Alan's Travel Blog

I seem to have missed out on several travel blog posts. Suffice to say it looks like I won’t be managing to keep up the (somewhat) regualar schedule that I had at the start of my trip, but in this post I will try to fill some of the recent void. Part of the reason for a dearth of entries is that I am now certain that I am not here as a tourist. Not only is 6 months a little long for tourism, but that’s not what I’m trying to get out of the trip anyways. My primary goal for this exchange was to learn the Norwegian culture, and I have gotten a good introduction to that already. So I really don’t feel like a tourist now.

Before Easter I missed posts because I was busy at work. I even worked all week the week before the easter week, to help out with a workshop we were doing at the office. And I didn’t take any extra time off for the Easter week because I was working on the project that had resulted – a copy of the Mx widget set in QML (the Mx widget set is the look and feel used by Moblin applications). Also before Easter I joined in a jam session of the Oslo Troll band, and while the songs they played were all before my time they had some printed lyrics and let me sing backup.

For Easter I went to a cabin in Nordmarka, and did the last of my skiing. It seems to be a bit of a Norwegian tradition to spend Easter in the mountains, skiing and enjoying the last of the snow. The mountains have snow for longer, so the snow in the mountains is still good at Easter. I wasn’t in the mountains (the cabin was techincally still within Oslo city limits) and so the snow was melting and turning to ice. Aside from some ‘amusing’ mishaps with my application of klister, a form of super glue that you put on your skis to maintain grip in icy conditions, I enjoyed  doing a little more cross contry skiing before packing it in for this year. In Oslo all the snow is gone, and much of the snow is gone in the surrounding country side by now, although there was still some left during Easter. But the skiing season is definately over for me now.

The days are getting longer now, and that’s been another hinderance. Since there are so many more sunlight hours, I don’t seem to be sleeping as well and I feel tired all the time, like it’s been a long day. It could also be that the extra sunlight is making me tired and lethargic, explaining the decreased frequency of blog posts. I prefer the winter here.  Hopefully I will adjust by summer time, but since I’m not staying for the peak of summer I might not be here long enough to adapt to sun all the time. Fortunately it gets dark around 8:30 pm at the moment, so there is at least some darkness for me to rest in.

After Easter I started playing the RUSE beta and the Starcraft 2 Beta, which were quite the distractions.  Starcraft has been rejuvenated for me by the games we’ve been playing at work, and I’ve recently gotten an internal ‘Starcraft VPN’ running at work in the hopes that the Brisbane and Oslo offices can play together. The Starcraft 2 beta has some limited single player, and I recently received a multiplayer invite. Suffice it to say, this will probably be the explanation if I don’t post again for a few weeks. In general great RTS games are rare, but this year there is both Starcraft 2 and Supreme Commander 2, bold and worthy sequels to my favorite games of all time. It doesn’t matter where in the world I am for these games, I’m still playing them (when my assignments are done of course).

Not much to report (part of the reason I missed last week). Still playing Supreme Commander 2, it’s a great game (Steam says I’ve spent over 60 hours on it in the last two weeks). I’ve also been playing Total Annihilation, including the Core Contingency expansion. Supreme Commander 2 is certainly a much more streamlined and efficient version, but with each iteration it seems to be losing unit types. Core contingency has over one hundred distinct units per side, Forged Alliance has around sixty, and Supreme Commander 2 has around thirty. Hopefully an expansion to Supreme Commander 2 will arrive with additional unit types.

Last week (where I appear to have missed a post again) was probably the last skiing for the year, unless I head to the mountains for Easter. The snow is melting on the sidewalks and the weather is getting dreary and rainy. It’s still in the interim between having nice sunny weather and nice snowy weather, so I may end up avoiding the outside as much as usual.

I have finished the Supreme Commander 2 campaign now, including all the secret objectives, and expect to be playing less of it in a week or two. When I get into the starcraft 2 beta .

Note that the title is still in Norwegian – it’s just a proper noun.

This past week was practically taken off to play supreme commander 2, as well as supreme commander and forged alliance beforehand. I’ll quickly list the other things of note that happened, and then leave the post to a discussion of the supreme commander series. Non-fans may wish to stop reading at that point, consider it an advantage of the medium that you can leave without offense.

Non-Supreme Commander events: I was so on top of my bug reports that I cleaned them up even though I had taken the day off (there was a special request for everyone to clean their bug reports that day, and it took me less than five minutes). I went skiing on Sunday, approximately 12 kilometers, and the cabin in the middle of the journey was so crowded it seemed half of Oslo had gone skiing that day (probably not an exaggeration, considering there are other cabins to ski to). Sedna suffered spillage and shorted severely, or something like that – since I had to play Supreme Commander 2 that week I immediately purchased a replacement, Marxon, which is running smoothly. I’m trying spotify and quite liking the service, I am finding that the superior internet over here leads to many additional uses (like spotify and steam) that greatly enhance convienence.

Supreme Commander 2 I’d characterize as a bold move. It’s interesting (and nigh unavoidable) to compare it to Starcraft 2, but the comparision works better on a series level. Total Annhilation is the clear analogue to Starcraft – a classic game that is still great fun to play and was an amazingly great game for its time. Now modern computing advances make it less awesome, as we come to expect more from the UI. Supreme Commander and Starcraft 2 bring the same gameplay and concepts to a modern game and are (or in the case of Starcraft 2, is expected to be) even better than before. Since Supreme Commander has already brought TA to a modern UI, Supreme Commander 2 cannot do that. While ‘more of the same’ would certainly provide a decent experience, I approve of the idea of trying a different take on the TA style of game. The implementation I find lacking in several areas, and so I’d likely rate this below Supreme Commander overall.

When considering Supreme Commander there are two flaws with the gameplay that I have heard often, though this might just be from the people that I play with. They do not like the complex economic model which requires more attention than the standard model and is harder to understand. And the games can take quite some time, much of which is not in contact with your opponent (due to the size of the map). Another perceived flaw I’ll raise is that the tech levels were often seen as a weakness, in that units from a higher tech level would often trump those from a lower tech level (which I would say is only true to an extent) and so games would be a rush to the highest tech level. These three problems appear to have been the focus of Supreme Commander 2’s design, as I am interpreting the two primary driving forces in Supreme Commander 2’s design to be mitigating these problems and improving the console port.

By rewriting the economy and tech structure, and shrinking the maps a little, I would say that Supreme Commander 2 has solved these probems. The games are faster paced, tech levels are de-emphasised and the economy is simpler. The Supreme Commander feel has been maintained, by having a powerful ACU to start with (although I don’t think you should get 2 engineers as well, and overcharge has been placed too deep in the tech tree) and by having both giant armies and giant single units as viable options. The tech tree approach also allows for an increased number of nifty tactics that you can employ – you can unlock teleportation, jump jets and shields for your units. And all the units are still robots built at factories on-site. I approve of the courageous attempt to perfect on the TA style gameplay with some radical changes; but I hope that they learn from this and keep improving, as there is just as many problems as improvements in the new game.

Through a similar order queueing system and repeating build queues on factories some of the scale of Supreme Commander was maintained despite the new economic model, which requires you to have the resources before spending them. However several things were lost which did not have to be. Engineers should be able to queue up buildings without having the resources (this would be clearly indicated) and they’d pause if they do not have the required resources upon reaching that point in their orders. What I’m describing is the application of the same system in place on factories in Supreme Commander 2, but you cannot do it with build orders. This is a great shame, because one of the best parts of the TA style gameplay was that structures were treated as the equals of mobile units. Additionally, the templates in Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance were a great boon to the UI, and with the current Supreme Commander 2 system there are no templates as they cannot queue delayed building. Other details have been lost along the way as well, and reasons are not always readily apparent. The UI overlays from Forged Alliance, able to show constant summaries of intel or weapons range, are gone. I cannot seem to find a way to discover radar range at any point, a feature that I have liked ever since TA. Similiarly, scout units have disappeared, and this lack of effective intel gathering removes a measure of the strategic thinking that was in the previous games. The drop in the number of unit and building types also feels like a step back, although it is vaild in the context of the new tech tree. Additionally, there is a different feel to games on a large scale map. With 1000 units over more than 5000 square kilometers you really get a sense of scale. It it more thoughtful, and containing less instant gratification, when it takes five minutes for troops to move into position – even when transported by air. I thought that Supreme Commander on a giant map did a better job of a strategic, grand scale battle than even the Total War series or Sins of a Solar Empire. This feeling does not yet extend to Supreme Commander 2. With these changes, Supreme Commander 2 feels less like TA and more like Starcraft or Red Alert. It is a subtle distinction between ’selling out’, and trying to mix the successful elements of other popular games into your own distinct feel in hopes of improving the game experience. If it weren’t for the console-port feeling that I get, I’d be convinced they were aiming for the latter.

The main thing that bugs me about Supreme Commander 2 is that it feels like a bad console port. There is a feature which allows you to ‘paint’ attack orders over enemy units. I have seen a similar feature in Halo Wars, it was the console controller equivalent of drag select. It was valid in Halo Wars, as it is a reasonable control scheme with the console joysticks. It is not valid on computer, where you can use the mouse with sufficent precision to place an effective attack move, you just assign the attack orders manually (and do a MUCH better job on the order). The graphics system has also been scaled back, presumably to cater to specific console hardware as opposed to the superior PC hardware. And the multiplayer interface seems appalling poor to me – it is likely they’re relying on XBox live for console and so didn’t spend much effort on their PC interface. While trying a different take on Supreme Commander is a bold decision which makes sense, this is a bold decision which does not. Strategy games not only have their primary market on PC, but the Supreme Commander series is even more so in that direction and away from the shiny, fast reflexes gaming of the consoles. Even if you want to bring strategy gaming to the console, which I believe cannot happen properly with the conventional console controllers, Supreme Commander is not the right series to experiment with.

The campaign felt a lot more standardized than the previous ones. This campaign did not stand out, in fact it felt outdated. Modern games, even the Command and Conquer series, are shifting to a strategic map view for a grand campaign vista that gives a sense of progress and strategic control. The other games in the Total Annihilation series had great campaigns where each mission sent just you, the commander, to a new world on a mission. And the previous games also had a great connection between the campaigns for different factions, you’d cover the same ground and same places as a different character. None of these approaches have been used – Supreme Commander 2 has the ancient formula of a linear series of campaigns, containing linear missions, telling a story (it is not a very good story either). The cinematic cutscenes are even inferior in visual quality to the Supreme Commander ones, in a suprising step back. The campaign is unfortunate in that on the ’selling out’ vs. ‘perfecting the game’ dimension, it only supports the former. If there was a good multiplayer interface I’d play online to compensate, but no such luck. It even locks you to games in your region – which is absolutely infuriating whilst I’m on vacation out of my home region and sounds like it’ll be a game breaker when I return to a sparsely inhabited region like Australia. These issues, among others, have prevented me from fully enjoying the game. Particularly since the AI is still quite puny and there has not yet been time for a community AI to spring up and fix skirmish mode.

Supreme Commander 2 has potential, and a lot of my issues could be fixed with a big patch or an expansion. But it has been difficult for me to enjoy so far and will not be replacing Supreme Commander on my most beloved games list. It should be noted however that it doesn’t appear to be aiming to replace Supreme Commander, but instead complementing it with a different style of gameplay. I would still say it is better than Red Alert 3, and forms a nice balance between the more strategic supreme commander or the more tactical, but still strategic, Starcraft. But in its current iteration it is “Jack of all trades, master of none”.

PS: Due to the small number of anticipated readers for the ‘Supreme Commander 2 Essay’, proof reading has been omitted to save time – time that allowed for writing those hundreds of words.

Update 12/03: It turns out that you can set it to show Intel and weapons ranges, but it’s hidden behind a toggle in the options menu. There’s one gripe down, although I wish there were an option to have the minimap start open as well.

I have theorized that the best part about a frozen sub-arctic winter is staying inside with a good book or computer game. I will soon have a (further) chance to test this out. I only recently discovered that Supreme Commander 2 comes out in under a week. I have played the demo multiple times, and am now replaying the preceding games in the series. The preceding games are among my all-time favorites, and the demo of Supreme Commander 2 suggests that it has solved many of the problems in the previous games without sacrificing the spirit of supreme commander. I expect that Supreme Commander 2 will have its own, different, set of problems instead but it still looks promising. I may even take time off work to play it, I believe it is released over a weekend, so I will see whether I need additional time or not.

Theoretically there is more to life than Supreme Commander 2. Starcraft 2 comes to mind, but I’d rather not think about it because it is far from release and yet too tantalizingly real – what with being practically finished and just needing the last few months of perfectionist polishing. But because I’m focused on Supreme Commander now, I am not going to read the rest of this post.

Don’t mention this to Alan, but there is a lot more to life than Supreme Commander. On the games front Napoleon total war has a great deal of multiplayer promise. Not only is it the first Total War I’ve played multiplayer for a while, but it has the multiplayer campaign to boot. And some awesome Norwegian Ski Troops (who don’t appear to use their skis in battle, even on snowy terrain, alas). If I get around to the single player on this one, I’m going to play Sweden or Denmark, instead of my usual Great Britain.

And outside of computer games, I did some more Cross Country Skiing on Thursday. It was a different track, and I’m getting better from practice as well. So that was fun. And I finally attended one of my NORINT0500 lectures, and am now happy to skip the rest. The lecturers change each time, but that one I went to was awful. Complete waste of time. And I’m not going to risk wasting 2-3 hours again for a class that I can probably pass without going to any lectures (this appears to be a low standards course, and I’m learning about Norway from talking about Norway at work – with Norwegians). This week I have also started having typical Norwegian meals at home, such as  frozen pizza, or sausages in a potato-based wrap. Other than the fact that there aren’t any vegetables in those meals, they are sufficient. Though I’m not really a fan of frozen pizza, I’ve been told that it’s quite popular over here.

Next week I expect to achieve little outside of games when I’m not at work. At work I hope to do better at Starcraft (and start fixing bugs again).

I missed another update, and this time for another completely different reason. I just seem to have forgotten. Whoops.

But I can see why I might have forgotten. It hasn’t been all that exciting here recently (and I know that’s probably my fault). Last weekend I did get some more skiing in, but other than that I’ve done little other than go about my business as usual. It might have something to do with the Starcraft 2 beta coming out and being unusally distracting, despite the fact that I don’t have a beta invite. I’ve just been hearing about it. But as someone who has now been playing hours of Starcraft on the days that I can stay at work that late, I’m very eagerly anticipating Starcraft 2.

Next weekend, if the weather is nice enough that I’m willing to go outside, I might look around the city or find some museums. Or maybe, if I’m going to be staying inside all weekend just watching the snow blow by, I should take up knitting again and use this ‘excellent’ internet to watch streaming TV. Someone at the office made an excellent point that repurchasing knitting materials will not ‘break the bank’ and basic knitting supplies are even cheap enough that I wouldn’t even have to bring them back to Australia. The cheap equipment and materials is something that I had not thought about, partially because the rest of my hobbies require expensive electronics, and partially because of how much I’ve seen fibrecrafters spend on their obssession .

I’ll try to remember to blog again next week, and get back into the weekly pattern. Even if there’s nothing to report.

Missed another weekly update – but this time not because I was having fun. I had a stomach upset followed by a cold and neither were pleasant. It even lead to time off work and missing a class. On the bright side, my resting has given me plenty of time to play mass effect 2, which I have now finished twice, and gratuitous space battles (also finished). I suspect that the cold isn’t helping my recovery, as I still have lingering symptoms. I’m glad that I took the swine flu vaccine, if the harsh winters actually do lead to increased susceptibilty to illness.

Mass Effect 2 was alright. It feels even more like a console port than the previous one, and more like an action game. It reminded me of halo in several places (like the shields), and gears of war in several others (the ammo clips, the cover system, and the pop up cover for starters). Still an improvement on mass effect one overall, but I feel it crosses the line from RPG into action. Odd that I think I’ve heard the opposite sentiment around the web, but it’s probably from the XBox players who are used to more action anyways. The combat was rebalanced fairly well, but I think the switch to ammo from heat alone was a big step back. Gratuitous space battle was a lot less action oriented. It’s an interesting game, where you design your fleet and then do little but watch as the battle unfolds. More cereberal than mass effect 2, and slower paced, so it worked better than Mass Effect 2 for resting.

It was the first week of university when I got sick, and so I didn’t get too great a handle on the start of university. But it doesn’t seem all that different. The biggest difference in the computer science course was that they seem to have better computer resources. There was a practical session in a computer lab which had windows 7 and appeared to be used only for classes. The practical is not entirely just hand-holding, but for me it was just as useful as the practicals at UQ (I’m glad I’ve found a class that I can skip most of the time). The class is starting with teaching emacs and common lisp, which I have not found difficult to learn on my own. As a long time vim user I did consider attempting to protest on religious grounds, but since there actually is a good reason for using emacs (it has somewhat extreme lisp integration) I decided not to be silly.

The norwegian language classes are probably different to the clases I’m used to purely due to the subject matter. It is fairly slow going but with lots of practice. And while I think it’s slow going, the practice seems to mean that it’s going faster than the norwegian courses from before. It’s somewhat annoying though, that the teacher does not seem technologically literate.

The new flat mate has arrived, and will be staying until slightly after I leave. He’s from the netherlands, and has a very different perspective on Norway than I. At least, it’s not a big difference for him at all. Most of the brands and shops here exist throughout europe, such as in the Netherlands, so it is very little change for him. Another example is the internet in the flat, which I have been really enjoying and think is great, which is apparently really cheap and crummy by european standards. And the weather is not so exotic for someone who is already from a temperate zone. We’ve been getting along fine so far though.

I’ve still been resting this week in order to hopefully shake the last remanants of my cold. I hope to finish resting and get back to 100% soon. And not just because I’m starting to get tired of resting (though I suppose I could finish mass effect two again).

I’ve missed my first weekly update (last week). This is how you can tell I’m having fun .

My attempt at a university exchange in Norway has started. During the orientation week I got introduced to the campus, and took the placement test for students with prior knowledge of norwegian. I placed in the introductory level, along with all students who didn’t know any norwegian before, so it looks like I didn’t learn much in my classes last year. I also made some mistakes when updating my class registrations to reflect that, and so I didn’t get placed in exactly the right norwegian class anyways. Oh well. Also I think that mistake cost me the option of having my preferred class times for the norwegian subject – and the one I’m assigned to conflicts with Starcraft time at the office. Sadly, I will be missing Starcraft an awful lot more than I’d like to this semester.

One thing that came out of the orientation week was a consensus from the various activity groups that the university social activities are generally coordinated through facebook. This means that I might even get a facebook account this semester – this is the last chance for anyone to be nice and stop me from joining the faceless facebook horde.

The norwegian subjects will be interesting no doubt, particularly since they’re taking place in Norway. But the only subject that I’m excited about is my computer science subject, which is computational linguistics. I’ve had a look at the course web page and noticed that it involves LISP (and from what I’ve heard LISP means emacs and emacs means depression, but I’ll find out soon enough). I’ve already started to look at the LISP tutorial recommended.

I got a little annoyed at using windows when trying to find and install a LISP interpreter. Linux has a much better model for application deployment, and I do not feel that I should have to trawl the internet to find and install widely used programs (and yes, a LISP interpreter qualifies). There may be some hope in that respect though, in that I believe Apple’s app store on the iPhone is the same thing but in a proprietary system, and other systems may just follow Apple’s lead and thus finally reach parity in that regard.

Classes still haven’t started yet. It originally looked like one class started last week, one class started this week and the third class started next week. Now it seems that all classes start this week, since the one last week was postponed due to illness on the lecturer’s part and the one next week has been moved forward – or it was just a mistake that it had the wrong date on the web page. So I still haven’t had any classes yet. It’s somewhat fortunate that I didn’t know about the postponed lecture last week until after I had arrived, because it took me some time to find the specified room and I would have been late if the lecture had actually taken place.

My current flat mate move to the next segment of his business trip today (he’s off to Berlin) and in a week I’ll be sharing the flat with an Oslo office intern. I believe that in this case intern just means new hire, because they need to have a probation period as a safety buffer in case they made a mistake in the hiring process.

Now that Uni’s started work is ramping back up at the office (people are back from vacation) and so the timing there isn’t that great. And now that I’ve gotten into a nice evening pattern I get to become a morning person again, because that’s better for my busy schedule this semester (it seems). We’ll see how well my hybrid uni/work schedule goes.

Side note: Editing the post in google chrome is a bit of a pain when it gives me the norwegian spell checker by default. I don’t think I set this machine to norwegian language, but all web services seem to think that people in Norway want to speak norwegian (and from what I’ve heard, in the technologically adept segment even the natives here prefer to compute in english).

This week I got another flat mate in the apartment. Since he’s working about the same hours as me I’ve been seeing a lot more of him than the previous one. He’s even shown me the way to walk to work, and I’ve been walking (about 35 minutes) most of the time this past week. 35 minutes walking in the cold (around -20 this week) I’ve found to not be a problem, as long as you keep moving. The ice on the pavement is annoying though, but it’s better than being swooped by magpies. And the cold is less annoying than the harsh Brisbane sun, although that’s likely to be because the preparation for it (thick coat vs. sunscreen) is less annoying.

My current flat mate is somewhat of a beer fan, and I’ve been following him to some of the pubs this week. The Norwegian beers seem fine, but with my poor tasting skills I’ve noticed little difference between the cheap stuff and the good stuff. Other than the level of carbonation that is. But this week I went through a variety of beers from the cheapest to ones from Norwegian micro-breweries. Still can barely tell the difference. What I found more interesting was one of the pubs, which has intermittent opera as a gimmick. While fairly well done,  I don’t think opera fits well into ‘pub patrons workflow’.

Use of Windows at home so far has been a mixed bag. It doesn’t run Starcraft as well as Linux is one downside. The only real advantage I’ve found so far is better interoperability with Microsoft products. And honestly that just makes me more bitter about their lock-in heavy strategy. For every feature that seems nice (better search in Outlook) there’s another which I sorely miss (decent mail filters in Outlook). At least for the myriad cases where it goes against my workflow (like search automatically indexing Outlook folders) it’s been fairly simple to disable it and get my own way. If Microsoft played nice with the other people (like GNU/Linux) I’d probably aim for a Windows personal computer, Linux work computer and Linux home server (I just don’t have enough faith in MS yet to even consider MS home server). But the interoperability wall makes hetrogenous environments difficult, and in my case the clear answer would be all Linux.

Got a pair of cheap skis this week, from a co-worker who had a superflous pair, and I’ve now gotten the boots and poles to match. I’m now ready to continue my skiing practice, and I hope to learn how to break before the season ends. It’s really necessary for much of the cross country here, it seems.

This was my last week working 100% at Nokia. I go back down to 50% next week as the university semester starts with an orientation week. I hope to learn my course timetable then, as well as start exercising in the gym below work (it’s affiliated with student services in Oslo, and so has cheaper membership for Uni students). Hopefully uni will be interesting (though I don’t think it’s called uni outside of Australia) and since it’s really wasy to get between uni and work I think I can still make most of the Starcraft games during the semester.

This week the office is practically deserted and little work is being done. This means for the most part that I am playing around with fun QML demos, such as my tower defense game and a Piet editor. I get to go back to working with others on the fun, but not quite as fun, demos next week. One downside of everyone being away is that there are no Starcraft games this week. Given that, I’m managing to cope quite well.

Since there’s no Starcraft in the afternoons, I’ve done a little more skiing. It’s easy to just go skiing after work, since you can catch public transport to a variety of cross-country skiing areas that are just at the edge of the city. One of the guys at the office let me borrow a pair of skis and helped teach me some more of the basics. It was all going pretty well despite the freezing cold temperatures, which you get used to so long as you keep moving. It was cold enough that ice kept forming on my mustache, but other than that and the occasional times I fell face first into the snow the cold was not a problem. The only real problem was the downhill part at the end. It seems that there’s quite a difference in the concept of ‘a gentle slope’ between the cultures of Australia and Chile. Looking at it positively, since I now have my first real bruise I’m a proper skiing beginner now. I’m just not doing downhill again until I learn how to brake properly (since braking improperly sends you hurtling off the side of the track).

I spent the New Years long weekend inside again. Since I spent much of 2009 enamored of particle effects in QML, watching particle effects from reality (fireworks) wasn’t all that appealing. I could see a few from my window though, especially when I opened it and leaned out into the bitter cold for a few seconds. With temperatures between -10 °C and -20 °C outside I think that staying inside all weekend seems quite reasonable.

Things that I did inside included purchasing the PopCap Games catalog on Steam. While I don’t like steam compared to any of the other alternatives they were the only place with this great deal. So far I’ve played a lot of Plants vs. Zombies and Insaniquarium, both of which are good fun if a little heavy on the clicking (so that’s where I got my exercise this weekend ).

Another thing I’ve been doing on Sedna, my personal laptop, is trying out Microsoft Windows. While I doubt that 2010 will be the year I switch back to Windows, I am giving it a trial as my primary OS for a few months (until the MS Office trial expires end of March at least). This is primarily because Windows 7 impresses me a fair bit, in that it’s catching up to my Linux experience in terms of shine (XP is hideous), functionality (some cool new window management features like Win+ArrowKeys), and sanity (User data is now in \users\username instead of some convoluted and torturous path. And it’s no longer labeled My Documents, you can use that label for your actual documents.). It doesn’t hurt that I’ve gotten to know windows a little better in the past few years from occasional attempts to develop on it (still a nightmare, but Qt Creator offers hope at last). And it further doesn’t hurt that I’ve started to find that the large 3rd-party segment does include free software (as in speech) and other stuff that makes up for a lot of the deficiencies in Windows. It’s still a lot more expensive, in both time and money, than setting up Fedora GNU/Linux with KDE but since it’s catching up in basic desktop quality, and still has the compatibility advantage at large, it seems worth a try now. I understand that Windows 7 is just Vista with more polish (and some of the things I like about 7 such as UAC and the user data path were in Vista), but that polish and stabilizing was sorely needed. There was a similar experience with KDE 3->4, where 4.0 and 4.1 needed time to mature and people didn’t want to switch from KDE 3, but at least with KDE they were honest and open about it. And since KDE 4 is also nicely polished and featureful Windows 7 has tough competition in becoming my primary personal OS. It’s still a long ways away from becoming my primary work OS though, for a plethora of reasons, and so I’ll still be having daily KDE interaction to compare it with (and that’s not counting the KDE SC apps I’ve installed on Windows already). I’m even drafting this blog post in MS word, and for word processing I’d say it’s on par with Vim .

It’s been a much better experience trying out Windows that it was trying out Mac for me, for two reasons. One is that I think I went into it a little better, and had a brief look at the introductory materials, which provided some workflow tips and gave much better sense of how to use windows effectively than any Mac materials I saw. The other reason is that I can pretty much do what I want and whichever workflow suits me, much like in Linux. Mac felt very constrained to the one “true” way of using it and without good introductory materials (or at least without finding them) it was a long process of getting frustrated, venting my frustrations to Mac users, and then being told how to do it properly since the feature wasn’t discoverable from my time doing it the wrong way. It also hasn’t hurt that my windows install was full of games as I previous used it exclusively for that purpose. It makes ‘using windows’ more fun when it’s broken up with other and more playful interfaces.

If my windows experience ends up working out well and I continue to use it beyond the trial, I still expect that I’ll switch back to Linux at home when I do my operating systems course. Compiling my own kernel sounds like too much fun. And do keep in mind that this was a freshly and personally installed version of Windows 7 Professional, my windows experience on other computers such as centrally administered ones or OEM crapware infested ones is still rather poor. I just now know that it’s not Microsoft’s fault.

2010 is the year that QML is released and that I complete my degree, so it’s shaping up to be quite an exciting one already. Happy new year everyone, and best of luck with 2010!

For the Christmas holiday I went on a Cabin trip with some of the other guys from the office. (Pictures will be uploaded to my flickr account in good time. Or at least at some point.) It was about three days in a cabin in the mountains with no electricity or running water. However this was Nordmark, which is just outside Oslo, so there was still cell phone coverage and we went most of the way there via city public transport. And the others kept laughing at me when I called it ‘the wilderness’.

Hiking there was long and, for the most part, dull. I didn’t find it very easy though, as life in Australia prepared me neither for walking through snow or walking up mountains. It probably wasn’t very steep by real standards, but it was steeper than I’d often encountered in Australia and it was all uphill – for a lot longer than I’d encountered in Australia. The only horrible part was actually reaching the cabin, because that’s when it felt cold. While hiking in the mild temperatures, maybe -5°C, I was generating enough heat to be sweating even though I had removed my primary warm layer. When sitting in the cabin, which was unmanned and frozen when we reached it, it was cold and I wasn’t doing much more than waiting for the fire to start (which took quite some time). After a few hours though the fire had gotten everything to be nice and warm and the inside of the cabin was as hospitable as it gets without electricity and running water.
Another difference from Australia was the water situation. Upon arrival at the cabin we found that the well that supplied it was frozen solid and unusable. In a drought stricken country like Australia, that would be enough to sentence the entire group to death. In this case we simply picked water up off the ground (snow) outside and were fine – we pretty much had water as fast we could melt and boil it.
After a delicious Christmas dinner, where I learnt how to make mayonnaise and how horrible meringue is to clean out of pots, I then survived the night when the fire burnt out. Not that there’s much choice about letting the fire burn out when everyone’s asleep, but I think the temperature only fell to 10°C inside the cabin before we woke up and started it again.
The next day I learnt cross-country skiing, so that we could ski back downhill to the train. Due to an abundance of soft snow to fall in, I managed to learn without an appreciable number of bruises.

Skiing back worked out surprisingly well. There had been a vast amount of snow overnight, and so we had to trudge through waist high snow and around small snow avalanches in the forest on the way to the skiing route. After that I managed to fall only a minimal number of times despite my inexperience – and it was still a lot faster and easier than the hiking uphill was.

Upon my return to civilization (well, dense civilization because apparently Nordmark is merely a ‘training wilderness’) I balanced out the physical activity of the past few days with two games of Sins of a Solar Empire. That took up the remainder of the long weekend. One was with the previous expansion Entrenchment, and the other was with the upcoming expansion Diplomacy, and it made me greatly appreciate Diplomacy for single player games. This is because the reworked Diplomacy system makes the AI players a lot less stupid, and even lets you have a working element of diplomacy with them. The general overview is that with the Entrenchment game, 3v3, the computer players on both sides just broke down and started attacking each other, making it easy for me to clean up. In the Diplomacy game, 2v2v2v2, the teams held and it was only easy for me because I had entrenched the chokepoints and was able to make enough peace with the AI players to take them out one at a time. And their teams not only didn’t break down, but two of the other teams coalesced when it was apparent that my team was dominant. Yes, I could just have played with locked teams but that’s not as fun.

A big difference from Australia is that I actually had traditional Christmas weather for once. I spent Christmas in a forest of snow covered pine trees, so the traditional Christmas imagery was not laughable (because in Australia, both snow-covered pine trees and Santa in board shorts are laughable). And it was nice and mild at around -5°C, whereas it’s expected to go down to -10°C and beyond from Saturday. (I haven’t been paying much attention to the weather on the days where I just sit inside all day. Finally, I’m in conditions where that’s not just silly.)