The IT Student Blog

Time flies. Three years have passed since I began studying at the IT-university. Three pretty amazing years I might add! Having been interviewed twice about why I started at the Software Engineering and Management programme I’m still not sure I know or remember the answer. However, in retrospect I don’t really care either as it has been a perfect match and I’ve enjoyed (almost) every moment of it. And since this is my last blog post on this blog, allow me to explain why.

• Problem Based Learning (PBL) – Without a doubt the projects that we’ve carried out at the SEM programme has been the most rewarding, as well as the most demanding. Getting a group with members of extremely broad backgrounds to collaborate and produce quality results is as fun as it is challenging.
  

  Some dude (aka Jonte) enjoying the cleaning after a Christmas party

• Work space – I wrote about it last year and I got some harsh critique on the post in the lines of “How much did the ITU pay you to write that?” but I stand for every word I wrote. Having open areas, and areas in general, which students can go to everyday and basically use as an office has allowed, at least me, to pick up on questions, material and facts that I’m sure would have missed if I stayed at home.
• Flexibility – almost every course have allowed the students to, to some extent, choose their topic of specialisation themselves. Not only is it motivating, but it also allows me to early on discover which areas I’d like to follow up and perhaps specialise in.
• Diversity – roughly 60% of our class were foreigners. This provides a tremendous cultural experience. Enough said.
• Teachers – (and for my classmates reading, yes, I know it’s controversial) Actually we happen to have had the luxury of having Gothenburg University’s best teacher, Carl Magnus Olsson, as he was this spring awarded with the university’s finest pedagogical prize. However, without giving any names, we’ve also been unlucky to have some pretty crappy pedagogues and thereby also had the opportunity to practice our course evaluation skills.

Overall though, my ITU experience will be remembered for the amazing moments: hacking late nights with crazy and fun friends still somehow managing to deliver on-time, Emil Janitzek and my thesis writing, the crappy free coffee, the countless number of pranks a common result of either too much free coffee or too much intensive programming.

There’s tonnes more to say but it is time to move on. Many of my classmates are already busy earning money at various companies around Gothenburg, some are about to start any time, some are continuing to study. Myself, I’m continuing with an Erasmus Mundus Master’s degree in Distributed Computing starting as an exchange student in Portugal this autumn.

Two final remarks: One, if you have any questions feel free to contact me (marcus at quandoo dot se). Two, if you’re interested in blogging here contact me too and I’ll forward your request.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

My first keyboard

Robert Broberg, a Swedish artist, once wrote a song with the following paragraph “Det som göms i snö, kommer upp i tö” which roughly translates to “What’s hidden underneath snow, will show in thaw.” Since we actually have a white Christmas this year and most everything in my dad’s garden is covered in snow I thought it would be more wise to do some cleaning in my old room. It has basically been aggregating stuff over the years I’ve been living on my own, of which a large part is old computer hardware that’s been rendered unusable.

In the cleaning process I uncovered my first computer keyboard, later elegantly marked “UBC-Router 1″ short for United Broadband Clan which a friend and I created sometime in the very very early broadband days. This has been the keyboard for my router ever since the 28kbps modem served our house. (Yeah, for those older than me there was a time before 28kbps too but I’m not that old!) The router has been running various versions of GNU/Linux, including Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo (for a long time) and when the hard disk crashed, it was replaced with FreeBSD which it ran up until this summer when a lightning finally killed the whole thing. Poor bastard.

Dual CPU Sockets

There was also an old web/mail server running on a Pentium Pro. The motherboard supported two CPUs, however, I only ever acquired one, but it was definitely a killer. This machine was running Gentoo from the start to the very end. I hope to recover the data on these disks when I get back to Göteborg, who knows what crap I’ve been storing on them over the years?!

Today, my so called server room was transformed to its original purpose again. Its glory days are well exceeded, but it will be remembered as the place where I began experimenting and for taking me into a field in which I’m studying today. Who knows what I will uncover in years to come?

What have you found beneath the snow this Christmas? Do you already know where it has taken you or are you still waiting to find out?

Gifts exchange owners at SEM Christmas Party 2009

Uni is relatively empty today. There are only a few members of my project group here although I have seen some lonewolfs around too. Christmas is coming as fast as the snow is falling. Most projects are over for the SEM students, thus there was a great Christmas Party last week. Photos from the event can be found here: http://event.quandoo.se/photos/christmas2009/

Just because uni is empty does, however, not equal to nothing to do. Our research project (studying the relationships between organisations who have introduced Free/Libre Open Source Software and communities) continues with a second, somewhat weird, deadline on the 4 January 2010. The 4th may not seem so innocuous at first, but the course requirements tells another story. A story where students aren’t singing Christmas carols, snow is replaced by heavy rain and days are turned into nights. In this story, students are visiting their grandparents accompanied by their laptops, frantically squeezing a minute of typing in between Kalle Anka and the Risgrynsgröt.

In an attempt to rectify the problem and possibly give 50 students a white Christmas we composed an e-mail to our course coordinator giving two alternatives. One where the deadline is postponed to match the requirements, and a second where the course requirements are corrected to match the absurd deadline. Now all we can do is to hope for some sympathy.

“Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
let your heart be light.
From now on,
our troubles will be out of sight.”

Merry Christmas everyone

Change is good?

Today DN, one of the largest newspapers in Sweden, has an article about how the municipality of Stockholm is outsourcing their IT infrastructure and support to Volvo IT. Quickly sifting through the comments reveal outcries of all sorts. “Why are they not choosing open source?”, “The state never thought about the IT infrastructure in the first place”, “Where does the numbers come from?” And so on! (Editors note: what does open source got to do it? it’s about outsourcing the maintenance and support… right?)

It’s dissappointing to see that no one dares to look at it from Volvo IT’s perspective. Not that I think the 8000-kr per installation price is justifiable, but someone there really appreciates the change. They’re making big money. Nevertheless, change is always for the better [from someone's perspective].

In a course called change management, which I’m unfortunate to take, my head spins with these perplexing thoughts all day. What’s changing in your head?

Oh, by the way, I’m not so sure the 200 IT technicians in Stockholm municipality agrees with me.

Whatever you may study there are always tremendous amounts of course literature you have to go through. Some books are good, some are not very good and certain books are like valium. You simply can’t keep awake while reading them. Pretty good for sleeping problems, but certainly not for learning.

So therefore I would like to encourage you to search for knowledge on Wikipedia. Simply because it’s a quick and easy way to get an overview of the stuff you got to get in your head. It’s also great when there’s a word you don’t understand, since you can very discreetly look it up without asking someone. That’s especially useful during lectures.

But “Knowledge on Wikipedia?!”

The Swedish artist Promoe raps sarcastically about the site in his popular song Svennebanan. And he’s of course not the only one who is prudent to Wikipedia. But even though everything might not be accurate, one shouldn’t hesitate to give it a try*

Wikipedia makes your life easier. Embrace it.

*Unless there are lolcats editing your articles. You never know.

Don't sweep documentation under the mat (by londonmatt@flickr)

During my summer internship at Erlang Training and Consulting Ltd I’m co-developing a tool for tracing, debugging and checking correctness of large distributed system. The tool, which hasn’t got a name yet, is built on another application part of the Erlang/OTP called Inviso. The task itself is part of a large research project called ProTest where several parties are involved (one of them is the IT-university).

However, something struck me today. The lack of formal documentation, especially that of requirements. What is it that is expected of the tool? And in turn from me? As it turns out, I spent most of yesterday (read: Monday) contemplating, tweaking, experimenting, crushing many many ideas. It felt as I were getting nowhere. I certainly didn’t if we’re counting lines of code produced (except for some ridiculously simple QuickCheck tests and some cleaning of previous work). Yesterday wasn’t really the first day with a similar feeling, the “where is this supposed to be heading” question has been with me almost from start. Would it have helped with some formal documentation? Most certainly!

Although I don’t necessarily suggest that formal documentation means long boring documents covering endless of pages, but having externalised the goals certainly improves to someone else’s ability to contribute efficiently to a project. Documenting your work may be stealing your time, but in the long run, it allows you to excel past your first goals.

In my opinion, documenting:

• helps you think through your work
• enables other to contribute
• allows everyone to stay focused on the task at hand
• and acts as a back-up, a knowledge base

But there’s a balance to everything. Someone said it before me: software development is hard, but jolly good fun!

The no-name tool is to be demonstrated at a meeting in October, more than a month after my internship here finishes. But before that much more has to be done and days are flying fast!

Finally, to the students, don’t fall asleep when the teachers are talking about documentation, please.

* Coincidentally I also found this article through Hacker News today about why software engineers doesn’t document.

** The image is a photo of a grafitti work by an artist’s calling himself Bansky, no one knows who he is, but his work is cool!

Buttersonic with Sub6 is a current favourite. Great psytrance for real concentration.

Some say that studying in silence is the only way to really keep you concentrated. They always claim: “It is scientifically proven!” You can neither question or doubt it. Nor could I. After years of (apparently) bad study habits, I had to make a change. I had to stop listening to music.

I tried hard for a long time to resist my iPod every time I opened up my books. It wasn’t easy at first, but little by little I got accustomed to work in silence. But I realized that silence is uncommon; there are noises everywhere. Buzzing fans, ticking clocks, my own breathing… It got even harder to concentrate than it was before. And the worst thing of all: studying became boring.

But then I heard of this woman who studied to become a physician. Future doctors have a lot to read! This lady had in fact seventeen books to memorize for an upcoming exam. The interesting thing about her is that she always listened to music. She says that music together with reading make the whole brain work instead of just one hemisphere. Music in that sense increases your capability of remembering what you read.

*wonder where I put my iPod*

Erlangers outside Old Session House

Even though every newspaper in every stand featured Michael Jackson’s death on the frontpages Magnus and I were more excited than ever. The second day of Erlang Factory were two hosts a new round of many exciting talks and it all began with the two keynotes: one by Simon Peyton-Jones and another by Kenneth Lundin.

Haskell and Erlang: Growing up together
For those of you who don’t know, Simon Peyton-Jones is one of the fathers of Haskell. He quoted his daugther saying “I know I’m not your first child. It’s ok.” Simon, an awesome rhetoric, filled the main hall of Erlang Factory with ease. His talk demonstrated Haskell’s and Erlang’s interdependent relationship since their inception which also happened to occur at roughly the same time. Haskell came from a university world, Erlang on the contrary originated from industry (read: Ericsson) and Simon pointed out some of the challenges that Haskell faced due to this. Of course Erlang faced other challenges. Challenges which offers many laughs today!

Erlang/OTP and Multicore Performance in Particular
Kenneth’s talk, compared to Simon’s, focused on the fine details of the inner core of Erlang; the virtual machine. For me, most of the things we’re hard to put in relation to anything else. Surely, most of the terms were familiar, but to really understand their work (which I’ve been told by a trustworthy source is awesome) I guess you either a) need more Erlang experience or b) have attended previous talks by Kenneth so that you can put the improvements he addressed in perspective. The one thought that struck me after this talk is Usain Bolt’s quote “Hard work and dedication.” That’s what the OTP team is for you, and the Erlang community!

Afterwards three new tracks kicked off, I attended the following two presentations and they “did it right”, i.e the presentation in itself.

Campfire loves Erlang
Mark Imbracio changed the polling service in Campfire, essentially what is underneath the Ruby front-end of 37signals messaging service, to use Erlang instead of C. By investing time in benchmarking Mark could show the impact of reducing the code base, adding extensibility, improving maintainability (1 OS process in Erlang compared to 240 C processes) and still being equally responsive! The talk contained a practical almost tangible discussion on where Erlang really shines.

An introduction to F#
Though not being an Erlang talk, Don Syme, managed to impress even Joe Armstrong with some of the stuff that they’ve built into F#. That would be the unit measurements in case you wonder. What Don did right was demonstrating the language in its relation to .net. Basically, a .dll of a F# program is usable by any other .net application. Through visual comparisons he efficiently high-lighted the large differences between C# and F#, and although the talk seemed to persuade C# programmers to use F#, he did a great job meeting the Erlangers.

Editor’s note: this post was written at Heathrow terminal 5 waiting for the plane sometime during the night between Saturday and Sunday.

It appeared as though my computer didn’t die (completely) after all.

You can never know with Windows running on a PC! And you learn something new every day.Today’s lesson: Always expect the unexpected.

Or rather: Don’t rely on computers. Sooner or later they’re all doomed to die. Just like ourselves. My old French teacher once said, “Life is a disease that no one survives”. Pretty depressing… However, this is true for computers as well. Maybe you can put it like, “Windows is a disease, no computer survives”

…but I guess, “Cia is a user that no computer survives”, is more likely the case.

Sometimes I actually wonder whose fault it is.

What do you think is most likely?

a) The user is stupid
b) The computer is stupid
c) They’re both smart, but something happened on the way…

And another question:

How come violence can revive a PC? I mean, you would never hit a Macintosh, but beating on a PC just makes it work even better?! -It sure is a mystery.

Never forget to do backups.

Never.

I just found out that my dear computer has taken its last breath. All my music, pictures, work, received files… gone. I know, I’ve been told before to do backups, but I never seemed to care. Well, actually, I didn’t care. I was more like: never store your life in a computer! But hey, that was obviously what I was doing; piling up my life story in a computer. And now, my life is gone. (Not entirely, but it certainly feels a bit empty).

My old computer had so many viruses that the anti-virus program stopped working. I couldn’t download new software, since it lacked Service Pack 2. It didn’t react to any external devices. Not even to my red memory stick. Pop-ups were jumping up my screen even though I hadn’t opened the browser. And it was always this woman in carnival clothes who told me I could win money without even touching my wallet. Tempting, huh?

I decided to do something about it. Disk defragging! But my disk defrag refused to cooperate. What the…?!

After weeks of ignoring my computer; I tried to start it. But to my surprise, it was as dead as a zombie. Sort of half-dead, with the fan sounding really angry and the screen just pitch black. Bloody hell.

Suddenly all the people who constantly have been telling me to do backups: YOU WERE RIGHT. (But please admit: you knew this would happen!)

To all the people out there… DO BACKUPS!!