Summer, and what resembled a vacation, is over. It was perhaps not as recuperating as I would have liked, but it certainly wasn't dull, either. All in all, I got to see a few Broadway shows, a gig in Madison Square Garden, a concert with the Blue Man Group, a comedy club show, a jazz club performance, bunches of movies and of course a lot of wining and dining in various restaurants. Pretty metropolitan, but I notice that a few weeks in a big city makes me miss good old Nature quite a bit.

I didn't spend all my time in the city, fortunately. I also found the time to visit Seemant, Aimee, Josh and Daniel in Boston (part of the Boston Gentoo posse, for those of you not in the know). Courtesy of a confused Fung Wah bus driver, we trawled the coastline from NYC to Boston, visiting all cities and ports on the way. In the end, we what was supposed to be a four hour bus drive turned into a six hour trek into the night.

I regret not having had more time to spend on visiting more acquaintances and people. I hardly left the city in my weeks there. Ah, well. Next time. Now I'm back in Bergen, moving out of my office at the CS department and tending to the remaining pieces of post-graduation formalities.

From the Chinese New Year in London (2006).
The Metropolitan Police were handing out free balloons for children at Leicester Square.
I think photo speaks for itself, so I won't ramble on. ;-)

Because I'm not shooting much at the moment it is still time to pull some things out of the archives...

This photograph is from June 2005 when I was doing a very inpsiring street photography workshop with Tate Modern here in London. We had a task to go out between the two forthnightly sessions and shoot, shoot, shoot. I work quite close to Camden and used to walk from across and around Kentish Town down to Camden in North London after work to try to capture things on the streets.

Camden is one of few places in London you still see original punks. These two guys were hanging outside of a typical Camden goth clothes&accessories shop. Who would've thought in the 70's that it would become a mass trend... Maybe she is a emo-punk-goth in the making, just look at her skirt...

What I like about this photo is that I have made contact with one of the punks at the same time as the girl is touching her hair (this is the moment she noticed the look of the guys). Was walking by hence the slight softness. Had to also square crop to eliminate some empty, distracting space in this.

It's good to be back! ;-)

The good news: my broadband connection is working now.

The bad news: I will start blogging some of my old shots here... starting now.

This shot was taken when Stig and Knut came over to London and we met for the first time in July 2005. We were wandering up and down the South Bank and the Royal Festical Hall was packed up for the now finished renovations. This text was by a cafe or a shop that was still open regardless of the construction facade.

In general when I do street photography I'm drawn to the quirky and humorous details in the environment, but this scene also attracted me due to the obvious graphic effect it had. When people walked by the text was just at the right hight to "title" them. There were more obvious shots from this spot I got where for example a group of men walked by. There is also a lovely shot I got of two elderly women. But somehow this worked the best for me. I love how the couple is lined up and in full profile and how their shadows are so symmetrical. The colour is just as bright as it was that day, too.

Though this time, it was closer than ever before. Been really ill the latest few weeks, so I've read a lot:

• The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, which I found to a very enjoyable book, even tho I've only read Alice in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark yet.
• Quozl, by Alan Dean Foster, which was semi-good. Very childish, and somewhat dithery, whatever that might mean.
• Goedel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstaedter, which is a book first and foremost about intelligence, with very relevant excursions into Goedel's Theorem, intermixed with Eschers paintings and some speculation around Bach's work. Very enjoyable, though it requires some attention while reading.
• Six Easy Pieces, by Richard Feynman, which is the most wonderful physics book I've read to date. Everything is explained in a clear, crisp way (except one passage that I had some trouble getting into).

I've also done some more work on kanga. It (she?) now supports rudimentary spline animations from 3D studio, and renders to OpenGL quite nicely.

Additionally, I've been playing with PCCTS for making a tiny language for writing polygon fillers in. It's not exactly Flex/Bison, which I'm not entirely sure what I think about, yet.

My Fortran was found lacking, so I started a port of Carlos Hasan's MPEGPlayer for Java. It's far from complete, as it turned out to be a huge rewrite and not a port. But now at least I have a more intimate knowledge of the dreary language that should have stayed in the 50s.

Finally, my good friend Vasilij told me about Kiev, a horde of extensions to Java lifted from languages like Prolog and Eiffel, as well as Pizza. I've not had the chance of testing it yet, since it munched all my memory, then crashed. There is supposedly a fix for that.

If they'd just operated.. I've spent the last four days in the annual fight upgrading my operating system(s). I usually try to do this in the summer, but this year I thought I'd start early. RedHat 6.0 was a profound disappointment, crammed with bugs and nasty stuff: ssh won't compile any more, icewm acts up, Gnome crashes, Netscape crashes, the compat-egcs stuff is a kludge, the pre-compiled kernel choked on large file copies, x11amp, the list goes on... kfm was very neat, though.

On a brighter note I was able to install FreeBSD and play a bit with it. But since it apparently had trouble co-existing with my bootmanager, I had to let it go.

I also had some re-revelations with templates in C++ again. Been a while since I've done templates, and just found out that you can parameterize lengths, for instance:

template <int L>
class Foo { int table[L]; };

I tried this out with a generic vector class, but it became more of a kludge than I had expected. Ah, well.

Turns our that my sickness wasn't solely to blame on my working conditions.

Been playing with different stuff lately, mostly Linux-related. The most fun of them was to get Linux working on an Amiga 4000 with a PPC 604e accelerator card. I was amazed at how easy it was to install the precompiled kernels and distos. The amazement continued, but on a darker note, when I tried to recompile the kernel myself. I've temporarily given up, but I advice interested parties to check out the Linux/APUS FAQ and the LinuxPPC site.

Also, I've been examining Qt Toolkit for making GUIs. Made a simple project manager in it at school. Finally, I took down GNU panorama for perusal, and played a bit with it. I expect to do something with this and Qt shortly.

The last months have been spent exhausting myself to the point of total breakdown. I'm now sick as (an unhealthy) dog, so much so, in fact, that I must take medication to function.

However, I have made some progress both here and there. First of all, I'd like to recommend the following books: Design Patterns, by Gamma, Helm, Vlissides and Johnson. It's totally awesome if you do any kind of C++ programming at all. Of course, it's pretty worthless if you don't care a tinker's cuss for the object-oriented methods.

Also in the wind: Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques. This one will only be good if you have a solid maths background, and a solid foundation in computer graphics. It is annoyingly terse at times, but where it's not, it's absolutely marvellous. This time, I actually bothered to have a look at the references, so the whole experience was all extremely worthwhile. Get this book if you're really into computer graphics, and not afraid of getting your hands dirty (and printer hot; you will want to download a lot of articles and papers after reading this book).

I've also had the chance to check out Gnome, which was neat but far from finished, POVRay on a Beowulf cluster, which was unstable but extremely neat and fast when it worked, a Cray Origin 2000 which was mind-bogglingly fast, and the chance to set up a web+news+mail server with its own domain name. At least I've learned from the experience.

I've just been working for the last 20 minutes to remove a stupid segmentation fault from a graphics program using PTC. I thought it was PTC's fault all along; some unstable internal bug or something, but it turned out (surprise, surprise!) to be my fault.

The reason is this:

const int myConst;

will (when running egcs 1.0.3 at least) be put into a read-only page, and thus your program will pagefault when you try to write to that memory address. I wanted to have a const GBuffer (bitmap descriptor) to the public, but I wanted it to updated internally (using some casts and pointers). That's not immediately possible without messing with compiler switches and #pragmas. Guess I'll drop the const for now.