Holidays in Sweden Monday, 30-Oct-23 20:35:49 CET

Fluid simulations every spare moment Sunday, 12-Nov-23 16:26:23 CET

Sunday, 05-Nov-23 19:44:44 CET

Working from the cottage

This was a regular work week, although we worked from our cottage in Sweden. Work with a holiday feeling, so to speak. The only challenge is that everything with the Internet has to work.

Monday 30 October

It rained the whole day. This was a stressful Monday, indeed. Over the weekend, I worked on sanding the living room's ceiling. You probably know this if you read the blog. I thought we were done with this, but this morning, the activities and the consequences of it came thundering down on me. Please bear with me while I tell you the whole story.

To understand the background, I first would like to talk about the chimney in the cottage. It is big, and around the chimney is the house. The chimney is not letting through any WIFI signal. You need several access points to have a decent signal around the house. We have one access point on each side of the chimney.

Usually, DW works from the living room, and I work from the room beside the kitchen. It is usually not warm there, and I have problems doing office work in chill conditions. We decided I would work from the kitchen and DW from the living room. That plan held up for a while, but when the practical things of setting up the workplaces were done, we realized that the network speed from the living room was not good enough. Why is that Jens?

What then happened made things worse. My connection from the kitchen was fine, but the connection in the living room was horrible. I started a network administration program set to administrate the network in our house in the Netherlands. The problem was we were in Sweden. Before I figured out I had to change the program into multi-site administration, I had already corrupted the network in the house in Sweden. At that point, I did not know how to repair it, and DW had a meeting, and she could connect to the Internet via our Dutch network credentials.

DW moved her workplace to the room next to the kitchen, and then we worked the entire day with Dutch credentials.

At 5 p.m. sharp, I logged out from work, drove to the big city, and bought a new access point to replace the broken access point in the living room. It was already completely dark. I noticed a group of roe deer next to the road at one place along the road. Luckily, I came on time to the shop before it closed and then drove home again. The group of roe deer was still around.

I connected the new access point when I came home, which did not boot. It was also refusing to function. Oh, could it be something with the cable? Sure! It had a large chunk missing where I had sanded the cable.

Now, I decided to get the original access point working. It required a few resets with a proper cable, but it came alive! Unfortunately, I did not have the network cable tester, cable clips, and whatnot, so I could not restore the broken cable. The access point can lie on the first floor and still serve DW in the living room.

What to do with the brand-new access point? We will take it to the Netherlands to improve the network there.

Tuesday 31 October

Today, it was time for the chimney sweeper to come and sweep the house's chimney. In preparation for this, we turned on other heating. He came during my lunch break.

He turned out to be a couple of months older than me. He was born in Denmark but moved to Sweden when he was eight. I did not ask him how he got into the chimney sweeping job. That is for the next time I meet him, I suppose.

He had some suggestions for me as well. The ladder had to be replaced by a new aluminum ladder. I will fix that. We have one stove that is out of order, and he had suggestions for renovating it and making it work again. He was delighted that I fastened the ladder on the roof.

When he left, we fired up the stoves again. It kept raining without an end. We are so lucky we had our holiday last week, not this week.

This Tuesday, it is Halloween. I am not into celebrating that, but many others are doing that.

In the evening, I worked on the fluid simulation. It is not flowing just yet.

Wednesday 1 November

This morning, I spotted two roe deers near the cottage! That is a pretty okay roe deer portrait if you ask me. It was light enough to get a reasonably sharp image.

Today, I worked the first half of the day. It went really well, and I was pleased with my effort. After lunch, we decided to walk around a bird sanctuary near our cottage. This is not the time of year when you go and spot birds, but that did not matter. It has been raining for several days, so it was nice it held up on my free afternoon. Because of that, we decided to do something more traditional holiday things apart from starting to cut and split chunks of wood.

I suggested we bring our wellingtons because it has been raining a lot. DW thought that was a great idea.

 

It was a little wetter than I had anticipated. I knew my wellingtons were not entirely good anymore, but I was unaware they were in that bad condition. My left foot got soaking wet, and my right foot had a slow sipping leakage.

We decided that it was about time for me to get new wellingtons. That was good because we were out and about, so why not go and fix this today! After our walk, I removed my socks before switching to my regular shoes because there was no point walking around with wet socks. I am not used to that, and it was not particularly warm either, especially around the ankles.

First, we went to the second-hand shop, and there we bought more stuff we did not need anymore in the cottage because we would not rent out the house anymore.

Then it was time for wellingtons! In the third shop, we came across this puppet. Apparently, it is the statue of the founder of the shop. I wonder what he looks like in reality.

There were a lot of wellingtons in the shop, but no wellingtons for me.

We drove to the next shop. I do believe we found the right ones in the fourth shop. At that point, it was dark outside. I got them, so I can go out and about without getting wet feet. That is excellent!

Thursday 2 November

Today, it rained the whole day. We stayed inside the whole day, working from our cottage in Sweden. This was not a spectacular day.

In the evening, I worked on the fluid simulation. I have been trying to port the source code from "Ten Minutes Physics." It is a YouTube channel and a website and whatnot. I found a fluid simulation in JavaScript in 200 lines of code there. I tried porting this code to c#, which was hard. JavaScript is not a typed language, so I had to deduce the types. The source code uses single-dimensional arrays to store two-dimensional values, which is also acceptable, but I prefer helpers turning x and y into an index. I thought I would solve this problem, but that was not the case. This evening, I found someone porting a similar library from C++ into Java, and please note that both are typed languages. That is so much easier. On top of it all, the original indexed through one-dimensional arrays with the help of x, y, and z. That is so much easier. I decided to follow this example. But not tonight.

That night, I was dreaming about calculus made with untyped languages.

Friday 3 November

Today, we worked from the cottage in Sweden. It was much better weather than the previous days. I had a perfect day.

At lunch, we decided to go for a lunch walk.

	The new neighbor created a pond.
	A mushroom on a tree stump.
	The neighbor will restore this building with the help of the municipality. It holds a wood shop of historical value.
	Here is the pond from the other side. It's always fun to dig around with a digging machine.

 

As the day progressed, it became better and nicer outside. We were deskbound, though. At some point, I opened the window and took a picture of the workshop house and the road from inside the window. This is the ultimate definition of epic autumn weather if you ask me.

Pretty.

In the evening, I started on the porting of the fluid simulation program for the second time. This time, from C++ to C#. It was a sample from Mike Ash. I was happy I found something to work with. I just had to make it 2D again.

We managed to work the whole week without Internet mishaps, which was fantastic.

Saturday 4 November

While drinking tea in bed this morning, I got the fluid simulation to produce something. White paint is injected in the middle of black liquid in random directions. The white dilutes gradually over time. So not, I got a program doing something. That is great. I could sit in bed the rest of the day programming this, but that will not happen. Today, we will clean up the cottage, pack our things, and prepare for going home tomorrow. I am grateful I got the project to something satisfactory before I had to go on doing boring things like cleaning.

I made a little photo shoot of the farm at this point.

In the evening, when working on the fluid simulations, I discovered that Mike Ash had switched essential parameters (current with previous), making a crucial part of the source much more challenging to understand. I did not know how to deal with this. That is for later.

Sunday 5 November

We drove from the cottage a little before 6 a.m. in the morning. I started driving as I usually do when we are in Sweden. We switched so I could rest at about 8:15 a.m. at a Circle K shop in Bjäred, Sweden. I had not been so tired this stretch, but getting some rest was beautiful. When I drove, my mind was busy with fluid algorithms.

About here, we decided not to go to the ferry at Rödby but via the inland of Denmark. At 9:50 a.m., we crossed the Great Belt Bridge near Korsør in Denmark. It was actually exciting to drive this way. It is our first time doing this, and we have been driving to Sweden for the past 16 years.

The reason for this is that we had a couple of bad experiences at the ferry one after another, and it was not feeling good anymore to sit for three hours to wait for the ferry for no other reason than that they screwed up. The first 15 years were not like that; what is happening with the ferry between Rödby and Puttgarden?

We have spoken about the alternative inland route for more than ten years. Perhaps we would try another route, even if it was just for fun? Now it happened!

In Nørre Aaby, we switched drivers again at around 10:45 a.m. It was my turn. I passed the border to Germany around 12:00 midday, and at 1:15 p.m., we entered the Elbtunnel in German. The only traffic jam was in Hamburg, and it was not that bad, but I must say that traffic jams are tiring. About 2 p.m. I was done with my long stretch of driving, and DW took over again. She usually avoids Germany, but I needed rest.

She arrived at the Dutch border at 3:30 p.m. There we had a cup of coffee in the restaurant. The coffee was cold, but I failed to mention it when the waiter asked if all was fine. Perhaps one should not put a grain of salt on every slug.

I drove through the Netherlands all the way home. We came home at 6 p.m.

Merida greeted us with purring already at the door. The sheep had also been purring if they knew how to do that. We gave them food supplements, and they produced satisfied sounds when fed by their favorite sheepherders. All happy to see each other. DS even came out from his tiny house to greet us, but he disappeared without a proper goodbye when the most necessary phrases were exchanged. He managed to keep the plants alive, which made me happy.

In the evening, I worked on the fluid simulation. Could not fix the Mike Ash confusion.

This concludes this week's blog!