daniel.haxx.se

Even a seasoned hacker’s heart can go soft at times…

Rex, Anja, Agnes during our summer vacation 2011.

At my little party for my 40th birthday, I got a present from a few awesome friends: a flight over Stockholm by helicopter. At August 19th 2011 it was made into reality and I spent roughly 20 minutes in the air. I took a (shaky) movie of the tour that you can see below. Enjoy.

Tack Grönros, Ericsson och Feltzing!

I had the seat to the left of the driver and had a spectacular ability to view everything both forwards and to the left. The ride was “shaky” and you could really feel the wind affect the little thing. The weather was sunny and 20-21 something degrees Celsius, a perfect day for this.

To really make it a day, I also opened up and had a sip from my Smokehead Extra Black that I received at the same time as the helicopter ride. It was similarly super!

I took the video with my simple Fujifilm FinePix F100fd camera, and I edited it with Openshot – which I had never done before. I found it to be a nice experience and I’m likely to use that tool again. I also learned that if you upload a 1.2GB video to youtube that is longer than 15 minutes, it will allow you to waste a long time to upload it, it will convert it, it will give you a link to it and then when you view that link… it says the video was too long so you can’t see it!

I just want to show off my awesome new mittens that my dear mother gave me as a present when I turned 40 (at least at the party I held for my birthday, I actually turned 0×28 already back in November). To help you decode them I’ve framed a line of digits. The left one is supposed to be read before the right one.

As a bonus design detail, the digits on the thumb are made the same as on the part which the thumb covers on the photo.

The backside has nothing to decode but instead features a tux image, the same one on both mittens so the enclosed picture only shows the left-hand one.

I’ll admit that I didn’t immediately decode the mittens myself when I gave it a first glance, and I blame the fact that no lowercase letters were used!

I used my mobile phone to take the pictures, so they’re not really top-notch quality.

This will make the coming winter much more appreciated and I hope to impress a lot of friends when the few warm days of the Swedish summer have passed.

At last, the first meeting with our recently started foss-sthlm effort took place. The amount of attention and attendance we achieved by far surpassed our wildest assumptions, and around 130-140 persons interested in open source showed up (we don’t know the exact number). The facilities in Kista where we held the event, were graciously let to our use by Stockholm’s University (DSV) and they were very good. MSC and Nohup were our two sponsors who donated great sub sandwiches and drinks to all of us. Thank you!

I’m glad we manage to offer this event completely free of charge to the attendees, and hey we had quality talkers speaking up on really interesting subject that I think the audience appreciated on the subjects of PostgreSQL, Upstart, Open Source Sweden, Rockbox and Debian packaging.

I did a 20 minute talk about curl – in Swedish. The slides are available (they are thus in Swedish too), see below, and hopefully there will soon be video available online with my presentation.

I also hope that we will gather all the slides at one single point to offer on the foss-sthlm web site, so check that out later on if you want the lot!

And here are Björn’s slides:

Me and Claes Jakobsson had a talk in #curl the other day about how we rarely meet Open Source people in the Stockholm Sweden area outside of our own little circles and friends.

In that moment we decided we’d try to arrange a meeting. Free Sofware and Open Source people in the area. In one place. Possibly involving beer. And why not some talks by some clueful people? We’re aiming for it to happen already during early spring 2010, but no date has been set yet.

We’ve already sent out a few mails to people, and we’ve posted about this idea at a few places and now I’ve setup a dedicated mailing list for this purpose. The foss-sthlm mailing list.

Do you want to participate at a meeting like this?

Do you want to help arranging the meeting and get the word spread in all the communities that we would like to get the word spread to?

Do you have any experience in arranging a meeting of this sort? We currently have no idea if people are interested enough, or if we get people interested how many we might be able to attract!

Do you by any chance have connections or friends at companies that would be interested in helping out with sponsorships or similar? My company (Haxx) will certainly make a contribution.

Don’t be shy. Join in and help us get some fun going.

Update: we now have web site monitoring our progress.

Summer time is here in Sweden.

Those of you who keep up with projects I’m involved in, or if you simple read my blog or follow me on twitter, might notice a slight decrease in activity during July or so when I’m going to have vacation and most probably not be at home during a few weeks.