Velkommen til steinalderen

Forleden dag tok jeg den eneste fornuftige bussen jeg kan benytte til
arbeidet. Jeg bor langs E18 i Ås, og jobber på Fornebu. De aller fleste
offentlige kommunikasjonsmidler jeg kan benytte vil forutsette at jeg bytter i
Oslo. Men Timeekspressen kjører en rute fra Mysen/Ørje som går direkte til
Fornebu. Riktig nok går bussen innom bussterminalen på Grønland i Oslo, og den
bruker lang tid. Men jeg kan sitte på samme buss hele veien, og gjøe noe
fornuftig. Altså et bra tilbud som kan få folk som meg over fra privatbil til
kollektiv transport.

Denne spesielle ruten, linje 9 i Timeekspress systemet, har ganske få avganger
som kjører gjennom Oslo og videre til Fornebu. Faktisk bare 2 om morgenen og 2
om ettermiddagen. Siden dette er en så bra tjeneste med potensiale til å bli
benyttet av en del mennesker skulle man tro at om man gjorde endringer så
ville det bli for eksempel ved å utvide med flere avganger. Men hold dere fast
folkens. Et eller annet supperåd i Oslo har bestemt at slike gjennomgående
ruter - det skal man ikke ha noe av. Buss får gå til Grønland og snu der. Man
kan ikke bare komme her og kommer her liksom, sitte på ut av Oslo igjen på
andre siden. Så fra nyttår avsluttes dette tilbudet.

Så hva er alternativene? Timeekspressen har ingen annen rute som passer, så å
gå av på Grønland blir bare tull - derfra kommer jeg meg ikke videre. Jeg må
nok heller bytte til sporveiens rute 31 på Oslo S. Da får jeg ikke overgang
selvsagt, og må betale full pris, så det blir dyrere. Dessuten er det en
melkerute, selv når den kjører ekspress. Så lang tid vil det ta. Men det er en
fin bonus da. Jeg må vel vente mellom 5 og 35 minutter før 31-bussen dukker
opp, så da kan jeg slurpe inn deilig 20-minusgraders januar luft mens jeg
venter. De har tenkt på alt disse folka. For å ikke glemme all mosjonen. Inn
på buss, av med skjerf og stor jakke (som jeg trenge når jeg skal vente på
31-bussen), opp med arbeidssakene. Oopps, fremme på Oslo S snart, ned med
tingene, på med jakke, skjerf og hansker, ut av buss, vente, hutre, vente. Inn
på overfylt 31-melkerute-buss, glem å jobbe for det er det ikke plass til her.
Setene er vonde også. Dessuten må jeg uansett stå og svette med den store
jakka på. Og skjer. Og hansker.

Nei, takk skal du jammen meg ha. Jeg tror jeg tar bilen isteden. Lenge leve
det kollektive Norge. Og det flotte supperådet som har bestemt dette.

Ha en fin dag da dere!

What to do in a Lisa tutorial

You are sitting there in a training class at Usenix/Lisa06, or any other lisa for that matter. It supposed to be really good. The most knowledgeable person in the world on the target. Ok, that's a bit over the top, but at least hi should be good. Then you just realize that he is a very lousy speaker. You have paid good money to be here, so what should you do? You should not leave, that's not polite. But, see, stuff is happen right there behind your back:

1. Bring up your laptop
2. Pull up your irc-client. Sure you have one, right?
3. Connect to irc.sage.org
4. join #lisa??, insert the current year.
5. have Fun!

It is as simple as that. A large crowd, with all the knowledge and great humor, can make event the most boring lecture quite fun.

I don't know. I'm probably just a bit bored. I think rehearsels should be mandatory for instructors people have to pay that much to get to listen to. Rehearsel in front of a board of referees, that is.

That's my idea for the future!

Take care, and be nice to bad instructors. And tell the organizers what you think!

The nerds are gathered!

With the usual buzz and fuzz, Lisa'06 kicked off tonigth with a beginners BOF (with some oldtimers and not-so-oldtimers sitting in the back). The training chair Dan Klein delivered the goods as usual, with a lot of humor. Everyone feel welcome, there is plenty of sodas around, the wiki and irc-channel (#lisa06@irc.sage.org) is up - everything is in order. Quite a few of the crowd are heading over to a nearby place for something stronger than soda... others just go out for dinner. By the way, there seems to be about 1200 attendees this year. Not bad consider the topics!

Tomorrow morning, at 9:00, the real thing starts, with tutorial and training on lots of interesting topics, by fine lectures. I will start out with a light topic, on distributed source code management systems. We have converted from CVS to subversion, but folks are not satisfied, and have started looking into mercurial (Hg). I have to figure out what is the best option, and what this really is all about. Theo Ts'o (of linux kernel fame) will be the lecturer, so this should be really good.

After lunch I will attend intermediate topics in DNS admin. This is something I don't know much about, and want to look into. Maybe I have time for some reports tomorrow night.

Take care, folks.

From 35000 feets

Wow - internet up in the sky; that is quite cool! Right now I am on a SAS flight to Washington DC (to Lisa'06), cruising away in some 850km/h. As Connexion is shutting down the service, the service is also free. It's maybe not extremely fast, but decent enough to read email and browse the web. And making blogposts as this.

Hopefully, SAS and Star Alliance can find a new partner such that we can keep this great service. If we can get poweroutlets in the cheap seats as well it will be very good.

See you at Lisa, folks, and take care!

New phone choosen!

As I reported earlier, I gave up on the SonyEricsson M600i, due to the problem of sync that phone with MacOSX. For a while I have looked around, and hesitated, but it turns out the best solution right now is something unspeakable...

My choice is: HTC TyTN. Allthough that phone uses the winblows mobile 5 operating system, it seems to be the best smartphone around that both have WiFi, qwerty keyboard, and possible to sync with Mac. To sync it, I have purchased missing sync from Mark/Space, it works quite well. It was some issues with connecting TyTN and the Mac on bluetooth, but once up it is a ok combination.

Maybe I care to give a more thorough review of the features of TyTN and how it pairs up with the Mac later on, but for now I just want to say that I can sync appointments, contacts, and I can mount the phones' storage as a drive. That I can both use skype and IM clients on the phone is of course a plus :-)

Take care,

Updated entry on my Unix commands in Norwegain page

For a long time, I have not made any updates to my page at http://home.simula.no/~aasmundo/unix, where I describe various tips and tricks for linux/unix users, in norwegian. Today, I looked up something for my own use, and created an entry on ssh tunnels. The entry goes like this:

Ssh tunnel

Av og til har man behov for å kunne koble seg til en maskin som befinner seg
bak en brannmur på en eller annen måte. For eksempel kan du tenke deg at du har
satt opp en linux maskin for noen som ikke er så kjempeflinke i linux, og de
ønsker å ha den stående hjemme, hengende på en adsl-forbindelse og gjerne
NAT'et bak en trådløs router. Hvordan kan man løse en slik utfordring? En fin
mulighet er å sette opp en ssh-tunnel fra maskin til en annen maskin som du
alltid kan nå. En slik tunnel kan settes opp med følgende kommando:

ssh -f -N -R *:20022:localhost:22 -lbrukernavn maskin.fastip.net

Opsjonene har følgende betydning:


-f: Tving ssh til å kjøre i bakgrunn.


-N: ssh skal ikke starte noen spesiell kommando på maskinen man kobler
til. Uten denne opsjonen vil et shell bli forsøkt startet.


-R: angir tunnel fra annen maskin. Alle maskiner (*) som forsøker å koble
seg til maskinen vi kobler oss til, på port 20022, vil bli sendt videre til
denne maskinen (localhost) på port 22, der ssh som regel kjører.


-l: angir brukernavn vi vil benytte for å koble oss til


Endelig oppgis maskinen med fast ip som vi vil koble oss til.
For å ta vare på sikkerheten er det nok lurt å definere en
spesiell bruker for formålet, og passord/passphrase må håndteres på en
passende måte. Det er også en del utfordringer med å holde forbindelsen oppe.
Dersom adsl-systemet får en dynamisk adresse (som er bakgrunnen for hele denne
løsningen), vil tunnellen måtte restartes dersom adsl-systemet får en ny
adresse. Man er selvfølgelig også avhengig av å ha tilgang til en maskin med
fast ip.

By the way...

If someone has some suggestions regarding my previous post on new smartphone, I welcome comments!

Time to move on

A few months ago, I bought the Sony Ericsson M600i smartphone. Initially, I had a few problems with it but most of thoses error was fixed with a firmware upgrade.

One thing remains, though: Synchronization with Mac OS X or Linux. This is really important for me. I like the keyboard of the M600i, I enjoy the screen and the multitasking capabilities. But I _need_ sync. So much that I have now returned to my older Z800i phone. That phone lack most of the capabilities, but I can sync it using iSync.

I have waited through two minor upgrade of OSX (4.6 - 4.8), but the M600i is still not supported. And from what I can see, Sony Ericsson will not fixed the problem eiterh.

So it is time to move on. Someone (windows user...) need a new smartphone?

take care,

Ubuntu under Parallels

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg! If you do that, inside a running ubuntu in full-screen, under Parallels, you can enable full resolution. So, on my 17" MacBook Pro I now have 1680x1050 resolution.

Really slick :-)

Just a quick follow up on yesterdays post

I wrote 'I'm not sure I like turbogears' in my previous post. Right now I don't remember why I wrote that. I have django up and running, and are doing some tests with it. But as I don't remember what I did not like with turbogears, I have decided to test that one as well. 

So that's what I do tonight.

Python and Ajax.

From time to time I need to implement some webstuff, where "need" may be as in work or as in "want to", related to private stuff. With all the buzz around Ajax, I guess everything I do in this respect should be "Ajaxified". In addition, I don't want to use PHP anymore, that's so stone age. Python is the rule these days. That leaves me with the question: how to use Python to make "Ajaxified" websites?

There are several python tools for creating webstuff out there, some of the main players are:
     * Django
     * Turbogears
     * Plone/zope
     * 
I guess there are many more, but which of them have Ajax tools? Django does not really, Turbogears uses MochiKit but I'm not sure I like Turbogears. I don't want to use Plone/zope. We use that in my company (Plone that is), and it is great for large corporate websites, but I don't want that for small sites created more or less for fun. And what about Ajax.

As you understand, I am searching. And this is a buzz compliant post. If I end up with something, I will probably make a post about it here.

Take care!

Still no support for M600i on MacOSX

Ok, folks - I am just polling on this. Still, there does not seems to be any support for m600i in iSync, no 3rd part vendor, nothing. I guess I have to switch to another phone. If not GCalSync (http://www.gcalsync.com) can make it. That will be a sync directly to the google calendar, but that's just fine with me as my main calendar is there anyway.

Take care, folks.

The new Apple MacPro

So, the new MacPro with dual core Intel Xeon processors is released. No doubt, its a kewl machine. 

I just want to  give a few of my own toughts after having heard the keynote deliverd by Jobs and his coworkers at WWDC'06 today. 

First, regarding performance the only comparison we saw was against Opteron was a performance per watt. I don't doubt that this is an interesting comparison for lots of people, but it also leave us with the tought that the new MacPro is not the fastest computer around.

Next, the standard graphics adapter delivered is a Nvidia 7300 card. Come on, Apple, you could have done better than that. Of course, there are other cards available as upgrades/built to order and keeping the price down on the standard configuration is really important to spread Mac to even more users. But you could have put at least a 7600 card into the box. 

Besides this, the only thing that is wrong with the new MacPro is that I have to get rid of my PowerMac dual G5.

Take care. 

M600i as a modem

First, I was not able to use my M600i as a modem from my MacBook. Then my colleague discovered some scripts made by Ross Barkman, available from http://www.taniwha.org.uk/. By using the CID1 script from that page, I can now use the M600i as a modem on 3G (UMTS) and GPRS networks. 

Great work by Ross, and my colleague Martin who discovered them!

Me from an airport near or far, through M600i. 

That was the summer!

Tomorrow I have to get back to work again. So, summer 2006 is history. Or maybe not completely, it is still nice and warm in Norway, and I plan for another week of vacation later in august - hopefully I can go swim in the fjords a bit more then. 

As I am back to work, there will be updates of the blog from time to time. And WWDC is comming up the next week, and I will be there, so expect some comments on that! 

Update on M600i

I have now used the Sony Ericsson M600i for a few days, and want to
give a status update. I think what's going on is that I adapt my
habits to the equipment, and therefore the equipment start feeling
better over time. So also with the M600i.

Initially, I had some problems with the built in Opera 8.60 browser,
it crashed on me a few times and things like that. Now, I think it
functions quite well. Probably because I visit pages that I know
works. Still, there are no pages that I need to visit regularly that
does not work, so it is probably ok for general use.

As for email reading, there seems to be something funny going on in
the network I am using. I tried a whole lot of different settings for
both imap for my regular mail accont, as well as pop from my gmail
account without any success. Then I tried pop against an account I
created with the Ventelo, the provider of the cellphone subscription,
and alas, then it works. Maybe the block pop and imap traffic? At
least something strange is going on. Anyway, as soon as I got things
right with my provider, I can send and receive email on the phone. It
is quite comfortable both to read and write messages as well.

So, in general I am quite happy with the M600i, but I still need to
figure out stuff. Maybe I write down a more complete review later on
(but don't hold your breath, it may never happen!)

Take care, and have a nice summer :-)

It took some time!

Finally, after a maybe 6 or 7 years wait, I can finally suspend/
resume my laptop!

What I am saying? Ok, this story need some background. Again, those
who are reading this blog on a regular basis, knows that I have quite
a few computers. I am talking laptop running linux this time.
According to an article at linux.com: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?
sid=06/05/24/1716222, it should be possible to suspend/resume a linux
laptop with only ACPI bios, as long as a recent kernel is used. This
is something I searched for for years, but eventually gave in and
installed software suspend (and later switched to MacOSX). But I
still have the small FSC P1510D, which only supports ACPI, no APM.

To make the story short, I grabbed the script from the article,
checked that I had the necessary commands available on my system, and
gave it a try. And guess what, it works quite nice.

The strange thing is that recent distribution, like Debian unstable
which I am running, does not come with a thing like this preinstalled
and integrated. These days, all it should take really is to shut the
screen down and put the laptop in your bag. But, hey, we're approaching!

To be fair, this could have been supported on my laptop for a few
months, I have not upgraded my kernel that recently. I discovered
this now due to the mentioned article. But it is true that I have
tested this in the past (of my 5 last laptops all but one have
supported ACPI only) without any sucess. It's essential stuff like
this which make people switch to MacOSX. But as I am not putting in
any effort to help the development of Linux in this direction, I
can't really blame anyone - that's the nice and bad thing about open
source!

Take care in the summer folks - Norway is getting really hot these days!

OS X upgrade and M600i

For a small moment, we kept our breath, as we installed the update to Mac OS X, v. 10.4.7. Eagerly, we started up iSync to check whether support for our new cool phone was added - the Sony Ericsson M600i.

But, no. Not this time. On to something else. Maybe the M600i must rest in the drawer until either Apple or Sony Ericsson releases some updated software.

Take care!

Amobil :: Telenor tester super-3G

Amobil :: Telenor tester super-3G

Yet another option for decent net connectivity not to far into the wilderness... (The rest of this goes in norwegian, as I link an article in norwegian).

Som en oppfølger til 3G løsningen basert på NMT-450 som jeg kommenterte for noen dager siden, skriver Amobil idag at Telenor har satt igang tester med HSDPA, en utvidelse av 3G (UMTS) teknologien. Jeg vet lite om dette, men går utifra at det dreier seg mer eller mindre enn software som man kjører oppå den eksisterende infrastrukturen, kanskje på samme måte som EDGE i GPRS. Det skulle i såfall tilsi at rekkevidden på HSDPA blir tilsvarende rekkevidden i 3G; ikke fantastisk, men ikke helt ille heller. Og mer interessant, så langt ut i ødemarken som jeg holder til til daglig, er det ikke usannsynlig at 3G støtten snart er ok (det er av og til 3G dekning i dag, litt avhengig av atmosfæriske forhold virker det som).

Så, hva snakker vi om? HSDPA skal kunne gi 3.6Mbps, altså langt bedre enn de 1.2Mbps'ene som ADSL leverandørene klarer å pushe på linjene ut til meg idag. Vi får vel regne med at dette også er en asynkron tjeneste, men det er sikkert mulig å få noen hundre Kbps den "andre" veien. Dermed skulle HSDPA være en bedre løsning enn det som kan tilbys av ADSL idag.

Alt dette er selvsagt helt i det blå, siden Telenor ikke har sagt noen ting om om og i såfall når noe slikt kan bli lansert for sluttbrukere. De skal selvsagt melke kua maks først, sånn de har gjort hele veien, fra før ISDN tiden. Og jeg lever sikkert godt med crappy ADSL fra Bluecom en stund til jeg - helt til flere i familien blir aktive surfere og skal dele båndbredden med meg. Det blir ihvertfall spennende å se hva som blir første teknologi som gir noe mer enn 1.2Mbps ut i villmarken.

Bondehilsen fra ødemarken Follo!

take care,

Don't buy M600i if you're a MacOSX user!

Today, I received a brand new cellphone, Sony Ericsson M600i. It's a business oriented phone, which should be strong on messaging and keepting track of appointments and the like. It also comes with an RSS reader, which is quite cool, and decent Web (Opera) and email software.

Unfortunately, there is no support for this phone in iSync on MacOSX (10.4.6). Hopefully such support appear in the near future, but for now I will advice you MacOSX users out there to avoid this phone.

Also, the software in the phone seems to be a bit buggy. While I was doing some experiments with the webbrowser it seg.faulted a couple of times. Among other places, I tried to visite calendar.google.com, which wasn't especially sucessfull. Compared to other SonyEricsson mobiles I owned in the past, this one also seems to operate quite slow; this may be to buggy and bloated new software. So, stay away from this one for a while and wait for software updates, both in the phone and on MacOSX. The idea with this phone is so great, so hopefully it wouldn't last to long before we see the necessary updates. I'll report on this later on (if what I need ever appears, before I move on to something better :-)

Take care!

digi.no - Snart får Norge sitt tredje mobilnett

digi.no - Snart får Norge sitt tredje mobilnett

Kanskje det endelig er en mulighet til å få noe mer enn 1.2Mbps ut på bondelandet! Bor man litt lengre enn et par kilometer fra nærmeste adsl sentral i dette landet, er det jo umulig å få noe særlig hastighet på ADSL. Og all utvikling (ADSL2+ osv) dreier seg om å få stadig raskere linjer, på bekostning av linjelengden. Det er fint å se at noen forsøker å få til noe annet av og til - bedre dekning i grisgrendte strøk.

Det hører med til historien at jeg bor rett øst for Oslo, i Ås kommune, så man skal ikke så veldig langt ut på landet før problemene dukker opp!

Take care,

The Macbook Pro has arrived

Hey folks, 

just a quick note to let you know that I am now playing with a brand new Macbook Pro with 17" screen. Pretty unusual stuff for me; the largest screen on any laptop I have used in the past was 14", and I thought that one was actually a bit to big. So this is huge...

Anyway, I'll let you know more about the setup and how it works later on. 

In other news, the oldest niece of mine, my older sisters oldest child, turned 18 yesterday. It's actually quite odd - it's a new generation coming up and we are soon the oldtimers. Old the best to you, Trude, and God Bless; may you have many, many, many great years.

Take care,

Confused about my recent posts?

You are with good reason. Somehow, a draft I thought was accidentally was deleted from the server actually showed up as published today. So there you are, two different versions of more or less the same post; written with a few days in between and with the content recreated from memory because the original post was lost (but wasn't anyway...)

Now, I'll read both posts my self and compare ;-)

Take care!

Me and my computers

For those faithful readers of the blog, you know that I currently use an AMD64 computer at work, running Ubuntu linux, and small FSC P1510 laptop running unstable debian and an dual G5 PowerMac at home.

It's time for updates! Allthough I used to be a strict Linux person, over the later months I start liking MacOSX quite well, and even though my home computer is a dualboot (MacOSX and Ubuntu linux), I tend to prefer running Mac on it for different reasons. In addition to that, more people in our company start running apple computers, so the sysadmin folks need to update their knowledge.

Fast forward - I have ordered a 17" Macbook pro, it should appear hopefully this week. I will probably not install linux on it at all, at least that's the plan right now... I'll report on who the machine feels for me anyway, later on.

As that's a quite big portable computer, I will need something smaller. But the difference between the P1510 and the Macbook is probably not big enough to justify keeping both. Therefore, I will probably try to get my hands on the new Sony UX (check out UX at sonystyle).

As this is not easy to get hold of in Norway, I'll probably try to pick up one when I'm in San Francisco in august.

Take care

Me and computers

As all me faithfull readers know, I mostly use Linux computers, but also have an Apple PowerMac at home. Although that computer have Linux (ubuntu dapper beta) installed, MacOSX tend to see more and more use on it. The reason is that some of the stuff I do at home simply work better on OSX, like playing music. So, instead of rebooting into linux all the time, I just get what ever I need to work on OSX - which is usually possible as I mostly rely on open source software.

Now, this has gone quite far, and in the company I work, Apple users seems to pop up here and there. Therefore, I and a colleague will visit the WWDC in San Francisco in august. And what is more natural than bringing an Apple laptop there. Alas, I have ordered an MacBook pro with 17" screen and 2GBs of memory today. That will be great fun! For the moment, I consider not installing linux on it at all, but we'll see how that goes.

While I have the FSC P1510, which is a quite small computer, Sony has announced their new Vaio UX recently - a real laptop computer in a very small housing. It has a 4.5" screen with great resolution; 1024x600, have wifi, bluetooth and even gsm/edge builtin. My plan is to get hold of one as soon as they hit the street, and then pass the big P1510 on to someone worthy of it - probably someone in the sysadmin group in the company which need something like it. It will, however, take some time, as Sony expect the UX to appear around 5. july, and considering the really bad decisions about Sony Vaio and Norway in the past, I can not expect to just by it in the store around the corner. Maybe I pick up one in SF...

At least for now, I will keep the PowerMac at home and the Amd64 in the office, since this complements the architectures I need to know about and build software on. Now we just need someone who wants to build our PyCC software on Windows, to ensure full cross platform compatibility.

I'll report when things starts to show up!

Take care!

Lei av å være verdens rikeste (N24.no)

N24 skriver:

Lei av å være verdens rikeste (N24.no): "Lei av å være verdens rikeste

Bill Gates synes ikke det er noe stas å være verdens rikeste mann. "

Det problemet er det jo veldig enkelt å bli kvitt skulle man tro. Om han ikke har det som den rike unge mannen i evangeliet, som Jesus spurte om ville bli fullkommen. "Selg alt du har, og gi det til de fattige, så skal du få en skatt i himlene; kom så og følg meg!" Han gikk bedrøvet bort, for han var veldig rik.

Take care,
Mandus.

New car!

I bought the family a new car yesterday. A slightly old (born 96) Volkswagen Caravelle TDI, the looong version. In that car, 8 persons can have a comfy ride, together with a lot of stuff.

So that's what occupied me the last few days. And the day after tomorrow, I'll travel to Madrid. Check out my photoblog, pictures of the new car, and from Madrid will appear!

Dr. Scient

Yesterday, I defended my thesis, and everything went well. So, finally, after 9 3/4 years, I have finished my Dr.Scient studies, and am now a dr. in scientific computing.

Well done, Mandus.

The trial lecture and the defense

Maybe some of you wonder what is going on - I promised to report on the progress of the preparations for my trial lecture, and said a few words. After that complete silence...

First, I have worked very hard the last 2 weeks - and tomorrow is the big day. And I think I have the presentations ready by now, although I have to test them a few times to check that I can stick to the schedule.

Next, I have to say that I didn't came up with extremely much interesting content. I tried to investigate the "formal verification" field to see whether there was something there that could be of any use, and find quite some material to read. Unfortunately, most of what I found is still to preliminary to be of any real value for practical verification of scientific codes. So I ended up with the standard pile of tricks, method of manufactured solutions beeing the most prominent, or the most advanced.

The presentation of my thesis is the toughest one, though, as I have to present what I am been doing the last couple of years (I started in -96...) in about 30 minutes. Though call, but I'll manage.

Take care, and wish me good luck tomorrow!

Preparation for the trial lecture

Maybe just for my own future reference... I will now briefly document the preparations for my trial lecture and defense of my Dr.Scient thesis.

So far I have worked on a "mindmap" using kdissert to organize the different aspects of the topic for the trial lecture that come to my mind. I have also search google and other places for relevant information. During thursday and friday I discovered at least 2 books and about 20 papers that seems to be relevant. I am now reading a paper by Salari and Knupp which are very relevant, as it discuss code verification by the method of manufactured solutions, which is a common approach in computational science and engineering.

As I move forward I also want to investigate to some extent the field of more formal code verification in computer science. From what I know from before, it is not possible to prove correctness of a scientific code (in the multi-million lines of code range) using such formal theories, as usually it is required that some special programming language is used, as well as the complexity can not be infinitely large. I am also not sure whether or not these to fields are talking about the same thing, as the interest in comp. sci & eng. is to verify that the output of the code is correct, and does not care that much about how it become correct (ok, I do simplify things here...), while traditional CS probably are more concerned about the correctness of the code itself.

Another topic is how we can relate verification of scientific codes to verification of experiments in other natural sciences, like physics or biology. I have to look further into this as well.

Now on to the reading to see what more I can discover!

The topic for my trial lecture

Today, I have received the topic for my trial lecture. The title of the lecture is:

Verification of Scientific Codes

Not a bad topic at all. Alltough this is something we don't think about every day, it sure is an important part of what I do. If we can't say anything about the correctness of the programs that we write inorder to say something about scientific problems, how can we then use the program to draw any conclusions for the problem that we investigate.

Also, a few years back we discussed this topic within the group, and one of my coworkers even produced some software that target some of the issues within this field. So I have someone to ask, and do have some ideas my self as well.

A trial lecture is never a walk in the park, but at least this is something that I can relate to, so I think it is an ok topic.

Now, on to diggin' out references, reading material and start producing slides for the talk. You wan't see much of me the next two weeks...

Take care folks,

Samsung Q1 - infoSync World - origami

Samsung Q1 - infoSync World

Is it just me, or isen't this very much like the previous U50/70/71 models from Sony? I thought we should expect something new. Ok, you know that I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but for all the hype I at least expected something actually new...

By the way, why can't any pda or small laptop maker consider making something with a formfactor comparable with the Psion models - a decent keyboard, ok display, good batterylife, and software and communication hardware (bluetooth/umts/wifi) up to todays standards. That will be a killer piece of hardware.

In other news, I am at the winterschool at Geilo, on Navier stokes and automation of PDE/FEM software (http://www.fenics.org), this week. Cool stuff!

My Ph.D thesis hot off the press

Not exactly true, but I have paid unipub a visit today, to hand over the press ready pdf-version of my thesis.

Now I only have to prepare a couple of presentation, and give them, as well as answering a few questions from the comitee, before I have earned the right to call my self a Dr. It's been a long and interesting journey, and I'm glad I can see the end.

The important date to remember is 30. March.

Take care folks!

Så sto vi her da...

Så sto vi her da..., originally uploaded by mandus.

Og jeg som trodde vi var vant til litt snø her i landet!

Ekspertene slakter Norge - Aftenposten.no

Ekspertene slakter Norge - Aftenposten.no

Hallo, liksom. Norge er et lite, bitte lite, land. Vi kan ikke forvente at vi skal ta en haug med gull hver gang det er vinter-ol.

Jeg synes vi har gjort en grei innsats jeg, og de som har flydd på ski og hoppa og kosta, de har gjort en hederlig innsats.

Dessuten har jeg fått vite at min dr.grads avhandlig er funnet "worthy of defending for the dr. scient degree". Så nå er det nesten bare tut og kjør igjen...

Take care,

digi.no - Rapport hevder Linux-servere er billigst

digi.no - Rapport hevder Linux-servere er billigst

Som man roper i skogen får man svar vil nå jeg si. Som ihuga linux tilhenger er jeg seff enig, men det er nå en gang sånn at Linux og Windows er to helt forskjellige systemer, så jeg skjønner ikke hvorfor man på død og liv skal sammenlikne.

Dersom du har sys.admins som kan både Windows og Linux, vil som regel Linux bli valgt på serversiden dersom applikasjonen man skal implementere tillater valg. Grunnen er opplagt - fra sys.admin siden er som regel Linux et langt mer behagelig valg.

Dersom du har sys.admins som bare kan Windows har du ikke noe valg. Bortsett fra å sparke staben og ansette nye da. Og dersom de bare kan Linux har du heller ikke noe valg.

På desktop siden er systemene såpass forskjellige, at dersom ikke ledelse og sys.admins ønsker å overkjøre sine brukere, og dermed få lite produktive, fiendlige innstilte medarbeidere, så har man heller ikke noe valg i særlig grad. Da snakker jeg om avanserte, oppgående brukere selvsagt - kveget får bruke det de får. Men de andre må altså få velge, og da vil hver enkelt bruker velge det saom passer best for seg, enten det er Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, eller et av de andre OS som finnes.

Omtrent sånn ser nå jeg det.

Gratulerer Sverige!!!

Som noen vet pågår det et OL for tiden. I dag var det sprint-stafett, en langrennsøvelse hvor ihvertfall de fleste normenn nok hadde forventet norske gullmedaljer. Men idag vant Sverige, både herre og dame stafetten. Derfor vil jeg gjerne få lov til å gratulere våre gode naboer på det hjerteligste!

I will soon be a doctor!

Just a short notice to inform my faithful crowd of readers that I soon will be a Dr.Scient. All the required documents are now accepted. The only thing left is that the committee must accept my thesis, and then the defense of the thesis, of course. But that should be walk in the park. not...

Anyway, wish me good luck on the last mile.

And as always, take care out there. There's lot of snow, and the roads are slippy. At least in my area in Norway. Just have a look out of my window:

A silly post. Mostly.

Ok, sorry folks, this post isn't very interesting. I am testing out a program called gnome-blog, running on linux, which can be used for posting directly to the blog from my desktop. As this is a gtk/gnome program, as should be evident from the name, it is not optimal for me. The optimal solution will be something I can run directly from the shell, or maybe even from a macro in the editor vim, but I will just test this program for now.

By the way, I have to report on an extraordinary service from our regular hardware-pusher, pc-express. As reported yesterday, the NIC on my desktop computer at work broke down. As the manufacturer in question, Shuttle, are known by our dealer to not exactly handle guarantee matters in a prompt fashion, I was told today that the just ordered a new box for me, and will handle the return of the old one without bothering me. In effect, I will get a computer back very soon, which is important to me. I think this is more than I could expect, so I am really satisfied.

PE2 2:10-11: But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities.

Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusation against them before the Lord.

Take care,

Me and my computers

The regular reader knows that I have right now 3 computers that I use regulary. With two of them there has been some events recently that I can mention here, and for the last one, the P1510, I have promised you some comments on the linux installation.

First, the AMD64 computer that I regularly use at work. The Ubuntu for AMD64 is working flawlessly on that computer. Everything that I need is running just fine. But on friday the NIC fell apart. Usually, that is not a big deal, you just pull the card out and slip a new one in to the box. Problem is that this is a Shuttle SN25p, with the excelent NIC built right into the mainboard. Combined with noe free PCI slot on the mainboard, I do not have any other option but sending the whole box in for service. So, I am happy with the box, it works quite well, and performance is more than adequate for my work (which includes some really heavy simulations of partial differential equations), but no free slot for a emergency NIC can easily be a showstopper in the future. I am thinking on finding other use for the computer within our lab, and get another one for myself.

The PowerMac at home is also doing fine these days. As you know, I ended up installing gentoo on that computer, because the installers of both debian and ubuntu for powerpc failed to work, due to problem with disk partitioning. The installer is just unable to detect the geometry of my partitions, and give me only the option to wipe out the entire disk, including my MacOSX installation, and put in linux. Not what I want, as I use MacOSX for different purposes.

The problem was that I never used the gentoo installed. It just take to much time to compile everything, and a whole lot of packages is masked out for powerpc64, as I guess not very many gentoo users play with these animals. But then I figured out that I already have a working disk geometry and working yaboot for booting the operating system I want, so I just tried to install ubuntu for powerpc64 into or on top of the gentoo installation. For this purpose I chosed the pre-release of the next ubuntu (Dapper Drake), and run the installer in expert modus. In stead of working through the partitioning and mounting step in the installer, I switched to another console, mounted what I wanted as '/target', run the necessary swapon command, and wiped out the original gentoo stuff from /target. Most of the installer worked just fine from that point, except making the installation bootable and writing a correct fstab. The fstab I could easily handle by hand, and the configuration for the 'yaboot' boot-loader I have been clever enough to back up to a USB drive. So, after copying in the yaboot config, running 'ybin -v' and doing some editing of fstab using vim, I have a working ubuntu. Now with most of what I need available in binary form. There are some issues with the airport extreme wireless card, my firewire soundcard and the built in soundcard, but I can live with this.

With the Fujitsu P1510, the history is not very interesting. I booted from Debian sarge net-install cd, performed a regular installation, upgraded to etch. Everything is just fine. Bluetooth, sound, WiFi, Xorg - everything works. There are only a few minior things. Suspend/resume is not working out of the box, so I patched the kernel with software suspend 2. Using this I can hibernate the computer using the swap partition to store the state, and bring it back up and running in a matter of a few seconds. I also have some issues with cpu throttling, I have not manage to get neither cupfreqd nor powernowd to run, this is something I have to look a bit more into.

Take care, folks!