Helsinki: Fun in the Sun... or Not

It's been a bit longer between updates than I had hoped; busy with Maemo 6, random hacking projects, and of course (attempting to) have a life away from said activities. I have finally booked my vacation back to New Zealand (and will also be visiting a friend in Melbourne, Australia.)

I probably picked the worst day to do my pre-vacation shopping; the weather in Helsinki has warmed up just enough (+1 degrees C) that everything on the ground has turned into a slippery slush:

• Number of times almost doing an unintentional back flip (or other such acrobatics): ~6.
• Number of times sprayed by passing cars: 2 (one of which I saw coming, but couldn't move out of the way...)

However, it seems the Finns are not totally immune to walking on slush; I saw one unfortunate person do a back-slide into a melted puddle.

This was just walking from Kaisaniemi to Rautatientori (Forum) and back; I still need to pickup a few things at Verkkokauppa. Unfortunately it doesn't look like the slush will be freezing again any time soon (more likely it melts slowly over time) so my vacation has turned out to be quite well timed. I'm leaving on the 10th.

Since I tend not to get out nearly as much as I should, I'm going to attempt to try some things I've never done before. Currently tandem skydiving is something I'm considering; I figure jumping out of an airplane is about as far away from software engineering as you can get. ;-) (Yes, I know about n900fly)

Anyone who has some ideas for things to do in Australia or New Zealand, please, leave a comment. :-)

Avatar 3D worth it...

I just got back from watching Avatar in the cinema this time, in much higher quality and in anaglyph 3D; actually I started out at the wrong cinema, Finnkino in Kaisaniemi; luckily the one in Kamppi is only a few minutes walk away.

I've mentioned before that usually these anaglyph 3D effects don't work very well for me due to varying degrees of myopia in both of my eyes, but I thought the movie was visually cool enough to give it a try with contact lenses instead of my normal glasses. I think this helped the effect significantly, but I still get the feeling that my brain starts to adjust to the effect over time so it's most impressive at the start of the movie.

This peaked my interest in ioquake3's anaglyph rendering mode, but unfortunately they ask for the glasses back after the movie, so no chance of trying it out (at least until I order a pair of my own.)

Anaglyph 3D on the N900 might be quite interesting, but of course I would either need to make much more efficient use of vertex buffer objects to make up for halving the FPS, or do a port of XreaL...

I think the later option is better for several reasons, but we'll see; Python, SCons and Scratchbox is a whole bundle of pain that I really don't want to be getting into at 02:00 in the morning.

Alarm clock vs snow plow...

Okay, technically it would be a backhoe scoping up snow/ice from the road and footpath, but seriously, at 09:45 and right outside my bedroom window!

I've had the alarm on my N900 fail to wake me several times, however this is much more effective; now if only they could do it at some reasonable time, like, oh, 12:00 or 13:00... and in keeping with the day of fail, my box at Nokia seems to have lost it's IP address, so no working remotely today.

Holiday boredom...

I don't have any plans for the Christmas holidays, and Helsinki is at just the right temperature to make doing anything outside really difficult. Some of the snow has melted and frozen into ice, making it feel a lot like walking on broken glass: physically and emotionally; I stopped counting the number of unintentional acrobatics after about the 5th or 6th time sliding in some way.

I might implement zlib compression for network traffic in my engine, which should only be a few dozen lines... or something a bit more interesting; stencil shadow volumes could still use more optimization, or some SIMD stuff...

There are at least a few dozen minor X server issues discovered by Coverity, but that's getting dangerously close to Nokia work over the holidays. The majority of the issues are error paths anyway, nothing really critical.

In the more being lazy and doing nothing area, Avatar looks like it could be an interesting movie...

Window drafts...

I'll be stopping by K-Rauta today and picking up some masking tape to put over the gaps between the window panes and the outer frame... I already replaced the older E sealing tape with thicker P tape before winter, but it seems there are still some nasty drafts coming through...

Now, I usually don't mind the winter; in fact I much prefer the shorter days instead of ~18 hours of sunlight, but it seems I don't share the Finns immunity for subzero temperatures.

New city, new job, new blog...

I decided to start blogging again, now that I've somewhat settled down in Helsinki, and hopefully I'll be able to keep some regularity in the postings this time. Picture is from Snellmaninkatu, near my apartment at about 14:00 yesterday.

It's been an interesting year; moving to Finland, working for Nokia, speaking at this years X Developers Conference and Maemo Summit.

Maemo Summit was arguably the most interesting since I was giving a demo of an early version of Quake 3 running on the N900 (also another video.) The whole thing started from a weekend project after chatting to Phil Carmody, who wrote the touchscreen and accelerometer kernel drivers. Actually it ended up turning into a several weekend project, but I digress; funny what happens when engineers get bored after work...

Currently I'm working on fixing two XreaL bugs with projected lights; I did a quick patch for the first issue but the second one is being more troublesome; Robert will probably get that before I do, and when it's 05:30 in the morning, maybe it's time to call it quits for the day.

Although, tomorrow might see the N900 getting more of a workout than Quake 3...