The weather started off wet. This didn’t stop the usual, crack commando team from staging an advanced strike into the centre of the town before the remainder of the infantry followed later at their own pace.
We first visited the library to get net access and to read any english language newspaper we could find so as to find out what had been going on in the world. Unfortunately there was only the Herald-Tribune International Edition which didn’t really help. The net connection was better so I managed to get the weather forecast for the next few days and read my Dept. e-mail.
We then walked across town to the Polaris attraction. On the way we passed the Macks brewery and discovered that it contains the British Consulate. Typical!
The Polaris attraction was really a mini aquarium with a largish pool holding four bearded seals. It also had a multi-screen AV-Digital film theatre within we watched a couple of films, one about Svalbard and the other about Antarctica.
Unfortunately the cafe wasn’t open there. This was probably due to the tourist season officially ending at the end of August. So, when we left we popped into the local Spar supermarket and picked up some lunch in the enclosed sandwich shop before attempting to buy provisions.
I don’t know what Norwegians manage to eat as the food in the supermarkets is terrible. Soups all come in dried form, spagetti etc. comes in large tins with very little sauce and end up as a congealed lump. There are all sorts of not very good salamis and junk food and that’s about it. I came out of there with only a bag of rolls, some milk and some sachets of instant hot chocolate.
By this time my cold had progressed to the point where I was feeling really fatigued and the nose was starting to run. At least the sore throat was going away.
This evening we were invited by Julia to meet other members of the International Student Union. It took some engineering but we did finally make it to the location of the gathering, the Sami cultural centre in the University.
The building has an interesting structure, made from rough hewn logs and polished gneiss with a semi-circular glass outer wall. In the centre of the floor is a large pit designed to sit around with a central fireplace in which a large fire was lit.
It was a fun evening and I managed to mostly fight off the cold for most of it.
I’m now, at last, writing up all the events which have happened so far which had failed to do previous nights. I really need to go to sleep now, though I’m not sure how well I’m going to sleep with a running nose.

After a slightly later start Nigel, Linda, Isabelle and myself went for a walk over the northern central hill of the island. It was a fun walk.
My cold had progressed though. The sore throat was in full force and I was starting to feel a bit brain-dead.
After lunch the group was herded off into town in an attempt to go on an 8 hour bus and ferry round tour. When we got to the tourist office, however, we found it closed so we couldn’t buy any tickets. The situation was saved by Isabelle’s audacity. It turned out that we could buy the component parts of the journey as they were required.
The tour was awesome, as were many of the views and very much worth the £40-£50 it cost.
There was an amusing confusion by the person selling tickets on the final ferry/cruise ship. Jonathan Antcliff gave them his University Card to show that he was a student (to get a discount) and the person behind the desk made the ticket out to a “Mr Earth Sciences.” Later in the journey tried some social engineering on the crew to get them to make an announcement asking “Mr Earth Sciences” to go to a certain place on the ship. Unfortunately, the person she asked knew too much and the joke fell flat.
We managed to sail into Tromso just in time to run to catch the last bus back.
There were no aurora though, oh well.

Nigel, Linda, Isabelle and I travelled into the city centre quite early to check things out and to go to the tourist centre, where we picked up a lot of leaflets. Then, on the way back to base we accidently took the wrong bus and found ourselves on the other side of the bridge near the airport, which made for a good adventure. After jumping bus at one of the main interchange points in the city, close to the airport, we did some shopping in a shop called “Rema 1000” and then managed to find our way back via a circuitous route.
Following lunch we all journeyed into town again thence, via another bus, to the cable car up to the top of the hill opposite Tromso Sentrum. Because of the lovely weather, the views were spectacular. The waffles weren’t bad either.
On the way back we stopped in one of the very many pizza restaurants in the city for dinner where we all got stuffed full.
After returning, it was time for bed. I started getting a sore throat, which wasn’t a good sign.
Not long after we’d gone to bed there was a ring at the door bell, but by the time we got there the doorstep was empty. It was only after I looked out of my window and saw the sky did I see what all the commotion was about… The Northern Lights!
The show was quite spectacular, some of which I managed to capture with my camera.

*WAVE*
WiFi is 50NOK an hour.. just under five quid. (ouch) But at least it works.

The flight(s) were O.K. and my Sainsbury’s cool bag worked a treat.

More updates as and when I get a chance…

TTFN.
Godnicht

Arrived in Tromso at about 5pm local time and spent a lot of the evening encamped in Tromso airport awaiting the arrival of the rest of the group and Julia Svetskova.

Well, it’s time. I’ve done 99% of the packing and really have only the toiletries to pack in the morning.

So, it’s up at 5:30am and off to catch a 10:20am plane to Oslo and then after a 3 hour stop-over it’s on to Tromso for the 15 day trip. No doubt there will be lots of photographic opportunities.

I’m not sure if I’ll have net access when there. There doesn’t seem to be any internet cafes as far as I can find using Google and the only WiFi hotspots are in the airport and a couple of hotels. Anyway, I’ll soon find out.

So, T.T.F.N. and see you in a couple of weeks!

I think I’ve beaten him to a blog link about wierd Aberystwyth happenings…

It seems that the University of Wales, Aberystwyth’s CompSci lot have been drinking too much ale again.. they’ve developed a welly wangging robot!

O.K. it’s not an official research programme.. more a Channel 4 programme as they’ve developed it for the “Scrapheap Challenge Roadshow”, but still. 🙂

O.K. I’ve spent the last few hours trying lots of combinations of ways to pack my cameras, lenses and iBook into a couple of bags.. the previously mentioned Sainsbury’s cool bag and a small rucksack I got at the IT Support Staff Conference in June.

The rigorous Department of Transport enforced size of hand-luggage of 45cm x 35cm x 16cm are proving a problem. The 45cm x 35cm is not a problem, it’s the very narrow 16cm which is.

With minimal padding, the width of an iBook and my larger aperture lenses is ~16cm, but then you have to add the thickness of the bag. I’m not sure that I can actually reach that magic 16cm. I will have more likelyhood of getting the Sainsbury’s bag into the hole that they’re using for testing than the rucksack, so I think I shall have to use that. Still, it’s still a risk that I won’t be able to force it in without causing damage.

It’s obvious that the size that the DoT and Home Office descided upon was a businessman’s briefcase and nothing else. Actually, it was probably the minister’s own briefcase which was measured. And the excuse that a bag any larger would be harder for the security personnel to search is a complete and utter bear faced lie. If the regulations stated a volume restriction or even a type of internal structure for a bag that would be a reasonable argument, but specific dimensions is just a stupid, arbitary restriction which serves no-one.

The ministers have also said that people should put only things in their hand luggage which they will need during the flight. That’s fine in theory and I would whole-heartly support it if, and only if, they could guarantee that the hold luggage was perfectly safe from theft, loss or being damaged by the baggage handling system. This is no-where near true. Not only this but the insurance industry won’t even cover hold-luggage and the airlines cower under the Montreal Convention terms which mean that compesation for damage is based upon the wieght of the luggage and has a ceiling of £250!

Those of you who have been on Bullet within the last week or so will know the “fun” I’ve been having with our new firewall. It’s a Cisco ASA5520 with the IDS card installed.

When I first tried bringing the machine into service I found that the machine would crash within 10 minutes. It took quite a while to get a new version of the operating system for it, which seemed to work a lot better.

However, on Thursday it was brought to my attention that ssh connections were no-longer reliable, especially if they were high traffic ones. So, I spent the whole of yesterday investigating the thing with tcpdump running at both ends of the connection and on the IDS (which runs Linux). The packets looked OK within the our network and at the IDS but there was some which were becoming corrupted at the far end, which the Linux kernel wasn’t spotting and was hence getting through to the ssh application. I tried loads of tweeks on the firewall to see if I could change the problem, but it wouldn’t go away.

Anyway, today I decided to test the same thing from home using my Apple iBook. The connection (and rsync, which I was using to test) seemed to work OK, but there were a few pauses. The problem still happened when I tried from my Linux server, however. I then tried the rsync to a different machine in Earth Sciences and it broke.. So, it looks like there are two bugs.. one in the ASA IOS (or there’s duff memory damaging packets) and a bug in the Linux IP stack which stops it from noticing that packets are corrupt. :-/

Anyway, as soon as I get BT SkyNet to move our support contract from them to Cisco (which I originally requested when I purchased the equipment but was given their own support contract) I’ll lodge a bug report with Cisco. Goodness knows how I’ll get a bug report sent to the Linux kernel hackers… maybe I should e-mail Alan.

Why is it that the new regulations for hand baggage seem to be designed to stop digital photographers?

Every photo+laptop bag is one or two centimetres larger in one dimention or another than their regulation maximum size (including handles and pockets). I’m sure that they’re doing this deliberately.