Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in kaol's LiveJournal:

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Friday, November 5th, 2010
8:33 pm	I decided to switch ISPs. This has gone just about as badly as it could have. I signed the contract with my upcoming ISP a month ago and we put there that I'd be moving in two weeks. The salesman said that it was better to put that in there since connecting the net would take 1-2 weeks. But I got a letter after that two weeks, saying that they'd connect my net after that 1-2 weeks. That wasn't quite what I expected. They already tried to connect my net on Wednesday, but somehow they got that wrong. They would have fixed that promptly, in a day or two, if they didn't go to a strike for the rest of the week, due to upcoming layoffs. I told my old ISP that I'd be moving to a new apartment and everything actually worked on the day when I told that I'd be moving, but they disconnected it on their end as soon as they heard that I'd be switching ISPs. Again, it was not what I expected. I've been without a proper net for over two weeks now. At least I can use my new phone as a 3G modem, but it is slow and laggy and trying to do anything with it is getting more and more frustrating. My new DSL will be 100 Mbit. I suppose that's almost worth waiting for. I tried to go get a library card and to loan some books but for some reason, the local library was closed. I wasn't the only one trying to go there in vain and there was no message about why it wasn't open. All the lights were out, too. I guess it has something to do with All Saints. It's got to be the most useless holiday around. At least I won't be surprised and need to go hungry this year. About the only Saturday when markets aren't open. My brother ordered some computer parts from Germany but that didn't get delivered before this weekend, due to striking post workers. I'm sensing a trend here.
Sunday, October 24th, 2010
8:23 pm	I've been living in my new apartment for a week, now. I've slept a few nights poorly but I'm getting used to the place. I've got most of my things unpacked now but I'll still need to go buy some furniture. Simply getting new drapes made the place look much nicer, already. I've chronically had more books than shelf space and they dismantled my old 'shelf in the move and it's still in pieces. I'd get rid of the rest of my cardboard boxes if I got myself a new one. I'll get this place feel and look like a home, yet. I've thought about making myself a monitor arm. I've got used of using two monitors at work and then at my parents', too. I could use one to stack my old CRT monitor and the new LCD one. But those cost a lot and welding one, possibly using a few ready made parts, couldn't be all that hard. There's also that that most aren't rated to accomodate the 10kg that my LCD monitor weighs. But it could take a while before I could try and see about implementing that project. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 19th, 2010
8:37 pm	I was hoping to get to move to a new apartment in Kouvola before the end of this month, but looks like I didn't quite manage that. I'm renting my current apartment only until then and I'll need to empty the apartment next Sunday and store my stuff at my parents', instead. Temporarily. I'm buying an apartment instead of renting one, so I'll need to care more about the apartment's condition. Naturally, it'll take longer to find one, then. I got a new toy, namely a Samsung Galaxy S. It's shiny. I wish I'd have the chance to code something for the Android platform sometime. I got another new phone from a different operator, too, since I get to use both of their operator specific discounts. At least that's just a basic Nokia model. They shouldn't give me the opportunity to optimize like this. I guess it doesn't hurt if I end up carrying two phones since the Android phone drains the battery in a day or two if I do anything with it. At least I get to do most of my daily idle web browsing in the train, now. I have ideas and the will to work on them but I still don't get anywhere. I know I can't get any useful work done in the train. It's frustrating, but I expect things to turn for better soon. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
11:33 pm	My probationary period is over, since last week. A permanent position, with all that entails. Surprisingly enough, I seem to cope with it. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 18th, 2010
3:00 pm	The job has kept me busy. Long commute times have left time for little else on weekdays and I can't quite spend every weekend sitting at computer, either. I've been to Turku twice now, mainly just to see friends. Perhaps things would ease if and when I get an apartment in Kouvola. Even though that'd be the point where I'd not have an apartment at all in Turku. I still have my own projects outside of work. Piperka, Debian and that scifi association in Turku all take their time. I've listed them in the order of my own personal preference, but, unfortunately, the urgency of things tends to go just the other way around. At least I've found some time for Piperka and have got started at coding the new web backend. I've found a web framework that I like well enough, at last. Namely, Snap. It looks like a good base for metaxslt, too, if I ever get to work on that again. Now if I only didn't have a headache. This is supposed to be my day off and I'd rather do something besides try to sleep it off. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 14th, 2010
6:03 pm	I was going to write about what a great time I had in Berlin. Somehow I don't feel like it now. I came home to hear that my parents' cat is going to be put down tomorrow. He was fine when I left but he got sick and they diagnosed him with cancer. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
10:26 pm	I can't believe that it's only Tuesday. (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 29th, 2010
11:31 am	I got a call last week. I assumed that it was a telemarketer and, accordingly, replied snidely but instead of that, it was a job offer. They interviewed me for a job a year ago. They didn't hire me then but now they wanted me. I went there again and accepted the job offer. It's in Kouvola, which is a town 300km from Turku, so I can't quite commute there from here. I'll be staying with my parents at first, but if it'll look like the job would continue for longer, then I'll need to find myself a new apartment and move for real. I've been living in Turku for over ten years now. I don't really look toward moving away from here. I have some very good friends around here. But life's felt pretty stagnant for a long time and I welcome the change of pace. I needed something to remind me of that that life doesn't last forever. Ostensibly, I'll have less time for my own projects, but this may end up encouraging me to do more. I'll have a probationary period first. Yesterday was my second day at work. So far, I've been reading about how to cross build deb packages for armel and about setting up a private buildd and a repository. I'm in Turku for the weekend, to meet with friends and to fetch my things. This all still feels quite unreal. It'll hit me yet. My employer had no problem with me going to LinuxTag. In fact, they gave me paid leave for it and I didn't even ask for anything of the sort. That's mighty fine of them. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 26th, 2010
3:49 pm	I booked my flights to Berlin. Too bad that I could have got them for cheaper if I would have done it sooner. I'll get to see what LinuxTag will be like. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
2:11 am	I made a purchase. Three balls. I thought it would be amusing to learn to juggle. I suppose it'll take quite a while before I get any good at it. One of the balls was larger than the other two and when I went to the store to change that one the next day, they greeted me by asking whether I came to return the balls. I'm not ready to give up that soon! I'm still working on that web site for that scifi associaton. I'm hoping that I'll get the new site in place sometime soon. There will still be a number of things that'll have to be finished afterwards. I wish I had got this all done a couple of months ago, already. It's hard to keep up with motivation, since it seems to be all the same what I'm doing to the people I'm supposed to be doing this for. At least I've picked up quite a few things that I could apply to MetaXSLT from jQuery and Ikiwiki. I can't properly focus on anything else as long as I haven't finished this project. Still, I've found myself reading about things like arrows. Like monads, the trick to understanding them seemed to be to just stop and read the definition. They seem to fit quite well what I'm about to do. I'm to have a way to define computations statically without any runtime effects, so it seems like a close match. Of course, I won't know how well it all would work before having a working implementation. Not that I have the opportunity to apply any of this for quite some time, yet. It's just that studying these matters was much more fun than the task at hand. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
5:56 pm	We had some issues with our DNS a couple of days ago. piperka.net's A record went missing from one of the two name servers, which lead to redirect loops since Firefox tries www. if it can't reach a domain without that suffix and I had configured the server to redirect connects to www. to the preferred URL. Piperka was quite not there for some hours. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. We're setting up a web site unrelated to Piperka and use the domain for some testing but a part of that didn't quite go as planned. Project Wonderful has launched geo targeted ads. So far, it's amounted to a lot of empty ad boxes for non-US areas. Those blank spaces are depressing and I'd rather see anything up there. PW's ads are generally of good quality and I'd say that they count as a service to my users. I haven't used PW to advertise my site for quite a while but I used the opportunity to land a few bids of my own. I can afford it if I end up paying a few cents for it. I'm preparing another upload of GHC package. We should be ready to have that in unstable soon enough. Looks like we'll have ghci available on all architectures now, which will make a lot of peoples' lives easier and make a bunch of packages buildable on architectures beyond i386 and amd64. (Comment on this)
Friday, January 29th, 2010
10:53 am	I got away from my last apartment and the pipe repair job that was coming there, only to land in the middle of a facade repair. I haven't minded it overly much, especially since I got away from it to work for much of last year. They've been drilling the facade for some time now, presumably to prepare to attach the new balconies. On Tuesday, they were welding something outside. I was away at the moment but they were two stories up from my apartment when I came. My apartment was filled with smoke and smelled like something had burned. I opened windows to let the smoke out but the smell didn't go that easily. I couldn't leave the windows open for that long since it was over -10 degrees outside. I was at home for a while but I left soon and spent the night elsewhere. I came back in the morning and saw a fire engine leaving. My door was broken and leaning on the doorway. Apparently they were alerted about the smell of the smoke and decided to have a look. A fireman came shortly afterwards, I told him that I hadn't seen any signs of burning and that they were welding yesterday and that my apartment was filled with smoke then. A locksmith came soon after that and I helped him lift the door on the new hinges. Afterwards I did see that the floor and the wall under the balcony's door was blackened at places. I don't know if it's only soot or if there's some other damage too. I can feel cold air coming from there so apparently there is a hole to outside in there. All my clothes smell of smoke, I smell of smoke and my aparment smells of smoke. I can't say that I enjoy hanging around here all that much. My friends make comments about camping and wanting to go roast sausages. I hope that the smell dissipates soon enough. I would open the windows but it's freezing cold outside. I don't like this. (Comment on this)
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
12:51 pm	I still haven't got that web site ready, but I'm hoping that we'll get it into partial production use next week. At least I promised so in the meeting this week. I've looked a bit into packaging GHC and it doesn't look like there are any major blockers there. A few patches will need to be updated, some dropped, and there's a few bugs to be fixed. The way how Cabal library registration is handled needs to be reviewed. Not a terribly lot to do, but I'd just need to make the time to finish it. I'm busy and I like it. (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
8:07 pm	It's the new year's eve and I can hear kids shoot fireworks outside. The temperature's under minus 10 degrees so I'm in no hurry to go outside myself. I may yet go to watch the city's fireworks at midnight. I'm still visiting my parents, though I'm starting to feel eager to get back home already. I've spent most of the Xmas coding. I let myself to be persuaded to get involved with a local scifi association and I'm designing a new web site for them in a hurry. For various reasons, I can't or won't use most of the existing web site's code, so I pretty much had to start from scratch with it. At least it's a good chance to learn all sorts of AJAX techniques. I did some javascript coding at that job a couple of years ago, and I must say that jQuery is lovely, compared to what I used there. I just wish I was further with this already. I'm prone to underestimating the amount of work needed. Even the simplest plan may have a surprising amount of details. I'll have to make time for packaging the new GHC, since there's a freeze coming. Hopefully I'll manage to delegate some parts of that to other Haskell packagers. My other packages will need some love too, but they're downright modest compared to that. At least my job ended just before xmas. I didn't have the skills needed for the kind of statistical analysis that they wanted me to do. It's nothing that I couldn't have learned, but I'd have studied statistics, applied math or economics in the first place if it would have been what I'd have wanted. It ended up being pretty frustrating, since I didn't feel that I could even make any progress or make much sense of what they were asking me to do, while I would have much rather worked on Debian stuff or on that web site. I'll start the new year unemployed, but I don't mind that much. I'm far too busy to have a job, currently. I'm already thinking about applying the same techniques that I'm using now to give Piperka a facelift. I still want to finish MetaXSLT and use that in the long term, but it would certainly help to have something finished before that. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
4:51 pm	I wish I really knew what I was doing at work. VAR models were an easy first step, but I haven't got much farther than that yet. I transformed the data into logarithms of differences. I saw that in a book and I suppose that works to normalize the data. Then I took 30 year long samples from the data and calculated models of those and took the logarithms of the ratios of its matrices rows' and columns' absolute values' sums. I didn't even try to explain that well. What I'm doing just seems so arbitrary and ad hoc to me. If I knew the underlying theory better I could get some results that I could actually explain. Even so, my boss liked what I had already. I'm spending most of my time at work reading various course materials, PDFs and books. At the same time, they're already waiting for results. I was expecting to see my job end by the end of the year but it seems like I'll be continuing after all. I was pretty frustrated with the job some time ago and would have happily quit then, but somehow I'm feeling better about it now. I'm learning new things, even if I have to start with applications, not basics. I'm still feeling that I don't have much traction with all this material. I still have to wade through terms that I only know vaguely. But it's not hopeless either. A few more months of this wouldn't be all that bad. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
9:25 pm	I've got to act as a social scientist this week. They've given me yearly stats on GNP, population and the amounts of students at various levels and have tasked me with finding causalities from those. Maybe even doing some simulations. Of course, I had no idea about how to approach anything like that. I still don't have much to work with, but I got started with a Granger causality test. Initially I couldn't make any sense out of that but that lead me to VAR models, which just means getting a least squares solution for a set of linear equations. That part was easy, even if I still don't know how to interpret that matrix. I guess it means something if the coefficients are larger one way. I'm still trying to figure out what a VARMA model is. Supposedly those describe the data more accurately but their definitions talk about covariance matrices and random variables and I can't quite make sense out of those yet. Nor am I familiar with thinking that starts with a null and an alternative hypothesis. Looks like I'm starting to have something where I can put numbers in and I get some other numbers out. I still don't know anything much about what any of it means. I haven't even heard the word "econometrics" before I started working on this. There must be a real shortage of people in this field if they want me to work on this. I'm hoping that I'll learn something that'll turn out to be useful outside of this job, though I hardly expect to become an expert on any of this. (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
12:19 am	I've been leafing through my thesis. I enjoyed working on some parts of it quite a lot and I got a few parts of my own added to it and didn't just copy from the reference materials. But only now I saw that I made a rather bad error in it. I claimed that \Gamma(G) = IR(G) and wrote a proof for it, but it was incorrect. I couldn't think of a graph where \Gamma(G) < IR(G) back then but those do exist. A paper written in 1980 by Cockayne, E.J., Favaron, O., Payan, C. and Thomason, A.G had an example of one. Neither my thesis advisor nor the assistant, who also read it, caught my error. Not that that makes it any better. I've found myself considering continuing my studies. I don't know if a licentiate's degree would serve me any better than my master's, but I miss doing math. I'll have to explore my options there. Asking that friend who finished her doctoral thesis more about what postgraduate studies are like would be a good starting point. I feel pretty uncertain about my chances in that field. I may be able, with much effort, but I wouldn't be great. Nonetheless, I have to try. Assuming that I can get some funding, since postgraduate students won't get unemployment benefits. I went to Slavonic Tractor's concert today. They're good. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 31st, 2009
2:22 am	I've grown pretty disillusioned with my job. I'm not qualified for it, not even enough to tell if what they want makes any sense really. It's highly frustrating. If I'm to do something, then I want to devote myself to it, to feel the flow. If I don't even know how to start, then I don't have anything. They put that ice hockey project on ice, for now. Now I'm supposed to work something that's actually got something to do with sociology and education. It'd be heavily based on statistics. I don't have any experience of such coding and nothing I've studied was aimed at anything like that. Presumably it's nothing I couldn't learn, but I can't help but think that they should rather have someone else do it. There's surely something somewhere that would require the skills that I already have. I'd rather have studied what's needed for this thing during some semester, years ago. I can learn and do learn. I can look at some of my more recent code and see that I wouldn't even have understood what it was about, earlier. But I don't even have any starting point with this. I have wondered even before whether I would have been better off, studying applied math, statistics and other subjects like that. I never reached a level where I could have made a meaningful contribution as a postgraduate student or a researcher and didn't really feel that I would have had a ready venue for pursuing that further. I was attending a friend's doctoral thesis defense today. It was a rather melancholic event for me, sitting among professors, lecturers and former fellow students, all slightly older since I've last seen them, talking to each other happily. Watching a defense, sometimes feeling like I could almost understand what they were talking about. I had wanted to be a part of this world, for a long time. Overall, I don't feel like I have much to be happy about, currently. I could use a break. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
7:50 pm	The move went okay. My ISP botched their part of connecting the ADSL to the new apartment and they bumped me back to the back of the subcontractor's queue. They're too cheap to even have their own technicians for that. I've been underwhelmed by their level of service before but I haven't bothered to do anything about it so far. This time, I'd say that they lost a customer. The novelty of having a job has worn off since some time ago. At least I feel that I've switched to a better one with apartments. Somehow it just feels nicer. Now I just need to finish unpacking and moving the furniture where I want it. It wouldn't take that long if I just got to do that. At least I have the new GHC's source code to amuse me at home. I don't need a connection to read a diff. I'm at a friends'. They're playing some annoying rock star game. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
1:01 am	This afternoon I coded yet another statistic and graphed it and was disappointed to see it type check and work on the first try. I always feel robbed of the feeling of accomplisihing something when that happens. This is supposed to be hard. I had plenty of time left so I turned the stat computing routine to a parallel computation. All it took was one using statement. Too easy. I wish I had more time. (Comment on this)