Rain in Helsinki...

Apparently the forecast got it wrong, but none the less it's nice to hear the sound of thunder and rain in Helsinki (which doesn't seem to happen very often.)

Unfortunately I've yet to buy any groceries, and now it's starting to look more like the great deluge out there...

Airports ftw... yeah...

I've finally made it back to Helsinki although my dislike for airports has probably reached monumental levels by now... Unfortunately I had a lot of bad transfers; most of them about 6 hours. Long enough to be annoying, but too short to get a hotel and some sleep. Next time, I'll plan a multi-stop journey so that I can actually sleep during the ~36+ hour journey. Bill Hicks is right on the money when it comes to children on airplanes.

I didn't take many pictures during my vacation, but here's a good reason to remember to fill out the "stop delivering junk mail" form before leaving for over a month. I also have to replace my house plant. The post office apparently doesn't use any no-junk-mail stickers. Quite fun sorting through that to find the important mails...


I brought back some nice teas from Australia: Indian Spice and Turkish Apple. Which is really just sugar, citric acid, and other flavorings (well, it tastes nice anyway.)

Apparently it must have looked interesting enough for customs to open my suitcase. The tea box was left open, but they were nice enough to not rummage through everything... The resemblance is uncanny though.



Now just to sort out paper-work and other miscellaneous things, then back to the office tomorrow (hopefully not totally jet-lagged.)

Mother Nature's a cold hearted bitch...

Unfortunately due to the EU airspace being closed because of the volcanic ash cloud I wasn't able to make it back to Helsinki; I ended up getting stuck in Hong Kong for a night (which was kind of cool; apart from the exceptionally expensive Airport Hotel.)

Yeah, I was lazy and got the closest place, optimistically thinking this might only last a day or two. Finally I decided to get a flight back to New Zealand rather than stay for an unknown period of time in Hong Kong. I don't even want to think about the number of timezones I've crossed in the course of this fiasco... I'm sure the jet-lag will hit hard.

Finnair are offering a refund for unused tickets (once they get around to processing it) so hopefully I will get at least some of my airfair back.

Oh, and if I never hear the words "final boarding call" or "passengers on flight..." again, it will be far too soon.

Start of my vacation in New Zealand...

After the initial ~35 hours worth of flying and airports (I swear the food gets worse every international flight) and accidentally letting my visa lapse, resulting in a fine from Finnish immigration, I've made it back to New Zealand. (Well, actually a couple of days ago, but I was lazy about updating.)

Fortunately I had an overnight lay-over in Sydney so I was able to get a hotel room for the night, have a shower, and sleep on a real bed. My schedule doesn't look so good on the return flight, though.

I'm having a fairly relaxing vacation so far, with the exception that I'm going to need to have some wisdom teeth removed. The dentist in Helsinki thought they would be fine, but considering pain is the body's way of telling the mind something is wrong, and after seeing the X-ray myself, I'm going with the second opinion. Hopefully this won't ruin my planned trip to Melbourne too much; apparently the recovery time is about a week.

I have been doing a little programming on personal projects, even though I said I wouldn't... :-) The next book that I want to read, Sleepless by Charlie Huston doesn't seem to be available in any bookstores in NZ yet. Perhaps I can pick that up in Melbourne; it's not worth the shipping costs for a single book from Amazon (UK or US) to New Zealand (although to Helsinki from the UK site is quite reasonable.)

Maemo 5/ioquake3 with native QVM's...

A number of people have asked me questions along the lines of "can I play my favorite Quake 3 mod with your package on Maemo?" The answer used to be that you could not, due to changes in the Client Game (cgame) module. I've now fixes these issues (mostly absolute vs. relative touchscreen events) so that an unmodified cgame will work correctly.

The short answer: yes, your favorite mod should now work.

I have done absolutely no testing other than checking that the vanilla, unmodified QVM's shipped on the Quake 3 CD work as expected. So your millage may vary.

There are still a couple of issues with UI interaction, but since this is a highly requested feature, and I have a flight to catch in some hours, I'm pushing ioquake3 (1558-maemo6) to extras-devel now.

Also, there are two cvar's you might like to tweak: sensitivity and accel_sensitivity.

Pro-tip: the key combination "Fn (Blue Arrow) + =" is Escape, and "Fn + Sym" is console up/down. Yes, eventually I will write some better release notes. :-)

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. :-)