hiidenkonttibeta

Someone had carved on the table we had in Tervasoihtu:

They look as if they’re based on Futhark runes, but I can’t make anything sensible out of them with any Futhark variant I can find, or with Angerthas created by Tolkien.

Can anyone figure them out?

Did you know they give you free food in all shops?

I have to tolerate using Micro$oft Window$ at work. I use software provided by my employer, and some apps I know from Linux world which have Win versions, too (like Vim, Firefox and Ethereal). So I’m not too familiar with sites providing Windows software, using Google for my occasional needs instead.

And it so happens that I needed to undelete some 300kB JPEG files from FAT filesystem in W2K. Googling for free version of a tool for doing it resulted in about 200,000 links, most of them pointing to “free downloads” or software which had “freeware” license. I downloaded a few at random to try them out.

They basically fell in three categories:

Free downloads

There’s no charge for downloading the software, but that’s it. Oh great. If I looked really hard, I probably might be able to find a site on which they charged for downloads, right?

The software itself turned out to be “freeware” (see next category), at best.

“Freeware”

Wikipedia defines freeware as “computer software which is made available gratis/free of charge”. Apparently the sites functioning as distributors for “freeware” and the developers haven’t bothered to check this definition.

Practically it means a free demo version. Is there non-free demo versions, too?! So, the applications are advertised as “We’re so happy you download our FREE software!” and actually they’re free only as long as you undelete less than 1 file per day, or it’s smaller than 64kB in size or it’s anything but a JPEG, in which case you need this registered commercial enterprise Pro version instead of this FREE version (which you can happily use up to two weeks for free, so it’s FREE!)

Freeware

In the midst of gazillion “freeware” versions there is also one piece of real freeware.

That is, freeware in the way free software seems to be free in Windows world, meaning that you get a binary which you can run without paying anyone to do so. I found zero undeleting tools which were real Free software as Free Software Foundation defines it.

In the end, I found the one freeware app I needed, but as a casual downloader I had to go through a lot of false positives first. So, following the rules of the M$ world, essentially all the shops give you free food – there’s absolutely no charge when you move it from the shelf to your shopping cart! You only need to pay for it if you actually intend to use it for anything, like for taking it out of shop (for eating, you’d need a Pro version). But “downloading” is free!

The downsizing is finally done, and we were told our destinies on Thursday. In my team, everyone’s employment continues, but the main responsibilities of most of us change. Hopefully even for the better.

To celebrate some co-workers and I went to have a few beers and to listen to rock’n blues band Steamroller in Tervasoihtu. They’re not at all bad, check out the samples on their homepage.

I hadn’t been in Tervasoihtu before – it’s a small place, a log cabin maybe 6x6m in size, with three floors. It’s the one in the middle in this photo from year ago:

The February real winter I’ve been writing about seems to be happening right now. We have enough snow, yesterday morning it was -20C, right now it’s -23C. According to weather forecasts this cold period doesn’t last long, the temperature should soon rise to about -10C. On some years there’s been this cold or colder for weeks, but it seems our climate has changed and winters aren’t so cold anymore.

Where do you get most of your ideas? Solutions to problems, innovative thoughts? Does it happen when you’re actually working with the thing you’re doing, or in some other time and place like while trying to sleep or while smoking a cigarette (if you have that infernal habit)?

My place is .. the shower. Walking ~20+ minutes from work to home is also pretty good at times, but it doesn’t have a chance at beating shower. The problem in both is, of course, writing the ideas down, or getting more information. Someone should write a web browser with voice i/o and capable of summarising google’s top search results. That might be how the computers on Star Trek came to be.

More whining about food.

One item in today’s lunch menu at our friendly local Sodexho was “tuna pasta”. Usually one expects to get some pasta and a sauce or stew with tuna as one ingredient. But with Sodexho, oh no.

It’s half a plate of pasta (pre-cooked and warmed in warm water), some spoonfuls of tuna straight out of the can on top of it, and some bulk sauce. Replace the sauce with ketchup, and what you got is the el cheapo lunch straight out of a poor starving student’s menu. But that would be tastier, since pasta is probably cooked with more care and any ketchup tastes a lot better than Sodexho’s sauces.