Photo: I took a day trip to Zurich in order to hook up with Sven-Thorsten Dietrich, his cousin and Thomas Gleixner over in Uhldingen in Germany. The Gleixner’s kindly cooked us lunch and showed us around the local region.
I like doing some fun things on the weekend. I decided it might be real fun to swing by Zurich for the day on Sunday, despite having too much else I should be doing (I just didn’t sleep Saturday night). I wanted to hook up with Sven and Thomas and talk Real Time for a while, while having lunch and a stroll around the local region. Thomas certainly lives in a nice area and he’s up to some seriously interesting stuff with mingo et al, so that’s all pretty cool.
I had never been to Switzerland (or, by extension, to Zurich) before and even though I spent most of my time across the border, I have to say that I think I quite like the Swiss. It’s just a nice country – nice and neutral too, 12% income tax (apparently), but otherwise expensive. I got a 06:something flight out on Sunday morning, got picked up by Sven and his cousin at the airport and then we drove to Germany (taking the car ferry across Lake Constance, which we later walked around another small part of). We had lunch, lots of coffee and dessert, did some fun things, talked quite a lot, then Sven, Nicole and I went back to Zurich for dinner. All in all, that ranks up there with one of the more fun Sunday outings that I’ve had. I got the early flight this morning back to London City and then worked from home for the rest of the day – though I did work on Saturday so I didn’t get a lot really useful stuff done today.
I’ve synced down a ppc rawhide from a couple of days back onto a workstation here (3.5GB or whatever) and will go do an installation thang onto a laptop in the course of this week. I’m trying to get up to speed and figure out which way is up at work, so I figured it was probably also a very good idea to start properly tracking things like rawhide in my spare time. Did some work on the book too over the weekend and I think I’ve got the portability chapter nearly finished. That only involved covering all of the following in 30 pages (yes, ok the I18N stuff really should have had its own chapter, maybe, but it is actually a portability issue – just not a straight hardware thing):
- History of portable systems from System/360 on up
- Linux distribution portability, the LSB, et al
- Packaging for RPM, Dpkg.
- Internationalization with wide characters, gettext, and friends.
- Autotools.
- 64-bit cleanliness.
- Endian neutrality.
I didn’t realize that when you write books, you actually need to write a lot 
And if you think you understood what I just wrote, go try it sometime.
Jon.