Get drunk at Halloween?

When talking about drinking too much we can think about the Halloween parties that are just around the corner. So take care of yourself and drink no more than you need to feel good and being happy. Do not do like these pumpkins!

IQ - Take care of yourself

Recently a new TV commercial started to go frequently in Swedish media. Directly it catches your attention with its brilliant representation of a "typical" Swedish wedding party including a lot of alcohol, talking, laughing, dancing, flirting, sex, jealousy, arguments, violence, sadness, despair, anguish and regret. The short movie is very clever in its way to catch what is happening during this wedding party and the people are miming the lyrics in sync with the message in the music while looking directly in to the camera. It is so intense.




Listen to the lyrics:
När vinet glöder i de fyllda glasen
och vi börjar bli i gasen
då lossnar tungans band
Vi som gått omkring och vart så blyga
vi slutar upp att smyga
modet kommer efter hand

Hej tjo och klackarna i taket
nu visar vi helt naket hur modiga vi är
Inga ord kan bli för stora
vad har jag att förlora
Så är det med det!

Senare när berusningen har lagt sig
och det som jag har sagt dig
verkar ganska meningslöst
Då undrar jag över hur du ser mig
man får se upp hur man beter sig
och då skrattar jag nervöst

Mitt hjärta har en frusen inneboende
med pajat självförtroende
som inte mår så bra
Hon plockar fram allting jag gömmer
och minns allting jag glömmer
Hon säger att hon är jag

Written by Peps Persson and perfomed by Lill Lindfors in 1978.


Last year IQ had another controversial commercial for a controlled consummation of alcohol. It was good then but I have to say that the new one takes it to a much higher level and it will be interesting to see how they can top this next year.

2 hours of panic

Just after most of my colleagues left work for the day our production ARS server stopped working. It is impossible to access the system in any way. I check the error-log and find that the service crashed five times in a row. Then my connection to the machine totally freezes and I can not even read the log. Still no access to the AR-System.

Panic!

I call the server maintenance (SM) and ask if they notice the problem. They say they do and that they have informed the helpdesk. I explain what I experienced and ask if there are any planned changes that are supposed to get implemented this evening or any other known activities. No there were nothing. It was getting more scary and it started to point at there was something terrible wrong with our system. Good that Girlwing is at a course tonight so it doesn't matter if I work late...

The server suddenly comes alive again and the SM-guy logs in and tries to checks the server information. The server freezes again and nothing can be done. We keep talking about what can be the problem and I am start having awake nightmares about evil viruses.

When the system was responsive I searched for all the information I could find about imports and reports and nothing was supposed to run at this hour. So I was starting to rule out heavy load on the ARS service. I relax and the system got unresponsive again...

A couple of minutes later it is again possible to do simple searches in the ARS and soon the Windows OS is workable again. The CM-guy continue to check the server information. The CPU is running 100% and the memory is all eaten by a bunch of cscript processes. Then everything freezes again... it keep doing like this all the time while we are talking about the incident and searching for the cause.

Then suddenly after two hours of hard work he say... "The system hangs every time I relate those incidents with each others".

I am silent for a couple of seconds... then I say... "So if you stop relating incidents with each others, the system will work well and helpdesk will be able to access the incident application?".

He agrees to wait a couple of hours to continue and I rest my case...

...

The thing that had happened was that some computer had been switched off before the monitoring had been taken off and hundreds of incidents had been automatically generated and send to SM and filled their support group basket. There is a lot of work to manually close each incident because you have to fill in closure code and cause description. But instead it is possible to select a lot of incidents and mark them as related to a parent incident and then close the parent incident and the related ones will get closed automatically. This is a smart feature!

The problem with this is that there is a poorly written filter that executes on every save/modification of an incidents and runs a windows server process of cscript to build an XML-file. Microsoft is not well known for its efficient small footprint applications. So when the SM-guy modifies 50 incidents at the same time there will be 50 cscript processes running at the server and consuming all the available memory including some virtual memory on disk. And I can only guess what will happen when 50 identical cscript processes tries to update the same XML-file at the same time. You will probably get a lot of waiting... and helpdesk personnel that can not do it's work.

Coop self service

Today when I went to Coop to buy some groceries I got surprised from the new self service stations for paying the food. Of course I had to try it!

These self service counters are for people with 15 or less items to pay for. For most people it will be slower than taking the regular old style human controlled lines, especially in the beginning, but soon people will get used to it and know which buttons to press and it will be quite effective.

As you see in the picture to the right, you put your basked with groceries on the left side. In the middle you have the automatic scanning device for scanning bar codes and a scale for weighing food like potatoes. To be able to pay for stuff with no bar code, like potatoes and onions, you use the touch screen to tell the machine what you just placed on the scale. Then you are supposed to put the groceries in a bag on the right side. When you are done you must pay. You do that either by cache or card the usual way, except that now you do all the work yourself of course.

I guess this will tempt a lot of people to not pay for some things they take from the store. They will probably deal with this by have some random controls, or maybe they have calculated this possibility and see that they will have to live with this loss for the sake of saving a lot more by not needing as many persons working in the store.

I am not sure what I think about this new self service. I don't like the idea of tempting people to being dishonest but I like the idea that I might not have to stand in line sometimes when I can take one of these self service stations. In the end I guess it is good that they give the consumer more options. It is all about to please the customer... and make more money.

Huawei weiqi club

Girlwing got a job at Huawei. Most of the people at the company are Chinese and as you know most Chinese know what weiqi is. Because Girlwing is quite a strong player the rumour soon started to spread and a strong weiqi player at the company wanted to play.

So Girlwing and I brought a weiqi set and went to her work yesterday evening. There we met some of her co workers who were working late, all of them Chinese. Soon we went in to the "Baltic" conference room where we were supposed to play. First the Huawei guy played against me. We sat down and I took black and we started to play...

We just played a few moves in the opening when the first people came in to the small conference room. We said hello to each others and they looked at the board while we played a couple of moves and soon they walked out again. A couple of moves later the next person showed up to see the game for a while... and like this it continued for the whole game. Some come in more often than others and it was obvious that they understand something about the game.

The game started quite good for me with a lot of potential territory while my opponent didn't have so much. But soon he started to invade and get aggressive and it got obvious that he is much stronger than me. In the end of the middle game I had to resign after he had destroyed most of my potential territory while he had enclosed most of the center.

Then it was Girlwings turn to play. The game looked very even for quite some time but somewhere in the middle he made some too aggressive overplays and Girlwing took the initiative and managed to capture a group of stones in what first looked like his big side territory. After that his position got weaker and more stones got lost in other parts of the board and in the end a big dragon got cut of and died and the game was over.

I couldn't help thinking about all those people who came and watched our games and what potential there is in getting more weiqi players to the Stockholm club and to Swedish tournaments. The problem is that Chinese players are very shy and and not confident about their skills unless they are among the very best ones. So they are not very willing to play in tournaments because they think tournaments are just for strong players. It is kind of the same with playing in a weiqi club. They feel that they are not strong enough. So when we explain that here in Sweden we play just for fun and everybody play in tournaments, even the weakest beginners, they seem to have problems in believing us.

Maybe we will go there again now and then playing weiqi. Maybe we can start the Huawei weiqi club in Stockholm.

On my path to work

This morning I took my digital camera with me to work and these are some of the pictures that I took on my way.

The path through the forrest

The young cow Ferdina

A view in to cow land

A view in to cow land

The cows water supply

You get bored of grass so you eat some trees

This used to be a farmers backyard

Now it cow land

A cold morning for the flowers

The spring flowers will soon die...

God starts to blog

My god starts to blog. Who is my god you might ask? My god is Linus Torvalds, the creator and current coordinator of the Linux project. Gods are creators of worlds and universes. Linus Torvalds created the Linux universe.

Anyway... Linus just started to blog and he often have very strong opinions about subjects relating to Linux and operatingsystems and this blog will cover other topics that is not directly related to the Linux project. As I understand the blog was first meant to be a family-blog but already Linus start by writing about totally different topics. I will be a reader of the blog. Gods words are true visdom. :)

1st World Mind Sports Games

Right now the 1st World Mind Sports Games are being held in Beijing China. Too bad I didn't have time to go there and compete for Sweden, which I would do if I had time and if I was allowed. Some day I might be able to go. This is actually kind of the Olympic games of mind sports. This is probably the only tournament where weak amateurs are able to play against the strongest professionals in a really serious way. Such an opportunity. I found some pictures that a chinese weiqi-fan took at the site. He posted them at a chinese forum were you need an account to see them. So I post them here...

Baek Hong Suk

Olof Fridh - Chen Yao Ye

Kimio


Wong


Gu Li

Park Jung Sang