga is going extremely well. Advances so quick I'd have never believed. Today I invented Shoulderstand in Lotus! If only I could draw or paint, I've got this idea of a bear doing Lotus or some other advanced asana, its title would be 'Yogi Bear.' 8-]

Fri, Aug 4

<22:58> New troubles with the prototype, and new solutions. It's starting to feel like it would work some day. Doing some technical writing :] while waiting for new parts ...

Sun, Jul 30

<01:21> I thought I received an order from a military officer called Major Update concerning these pages. Only a bare minimum has been updated, and the frames and styles seemed OK as they were. However, there was and still is lots of work with the content. Feedback will be appreciated.

Thu, Jul 27

<19:42> Dunnit with the filter.

<19:43> Started brewing Scotch dark heavy ale :-P

Wed, Jul 26

<19:58> The first prorotype is ready, and it works (barely;). However, there's lots of R&D to do for the rest of the summer. Now I'm going to implement a filter to get rid of some noise.

Mon, Jul 17

<23:51> Spent the weekend fishing with old friends, the Mäkipaja family. What a relaxing interlude, though the work is getting progressively more interesting. Soon the first prototype is ready. The weather is a typical Finnish summer alternation of scorchingly hot sunlight and thunderstorm showers. Which is pretty cool. (pronounced a'la Butt-Head, so cannot be spelled `k3w1.' ;)

Wed, Jul 12

<18:36> Finally got my hands on some custom built parts, started to assemble the first prototype of my project. After two weeks of brainstorming it's starting to look it's for real.

The old 486 I've been trying to install Linux for a while now, is not feeling well. It's been formatting the 200MB HD for 22 hours now, the end of the disk is densely speckled with bad blocks :-(. Patience, patience.. :)

Wed, Jul 5

<14:18> Pretty lazy day at work, making use of the time by downloading stuff on my computer. Not nearly as good as my 10Mb at Queens' but better than the modem at home.. :-/

Sun, Jul 2

<20:03> The Hog Feast is over. My meat eating quota for the year has been fulfilled. It's also been excellent time with old friends, having deep discussions and enjoying the nature, sauna and swimming.

Oh, BTW I also celebrated my First in NatSci part IB. :-)

Thu, Jun 29

<21:34> Work going quite well. The week's been amazingly fast, which is good; I like the place and the work. My hands are itching to get started with the prototype. Also feeling a bit hack: installing Linux on my old laptop from the CD on this machine, using NFS thru PLIP. From tomorrow til Sunday it's Sikabileet 8-P.

Mon, Jun 26

<02:11> A couple of quiet days @home, recovering from the intense pardey time of Cambridge. Starting work tomorrow, that should be pretty k3wl, despite the early mornings :-}.

Thu, Jun 22

<03:36> Just came back from a pardeyy at Trinity Hall. Great event with free drinks and five different music platforms. The only thing to complain is what time it is now - feels like it ended a bit too early. Nevertheless, it's been excellent ending for a superlative year, for in thirteen hours cd /home/rp241 ;-]. Kind of farewell to some friends as well, but that's life :-/. Now, a thought I've had many many times this year after great happenings:

The world is a beautiful place.

Tue, Jun 20

<12:09> Yesterday evening: Scandinavian Society garden party with plenty of wine. Nice and cozy end-of-year meeting. Afterwards, dinner at Eraina (of course) and pints at Queens' while watching fireworks from other colleges' May Balls. Right now I'm trying to pack, so that everything's ready for tomorrow's final pardeying.

Mon, Jun 19

<00:35> Packing & related preparation (I'm leaving on Thursday) and applied gym physics in the afternoon. Right now Lauri is jolly well drunk. He's had an interesting day punting, and consuming half a whisky bottle. The only word that can aptly depict the situation is `bileet' (something like pardey (sic) ;) which the two of us had for a while, until Lauri felt he's had enough ;]. Looking forward to Wednesday and the Event.

Sat, Jun 17

<00:02> Quasi-eidetic report of the day: While sitting in Trinity Hall Fellows' Garden, sipping punch and eating a veggieburger, with the local stellar object radiating through diffraction apertures in the relatively condensed lumps of H₂O above, it finally felt like a worry-free summer holiday. Right now it's feeling like everything's perfect, having eaten and drunken well, and just listened through Verdi's Requiem which reminded me first of musical performances, and also of other great experiences of this academic year. Message over, with a sincere :-).

<13:50> In a few minutes I'm off to punting with some friends, finnish and probably other nationalities too. It's blazingly hot, something like +25 degrees. On a day like this it is important to keep the fluid balance of the body by consuming sufficient amounts of drinks.

<20:14> What an afternoon. The punting trip developed interesting occurrences, as Lauri, Rudi, Essi and Ulla tried out actually punting for the first time. Rudi managed to fall into the river Cam while punting, and Lauri jumped in just for fun. These happened on the way back, after a picnic on Grantchester Meadows. Naturally we all kept balancing the fluid budget of our bodies. Unfortunately I still don't feel I can punt, but gotta keep practicing! Now we're off to Eraina for a First Class pizza (with honours;). Yummy.

<23:20> The current emotional distillate of today resonates within Heisenbergian uncertainty limits with yesterday's. I should be less sunburnt because of a cunning decision to use a SPF10 sunscreen, and in a way today has been more funny than yesterday, but in the end it still feels great. What May Week in Cambridge should, indeed.

Fri, Jun 16

<21:37> Ohh. What a day. 8-] Started at the Physics Society garden party at Trinity Hall at 1pm, drinking steadily and taking advantage of the free food as well. There we met Matthias from Queens', he told us (me and Lauri) about the May Bumps, the intercollegiate rowing competition, so we decided to see some of that. The place was actually quite far away, we walked along the Cam for an hour or so to a little village, where we enjoyed wathing well trained ladies rowing. Then back to the city for a dinner, and we called it a day just a minute ago, for tomorrow it's punting with other Finns. Which is nice indeed.

Thu, Jun 15

<14:50> Yesterday 12 noon - 1 am: celebrating the end of exams. Lauri was the last one to fin[n]ish. Went to Sauna, then on to a pub and a garden party at Clare, later a nice Italian dinner at Bella Pasta. Now going for a walk to Grantchester..

<22:55> After that walk to Grantchester, went punting with some Buddhist friends. It was nice, I also tried the pole for the first time. After some good advice from the guys - you can actually use the pole as a rudder - it went on pretty well. Then on to CB2 for some tea, and that was basically a farewell to the guys. What an amazing year it's been!

<23:20> Just testing another feature of my what's up script: I'm actually writing the entry in the comfort of the 'nano' text editor, but the rest is automatic. Much easier to correct the text now. And it is a hack, of course.

Wed, Jun 14

<01:39> A useful update to the infamous sig hack: it now contains both the remote database hack and the good old sig recycler. Each time a sig is needed, it checks whether the database is accessible and decides which one to use.

Today (well yesterday by the date;) was the last meditation class of the year :-(

Tue, Jun 13

<12:06> Last night Hannu finished his final exams (theoretical physics :) and Lauri nearly finished his first year, so we enjoyed a couple of beers. Later on, Lauri gave me some French absinthe he considered 'orrible, and I couldn't but disagree. We also had a sip of good ol' salmiac spirit. Not exactly Old Janx Spirit but it worked.

<13:59> Received confirmation of the acceptance of my vacation internship as one of the Part II projects by the Physics department. Gonna skip one of the two theoretical courses - or maybe check out the lectures just for fun, with no pressure about the exams. B-]

<19:01> Great browser news: Arachne alpha release for Linux came out, as well as a new alpha of Opera. I'm really excited about Arachne, as it has the familiar look and feel of the DOS version, and it works. In fact I like it now even more, as I realize how it follows the unix philosophy of being simple and modular, hence so elegant.

However, there are some minor quirks:

• Needs to be run as root; SVGA server thing
• Remember to adjust /etc/vga/libvga.config, VESA seems to work well.
• Hogs about 85% of cpu time ;-(

Sun, Jun 11

<23:46> Just got back from a blast pardey weekend at Leicester. Tommi, my classmate from the IB, is studying physics (of course; what else? ;) there. To begin with, my visit started and ended with a pint in a pub, so perhaps that gives a good picture of what we did. But because the pubs close so damn early, we also enjoyed some good whisky at his place.

We managed to refresh some IB memories of hanging out in pubs, playing pool, and enjoying draught ales. Most of the tables we played pool on were red, which was some thing I'd never come across before :).

On Saturday we walked arout the city, with the occasional pub visits. Comparing to Cambridge, it is a large city but much less crowded - imagine roughly the same number of students there, or packed in our tiny old centre. That's really what I liked most about the city. And the beer was a bit cheaper as well. We even found some Wychwood ale.

We didn't quite make it through either night, staying awake with the aid of whisky and cider until 4am on Friday and 5:30am on Saturday nights. Yet this morning we felt a need of refreshment so we decided to walk to the sauna: about 4 miles, a nice morning stroll. Four was also the number of hours we spent in the sauna. That one also was a lot better than the one in Cambridge, we could actually toss löyly on the stove. That was one of the many times I remarked to him with something like 'lucky bastard' ;). And in Leicester they don't work a fraction of what we do; getting pissed and social life are higher priorities. Not surprisingly, Tommi has turned out to succeed well in comparison to others.

Fri, Jun 9

<00:52> Finally worked out how to set up a virtual X frame buffer to use RealPlayer for IP radio under console. After trying it out with a shell script, I realized the only possibility for a wrapper script is via Python 8-} and it enabled a crude address book as well.

Thu, Jun 8

<11:32> Yesterday evening turned out a nice mini pub crawl with Lauri. We managed to clear out a few things in physics/materials, which is good for his soon coming exams. The night ended with the excellent news: M$ -> M$.Apps & M$.OS ;-] Check out some pathetic videos of Gates at CNN.

<16:02> Updated to Linux 2.2.16. Apparently, an important security bug has been fixed. It shouldn't affect me as the only user of Willow, but the update has high pure hack value. 8-)

Wed, Jun 7

<01:44> The .sig hack has reached ridiculous measures. With the kind permission and advice from Lauri, as well as the MySQL module for Python, the sig quotes are no longer from a static file on my computer, but:

Every time I use a .signature, a new quote is fetched directly from Lauri's database (on his machine) of dadaistic sentences. Is this a hack or what? B-]

Tue, Jun 6

<23:19> Enjoying the state of not having to do work. I started reading Dale E. Graff's book on remote vision and other psi phenomena. He's a physicist so the treatment is well balanced, not overzealous or hypercritical. I'll try a nice evening of reading instead of deep hack mode. Really.

Mon, Jun 5

A nice Python hack after a while: the What's Up script now accepts several entries a day, putting them under the same heading. Using regular expressions.

Just testing the above.. ;-)

<00:26> A tiny addition to the above :)

<20:17> Applied physics, again! I missed the usual workout yesterday because of the walk, but that itself was a good substitute, at least for the legs. So today I trained the upper body.

Improving my .signature engine; Lauri suggested using a FIFO file for the .signature, so the generator would add a new .sig each time the email/news client reads the file. Neat. So that's how it works now. Also, the current quotes are from Lauri's silly database.

<22:30> Another test. Miraculously, joining the elements of a list into a single string is a bit faster with a built-in Python function than using a q&d 'for' loop, when there are O(10³) elements.. ;-/

Sun, Jun 4

You see already what's up, unless you're using a real men's text mode browser ;-}. Any more ideas on improving the clarity of these pages are welcome.

Updated Gnome; the new panel is much better, I've set it only 24px wide which is good for this laptop. Their installer r0x0rs, however, some day I may have to recompile the thing, simply for the geek factor..

Lauri suggested a walk to Grantchester, so off we went. The Green Man was a perfect little pub with a nice beer garden. Discussed a lot of physics there.

Sat, Jun 3

It's over now. Today I had relaxing afternoon coffee with Dharmasiddhi and Lauri. More than two weeks of pure relaxation in Cambridge. In fact it's my summer vacation, as I'll start working right away in Finland.

Fri, Jun 2

9:00 - 12:00 Mathematics [2]
\end{exams}

National Celebration Traditions Part IV B
13:00 - late

Applied Thermodynamics
Field Experiments in Organic Chemistry
Fluid Mechanics
Park Chemistry


Thu, Jun 1

9:00 - 12:00 Advanced Physics [3]

1 minute of downtime for the memory of Donald Davies, the inventor of packet switching communications, one example of which being d4 n37.

Wed, May 31

1:30 - 4:30 Advanced Physics [2]
This is starting to cause mild physical fatigue. Hope tomorrow goes well.
5:40 - 6:15 Applied Physics [n+1]
10:00 - 11:00 Dean's birthday; he's 17 again again :-)

Tue, May 30

1:30 - 4:30 Advanced Physics [1]
4:50 - 6:05 `Exam Tea' with the Dean

Mon, May 29

\begin{exams}
Natural Sciences Tripos Part I B
1:30 - 4:30 Mathematics [1]
5:40 - 6:15 Applied Physics [n] (sorry, can't remember how many times I've been at the gym.. ;)

Sat, May 27

Last night, another Finnish sauna evening. We had some excellent Wychwood ales, as well as traditional Finnish black salmiac booze. Yummy.

The previous night I was doing some physics that needed graph paper. I found this, changed the colors with the Gimp and printed. Also here are some log graph papers.

As you all diligent browsers of these pages have noticed, the minor thingies have been added at the bottom of each page. This was mainly because the theremin page got lots of hits via web searches, so the people would only see the page without frames. Now they know where they are and, hopefully, will also check the rest of these pages.. :-}

Fri, May 26

Last supervision today. Now it's time to prepare for the soon coming exams, and the best way to do that is via intense relaxation at the sauna and some rehydrative procedures thereafter. Maybe I'll check some crucial details/bookwork, but I try not to work too hard. Otherwise, work hardening would occur as the consequence of increasing dislocation density as Frank-Read sources (IIRC) reproduce those line defects by looping around the pinning impurities. Yeah.

Tue, May 23

<last|lecture> had a fun bit: the entanglement of spins which we'd learned before, applied to quantum teleportation, i.e. beaming up. The nice details are, you cannot beam things faster than light, and the input wavefunction is collapsed - you cannot clone things. Now I'm supposed to do a lot of work (the exams start next monday) but consider this: I've got five exams next week, something like a marathon. You don't prepare for a marathon by running one every day, do you?

Mon, May 22

South Park - bigger, longer & uncut. Perhaps just a long version of a typical good episode, except a bit more: computerized scenes of Hell were k3w1. A good laugh yes, but nothing more to ponder upon. Worth the £1.50 though.

Sun, May 21

cd /odd/bin
Welcome to Possogroenoe's Liquor Store!
There is a box here, loot it?
c - a hobgoblin (12).
That's 14 zorkmids for the hobgoblinns, sir!
cd /home
You quaff the hobgoblin.
The hobgoblin bites! The hobgoblin r0x0rs!
My, was that a yummy hobgoblin!
Go get that Hobgoblin.

Fri, May 19

Went to see "The Voice of the Buddha" at the Buddhist Centre. It was performed by the unusual mixture of a chamber orchestra, a chorus, narrators, solo singers, and a folk band. And it all worked well together. Basically, it was the story of the enlightenment of Buddha, on this date because it supposedly happened on the second full moon of May. Amazing it was. I almost got enlightened :-]

Thu, May 18

Minor linx updates/additions, in case you haven't checked. Physics? -Well, you know, the exams are approaching asymptotically and stress is proportional to strain. ;-}

Wed, May 17

Thanks to Lauri, some of my mp3s are now on a CD so I've got plenty of free disk space. Though there's so much work right now that I can't really enjoy it..

Tue, May 16

A blazingly hot day. Only later in the evening did I manage some work. Lauri started a mailing list for the Finns@Cam and I became the co-admin. Hope tomorrow is a bit more k3wl so it would be nice -19 to work.

Sat, May 13

Yesterday, once again, a Finnish Sauna evening. The talking elevator at the pools was funny. The night ended with two physicists, one theologist, and a bottle of Spanish brandy. No surprise, we got quite deep in discussions about Christianity, the paranormal, and getting one's fingers stuck on sandal straps. ;-]

Today a picnic at Grantchester Meadows with the buddhist guys. It was blazingly hot so the sarong I got yesterday came in really handy.

Thu, May 4

Upgraded to Linux 2.2.15. The only problem was with the sound module. After replacing maestro.c with that from the driver homepage, it works fine.

Improvements w.r.t. 2.2.14:

• NFS now works as a module.
• /proc/cpuinfo shows cache for K6
• Framebuffer console scrolling ~1b faster - ypan &c nifty stuff don't work on da laptop.
• The idea of using the latest stable kernel as an end in itself, PRKL. ;-]

Wed, May 3

Feeling such a geek for not having updated this page for days. Though I feel very much alive, more than this page ;-} even, I'm spending so much time with physics. Heck, I just like it a lot. So sorry everyone for not keeping in touch or whatever. Bear (grrr grizzly :) with me until the exams are over on 2 June MM.

Sun, Apr 30

The hack goes on. Linuxconf and its profile management kinda sucked, moreover I had to profile other than system files as well. So what can you do? Write a Python script!

Thu, Apr 27

A brief downtime because I tried out QNX, a lightweight, stable, realtime unix. It was the evaluation floppy; they will release a full free version by the summer. I'm definitely considering it to give a new life to an old 486 I've got back home. ;-]
Other than that, lectures are about to start and I already had the first supervision of the term. I/O, I/O, it's off to work() I go...

Fri, Apr 21, 02:11

Back @cam for the summer term. Nothing else really.
Oh, except I found some hardcore Suomi-Rok mp3s here.

Fri, Apr 7, 00:26

Got a job for the summer. I'll be hacking hardware and software in Varkaus, Finland. Looking forward to that.. oh, BTW there's still one term left and the exams! ;-D

Sun, Apr 2, 17:53

After watching the Simpsons whacking snakes, I've been hacking Python ;-]. In fact, I'm writing this entry with a script that automagically formats the html and so on. Saves a lot of time, and it's been a gr8 exercise on Python.

Sat, April Fool's Day

I spent last night hacking with Python. The result: a script to change the quote to your .signature file from a list of quotes.

Mon, March 27

Visited my sister at her new job location, had a job interview myself. These involved traveling by train around southern Finland. It's been fun for a change! Maybe starting the holiday work soon.. I hope.

Tue, March 21

The end, yes. I'm off to Finland early tomorrow morning. A month's Easter vacation will hopefully prove useful despite being away from some of my best friends :-( but, then again, I gotta see my Finnish pals too..

See you around online, I'll try to keep updating this page!

Mon, March 20

This is the end, my only friend ;-]

.. the end of term! I finished the physix report this morning and returned it to `Cave.' I guess it's pardey time and sauna tonite.

Sat, March 18

Recompiled the kernel with framebuffer and mtrr support. Now the console is full screen and the startup is watched over by Mr. Tux. ;-] See LDP's Framebuffer Howto for details.

I had fun yesterday trying out 2.3.99pre1 but right now I don't feel like spending hours hacking so I'm back to good old stable 2.2.14.

Some incredibly interesting discussions with a special¹ person until about 2.30 am.

[1] cryptic enough? ;]

Mon, March 13

Now guys, this system has 'munaa' in Finnish but I can't think of a decent translation. [like it kix ass :] I've recompiled the kernel with k6 optimizations and, I tell ya my man, it is subzerokewl. Many people said you can't usually make pgcc kernels, though there are rare exceptions.. must be the same ppl who claim you can't undelete files in Linux.

It is not hugely faster - the system speed is mostly limited by the hd, but most of all I like the idea that 3DNow! et al. K6 extensions are not lying around doing nothing. There's still that bloody Setiathome 386 client though.. :{

Sat, March 11

An excellent day of meditation and friendship: 'day retreat' at the Buddhist Centre. Three hours of meditation, lots of discussion, vege food. A relaxing as well as a mind-blowing experience.. a leap towards enlightenment (no, not da kewl windowmanager ;)

PGCC working. Web server and misc progs have been converted. K6 kicks butt now that it's being properly supported. I wonder if the SETI guys adopt PGCC for some lightning-fast wus.. though that probably isn't what they want.

Thu, March 9

It's eighth 8-] and last week of term! I'm already getting a bit burnt out, but (I hope) the idea of the holiday keeps me going for the last week or so. I should be getting some K6-optimized stuff, including an optimizing compiler soon, looking forward to some performance boost. It kinda sux that while most PCs have a 586/686 level cpu, the software is often compiled for generic 386.

Because of the university policy, I've set wget to fetch the stuff from the USA during the night. The only downside to using PGCC is its poor stability with kernels. K6-optimal RPMs, including PGCC, can be found here.

Sat, March 4

Found a nifty text mode browser: W3M. Better than Lynx in that it handles tables correctly, and frames (rendering them into tables). I'm already fed up with that NjetCrap bloat. A graphical one would still be nice, and Opera does the job well and fast - though still in alpha..

Thu, March 2

In fact it was Thursday when I installed Boa, however I consider it another day only after a night's sleep. Anyways, I've now removed that biig bloated hog Apache, to run a fast minimalist server. And in case I 4got to mention, Ms. Halonen (yes, not Mrs) is the President of Finland since yesterday! But hey, gotta get doing some work... :-@

Wed, March 1

New ^ web ^ server installed! Much less a memory hog than [insert your favourite server]. Also faster than Apache which I used previously.

Heh, it's 3 am and 6 h til my QM lecture.

Sat, Feb 26

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, as we had a 'Finnish formal hall' totaling 17 Finns at Corpus. Plenty of fun, as was this morning's quantum mechanics lecture at 9:00. ;-]

Willow was offline since late Thursday night. I couldn't wait til next week for someone at the college to fix the problem (broken cable) so I did it today.

Thu, Feb 24

The 5th week is over! So should the blues. Mine was aptly enhanced by some nasty physical manifestations of blues, but I'm recovering. At least I've had good excuses for not doing work 8-}. After 5/8 of the term now, it feels like downhill already. Cynically, however, it means 3+ weeks of hard work and a bit of rest during the subsequent holiday, in the midst of those loads of holiday work (what a paradoxical pair of words! :).

Thu, Feb 17

*yay* Snow, at last! So we do have _winter_ in Britain. Also a new physics course started: QM. The lecturer even promised a demo on quantum teleportation. Beam 'em up, Mikey!

Mon, Feb 14

Happy Valentine everyone - my mistress today has been Milli Amp. Yes. Physics::Electromagnetism. Good luck for those of you with live partners. :-{

Sat, Feb 12

Now this looks like a geek's diary:

Nothing special lately - I've been doing lots of physix work. Also installed 'net phone software, so if any of you guys outside Cambridge would like to chat, let me know..

Tue, Feb 8

Fraunhofer diffraction expts at Cavendish. `The light and dark sides of physics.' 8-}

Some experiences from today's Metta Bhavana meditation: There is no me. Other people are parts of `me' or, more precisely (?), the universe is not a thing but a being. We are parts (organs and cells, if ya like) of it. In the last stage of the meditation I could sense that being.

Sun, Feb 06

YESS!!! Ms. Halonen was elected President of Finland. Pardey Time! We also watched Eyes Wide Shut, quite an original piece of art (though overly hyped about). An `honest' film in the sense that it reflected the dark sides of human mind as well. Well, I gotta get some sleep, it's 3:30 am.. =8-]

Mon, Jan 31

After a refreshing weekend, it's back to working { at least I try my `best' whatever that is.. ; }. Here's a quick summary:

• Friday - Sauna, and the relevant stages of rehydration.
• Saturday - early morning lecture, then off to London for the Finnish presidential election. Hanging around, shopping, eating, drinking.. with Reima & Lauri from Cam and Hanne & Dookie from the big L. One of those things you want to do again soon, if you got the money.. 8-/ BTW I bought a shirt from CYBERDOG.
• Sunday - back to work! Did a bunch of electromagnetism. That stuff is getting pretty damn interesting.. ?

Thu, Jan 27

Did some nice variational maths (OK, you really don't wanna know this.. :), pumped some Fe at the gym, then an evening lecture by Prof. Longair, physicist, showman. The kosmo constant still appears to be a mystery, though there are quantum explanations for its origin - think of the forces pushing Casimir plates.

A minor update on Interests.music.

Tue, Jan 25

A pleasant surprise with the term's first physics lab day. It only took the morning, an unassessed introductory session on optics.

So, as there's been a bit of a lag in updating this, I've been quite busy. Pardeying and hacking ; } maybe, not so much with the academic work.. Anyway, great to be doing stuff again after the xmas holiday hibernation.

Btw, no problem with that mentioned holiday work, though it's no easier now. "As a reward for a work well done, we present you, Corporal Willow, with more work!!"

Sun, Jan 16

Back online by the Cam. Term starting soon, better get that work done, d'oh!

Sat, Jan 8, MM

Bored. I'm only glad this vacation will be over in a week and I'll get back to working pace. I dunno why it is but I kinda hate long vacations. Maybe that has something to do with why I'm still up at 6 am (no pardeys or anything). weird.

But at least the world did not come to and end.. perhaps in a year, at the turn of the millennium... ;} <- programmer's smiley or what?

---

Risto A. Paju