Weekend in northern Sweden

I took a prolonged weekend (fri-mon; 30.11-03.12. 2007) in Northern Sweden; more accurately near the town of Piteå, visiting a friend. Actually, his house is on a nearby island that has only recently been connected to the mainlands with a road. The trip went (by plane) Oslo -> Stockholm -> Luleå (Kallax airbase) where he picked me up with a car. During those few days, we also visited some other places: Luleå, Kalix, and Haparanda/Tornio which lies on the border with Finland. (Haparanda is Swedish name, and Tornio is Finnish name.) You can see all of those places on the map. He bought some spirit drinks in Finland (the shop is named "Alko"), and I bought a bunch of Finnish salmiak/lakris candies. It was interesting to see people in Alko pushing FULL shopping carts of various drinks. Apparently, Haparanda has just recently gotten an IKEA shop, which has boosted the local economy. It is the nearest IKEA shop for that part of Sweden and Finland. Otherwise, it's been a very relaxing and interesting weekend, and they even got me to play bowling; the bowling hall was very nice for such a small town.

I was amazed by Swedish roads. Even though we were kinda in the middle of nowhere, the roads were in good shape (no holes or such) and very well cleansed - there was some snow/ice on them, but despite winter conditions it was possible to drive at speeds over 110 km/h (though with "piggdekk" - spiked tires). Norwegian roads are really bad compared to Swedish roads. (And I mean bad - even in Oslo you can find roads with holes at size of a football-ball in diameter.)

On the way back, I tried to take two cans of surstromming, but it was unfortunately taken by the security officer in Luleå. (BTW, he was really nice - told me that I should have checked that in, asked me whether I was coming back soon [he wanted to store it..]. It's rare to meet a nice security guy.. I guess that small towns have their advantages too :-)) BTW, there's also a technical university at Luleå.

Being far up north, near polar circle, I wanted to experience the "perpetual darkness". Well, it's not perpetual, but pretty close. So I have some pictures too. This picture is some kind of meeting place for young people in Piteå (the two arcs); the most interesting thing is that the picture has been taken ca. 15h.

This picture has been taken at the brightest time of day (though, cloudy one). It is a road that approaches the friend's house. It's a representative picture for most of the roads that we've been driving on.

The following picture shows the frozen sea. It's impressive. Later during the winter, the ice gets so thick that the easiest way to the town is to use a snow scooter and just cross the water.

This picture shows the entrance to the IKEA in Haparanda. I have taken it because the leftmost flag is that of the Sami people.
 
The last picture is mostly for amusement: it's an announcement in local newspapers that, due to maintenance of the electrrcal network, there will be a short power outage. But notice the time of day :)

Netbeans

Few days ago I started to write some Java code (I'm using the Choco constraint solver) and tried to use the Netbeans 5.5 IDE (and the version 6 should be out soon). I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. It is simpler to use than Eclipse, and feels faster. Now I have started to use it for C and C++ development and I'm wondering like... WHY haven't I given it a chance earlier :)

IT Underground 2007

Yesterday late night (or rather, today early morning) I returned from the IT Underground conference where I have been an invited speaker. I gave a tutorial (as it later turned out, rather advanced) on the ELF file format and shared libraries. I also commented on some possible uses of GOT, eg. to plant an invalid address at a GOT entry in order to trace accesses to global variables. You can get the slides here. Otherwise, conference as a conference - not much to tell :) I attended some interesting lectures and met some new people, and experienced some nice surprises :)

I flew with SAS over Copenhagen. On my way to the conference, after having checked in, I saw that I had been transferred to a later flight, scheduled to leave Copenhagen at 18:30, instead of the earlier flight that was shown on the ticket and which should have departed at ca. 13h. The clerk at the SAS's desk explained that the earlier flight was canceled because it was scheduled to use Dash-8 plane type. SAS had a number of incidents with these airplane types within the last month, and has, for safety reasons, grounded all Dash-8 planes. They have announced to sue the Dash-8 producer, because they suffer enourmous money losses due to grounded planes.

Anyway, since I had more than 7 hours of waiting time, I decided to take a walk through Copenhagen's center. On the metro station I asked some Danish girls about which line to take to the center and overheard another girl asking the same (literally: "I just want to get to the center"). Somehow we ended up entering the metro at the same door and I started the conversation by asking (in English): "Do you also have a long time until the next flight?" She said yes, asked me where I was going and I replied to Warszawa. Then she asked me whether I was polish and I replied that I was Croatian, after which she said in serbo-croatian: "Ja sam iz Novog Sada." (translation: "I'm from Novi Sad"); Novi Sad is a 2nd largest city in Serbia. Then we both started to laugh, were talking much about everything [turned out that she graduated in Russian studies at university in Novi Sad and is now learning Polish language], took a walk through the city center, ate a lunch and took a coffee in a cafe afterwards. Then I headed back to the airport, and she stayed a bit longer in the city, since her plane was leaving 2 hours after mine. It was a very nicely spent time, and when I left for the airport, I realized that we never har introduced ourselves.. I never asked her about her name, nor did she ask me about mine... we were too involved in talk about, like, just about everything.

As for referring to the language as "serbo-croatian".. I'm aware that many Croatians will probably object to this name, but I don't give a sh*t. It seems that I and that girl have very similar views on the language; personally I consider "croatian" and "serbian" being two dialects of the same language that are being kept different for political reasons. I understand what she is saying, she understands what I am saying (except for few words of region-specific slang), so why make a fuss about it? I wrote "serbo-croatian" just to make it explicit that her spoken dialect was of the "serbian" flavor. Nevertheless, her dialect was much closer to the lanugage I'm used to hearing in Zagreb from Zagreb old-timers than the dialect of people coming from Hercegovina and that are considered to be speaking, ironically enough, "croatian" language. Bah, crappy politics. In elementary school (back then when Yugoslavia still existed), we were taught that there were no "croatian" or "serbian" language, but only "croato-serbian" or "serbo-croatian". As much as it is politically incorrect to say it (but hey! Croatia is supposed to be a democratic country with freedom of speech), I personally feel that an attempt to fully separate this (single) languages into two separate languages feels.. not wrong, but just a wasted effort.

It would take me too far to try to explain here the small differences in spoken language between the serbian and croatian dialects. Suffice it to say that the differences between spoken "croatian" and "serbian" languages/dialcets are far smaller than regional differences in the spoken norwegian language (eg. between Bergen - Oslo - Tromsø dialects).

How to raise SW patent hell

Today I got a nice idea on how to show that SW patents are either total crap or an idea that could put every major SW producer in trouble.

So the plan is this: find a good security engineer and a good patent lawyer. Make a patent titled something like "A method for covertly taking control over software". Make sure that the patent text covers buffer overflows. Next step: sue for patent violation every company whose software has at least one unpatched buffer overflow. I'm sure things would get pretty hilarious in the courts.

A critique of C++

The usenet article with message ID 13h30fshbtk53eb@corp.supernews.com (google groups has not yet picked it up, so I can't provide a direct link) analyzes in detail what is wrong with the current C++ language. Interesting read.