Monthly Archives: August 2009

Laser 160588

Monday, August 31, 2009 – 08:00

This weekend I finally sold my Laser dinghy. Because of the lack of good sailing opportunities in Linköping (no, Roxen hasn’t really been an option) it’s been stored in the garage since 2005, and we figured the chances of me going dinghy sailing the next years are slim due to exchange studies. When doing the finishing touches on the boat before the sale I felt a slight sting in my heart. It was in this very dinghy that I really learned to sail, and I got several flashbacks from the many hours I spent in this crazy-fast four-meter dinghy.

Reaching with the Laser
This photo of me practicing fast reaching is from 2004, when I was sailing in lake Sommen. As you can see the hull is almost lifted out of the water, bouncing off the waves in wet fury. Few things in life are better than that!
By Jonathan Fors | Posted in Life, Photos | Comments (0)

Adapt, adopt, improve!

Monday, August 31, 2009 – 00:00

I have to apologize to everybody who’s been unable to visit my blog the past week or so. There’s been some downtime, but I hope that the issues are sorted out by now. Here’s the story behind the outages.

The whole summer I’ve been planning a major overhaul of the servers I’m running in the cellar, and this last week I’ve been working hard on effecting these changes. Shutting down a server that has been running continuously for 480 days is never easy, but there was no option because of the extremely serious sock_sendpage vulnerability recently found in the Linux kernel. The updates I’ve done have been the focused around security, and since I’ll be abroad for the next year everything needs to work with minimal need for maintenance.

The new setup is a combination of one server running the very secure operating system OpenBSD spiced with additional measures such as chrooting and intrusion detection, and one server with six virtual computers running Ubuntu through Xen. All machines are protected with an advanced intrusion detection system and a separated logging server, hopefully making any intrusion attempts detectable and void. But no-one can achieve perfect security, and I won’t say I’m immune to attacks though I hope I’ve made the systems robust enough. In the process I have learned a new operating system, OpenBSD, and I’ve almost fallen in love with it :) I must be a strange person.

Now everybody back home knows enough to keep the servers running when I’m away, and I’ve specifically asked them to make sure things stay afloat in the event of a power failure. The battery backups are cheap and not very reliable, but they protect against the minor outages and prevent the most annoying sub-second power spikes.

Enough of this technical mumbo-jumbo, here follows a picture of these new computers that will be working hard to serve you these web pages! (Nothing would work without that typewriter.)

Servers, August 2009
By Jonathan Fors | Posted in English, Meta, Photos | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Accommodation

Sunday, August 23, 2009 – 14:28

Classmate Jesper writes about his principles for the exchange year on not getting stuck among other exchange students but to really assimilate the culture of the host country in order to learn as much as possible. I wholeheartedly agree with what he says and have planned to do the same for my year. While Jesper (who now studies in Montpellier) and I both have lived in our respective host countries for extended periods of time before this year of studying abroad I think that anybody studying abroad should consider this.

Many exchange students come to Linköping every year, and almost everybody just hangs out with other exchange students. There are dedicated “international evenings” at the pub and excursions arranged by the ESN, and while it might be nice to meet other exchange students, one should really try to get in touch with the locals as well. Yes, I know that the Swedish “protocols” of getting-to-know-each-other can be awkward to most foreigners, but that is beside the point. Even if being abroad is just about improving one’s CV one should really get under the skin of the host country.

In Zürich I will try to make as many Swiss friends as possible, I will not take the introductory language course offered and I will avoid all ESN excursions. Not that the exchange students are bad friends or that the language courses or excursions would be bad, but because exchange studies are all about the host country! I also plan on becoming more experience with the German language and to regain some if the Schwiizertüütsch I lost since my parents and I moved to Sweden in 1994.

There is just one thing that I could not do anything about, and that was accommodation. The housing situation in Zürich is alarming, and according to the Statistics Department there were 57 vacant apartments in June 2008, corresponding to a vacancy rate of about 0.03 percent. Finding someplace to live takes months, and thus I was happy to accept the room offered to me by the exchange office at the ETH. Yes, I broke the first principal, but there simply was no option.

Google Street View was launched in Switzerland just a few days ago (and has already come under fire). It is an excellent tool for browsing the streets of Zurich, planning shopping routes and finding bus connections. Of course I had to take a look at my soon-to-be home, but I was greeted with the following:

There is no house!

There is no house!

The lack of a house is actually a good thing, since I have done my research and know that the house won’t be finished before the 1st of September. In other words, I will be living in a brand-new home! And the rent is so cheap it’s probably subsidized by the government. 500 CHF/month (3300 SEK or 330 EUR) is a bargain in this city. Almost everything, down to the bed sheets, are included in the rent. I am really grateful for having been offered such a nice place, though I believe there won’t be any Swiss students in the house.

16 days to go!

Zürich

Zürich. Photo by MadGeographer under CC-BY-SA 3.0

By Jonathan Fors | Posted in Opinion | Comments (0)

The world of Yi

Friday, August 21, 2009 – 12:36

world_of_yi

I and my university class of twelve have now completed two years of studies at Linköping University and the exciting third year now begins. Everybody in the class are studying applied physics with international perspective, and we are all going abroad for the third year, studying physics in our respective languages.  My profile language is German, but in the class there are students of Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish and French as well.

Jesper has done a great job setting up a homepage for our adventure and all of us are going to have a blog of some sort where write about the life in the foreign country.

I have added my blogging classmates to the links on the sidebar, you can also click the links below to read their blogs:

Mandarin

  • Daniel, National Tsinghua University, Hsinchu City, Taiwan
  • Christopher, National Central University, Jhongli City, Taiwan
  • Per, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

Japanese

  • Pär, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
  • Carl, Saitama University, Toky, Japan
  • Jakob, Chiba University, Chiba, Japan

French

  • Lovisa, Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, Grenoble, France
  • Jesper, Polytech Montpellier, Montpellier, France
  • Li, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • Viktor, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Nancy, Nancy, France

Spanish

  • Frida, Universidad Técnica Santa Maria, Valparaiso, Chile

German

  • Myself, Jonathan. Eidgenössische Techische Hochschule (ETH), Zürich, Switzerland

For my own part, I now only have 18 days until my flight departs for Zürich but I haven’t yet grasped that I finally am going abroad. Many things must be prepared, I’ll someway have to wedge in a year’s worth of packing into the 20 kg luggage weight restriction.

My university class
Above: Class of Yi3 (minus Daniel and Lovisa)
By Jonathan Fors | Posted in English, Meta, Photos | Comments (2)

Frizon 2009

Thursday, August 20, 2009 – 19:00

The Frizon festival has become something of a tradition for me, and this was the fourth time in a row I attended the four-day event. Music as well as food for the soul in the form of worship and bible studies.

Frizon 2009
Sarah Kelly

Sarah Kelly, who got her breakthrough with her concert at Frizon 2006, performed on the first evening.

Maia Hirasawa

Maia Hirasawa was the biggest name at the festival.

Bird's eye

The trampolines were popular.

Balkan Beat Party
Samuel Ljungblahd

Samuel Ljungbladh grooved the whole Magasinet with soul and gospel.

As this was the first Frizon since I got serious with photography, I took plenty of photos. In addition to the above photos, I’ve published some here.

By Jonathan Fors | Posted in English, Life, Photos | Comments (0)