Office Hours

We are obliged to hold office hours so that we are available for our students to meet us for questions and information. So every Tuesday I hold office hours from 9.30 to 10.30. This covers part of a break (9.30-9.45), so people who need signatures are sure to be able to drop by. I publish the times on my door and my web site.

I try to arrive by 9.15. I hang up my coat, make a cup of tea, water the plants. I dust my desk, collect up all the pens that got themselves strewn in the course of the week. I file papers, sort through administrivia, sign certificates. In general, no students come. Sometimes I get a telephone call, and today I even had a Master's student drop by to chat about her research topic. I generally hang out until lunch time, as there is a lot of administrative things to be seen to.

The moment I have my coat on and lock the door, people dash up. "Could I have your signature quick?" On the way over to lunch "Do you have time for a question?" After class I have six emails requesting information, two want me to print out something for them, sign it, put it in an envelope and walk down to the mail dropoff on the second floor. No, I don't have a secretary.

Office hours are times when I promise to be there for the students, but it doesn't fit their work schedules, it seems. So why do we keep up the pretense? Okay, my desk gets sorted out once a week. That's good.

Julotta

The Swedes have this quaint custom of having a Christmas service in the wee hours of Christmas morning, called Julotta. It was scheduled in the village church this year for a rather civil 9 am, so since I was actually awake at 7.30, I decided to get a quick cup of coffee, get my boots on, and trudge down through the Christmas Slush.

Actually, the slush was gone from the streets, except for the odd, treacherous bit of ice. It was just beginning to get light out, not even the birds were awake. I did meet a couple picking up Maj-Britt, a former missionary to Africa who is the village genealogist, as I passed her place. "God fortsättning!", a good continuing of the Christmas season, they wished me.

The church was ablaze with candlelight! The custodian, Eva, had probably been there for the last hour or so, lighting over 120 candles inside.

I've often been in the church where only 4-5 people were attending, but this morning there was a good crowd. We sang some old Christmas carols, and a young woman sang and played the flute. The preacher was hoarse, in addition to speaking the local dialect, so I didn't understand much of what he was saying. Maj-Britt gave me a hug and the best of wishes for the coming year, I wished her continued good health. All the others just kind of eye the stranger, if you haven't lived here for most of your life, you are a stranger.

Heading home, the sun had come up, although the sky was still very grey. The birds were making quite a noise, almost as if it was spring!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Geisterfjord

Ooooh, a thriller that takes place in Ísafjörður, Iceland! Had to buy that one, as I loved being in Isafjördur a few years ago. Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's Geisterfjord (Ég man þig, literally "I remember you") seems to be two completely different stories for a while. One concerns a group of three people with the crazy idea of renovating a house on Hornstrandir, an abandoned area across the Ísafjarðardjúp from Ísafjörður. The other is a newly-divorced psychiatrist with a dark secret working in Ísafjörður.



It took me a while to get into the book, I considered pitching it about a third of the way in. But it got better and better, and the last few chapters I read all at once until the wee hours of the morning. And then I couldn't sleep, I was hearing ghosts all over the place.

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir is not Stieg Larsson, like the back cover states, but the book is a good read. I'll try some of the other ones she has written!

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

At Christmas we like to go see some epic movie in English. Three years running we saw the Lord of the Rings, so it was fitting to go see "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" this afternoon. We sprang for the 3D version.

Yawn.

I repeatedly looked at my watch, to determine how much longer I would have to suffer.

I had wondered how such a thin book as "The Hobbit" could be extended to a three-film sequence. Well, every half-page skirmish is drawn out into a looooong battle. And there is nothing new here, lots of ugly trolls and some dirty-looking dwarfs and some beautiful elves. Oh, and nasty Orgs and their toothy tigers or whatever it is that they ride.

The film is riddled with continuity errors. The list on IMDB is long, but doesn't contain half of the ones I saw. Bilbo has his rucksack on, then off, then on again. It gets dirty, is miraculously cleaned up, and is dirty again. Bilbo's clothes suddenly end up clean and pressed as well. Only the buttons popped off remain off, it seems. And we never see the feet of Bilbo much, so they could have just saved all the fuss with the foot makeup.

In LotR it was magic to see how Gollum moved. Motion-capture is old hat now, as is computer animation. So many of the scenes were obviously SFX. Lots of little figures that were probably dolls, so many computer-generated fighting scenes.

Oh, right, we paid for 3D. What was the point of that? There was depth to the scenes, but I felt that when there were multiple people in the scenes that they seemed flat, somehow. In perspective, but without being embodied. Oh, there was the odd bird and butterfly that seemed to be introduced into the story just so there would be something 3D-ish to ooh and ah about. But Avatar already had that, so what is new? Okay, the 48 fps maybe made things smoother, I didn't get motion sick.

The credits mention rotoscopers -- how quaint! And scores of TDs, are they all "technical directors"? Then there are "scale doubles" - are these midgets that look like the main characters? And how are they different from "body doubles"?

The only interesting bits were the attempts at character development and dialogue, but that was only about 30 minutes, max. 

Anyway. I was glad to be released from an uncomfortable chair and to get out into the wonderful winter wonderland outside. It's supposed to all melt by tomorrow, but it was much more exciting to walk through the snow, catching real snowflakes on my tongue, than to watch this movie.

We're still here!

Well, we made it to December 22, 2012, without a mishap, it seems! Of course, the question arises: where did December go? I have this blur of classes, meetings, talks, examinations, and the odd Christmas Party in my mind.

Good thing I have a few days in Sweden to clear my mind. There's a good bit of snow on the ground (the neighbor says they had half a meter earlier this month), so everything looks lovely, bathed in white.

We went food shopping this afternoon, you could swear people were getting ready for long days and nights holed up somewhere from the looks of what they were buying. And the store had everything in Jumbo-size-only, it seemed. I managed to get a 2 kg package of ground meat repackaged to give me just the pound I wanted. But cheeses all started at 1 kg, it seemed, and bread or cakes or sausages came in a size suitable for a soccer team. I suppose everyone has family over, and the eat to avoid speaking with each other.

The mega-supermarket now has "self-service" - you take a scanner as you go in, bag your fruits and veggies yourself and scan everything in, then pay at the self-service stations. I suppose since Swedes are generally honest that this works, but why would people want to do all the work themselves. Just so they don't have to wait in line?

So what's on the menu for the Christmas season? Hamburgers, Salmon, Zucchini Lasagne, and Reindeer with Mushrooms. I'm going to try some easy appetizers like this or a pomegranate and apple salad. Yum!

Mac Xcode Fail

I have a brand spanking new MacBook Pro Retina since this summer. I was next in line for a new computer and they were just out, so I decided to get one.

It was beautiful -- wonderful graphics, sleek design. I reported on some of the setup hiccups back in August, haven't been blogging much since. I didn't start putting stickers on it, because since I began to use it, I began having headaches. I soon realized that the non-Mac programs were not using the Retina display properly. I debated whether to sell the Retina off to a colleague and get a non-Retina for myself, but finally decided to keep it. I've started off just with a WikiData, a CC, and a FSFE sticker.

But problems keep arising. I have to order an Thunderbolt-2-Ethernet adapter when I am suddenly in a place that doesn't believe in WLAN. I want to plug in a microphone and I discover there is no jack anymore for my super fancy room microphone. I want to leave my laptop in the library and go for coffee, so I whip out my Kensington lock - and find that there is no place to attach it to! My choices are no coffee or no Mac. I settled for the former.

Then suddenly, Keynote is crashing regularly. Or PowerPoint. Or both. Or picd crashes and wants to tell me about it many times. Urgently. Or the TimeMachine interrupts a presentation to tell me that it can't find the TimeMachine. Duh, I'm not home, dude.

I finally narrowed it down to Keynote / PowerPoint crashing when I plugged in the HDMI beamer. It also crashed with the VGA adapter. I tried plugging in and then turning on the beamer, turning on the beamer and then plugging it in, with all variations. Crash, crash, crash. Today, it didn't crash. No idea why, maybe because I installed Xcode last night?

I had avoided installing Xcode over the summer. It didn't get transferred, and is a 4 GB (GIGAbyte) package to download. Since I only have 5 GB a month on my plan, I delayed this until the fall when I could use the line at school. Last night a friend challenged me to a simple task. Should be a 20 minute job, just need to compile a tool in C.

Except that there was no Xcode installed. Okay, let's start downloading ....... Got it, now install. It now expands to 9 GB (!!!!!) somewhere on the disk. My new, larger disk is rapidly evaporating. It gets installed, I now have gcc, go to set up the code for the challenge.

BZZZT. Error.

LLVM ERROR: Cannot yet select: 0x1009eda10: f32 = fp_round 0x100a53310, 0x1009ed810 [ORD=1412] [ID=40]
  0x100a53310: f64 = fdiv 0x100a56910, 0x100a52e10 [ORD=1411] [ID=38]
    0x100a56910: f64 = sint_to_fp 0x100a56a10 [ID=36]
      0x100a56a10: i64,ch = load 0x100543bc8, 0x100a52710, 0x1009ed910 [ID=32]
        0x100543bc8: ch = EntryToken [ORD=1397] [ID=0]
        0x100a52710: i64 = add 0x100a56b10, 0x100a06c10 [ORD=1405] [ID=26]
          0x100a56b10: i64,ch = CopyFromReg 0x100543bc8, 0x1009eee10 [ORD=1405] [ID=18]
            0x100543bc8: ch = EntryToken [ORD=1397] [ID=0]
            0x1009eee10: i64 = Register %reg16385 [ORD=1405] [ID=6]
          0x100a06c10: i64 = Constant<24> [ORD=1397] [ID=2]
        0x1009ed910: i64 = undef [ORD=1398] [ID=4]
    0x100a52e10: f64 = sint_to_fp 0x100a56d10 [ID=35]
      0x100a56d10: i64,ch = load 0x100543bc8, 0x100a56510, 0x1009ed910 [ID=31]
        0x100543bc8: ch = EntryToken [ORD=1397] [ID=0]
        0x100a56510: i64 = add 0x100a56b10, 0x1009ee610 [ORD=1407] [ID=25]
          0x100a56b10: i64,ch = CopyFromReg 0x100543bc8, 0x1009eee10 [ORD=1405] [ID=18]
            0x100543bc8: ch = EntryToken [ORD=1397] [ID=0]
            0x1009eee10: i64 = Register %reg16385 [ORD=1405] [ID=6]
          0x1009ee610: i64 = Constant< [ORD=1399] [ID=5]
        0x1009ed910: i64 = undef [ORD=1398] [ID=4]
  0x1009ed810: i64 = Constant<0> [ORD=1404] [ID=3]
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [sim_c] Error 1 

Right.WTF is LLVM. I googled. It's a linker. I haven't tussled with a linker for 25 years! I scoured the forums. Lots of people have an LLVM error, and there are various incantations that may or may not work. I clicked through Xcode, looking for something to set. Nothing looked useful. At 2 am I gave up and went to bed.

This morning I showed the mess to one of our engineers. He had a bright idea, he had run into this trying to install Github on our iMacs. "Open up the preferences in Xcode", he said. "Go to Downloads and Components. Look, you don't have the command line tools installed!" It turns out, when you install 9 GB worth of Xcode in order to have a make around, it doesn't bother installing 150 MB worth of command line tools. So we downloaded them, installed them, and by magic, I was now able to create the tool for the challenge.

Look, Apple. It's not just the creative types that like to use your systems. There's Linux under the hood, so that it is possible to program without all the window-y stuff and 97 million checkmarks or buttons to set up for an Xcode project. That might be fine if I'm preparing an app for an iPhone, but when I want a trivial little thing built to fire off a simple task, I don't want to first have to install 9 GB of stuff just to get the compiler put somewhere where I can find it.

Skyfall

Sorry about all those posts I've written in my head and forgotten to post ;)

The usual gang of suspects managed to get their calendars in order to meet up for James Bond and Skyfall in English. It was an enjoyable evening, even though there is far too much in the way of gunfighting and fires and stunts. The motorcycle chase along the roof of the Turkish bazaar was voted best scene.

To put it in a nutshell, an older Bond and a very grey M are caught in between a fight of old school spying vs. fancy new electronic spying. There are lots of computers around, and many cryptography buzz words are thrown in, if not always correctly used. Cute that one of the Bond girls is named Eve and the new boss Mallory, these are usually the two "bad guys" in cryptography protocols. They didn't get elliptic curves thrown in, however, more's the pity.

It was nice to see some strong women -- M, the minister -- not decked out in sexy clothes. And Ola Rapace is just sooooo good-looking, don't know why Noomi divorced him.

Even if the film was long (and there were 35 minutes of ads and trailers to bear before the film started) it was worth seeing.