2002-05-04: Technical stuff

Found this neat website called DreamFabric where six Swedes (members of Swedish Institute for Computer Science) record the various projects they're interested in (``ShareDreams is built on the same concept as Shareware but there is no software to share, only dreams.''). I found it because they have some good information on the SMS protocol. I found this because I am interested in writing a little program that will talk to my Ericsson mobile phone through the AT command interface to let me do things like edit the addressbook and send SMS's, etc, from the computer. `Would make a nice little GTK application.

I looked up some microscopy stuff on the internet. Unfortunately it looks like for the papers I want (i.e. the original one, Reconstruction of three-dimensional structures from electron micrographs by Aaron Klug and David DeRosier in 1968) I will have to wait until Monday when the library is open. I did find out that this 3d reconstruction technique we'll be using was pioneered by a guy named Klug (doesn't that mean "smart" in German or something?) , who really was a pioneer of electron microscopy in general; In 1982 he was awarded the nobel prize ``for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy, and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.'' (See for example this). Another researcher to check up on is David DeRosier, who co-published the 1968 paper with Klug.

Ported Chris's journal program (/projects/journal) to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL (that was trivial actually). It will be pretty easy to turn it into the sort of thing I want. Then I just have to convince myself that there's some reason to store these journal entries in a database instead of this increasingly huge file. The big bonus is that each journal entry will have a number of paths (like ``/personal/tobin'' or ``/projects/eeg'' or ``/politics/israel'') so that journal entries could be browsed by subject, not just author. And the other bonus of course is that it will be multi-user; hopefully some other splorgusers will use it. Also I intend to use it to allow people to comment on my various web pages, and even pictures. I hope to have this working before I leave for Israel, just because that seems like a good time to transition anyway.

I thought about RPC a little bit — remote procedure calls as a form of inter-process communication (IPC). It's really kind of annoying that the only way to talk between two processes on unix is something like a pipe. There's no "in between" form of IPC: you either have shared memory, or you don't. It would be so nice if I could just invoke function calls into another process. But before one can do that, one must make an entire protocol which is just annoying. Well, of course some people have done something about this. Currently XML-RPC is all the rage; but it uses HTTP and XML intermediately; I think maybe CORBA is exactly what I'm looking for. Interestingly this RPC is the primary form of IPC in the HURD. Well, the HURD (see, for instance, the Hacking Guide) has this simple ``ports'' message-passing interface, and on top of this is implemented an RPC mechanism using MIG, the Mach Interface Generator, which is something like CORBA. And speaking of this HURD stuff, I wonder how much of the HURD could be ported to Linux, like translators and the MIG stuff? Maybe we wouldn't have a nifty microkernel in that case, but we'd have many HURDish features on top of a mature kernel.

2002-05-04: UC Excursion

So today was the last UC excursion for this year. First we went to some castle called Torups Slott down in the Skåne on the way to Trelleborg. We got a little bus this time, instead of Göran's regular big bus — after all, there aren't so many of us here anymore. The castle wasn't so particularly extraordinary, but combined with the surrounding area, well, it really felt castle-esque, with the birch forests and the rolling hills and the ponds and whatnot and so-on. Nonetheless the `adults' couldn't help but oooh and aaah over every bit of castleishness inside, as if it were some programatic response to famous builings by tourists. In truth the `living room' of the castle looked rather normal; indeed, the castle is currently lived-in by the current heirs (the "woman of the house" and her daughter?). Oh, apparently the daughter married someone in another noblefamily and inherited a different castle that way — all this nobility stuff is apparently alive and well. (As Keith says, southern Sweden, which was Danish until 1658, is Chateau country, full of these mannorhouses and such; northern Sweden, on the other hand, never experienced feudalism.)

The next stop on the excursion was a *, a type of road house established in Sweden during * by royal decree. We had the now standard lunch of salmon and potatoes with Åbro beer and chocolate cake with mint and raspberry sauce for desert (yes we have pretty high standards). The most interesting thing I learned was that Ryan is planning on going to Istanbul in the summer. The funniest part about the lunch was that the plates were so huge, making the portions look rather diminuative by comparison.

Leaving * we drove out some one-lane, unpaved `highway' eventually ending up at a little sort of fishing village looking remarkably similar to a similar place where we had dinner in Kivik. The reason for coming to this place was that it is the southernmost point in Sweden. They have a signpost there with arrows pointing and giving the distances to various important cities, and this served as the focal point for many photos; but then we realized that the sign couldn't possibly be right, since it had Stockholm and Moscow 180° apart, and London only ≈30° anticlockwise from Stockholm. Finally, we nearly lost Keith when he fell off the southernmost point of Sweden, astonishingly surviving without injury.

The final destination of our excursion was Trelleborg itself, or should I say Trelle-borgen, some kind of Viking fort built there long, long ago by Danish king Harold Bluetooth in his effort to unify Denmark. The tour turned out to be very much a use-your-imagination sort of affair. Example: They think the fort was made of wood, but have found no actual traces of timber in the excavation, so they basically guess what things looked like. Originally the thing was a (roughly) circular fortification; when the city of Trelleborg discovered it in 1988 they eagerly rebuilt a quarter of it. Anyway, the tour guide, who happened to be an archæology student here at Lunds, was rather cute, so I took the liberty of offering her a ride back to Lund with us on the bus. This apparently pleased her greatly as her plan had been to wait nearly an hour for the next public bus to Lund. Keith rejoiced too at this plan (seeking as he was to reward the tour guide for the tour he liked so much), and all was well, and I was quite pleased with the minor coup.