The Swiss television channel Schweizer Fernsehen visited the Student Hostel the other day and made a reportage about being an exchange student in Meierwiesenstrasse. The kitchen was relatively empty when they shot this, it is ususally even worse…
Link to the video (The whole broadcast is in Swiss German)
If anybody reading this blog lives in Linköping or attends the Linköping University and has either a computer cable for the Canon PowerShot G2 or a CompactFlash memory card reader (USB or PCMCIA) I would be overwhelmingly grateful to you if you could borrow it to me for a few hours. I want to be able to download my photos of the past Orientation (nollning) Week at Y-linjen to my computer and eventually publish them on the blog.
The news value of these photos are deteriorating quickly and I would really like to have them here on the web.
You can either drop me an e-mail, a blog comment or meet me in persona at the university tomorrow. Thank you!
(quote of the month) for February:
Jimmy said:
I have prayed to God that I should not get a girlfriend. That prayer is being fulfilled every day!
Oh, Jimmy. We love you.
The past months, I have been developing a program written in the beautiful and fun language of Python during my spare hours on board Elida. It is too early to reveal any details, but I do feel excited about the program and its features, and I hope to make a first alpha
release next year.
The program uses the ncurses library, which is a standard tool used by almost anybody who develops graphical applications that run on the Linux and Unix console. However, the Python implementation seems to have several shortcomings, some that have caused trouble for me.
First off is the apparent lack of support for wide characters. It might just be that the Python packages I use are not compiled with support for wide characters. Wide characters means letters and characters Unicode character set, supporting any letter in any language through all known history, compared to 256 characters that the standard ASCII character set supports. When displaying strings with these extended characters, my program just displays garbled text. Solution: Filter out all non-ASCII characters (ugly)
Then is the troubles of inputting key codes. When I press different control characters on the console, “Ctrl-J” is the same as “Enter”, “Ctrl-H” is the same as Backspace and so on. I want to take use of the combination Ctrl-J and Ctrl-H, but that means that the Enter and Backspace keys get the same actions. That is not what I want. I have looked at the source code of ncmpc, an excellent music player program that uses curses in a similar manner to my program, and it seems to get different key codes for Ctrl-J and Enter, which of course makes me jealous.
On board the ship I have just to little possibility to get out on the Internet to make a thorough research on these issues, but by reading my offline documentation for Python and Curses, I get the impression that the curses support is just not ready for prime-time yet. Is there anybody out there who happens to know more about this issue, or that even has any experience developing with this toolkit? I would love some input on this, since I feel a bit confused about everything right now.
I got a letter this Friday from the Swedish military service authorities. I am liberated from doing military service, and I don’t even have to go through the recruitment process! I feel very joyful and relieved, I have for a long time wished to become assured of this.
The last two weeks with Elida have been spent on the island of Öckerö, a few kilometres north of Gothenburg. We are moored at “Ö-varvet”, a local shipyard that is installing the electric components of the Diesel engine. Elida V has got the side rails installed, and I have been working with the radios and navigation equipment. As a certified passenger ship, there are tough requirements on the quality and number of communications equipment on board. To this date, I have installed one long range MF/HF (short wave) radio, one VHF radio, one NAVTEX (navigation information and text messages) receiver, one GPS receiver, three hand-held and water-resistant VHF radios and one SART transponder (a radar beacon for locating the ship in case of emergency. What is left are the two combined AIS/GPS units and the chart plotter.
This weekend I spent with Robert, Karin, Ellinor and Mattias in Gothenburg, away from the ship. We slept over at Ellinor’s and Mattias’ apartment, watched Happy Feet on Friday (yay!), went Christmas shopping on Saturday (I am finished buying Christmas presents!), and on Sunday we went to service at the Livets Ord (Word of Life) church. Thanks to Ellinor and Mattias for their hospitality and all the good food!
On Thursday I am leaving for Västerås, where I will spend Christmas with my family. After that, Livskraft!
I am for the first time blogging from Elida. I came back to the boat in
Wednesday and have since then been helping out with Elida V.
We are really making progress, and the current goal is to be ready for
departure on the 10th of November. Then we are to be finished with the
crew compartments, the deck equipment, the electricity, steering, the
fences, all laminating and painting. I and Lennart, the man in charge of
the project, have been laminating the rings hold the masts where they go
through the deck. The rings are massive plastic constructions, and to
give the necessary strength for supporting the masts. We have therefore
put a double layer of glass fibre fabric laminated with Polyester on
both sides of the rings, and that took almost all day today.
Laminating is quite fun compared to sanding and painting, since that is
more of a constructive task, and it is just as much challenge as I need
right now. It is inspiring to work with something that requires both
brains and muscles, compared to the monotonous sanding.
My wireless card from Cisco doesn’t seem to work even after a firmware
upgrade. I am really confused about what to do now, since it has to work
when we leave for the Mediterranean Sea. I’ll keep investigating even more.
After being a latent blog for a few weeks, I have set up a better blogging system, meaning that it will be easier to write here periodically even though I am offline for long periods, which I usually am for the time being.
I have returned home this weekend from Elida for a short break and to work out a few matters at home. My Thinkpad laptop has a problem with the cisco aironet wifi card, and as far as I know I have to update the firmware under Windows for it to work. Phew. My time on Elida so far has been very much being in harbour and not much of sailing. We are working on the new Elida, Elida V, which will be one of the fastest sail boats in Sweden while being a certificated passenger ship. We believe that there is about one month left of work until the
ship will be finished for our departure for Holland. In Holland we will mast the boat at Nirvana Spars in Den Helden, whereafter we leave for the Mediterranean Sea.
Stay here for more updates, they will hopefully follow!
I got my first “cool” rating on istheshit today. Check out http://fire_fox.istheshit.net/