Jonas Beckman

My home network is running again. When I came back from my course at the Parliament, a software firewall (that should have been disabled) thought my Thinkpad was an intruder and started blocking IP-addresses.

Craig, garret and several others are covering political issues with great intensity. That’s great! More than ever, we need sane voices that speak up about all the outrages.

Workshops are always exhausting - yesterday was fun, but too little sleep made me very tired afterwards. Also, using my Thinkpad as a temporary fileserver somehow screwed up my network connections - I spent three hours trying to re-establish my home network before giving up.
After all the hype and subsequent doubts about Active Directory in W2K, I foolishly imagined a simple peer-to-peer workgroup would work as advertised… now I recall one of the better error messages as haiku:

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

I’ll hold an introductory XML-workshop tomorrow: a little DOM, a little SAX, why and how to validate… things like that. And of course there is no easier way to illustrate those concepts than with Python.

It takes just a few minutes to install Python 2.0, the Win32 extensions and the latest version of pyXML - but this slick little installation gives me exactly the kind of small, readable and tweakable samples I want. And very easy COM-automation of Internet Explorer and MSXML, too:

from win32com.client import Dispatch
xmldoc = Dispatch(”Msxml2.domdocument”)
xmldoc.async = 0
xmldoc.validateOnParse = 1
if (xmldoc.load(’sample.xml’)):
print ‘OK’
else:
print ‘No good!’

Unfortunately, I have been very busy with other things today, so preparations will prevent me from sleeping as much as I’d like to tonight. But that’s life, sometimes.

Today I did a demo of an XML-editor for the Parliament’s standing committee of Law. They were, not surprisingly, very skeptical about any attempt to auto-generate legal text. So am I - but there are simple cases where I believe it is not only justified but can actually makes the overall decision process better.

Often demos like this are all about trivial GUI details - but this one got surprisingly deep in very short time.

Home from Finland. Or rather: off the ferry - the stop in Finland is only an hour. For most people the point of this particular tour is getting drunk and/or buying taxfree stuff. But me and Aila were much too busy for that.

It’s very early Saturday morning. Sun is shining, I can hear birds… some kind of spring is finally coming. It’s still cold, though. Below zero most of last week and coming up slowly.

I start this weekend with more questions than answers… we’ll see what happens. Some of those answers I must give myself. We’ll see.

Me and Aila will meet at Eriksdalsbadet soon - this week she is finally well enough to train again.

Spring is coming! I sat outside after swimming and almost fell asleep in the sun - then I felt my stomach rumble in a way it hasn’t for the last five months: the low, satisfied and natural sound of a body that could do with some something to eat but is feeling just fine.

Djurgårdsfärjan is a small ferry that goes from the Old Town to the the beautiful island Djurgården. This is a very nice trip and takes about ten minutes. I searched for a picture of it - instead I found this story and laughed for a long time.

The Museum of Far Eastern antiquitues has always been one of my favorite places in Stockholm - it’s a very good place to think slowly. And since we had difficult things to discuss, me and Aila spent a very contemplative afternoon there thinking, feeling and occasionally talking.

Now we’re briefly at my place before getting on a ferry to Finland. Difficult discussions will continue on board - but we are happy and in a good mood again.

It’s Friday morning, I’m writing in bed on my Thinkpad. The week still seems a little unfinished: work is fine, but both personally and in my business I’m finally confronting some really old problems.

Me and Aila need more time to follow up on last weekend’s revelations - but the right things are already happening. I think this weekend will be great.

Having your own company is all about realizing goals - professional and personal. The beauty of a really small company is that you get to choose those goals.

Later today me and my business partner will discuss budgets and taxes - we have to make some hard choices, but our situation is actually pretty good. The real issue is that our personal lives are very different from when we started - what we must discuss is just how different our goals have become. They don’t have to be the same of course - just compatible.

My goal for today is simple: when business is finished, I’ll have my Friday massage. Then I’ll meet Aila.

I had breakfast and installed SQL Server 2000 on my home server - now I’ll try to access it using XML and HTTP. OK, that worked. Now to the Python part….

My week feels a lot more finished now.

I spent a very constructive afternoon with my business partner, planning for the future.

Then I had a great dinner with Aila. We were both extremely tired, so we’ll sleep apart tonight and continue tomorrow - we need fresh minds for what it is that we do.

.Two more demos of another XML-editor for parliamentary documents today. Beautiful old buildings that are beginning to feel very familiar - many people I met today I’ve seen in other projects before.

Our project at The National Police Board is rolling along: XM-modeling and Python scripts for crime analysis. They are old customers, and this project is fun, so far.

Yesterday I found a Python XML SQL HTTP Gateway - might be worth a closer look. We want to stay very pure, simple and cross platform when it comes to object-models and basic functionality. But storage is another matter: we have low data volumes but limited resources for support and maintenance - so we can’t ignore what the customer already knows.

Had an interesting conversation with my auditor this evening. Sweden does have insane taxes - but we’ll manage. I really hate this stuff, but we do what we have to do: Aila is looking over some receipts right now, tomorrow I’ll have a budget discussion with my business partner.

Me and Aila are currently very happy. We discovered many things this weekend - but there has been no time to write. Old sadness and wild new energy…

Today we are installing ethernet cables all over my place - sometime next week we’ll do the same for our downtown office. My business partner Olov is already Daddy Sysadmin: his woman and four daughters have a nice home network.

It’s time for lots of small networks. I talked to a Swedish broadband broker today: we want lower phone bills, some kind of VPN for two home networks and our downtown office plus a good co-located server. The broker was young, hungry and said: Sweden is a good place to shop for this kind of stuff right now.

Sweden has never been a good place when it comes to taxes, though. Our company taxes are coming up and were surprisingly high this year - we may have to sell some funds at a loss. But that’s life… it won’t kill us and business is still good.