Month: May 2010

Hello Openismus, Hello Berlin

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Openismus

Looks like I will be joining Openismus in Berlin from July, as one of three trainees! There is much to learn, but that’s gonna be half the fun. The other half will be working with something I really like, free and open source software, and with great people in a very good environment.

Going from living in my childhood home with my parents, studying at the local college, to my own place in a big city in a foreign country training/working as a software developer is going to be a big change. But I feel like a change, and I don’t think it could have gotten much better than this.

But before that; Hello bachelors thesis completion and Hello exam preparations!

Grapikslabor, MyPaint meetup, attending LGM2010

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Very sorry about the wall-of-text-with-no-images. I’ll do better in the future, promise.

While on my trip to CERN I spent a couple of days in the area of Zürich. On Sunday 2th of May I traveled from Geneva to Zürich (coming directly from a night-shift, ugh). There I attended Grapiklabor, which is a series of workshops on graphics using free software held by Alessandro Rimoldi, a Scribus community member. On the schedule that day was vector based graphics with Inkscape. It was a very useful workshop for me, I now have at least a pretty good idea of how to use Inkscape to solve real problems.

MyPaint developer meetup

In Zürich I also meet up with Martin Renold, the creator of MyPaint. In addition to attending Grapiklabor with me, he was kind enough to let me stay in his home in Winterthur for a couple of days. On Monday we went for a longer hike in a nearby forest, an I got a tour of the city. Of course, with the two most active developers together, the meeting also involved some MyPaint hacking:

– We did some design for our oldest bug; adding some sort of fixed size image functionality. The challenge is doing that without compromising on MyPaints  infinite canvas feature, but still being intuitive and efficient for users, and being able to inter-operate with other applications in a good way.
– We also approached the usability issue with the current brush settings dialog, got a significant improvement committed, and a even better solution, in my opinion, sketched out.
– Also committed was support for layer visibility attributes in OpenRaster, both in MyPaint and in GIMP.

I’m going to LGM 2010!

I’ve now also confirmed that I’m going to Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels, plane tickets have been ordered and everything. It will be my first LGM, heck, my first conference of any sort! There I will meet up with Martin, Alessandro and many other great people in the free software graphics community. Drafts of the program has been published on the create mailing list, and I’m really looking forward to both the social and technical aspects of the conference. Great things have come out of LGM before, I bet this year will also have some in store.

I might also have another, exciting trip abroad upcoming. If so, more on that later 😉

Back from CERN

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Bad blogger me, late as usual.
On Thursday I got back from a longer trip to CERN, Geneva. The purpose of the trip was to sit shift for the HLT subsystem in ALICE, on behalf of the University of Bergen. While not a prerequisite for completion, its was part of my senior project.

Due to the whole volcano ash thing, we had to take the train from Tønsberg, Norway to Geneva, Switzerland(!!). Actually we didn’t have to, but we wanted to go, and after 4 days of “ash clouds, maybe there will be a flight, maybe there wont” we decided to just get there on our own.
The trip turned out a bit less smooth because the ordinary night trains from Copenhagen to Basel were full, so we had to wait 8 hours in Copenhagen and switch between several small regional trains in Denmark in the middle of the night. But hey, we got to see Copenhagen also 😉

The mainline news coverage of the volcano ash business has been all but sickening, but the following little comic made me laugh hard. Especially because of the supposed-to-look-icelandish language used:

'Put 30 billion euro in the garbage can infront of the icelandish embassy tonight, and we will turn off the vulcano! Don't call the police!'

‘Put 30 billion euro in the garbage can in front of the Icelandic embassy tonight, and we will turn off the volcano! Don’t call the police!’

Down at CERN, most of the shifts were pretty uneventful as there was seldom “stable beams”. The beam refers to the particles being accelerated (in the LHC in ALICEs case), and stable means that collisions are happening in a controlled manner so that you can actually start data-taking.
So, when you’re not taking data, sitting shifts mostly means noting down problems that occur with your subsystem, and possibly notifying the on-call expect if deemed serious enough. Actually, being a shifter on HLT should be like that all the time, as it is supposed to be a completely autonomous system in this aspect.
I got to work a bit on my senior project, a bit on MyPaint, a bit on other things, but didn’t really get to be as productive as I would have liked. Especially on the night-shift, I found it hard to do any serious work. Strange, as I often have my most productive times after midnight when at home.

One thing I regret the most is packing too much clothes, and not bringing a camera. Even if we didn’t really do a lot of very exciting stuff, it still would have been nice to have pictures; Capturing the moment, binding the state of mind at that instant to something physical, for easier retrieval at a later time.