blog.dlade.net

Danish and Swedish, same same but different

Ever since moving to Copenhagen, I’ve been mentally collecting a list of words that are the same in Swedish and Danish but actually have different meanings. One of them came up in conversation today at lunch, which reminded me that it’s time to take the list out of my head to make room for other things.

[1] - All my relatives (from the south of Sweden) use the word “grina” in the Danish meaning, but it seems the general Swedish view is that it means “to cry”.

Morning light

This morning, I got up at 5:00 to join a few other photographers trying to catch the morning light near the opera house. I was reminded of two things that I already knew. First, that it is much more natural for me to still be up at 5 (although my current life doesn’t often let me actually be so) than it is to get up at that time. Second, that even with the amazing light that I admit can be had that early in the morning, I’m just not really into landscapes, buildings and other static objects. It was less than half way through the session when my attention started drifting and I was ready to pack down my camera while the others just swapped lenses a second time and got ready to photograph the same scenery once more. At a similar meetup for evening shots along the Thames in London when we still lived there, the result was exactly the same. That time I even think I packed my camera down and just observed the others after the first two hours.

Photography

Well, I think it’s clear to everyone that I’m not writing much here. In fact, I’m not producing many words in general, here or otherwise. Most conversations I used to have online have gone silent, for different reasons, and the people I used to talk to at work are now all in different parts of the world, including me. Moving to a country where I only just understand the language also means that my usual quiet has become even more so, because I have to spend some extra time interpreting what is being said, and then I’m not sure if I understood correctly, or if my answer will be understood. I’ve always hated repeating myself and will rather stay silent than risk having to repeat myself in a Swedish-Danish conversation. In return, my photography seems to be taking off more, and I’m also reading a lot more about photography than I used to.

Since I still feel the need to express myself here, I’ve therefore decided to try to use my photographs as a catalyst for the words. I thought it would be suitable that the first one, above, should be from the first set of photos that I published online when I got myself an SLR camera a bit over seven years ago. When starting to play golf, there’s always that one first good shot for everyone that suddenly gets them into the game and makes them want to continue. With photography, the picture above was probably it for me.

Running a mail server under TDC

Stupidly, I got into the habit many years ago of running my own server for dlade.net. This is always an extra cause of stress when moving anywhere, since it means I have to take down my primary mail server and not be quite sure when and how I will be able to get it back up again. And moving is often the time when I need email the most.

Having moved a few times (I lived in six places during my six years in London, moving more than once a year in the beginning), I was quite prepared for it this time, and even read about how to run a mail server in the TDC FAQ. When I finally got to set it all up, however, nothing worked the way I expected it to, and I could neither receive nor send email from my server, because port 25 was blocked both ways.

Reading the FAQ again, I found new information that mentioned that port 25 is blocked and you need to route your email via the server asmtp.mail.dk (with authentication) on the way out and the server backup-mx.post.tele.dk on the way in. However, neither of these would actually accept email for my domain, so I gave up for a short while. Googling randomly on the matter a bit later turned up the unauthenticated server smtp.mail.dk for sending email, which wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the FAQ, and finally four days after the move I could start sending email by myself. Incoming mail still had to go via my secondary mail server and fetchmail from there.

Today, as I was preparing to write this, as a way of spreading the knowledge of smtp.mail.dk a bit more (since it was hardly mentioned anywhere that I could find), I was again looking through the FAQ and today found a new entry that claims that port 25 should be open if you have a fixed IP address, and that you can ask for it to be opened if it isn’t already. So I called customer service, who impressively answered straight away and understood what I was talking about, and a few minutes and an automatic cable modem restart later, my mail server is now accessible from the rest of the world.

Do you push or pull?

As I was leaving the international clients area of Den Danske Bank, I faced a pair of ambiguous door handles and had to decide whether it would be right to push or pull the door. This time, I pulled the door towards me, but noticed that it would probably have worked either way. And so I thought to myself, it would be really interesting to see a psychological profile on people who choose to push or pull these doors.

When I got home, I faced very similar door handles in the building where we now live, and immediately went on to push the door open. So now I’m confused and think there is no real pattern. Or did my subconscious deliberately decide to confuse my conscious self by changing just because I had thought about it? Does my subconscious perhaps hate my conscious self? That would explain a lot of things…

Premus 1.1.1

With no normal job to take care of and with a few encouraging words from friends and users, I’ve managed to find some time to update Premus a bit. It’s nice to finally be back in the code to give it a bit of the cleanup it’s needed. There’s still lots of cleaning up left to do, but I at least got rid of the table layout and the onload attribute… These changes include CSS and javascript changes, so if things look and behave a bit funny, make sure to shift-refresh.

Apart from the cleanup, I’ve also had time to add a few things. I’ve always hated the popup UA string selection, so now I took the opportunity to add an autocomplete when you type the string instead. I hope you prefer it to the old way, I certainly do. I also got a newer PML spec (version 1.13.5, if you have a newer one please let me know) sent to me and started implementing some of the features in it. I didn’t get all of it done, but thought it was best to get a release out with at least parts of it, before the wedding next week starts interfering with my ability to sit for hours in front of the computer. =)

A more detailed list of what’s been changed can be seen in the change log.

Update: Now it’s 1.1.1, because I completely forgot about testing in good old Internet Explorer before.

The UTF-8 BOM

I was looking into a bug with Premus and discovered that it was caused by the page requested starting out with a BOM (Byte Order Marker). I’d seen BOMs many times before in UTF-16 documents, but I’ve never actually seen a UTF-8 BOM before, which I now find quite amazing since they’re completely valid and have been around for a long time.

Now, the problem with the UTF-8 BOM in particular is that Python doesn’t automatically strip it out if it’s there. And it looks like other languages have the same problem. Python 2.5 does add a specific encoding for UTF-8 with a BOM, but that seems to imply that you should know if you’ll be getting a BOM from the start. Another problem is of course that only one of my machines is running 2.5 so far.

I solved my problem by better keeping track of what input encoding I get and with the help of Evan Jones’ very helpful notes on UTF-8 and Python, but this really seems to me like a problem that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Hack day

So, now the open hack day is not only coming to London, it is also happening right next door, at Alexandra Palace. It’s obvious, then, that something will have to happen to make me unable to attend it. And there we go, I’m moving out of the country just two weeks before.

Of course, I didn’t really participate that much on the hack days while I was still working at Yahoo!, and I probably wouldn’t come up with any ideas for stuff to build this time either, but I still find it amazing that they can time it so well.

What, me worry?

As a reaction to me telling them about the current set of changes in my life, someone pointed me to the Holmes-Rahe Scale as a way of measuring my current stress level. Personally, I most enjoyed going through the effects of too much stress listed there to see which ones rang a bell.

Concentration and attention span decrease

What, like randomly clicking through my email without having received anything new, or swapping between tabs in my browser and not knowing why I opened them? Or perhaps staring at the Holmes-Rahe list, trying to remember a whole point before switching back to the window where I’m typing this?

Short- and long-term memory deteriorate

Michaela will be able to provide you with a long list of things I keep forgetting. Me, I don’t remember what they were anymore.

Drug abuse increases

Food is my drug, and it looks like my weight is slowly creeping upwards again.

Sleep patterns are disrupted

The time is currently 02:08. At this time, I would normally have been asleep for three hours already.

Looking at another site for the Holmes-Rahe Scale, I am also told that I have an 80% chance of serial physical illness within 2 years. I feel that is a great way to help someone dealing with lots of stress.

What’s happening? I really can’t remember anymore. Oh wait, there’s something about us getting married, moving to Copenhagen but not having found a flat yet, and me having to find a new job there. So it’s only a few small things, really. Any hints would be gratefully accepted. =)

Self image

When I was at university, I had a period when I would spend a lot of time looking into the mirror. I would stare at myself, observing every detail of my face. Thinking back, I don’t remember why I did it, but I do remember that it would calm me down significantly. It was also how I discovered my first few grey hairs at the age of 22. Later on, my habit just disappeared by itself. The need to stare into the mirror just wasn’t there anymore.

Yesterday afternoon, it returned. It started in the mirror in a dressing room, and continued when I got home and then again this morning. The big difference is that this time it wasn’t my face I was staring at, it was my legs. Or rather, the cloth covering my legs. After a short period of trying on new trousers and not finding what I wanted, I made the sudden decision to buy a pair of jeans. This has now become one of the most uncomfortable experiences I can remember.

The important thing about these jeans is that they mark the end of a 17 year long period. As a young teenager I decided that I was tired of trying on all these uncomfortable variations of blue with their obscure names that needed a mapping to explain what they meant in terms of how they would fit on my body. And the reality was that none of them ever did fit. 17 years later, jeans still come with obscure names that mean nothing to me and there are more variations on blue than there used to be, but my body has found a new shape and the jeans have actually become comfortable to wear. For the legs, not for the mind.

I was shocked to find a pair of jeans thrown over my chair this morning. It was as if someone else had been in our bedroom and put them there. They could certainly not be mine. But after I had showered and had breakfast it was I who put the jeans on. Later on, it was I who wore the jeans when going shopping for a carbonated low calorie soft drink with vegetable extracts with sweeteners. But when I looked down where my legs used to be, it was someone else’s legs that were moving me forward. There was just no way my brain could acknowledge that those jeans wearing legs could be mine. It’s all a bit surreal right now.