Diary

Spent all day packing, and cleaning my room at the hotel. When finished late in the afternoon, I went for a walk down to the sea and the old town.

Left the hotel around seven, and carried all my bags down to the station (usually a ten minute walk, but quite a lot slower today). Had a sandwhich and a glass of wine at the station, before my train arrived.

In my cabin, there were one man from Antibes, another one who got on the train in Cannes, and a few more somewhere later in the night. I think we were at most five people, in a couchette with six beds. I managed to make some conversation in French with the man from Antibes. Went to sleep quite early.

2006-03-21: Bye, INRIA

Final day at INRIA. Felt a little sad to leave, even though I don't think I know the people in the Planete group very well after my two months here.

Left in time for the 17 o'clock bus, but decided at the last moment to walk back to Antibes instead. Found another roman aqueduc, which wasn't proken (I could walk across it). I can't show any of the photos, for reasons I'll describe later.

2006-03-19: Final weekend in Antibes

First some photos from Friday. I took bus number one to Trois Moulin, got off the bus almost where I had indended, and walked from there.

This is somewhere upstream from the the stone bridge.

Interesting plants.

When following a smaller path, I found this hole in the ground, almost in the middle of the path. Perhaps there's some reason it is VERBOTEN (sorry, I mean INTERDIT), to walk in the forest during the night.

Romarin in the wild. I had tried to walk uphill in the forest, towards INRIA, but close to this place, a fence forced me to go down again until I found a proper path.

I followed this path for a while, before I could continue to the right and uphill.

I was getting sick of the fences, so finally I climbed over one of them, to emerge on this parking lot.

But I needn't have bothered climbing it, since this particular fence ended just s few meters futher away...

A bug living in the forest.

An ant insisting on walking on my desk. The black shave at the top is the edge of my keyboard.

Yesterday, I went for my probably last shopping round in Antibes, to get some more milk, rice and other stuff. Looking through the kitchen and trying to sum up, it seems that since arriving here I (and Cicci, when she has been visiting) have consumed approximately

Spent the rest of the day doing the laundry, and continued to work on gcd calculations. I've promised to do a talk about that when I get to Nancy.

Today, Torbjörn came to visit. He had an incredibly troublesome journey from Nancy, since the railway between Toulon and Antibes was closed for maintanance yesterday, and there were no buses either. So he had to spend the night in Toulon, and arrived around lunch time today, instead of yesterday evening as was planned. After lunch, we walked halfway to Cap d'Antibes. It was very windy, and some impressive waves. We say one crazy wind surfer.

After leaving him at the station (he's taking the night train back to Nancy), I bought train tickets for myself. I'll leave with the night train 20:07 on Wednesday evening. I had some difficulty choosing between this train and the day train leaving on the morning the same day, but this way I should have plenty of time for cleaning and packing on Wednesday.

2006-03-13: Sunday means closed

The train back home arrived on time. First to Marseille, where I took a couple of pictures of the station while waiting for the next train. Then to Antibes, around half past eight in the evening.

The great hall of the railway station in Marseille.

Outside of the same building. The place in front of it was a construction site.

View over Marseille, and the stairs leading down to the city.

Saturday evening

After leaving my bags at the hotel, I walked back towards the station and bought a take away pizza paysanne (with bacon, champignons and chevre cheese) at Le Collier. It was more expensive and longer waiting time than at its neighbor, Mister Pizza, but it was also much better.

Sunday

On Sunday, I slept late for the first time in two weeks. Had the rest of yesterday's baguette and some chevre for breakfast. Since my fridge was empty, I needed to go shopping. Most places are closed on Sundays, but I figured that the Carrefour super market ought to be open, so that's where I walked. Unfortunately, it was open Monday to Saturday only...

On the way home, since I didn't have much to carry, I left Chemin de Saint Claude, and walked a slightly different way. At least, I passed by an open bakery so I could get a fresh baguette. I also photographed some of the flowers along the way. Fun playing with the macro feature of the camera.

Romarin, planted alongside a road close to Carrefour.

Not sure what these flowers are.

Looks like a coquelicot (vallmo).

A cherry or possibly apple tree?

And a larger romarin bush.

Available ingredients for dinner were quite limited: rice, pasta, one onion, and one can of chopped tomatos. So I made some pasta with a sauce made of the onion and the chopped tomatos. And I could make some tea to have with my baguette.

Spent most of the rest of the evening with the analysis needed for the design of a new algorithms for computing the greatest common divisor.

Monday

Today (Monday morning), I woke up surprisingly early, and had time to review the earlier French lessons during breakfast. Which consisted of tea, baguette, and chevre, rather than the traditional oat porridge with apple compote and milk I usually make.

Took the nine bus to work. I didn't get much done, except for catching up with email and lyskom. It turned out that today's French class was cancelled, because half of the students had some other compulsory seminar at the same time.

Around half past six, I left INRIA to walk down to Carrefour. When I arrived to Antibes in January, it was pitch dark at this time of day, but now it was early enough to have daylight during the walk through the woods.

When approaching the back gate, I noticed that the parking lot on the other side of the gate was completely empty. The gypsies have moved. I'm told they stay in Sophia Antipolis only during the winter, so I guess this means that it's now officially spring. A more annoying change was that the gate was looked. I don't know if it was because of the time of day, or for some other reason. There were a couple of card readers attached, but I couldn't convince any of them to let me out, so I had to climb over the gate to get out.

A tree in the twilight, without and with flash.

The stone bridge. No water below it today.

A full moon over the valley.

The passage under the motorway, seen from the Antibes side.

Outside Carrefour...

... and inside.

2006-03-11: Skiing

Sitting on the train back from Briançon back to Marseille. Blue sky, a few small clouds, and it looks like excellent skiing weather. Probably a bit windy on the tops of the mountains.

Tomas and I had planned for a whole day off-pist excursion to la Grave, with a mountain guide. But for various reasons, that didn't work out. That area has been closed for several days, due to bad weather, too high risks of avalanches, or both. And it has been difficult to put together a group of the right size (it's at most six persons, and it gets too expensive if you're just two persons).

So yesterday morning, when it turned out that (1) the rest of the group never turned up, and (2) the guide informed us that la Grave was still closed, I and Tomas decided to hire the guide for half a day, and set off for some skiing in the Sierre Chevalier area.

After some warm up skiing to get to Monêtier, we took the chair lift up to Pic de l'Yret. This is about 2800 meters above sea level, as high as one can get by lift in Sierre Chevalier, but still well below the glaciers. Went in the opposite direction from the regular pists, and down a valley at the north (I think) of this peak, at the edge of the resort.

There had been a huge avalanche there some week ago, so the main difficulty was passing through the "deposit area" of the avalanche, that is, the place where the snow had stopped. There were hard pieces of snow from the avalanche scattered around, with a layer of softer snow on top and between. Below this area, the snow was softer and easier. And the final parts of the track down was narrow and almost flat.

At the end of this run, we were at the village le Monêtier les bains (1500 meters). We took a couple of lifts up to the same top again. This time, we slid off a path which the guide called the "Jackson ride", which led alongside the mountain, then up a little bit, and then down through some soft and nice snow down to the bottom of the Cucumelle lift. This is a short lift close to the top of la Cucumelle.

From the top of this lift, we walked for some ten minutes upwards, towards the Cucumelle peak. When we skied down, the snow was soft and entirely without previous tracks. We were instructed by the guide to keep a safety distance of about 30 meters between us, for the first, steepest, part. Further down, the snow become crusty and difficult to ski in. We took a short cut through the forrest to get out into the pist, a bit above the Frejus lift.

Then this half-day was over, and we said goodbye to our guide. It was around half past one, and we went to the lunch restaurant where the rest of our company waited for us.

After lunch, it snowed heavily, and visibility was very poor. It's difficult to ski when you can hardly see how steep or flat the ground is... So we soon headed back to the village, some of us by ski, while the others took the lift down. Those of us who had rented skis returned them. We were all pretty tired at dinner time.

Today, we had to pack and check out by ten. Tomas, Kalle and Henrik went for a few more hours of skiing before lunch (the transfer bus to the airport in Grenoble is supposed to leave sometime in the afternoon). I had to catch the bus to Briançon at 11:40.

The main street of Villeneuve.

Cicci inspecting our bathroom.

Dinner at the hotel.

Lunch break.

The snow cloud on the right is Tomas. And the one on the left is me.

2006-03-04: France by train

Stood up at 8:15, to make breakfast and pack the last things, empty the refrigerator, etc. I was finished almost an hour before I had to leave, so I also made a cup of coffee before leaving.

The train was leaving from track two at the station, and it turned out it was actually two different trains coupled together, the first one was destined for Brussels, and the second one, which was mine, was destined for somewhere else. I had some bread with me, but I still wanted to check out the restaurant on the TGV train. I ended up buying a good but expensive portion of youghurt. Besides that, not much happened during the two hours it took to Marseille, and the train was almost in time.

In Marseille, there was half an hour until the train to Briançon was leaving, and information about which track it was leaving from was not yet displayed. So I walked outside the station building. The station is a sack-station, where all tracks end within the station hall. It seems to be built on top of a hill (don't ask me how that works), because when stepping outside, there was a great view of Marseille below, with an impressive stone staircase leading down to the city.

I stayed just outside the building, when I noticed a Swedish family, who seemed to be doing about the same thing as I. It turned out they had arrived with the same train, from Nice, and were also going to Briançon, or more precisely, to go skiiing in Sierre Chevalier. Mother, father, and a daughter who I would guess was at least ten years younger than me. We had company for the rest of the trip.

When entering one of the second class cars of the train to Briançon, it was half full, but people were spread out so that there were few places where two persons could sit together, and none where we could sit all four of us. So we continued until we found an empty cabin in the next car.

That was a mistake though. When the train had departed and an officer passed by to check our tickets, he informed us that we were sitting in a first class car (which was hard to believe, since it was very worn and not exactly high standard), and that since the train had already departed, it was for some reason not possible to correct our mistake and move back to one of the second class cars of the train. Instead, we should pay 25 euros each for upgrading our tickets. After some protests, he gave us the offer that we pay "only" for two of us, i.e., 50 euros, and this seemed like an offer that could not be refused.

When we got closer to Briançon, the weather changed, and it became cloudy, or even misty.

The train was delayed half an hour, and arrived in Briançon around 19 in the evening. It turned out there were busses from there to Sierre Chevalier (which isn't very far away), but it was quite chaotic, since the last bus for the day was scheduled for 19:15, and all passengers had to buy tickets before getting on to the bus. In the end, the bus waited for us, and also for the passengers from the train that arrived after us, so it was severely delayed.

It was just three stops or so until Villeneuve, the largest of the villages in Sierre Chevalier, which was where most tourists left the bus. I knew only the name of my hotel, "Vielle Ferme" (the old farm), but luckily enough I remembered correctly that it was located close to the centre, and Villeneuve was indeed the right place.

My company also didn't have the address of the apartment they had rented, only the name of the house and a telephone number of a contact person who should give them the keys. When they had located the place, after asking a couple of people for help, I asked my way to my hotel, and found it without much difficulty.

Staff at the hotel are Swedish speaking (or there may be some Danish and Norwegians as well, I haven't met all yet). When I had checked in, it was around 21, and since I hadn't had anything but bread since breakfast, I went out to find some dinner.

I went to one of the closest bars, which offered salad with chevre chaud. Had one of those, a glass of red wine, a desert, and coffee. The people serving at the bar were perfectly English speaking (as I guess is to be expected for a place like this with huge numbers of tourists), but I avoided English and tried to use the little French I have learned by now. It's might be a good idea to try to stick to Swedish and French only this week.

The place was deserted when I came, but more and more people dropped in, and when I left after some 45 minutes, all tables were occupied, and the bar was crowded as well. At the neighboring table was a birthday party consisting of a dozen of Swedish girls. One of them looked like she was working for Langley.

Got back to the hotel room, had a shower, and went to bed. In the village, there's at most half a meter of snow, and melting, but somewhere between Sierre Chevalier and Grenoble the road is blocked by snow, so Cicci and the rest of our company will probably not arrive until several hours after midnight.

2006-03-01: Lambert's function

It was nice weather today, so I started with breakfast on the balcony. At work, I spent the first few hours writing comments for a conference paper for which Krister is the main author, and for which the deadline was at midnight. Although late in the afternoon, it was announced that the deadline has been postponed a week. For some reason, conference organizers almost always do that; perhaps it increases quality if people write an acceptable paper by the deadline, and then they get a few extra days to improve it further.

Then I took an earlier submitted conference paper of my own, and cut it down severely, to prepare a submission for a local Swedish control conference. This conference also had the deadline set to today, but yesterday it was announced that it was postponed two weeks. I also printed out some material on Lambert's function, which Chadi and Kostya figured out was relevant to our work.

Took the bus home at 18. Attempted to catch the beautiful view from the bus stop, but it's difficult to get the snowy mountains far away to look good on a small picture.

Back in Antibes, I went to the closest shop, and to the bakery, although the bakery had sold out all their bread for today. At the hotel reception, I managed to buy a coin for the washing machine, without speaking any English. After unpacking the food and changing clothes I went down to the buanderie and started a machine.

While waiting for the laundry, I made some tee and started to read the material on Lambert's function: The wikipedia article, and a survey article from 1996, written by a couple of people, among then Donald Knuth. First reference was a paper by Johan Heinrich Lambert from 1758, and it was developed further by him and Euler later the same century. It seems very relevant both to my current work at INRIA, and to some of my earlier results as well.

Basically, Lambert's function w = W(z) is defined as the inverse of f(w) = z e^z (in the same way as the ordinary logarithm is defined as the inverse of e^z ). Among other things, it can be used to solve equations of the type e^x = Ax + B . I've seen equations of this type both in connection with linear time delayed differential equations, which seems to be a classic application, and in expressions related to the queue and buffer sizes in networks with TCP traffic, but I've never seen explicit solutions to them before.

2006-02-26: Fort Carré

I slept quite badly, mostly due to coughing, and got out of bed around 10. This was early enough so that I could have breakfast on the balcony, in sun-light. Since it was so nice weather, I decided to go for a walk and bring the camera. Down do the harbour, around the Fort Carré, and back again. Seems to be a popular path for a Sunday walk, and not as long and challenging as Cap d'Antibes.

The very end of the harbour, and the view to north east. One can barely see Nice, and the snowy mountains.

An appearantly well-used path.

Nice view of the harbour, the old town of Antibes, and Cap d'Antibes far away.

Very impressive locks.

Fort Carré, as ssem from the bridge over the railway.

To my surprise, I was back already around 13. Spent the rest of the day indoors. Did my French homework. Tried to sort out and write down some new ideas on the computation of the greatest common divisor.

2006-02-25: Use the source, Luke

I finally figured out what was wrong with credentials passing. With google's help I might have found the solution in five minutes, but I don't have any Internet connection at my hotel. Or rather, there is a wireless network, operated by "Meteor networks", but since it costs some ten euros per hour to use it, it seems to be targeted for those who are either rich or really desperate. If it were ten euros per week, or even per day, I would have considered using it. I wouldn't be surprised if the network is almost unused.

Never mind, I did have the linux source code on my hard drive. Since I'm not at all familiar with linux internals, it took me a couple of hours of searching and reading before I located the interesting spot, in an inlined function in include/net/scm.h,

2006-02-24: Staying at home

I decided to stay home and work today, trying to recover from my cold. Read a couple of the papers on my to-read list. It was rainy and cloudy outside, so it wasn't very tempting to leave my room.

Nevertheless, I went for a short shopping tour into town. Bought some more groceries, a fresh baguette, and I also went to the railway station to buy train tickets for Briançon, a town close to Sierre Chevalier. It will take almost an entire day to get there: two hours from Antibes to Marseille, half an hour stop to switch trains, then five hours from Marseille to Briançon, and finally an unknown amount of time to get from there to Sierre Chevalier by bus or taxi. But it should at least be faster than going via Stockholm...

In the evening, I continued hacking on the pty helper program. After some testing, it seems that linux (at least the 2.6.12.5 version I have on my laptop) simply doesn't support sending credentials over an AF_UNIX socketpair. No errors on either the sending or the receiver side, it's just that, on the receiving side, no credentials appear. It does work to pass file descriptors, though. So it's more or less back to the drawing board. Which might not be an altogether bad thing, but I think I'll spare you the details.

2006-02-22:

I had a slight throat ache today, but still went to work. I and Chadi managed to miss each-other when he came by to pick me up, so instead I took bus number 1 up to Carrefour, which unfortunately was the final stop for this particular tour, and walked from there.

I had planned to leave quite early. But it turned out to be a small party in the afternoon, given by one ex-student who recently finished his PhD, and is leaving INRIA at the end of the month. Main attraction was an assortment of Iranian sweets.

After that, I noticed that the lsh mailing list had got the worst spamming ever. Almost 100 spam in 45 minutes, which weren't recognized as such by the spamassasin installation at Lysator, and hence forwarded to all the list's subscribers. For the time being, I have restricted posting to list members, which isn't a very satisfactory "solution" at all.

Due to this distraction, I missed one more bus, so I finally had to take the bus at 18 to get home. Made some dinner, did my French homework, and spent a couple of hours hacking on lsh. I managed to get the reimplemented gateway feature to work. I also started on a helper program to manage pty:s and utmp/wtmp logging for unprivileged processes. To do this, I need to use the somewhat obscure features of passing file descriptors and process credentials across sockets in the AF_UNIX family, something I have never tried before.

2006-02-19: Rain and thunder

Got out of bet early, since Cicci needed to catch a train at 8:05 to get to the airport in time. After leaving her on the station, I got home and slept for one or two hours more.

It has been cloudy all day, and I have stayed inside. I think there was a short shower around 9 in the morning. In the evening, came more rain, as well as some great thunder and lightnings.

Yesterday, it rained in the morning, but afternoon was fine. I and Cicci had dinner at a restaurant in the old town. The first course, salad with chevre chaude, was fantastic. The rest of the food wasn't of the same class, but it was still a nice place.

2006-02-17: A stroll in the harbor

Nisse went to work around 9 o'clock. I (Cicci) made a cup of coffee and sat down with some work in the sun at the balcony. At eleven the sun disappeared around the neighbor's balcony. Two cups of tea, a bit of baguette and some reading later I left the hotel for a walk to town. I went to the port to take some photos of the "common" boats here in Antibes.

The big read car is looks like a toy beside the white boats. In the background of the picture you can catch a glimpse of a snow covered mountain top.

The blue sailing boat at the left is a quite large, but it looks rather small in this company. Some of the boats had rather interesting flags; the Union Jack combined with various symbols which might be heraldic shields.

2006-02-16: First French class

Got up earlier than usual, to catch the 8 o'clock bus to INRIA. At 9, I had my first French class. We were six students, from China, Hungary, India, Korea, Sweden and Turkey. The lesson started with some basic phrases, then we were tought the most common verbs, être and avoir, the prepositions à, de and chez, and practiced some basic sentences.

As homework (next lesson is Monday afternoon) we got a couple of exercises from the book, and our teacher also recommended that watch some French television daily, taking advantage of the optional subtitling on TextTV. For example, the French soap-opera Plus belle la vie, set in Marseille.

Left work at five something, since I desperately needed to shop. I walked down to the Carrefour supermarket, using the path through the woods which is getting familiar. There was more activity in the camp behind INRIA, and children playing, than I've seen there previously.

Since it's now two weeks since the last time it rained, the stream below the stone bridge was empty again. I also took a picture of the ex-house down in the valley. I wonder what it does there; if there has been a time with more water flowing, it might be an old mill, but I really have no idea.

At the supermarket, I got the supplies I needed. I also bought volume 2 of Tsubasa. I've read halfway through the first volume, and I hope it should get easier to read with time, as I learn more of the language.

Cecilia should arrive at the Nice airport about now, so she should get to Antibes in about an hour.

2006-02-13:

Did not get very much work done today. But I finally found the mail sent to my email address at INRIA. Earlier, I had only tried using the webmail. And I didn't care much that the inbox was constantly empty, since I've been using my KTH and Lysator mailboxes without much trouble.

But when I followed the instructions to get mozilla to talk to the right IMAP server, there were a few dozens of messages waiting there, including some information about my INRIA account and how to access email... It should be straight-forward to fix my Gnus configuration so that I can access this mailbox from within emacs; using mozilla to read mail feels somewhat alien.

Among all that mail, there was also a message saying that I've been admitted to a beginners course in French that is given at INRIA. First lesson is on Thursday morning, and then every week it will be two hours on Monday afternoon and two hours on Thursday morning. I most likely won't be able to finish the course before I leave Antibes, but I hope I still will be able to learn some useful French.

Speaking of French, I've actually been able to finish the first chapter of the French translation of the Tsubasa manga, but since for each page I have to look up a couple of words in my dictionary, it's a very slow read.

2006-02-12:

After breakfast, I bought a coin for the washing machine (but no dryer), and did the laundry. I let it hang on the balcony during the afternoon, but I had to move it all indoors when it was getting cold around five.

I went for a shorter excursion, walking Chemin de Puy, a road that goes around the neighboring blocks. It was warm and sunny, with several beautiful houses and trees. But I'm a little disturbed by the fact that everything is locked up. It seems that one can walk forever, and the only way one might turn is back, because to the left and right, there are only hedges, fences, locked gates and an occasional small road clearly marked as private. The only open gate I saw was the one to the cemetary... At last, I emerged on a larger road leading back to the hotel, and on the way back, I also passed my closest food store and bakery, but they were closed.

A few hours later in the afternoon, I figured I needed to get some more bread, so I walked to the other bakery, on the main road, which was open. For some time, I have wondered if "baguette ancienne" means an old-fashioned baguette, or an old one, baked yesterday. But I think that can be considered settled now, since todays baguette ancienne was still warm from the oven.

While at home, I spent most of the time hacking on the next generation of lsh. Now it seems I have basic processing of configuration files working, for the different server programs.

2006-02-11: Saturday

Slept quite late in the morning. After Cicci left last Tuesday, I've been awake late several evenings, reading the second (and final) volume of Mordant's Need. I finished it around 4 o'clock Friday morning.

Had breakfast and a bath, before I went out for some shopping. I first went to the English bookstore, to get the third volume of the series about the Lady's detective agency in Botswana, "Morality for Beautiful Girls".

I had half planned to have lunch somewhere in Antibes, but instead I just walked around a little, before visiting the supermarket and a bakery. When I got home, I had some tea, baguette and chevre for lunch.

I had also planned to wash some clothes and bed sheets today, but it turned out it wasn't possible. I'll try again tomorrow. So I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening indoors, with some lsh hacking. For dinner, I made rice and SFR (stirred fried random), consisting of bacon, carrot, aubergine, egg and garlic. It was surprisingly good.

I haven't written any diary entries during the week. On Tuesday, Cecilia accompanied me for a walk up to INRIA. We found a couple of spring flowers on the way.

I worked for a just few hours, while she was walking around in Valbonne. Caught a bus back to Antibes early in the afternoon, to be able to get some dinner before she needed to go to the airport. As usual in France, "early dinner" is non-trivial to come by, since all restaurants are closed and don't open for dinner until seven or eight. We ended up at an asian fast food outlet, before we took the bus to Nice, to say goodbye at the airport.

2006-02-06: Nice

2006-02-05: Cap d'Antibes

The day started with sunshine, and we desided to pack lunch and take a walk to Cap d'Antibes. On the map it looked as if it would be 8 or 9 kilometers to round the Cap. We walked by the town to find a bakery open on Sunday.

At the end of town we saw the first sand beach in Antibes. We tried to walk by the wather but for the 2 or 3 kilometers there were private houses or steap cliffs by the waterside. The weather was sunny so we could walk without coats.

After one and a half hour we stopped for picnic at Plage de la Garoupe. There started a narrow path at the waterline, Sentier Touristique de Tirepoil. It was an amazing view with white very broken cliffs and thundering waves. At some places one could actually feel the spray of the Mediterranean sea in one's face.

We walked back on the west side of Cap d'Antibes with only two stops: One for crêpes and one to buy a new baguette. We came home after dusk and it turned out that we had walked a bit longer then first expected. According to Cicci's step counter, the day's tour had been 26254 steps, or approximately 17 kilometers.

After a nice hot bath the house served Pot-au-feu (made of Friday's Boeuf Bourgogne) and Pâtes au légumes et lardes.

2006-02-04:

On Friday, Cicci and I walked by the harbour, with many huge boats. Walked through the old town, and on the old city wall in the sun. We had lunch at an outdoor table, and learned a new useful French word, "canard".

After lunch, it was still some time left until the Picasso museum would open, so we walked back to the central town, checked the opening hours of the food store, before walking back towards the city wall. On the way, we got ourself two icecream cones, with the icecream shaped as flowers.

The museum is housed in Chateau Grimaldi, where Picasso had a studio during a few months in 1946. At the museum, there was a terrace with sculptures. On the topmost floor was the works of Picasso, and also a room with photos from his time in the studio here. In the displayed works, recurring themes were: Faun with flute, Nymph with tambourine, Centaur with trident, as well as goats and oursins. The ceramic works also included a large number of fauns heads.

On Saturday, we took the train to Grasse. From the railway station there was a long uphill path up to the town. We walked around, trying to figure out where to go. Had lunch in the sun on a small square. After lunch, we found our way to the Fragonard perfume museum. The fountain in front of the museum contains, guess what?, perfumed water.

Back in Antibes, we decided have dinner at Le Collier, an italian restaurant and pizzeria close to the hotel. For starter I had tomato and mozarella, and Cicci had salad with fried chevre. Main course was fish with almonds, and desert was home made chocolate mousse and nougat icecream.

2006-02-01:

Had my seminar, "Automatic control issues in networking", in the afternoon. Later in the afternoon, also a short meeting to discuss ways to model TCP Westwood+.

Was pretty tired when I got home. After dinner, tried to read some more in Tsubasa. I've gotten through half a chapter now, with much use of my dictionary.

Also wrote down some ideas on how to design a congestion control that can maintain small queues everywhere. We'll see how that works out.

2006-01-30: More shopping

It was desided that I will do a presentation about my work on Wednesday afternoon. Besides that, not much interesting happened at work. I left fairly early in the afternoon, since I wanted to walk around on may way back to town, before it got dark.

I didn't use the main gate when leaving INRIA, instead I crossed the gypsy camping, on a parking area just behind INRIA and the neighboring university. From there, I took the path down into the woods. Since it had rained all weekend, the stream under the stone bridge was no longer empty. I followed the path along the stream, and instead of turning left to the industrial area of Trois Moulins, I continued in the direction of the "Romain aqueduc"-sign. It was mostly ruined, with none of the vaults intact, and it was actually pretty close to one of the roads that I walked on the first day. To me, it looked mostly like abridge, except that I would have expected a bridge to be wider.

I tried to walk upstream from the aqueduc, but I soon lost any track of an old water channel. Got back to a road, and walked to the Carrefour mall. Besides food, I also bought the Leonrd Cohen album "Dear Heather". I've been listning to the same few records over and over again since I arrived. Kate has been dominating, but I also brought a record each of Cohen, Annie Lennox, Miles Davies, Monika Zetterlund and Sisters of Mercy. Furthermore, I bought the first volume of CLAMP's manga "Tsubasa". Translated into French. Don't know mush about the story; it seems to be a fantasy setting, and CLAMP are usually good. Maybe I can figure out how to read it, maybe it will be futile.

On request, I end with a couple of photos of my room. All today's photos are taken with no flash. They seem reasonable in terms of light and color, but some of them are too dizzy. I'm relearning how difficult it is to keep the camera still.

2006-01-29: Labyrinths

The weather has been miserable all weekend, raining and windy. Since getting home from work Friday evening, I've made only two excursions outside of my room. Instead, I've spent almost every hour sitting or laying on my bed, reading "The mirror of her dreams", by Stephen Donaldson, with breaks only for sleep and some food. I got this book as a "wedding present" at Monika's and Jimpa's wedding a summer or two ago. The theme of a heroine that is unexpectedly transferred to an different world somehow seems appropriate. The story is set in a world where mirrors work quite differently and dangerously. The characters spend most of their time within the walls of a large castle, with rooms, hallways, corridors and dungeons, and far too many conspiracies.

The book is part one of a series of two, I think, and of course it ended with a cliff hanger. That's how series works, I guess, the end of volume fourteen of the manga Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou, which was what I read before starting on this fantasy series, also made me want to read the next volume right way. Actually, the next volume in each series are standing on my bookshelf back home in Stockholm. I hope Cicci can bring them when she gets here to visit.

The weekend's first excursion was after sunset (as if the sun was ever visible that day) on Saturday, to the theater. I wasn't quite in the mood for it, but I had booked a ticket, and I needed to get out a bit. It was dark, rainy, not quite as windy as earlier in the day. The town seemed remarkably empty and deserted for a Saturday night. The theater was small but crowded, with less then a hundred places. As expected, almost everybody in the audience were Swedish, except for a small number of acquaintances and boyfriends that were speeking French. Also as expected, I didn't recognize anybody but the actors.

The play was a kind of modern sequel to two different plays by Tjechov, which I haven't seen. Two characters, a man and a woman, from different plays, meet at a café in Moscow; they have met at the same plays also the evening before. They talk about family and old memories, real as well as made up ones, share a bottle of vodka, and then depart again. They may, or may not, ever meet again.

I finished the book this afternoon. After having a bath, I went for the weekend's second excursion, which was entirely indoor. I checked out the buanderie of the hotel. To get there, one has to take the elevator down to the ground floor and enter a door next to the reception. Then, follow a stairway two floors down to the parking garage, exit the garage through a different door, another stairway one floor up, then a couple of steps first down, then up again. Finally, one enters a small chamber with no windows, two washing machines and two driers, all coin operated.

2006-01-26: Theater tickets

Today, I finally booked a ticket for the theater on Saturday. It turned out that the arrangement is a cooperation between Dramaten (the Swedish national theater) and Rivieraklubben, a society for Swedes living in the French Riviera, or neighbouring areas. The correct way to book was to dial the number to a lady in the club, who was obviously Swedish speaking.

Took the bus home at six in the afternoon. Made some dinner, and continued with the openpgp hacking. Now I'm finally able to convert an RSA key in sexp-format to a public key file that can be imported by gnupg.

The spec is definitely a mess. I'm trying to follow the version 4 openpgp formats, described in RFC 2440, rather than the older pgp formats described in RFC 1991. But this means that when creating a pgp key certificate, the encoding of the key in the certificate, and the encoding of the key which is used when computing the signature on that very same certificate, use totally different headers. Makes me wonder why anybody would want to implement openpgp version 4; if you're required to implement the old supposedly obsolete formats anyway, for some uses, why not just stick to using the old formats for everything? That seems to be what gnupg does, although for compatibility it can read the new formats too.

2006-01-25:

Took a fairly slow morning. Walked up to INRIA. Didn't carry my laptop with me this times, since I now most things I need on the workstation there. Instead I can use the SneakerNet(TM), in the form of a USB memory stick, to carry any work files I need.

Had a talk with Chadi about possible research directions, besides that, nothing very interesting happened.

2006-01-24: The big supermarket

Chadi picked me up in the morning, as promised. Fiddled with my TeX and Gnus configurations. Got two papers from Chadi on probabilistic modelling of TCP.

I needed to go shopping, since I hadn't bought any food since Saturday (except for the daily baguette), and I didn't even find everything I needed then. The Carrefour mall i slocated on the edge of Antibes, about halfway between my hotel and INRIA. Since I was walking I left quite early in the afternoon, so I would get to Antibes before dark. Found a reasonable shortcut to the path that leads to Antibes. Also looked closer on the signs on the way, at one crossing a sign said "Romain aqueduc 40 min", so I guess I have to check that out some other day.

I had no problem found Carrefour. It's a one story building (with a parking on top, I think), and the largest supermarket I've seen so far, perhaps 100 × 300 meters. They also had most of what I was looking for. Pasta (of course), a large selection of rice (the previous store's I've been in haven't had any rice except for Uncle Bens', wich is hardly worth counting). I also managed to find flocons d'avoine, compote de pommes, milk, chopped tomatoes, a tea mug, and a cheap but working kitchen knife.

By chance, I happened to enter the "new checkout queue" when leaving the shop, which meant that I was supposed to scan the barcodes of the products by myself, and pay using a credit card reader. Seemed to work fine, even if I needed a little help since the instructions were all in French. Managed to pack most of the stuff in my rucksack, the rest in a plastic bag. Then walked home to make dinner.

About the distances, it seems to take 30-40 minutes between the hotel and Carrefour, and 40-50 minutes between Carrefour and INRIA, which means that it should be approximately 8 km. (For comparison, back in Stockholm I have a 55 min walk to work, when I don't use the subway (40 min) or bicycle (25 min)).

2006-01-23: A path through the woods

I decided to walk from Antibe to INRIA today again. My new map included the area between Antibe and Sophia Antipolis, with a couple of roads. Last time I walked to the west of the forest area, on Route du Parc, which was a large detour. This time I planned to take the main road on the eastern side, which should be a couple of km shorter, although still a detour. However, when I got there it turned out to be a busy 90 km/h road with no sidewalk, so I changed plan and headed for a smaller road.

The later part of this "road" didn't look quite like I had expected from the map. I emerged from this path behind INRA (which is not at all the same as INRIA), so I had to walk around this fenced-in area to finally get back to a proper road somewhere close to rond-point de Chappes, which is still quite off. On the way from there, I noticed another marked path emerging close to rond-point St Philippe, I have to try that some day when I go from work early enough (it starts to get dark around 17:30 or so), on my map, there's another road or path with a dead end not far from there.

At INRIA, I met Chadi, who was teaching some course in Tunis when I arrived last week. In the afternoon I went to a seminar at another one of the institutes in Sophia Antipolis. Besides that, I spent most of the day installing various programs on my workstation, to make it behave the way I want.

The keyboard is US style (which is less confusing than French). I haven't yet decided if I should stick to that, or remap it like a Swedish keyboard. There are two problems with the latter alternative, one hardware- and one software-related:

I didn't leave in time for the last bus. Instead, Chadi drove me back to Antipolis. I was back at my room around eight.

2006-01-22: A day on town

Spent most of the day walking around in the town. Had lunch in the sun at a place close to Bastion St. André. Read one more chapter of the Kare kano manga. Visited the arcehological museum. In the late afternoon, I went to Palais des Congrès Juan-les-Pins, for a free spectacle "King Arthur". It was like a short opera; I couldn't figure out the story, if there was one, but orchestra and singers were pretty good and the choir was really good.

Tried in vain to buy tickets at the theatre, for the Swedish-speaking play next weekend. I have to call some number to make a reservation.

2006-01-21: Unexpected swedes

Today's plan was to arrange some more of the practicalities. More food, a French prepaid SIM-card for my phone (so that I can receive calls for free), and a decent tea-mug.

The closest food store was open, and I even bought some vegetables. The next door tobacco shop sold "refill"-packages for Orange and SFR and may be other phone operators as well, and they also sold the startup kit for SFR. However, due to communication problems, I couldn't figure out what the rates were, or if that was the correct package. After a while, an English-speaking guy entered, and he recommended that I try to find a specialized phone store down town.

I brought the groceries back home, and then I headed for the town, for the first time in daylight (although the weather was overcast and windy, not warm and sunny as daytime yesterday). I was getting hungry, so I didn't walk very long before I stopped at a bar and got a sandwich and coffe for lunch. It turned out that one of the women working there was Swedish, and she draw a map for me, explaining how to find the closest SFR phone shop.

It was just a couple of hundred meters, but the shop was closed for lunch. Then I went to a newspaper shop across the street, and I bought a new map of Antibe. This one includes Sophia Antipolis, so maybe I can find a better way between Antibe and INRIA.

It was still more than an hour until the shop opened again, which I spent walking around in the town. On the way, I passed Antibea Théâtre, and took the program for the spring. Most plays are in French, nturally, but they're also having one play in English and one in Swedish. I imagine there must be quite a lot of Swedes living here. It's Friday and Saturday next week, and the rôles are played by Lill Terselius and Helge Skoog.

When the SFR shop finally opened, I was able to by an prepaid SIM-card for 30 Euro, and I texted my girlfriend and my mother to give them the new number. I still haven't figured out how to find out how many credits I have left and when it is time to refill it.

Spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in my room. Tried to pick up the OpenPGP code I started writing for Nettle some two years ago. Conclusions: The PGP spec is a mess, and GnuPG isn't very graceful when handling incorrect data; it just displays a message such as "gpg: Ohhhh jeeee: mpi crosses packet border [...] Aborted".

I think I'll cut one more piece of the flute Antibois I got at a bakery on the way back to the hotel, and save the rest for breakfast.

2006-01-20: Lost in france

Got out of bed around 8:30. Made some coffee and had one of the buns from yesterday as breakfast. Since the buses didn't go very often, I din't know where the bus stop was, and I find it very hard to understand the local geography when going around in a bus, I decided to walk up to INRIA in Sophia Antipolis, 7 km away.

With some help from the staff at the hotel, I figured out how to go. First half an hour or so, to the edge of Antibes. Then I followed a small road running in parallel to the motorway, and then off through the woods to Sophia Antipolis. INRIA was not located 49 meters from Route du Park, as claimed on the map (courtesy of mappy.com), but one or a few km along Route des Lucioles. All in all one and a half hour, but it's probably at most one hour if one finds the right way. Buses stop running quite early in the evening, so it may not be the last time I walk. Or maybe I should buy some cheap bicycle.

At INRIA, I met the people of the Planete group, and was given a place in one of the offices. At least I made it there before it was time for lunch. I made the final edits the the article, and submitted it in the afternoon, and also tried to catch up with mail and Lyskom. I had a fairly serious security related bug report for LSH.

I left INRIA in time to catch the last bus at 18:33. Since the closest shops were all closed by 19, I left my things at the hotel and then walked into town, searching for some food store or supermarket. I finally found a small shop at the other end of the old town, close to Place Nationale, where I found a few of the things on my shopping list.

For dinner, some pasta with bacon. I did buy a package of eggs, but I forgot to buy any butter or olive oil.

I also manage to figure out how to get images out of the digital camera I borrowed from my parents. The first tries didn't work at all, the mount command just hanged when trying to mount the memory card. But when I switch from the small 2 MB supplied with the camera to a larger one, it worked flawlessly.