Memos From the Cube

Over the last two weeks things have been relatively uneventful, for the most part. Except that is, for getting thoroughly merry once again down at the Microbrewery again with my workmates, and a few other bits and pieces.

Bit and piece the first: I turned 23 last Tuesday. That’s right, I’m ancient and the Alzheimer’s is starting to kick in, so be prepared for unprecedented levels of forgetfulness henceforth. Kristian was kind enough to bring in a cake for me at work, which we all ate with the gusto known only to engineers trying to get out of doing actual work. Officially the cake was to celebrate several events of the day; my birthday, Valentine’s day and some minor internal restructuring, but of course I know better. Me me me.

That night I had to endure attend my weekly Norwegian class, so Anika and I weren’t able to go out to dinner to celebrate. On the upside, Anika rectified that by making a delicious mud cake of her own during the day to mark the occasion:

Bit and piece the second: Holy sugar-rush Batman! On Thursday a package arrived from my aunt Betty, who apparently had come to the conclusion that sugar does not, in fact, exist here in Norway. Actually, after trying some of the local “Salmiak” “candy” (yes, the second set of quotes are necessary here), I don’t think she was all that far off the mark, really. Also included in the box of deliciousness was some Hawaiian coffee (I’ve tried this before, and I love, LOVE the stuff) and some bags of Macadamia nuts. Franky I had to resist giving a Lord-of-the-Rings-style Gollum impression over these, as they really are one of the most delicious snacks ever invented by humanity. I learned from Betty’s care package the last time I was here that the Atmel engineers liked they just as much as I do, but it was still interesting to bring them along to work anyway. I’ve never seen so many people happy to see me before.

Also included in the care package was a coveted jar of Vegemite, which is also known as the “Australian Nationality Test”. At the Australian immigration line in our airports they force-feed you a spoonful of it, and if you don’t flinch you’re a true blue Aussie and are let through. True story. In any case, it was nice to finally have some funky food of my own to retaliate with at lunch.

Oh and the Tim-Tams are MINE.

Bit and piece the third: Wined and dined. Since we couldn’t go out on Tuesday for my birthday to dinner, Anika and I decided to go out somewhere special on Saturday instead. After asking around at work, I was recommended to patronize AiSuma, a restaurant conveniently located on the other side of the river — if we crane our necks from our living room window, we can see it. There in the old-world ambiance of what appears to be a renovated shipping warehouse, we both enjoyed a delicious three course meal and wine, which was some absolutely stunning food (with a price to match). I wish we could get Scallops even half the size of the absolute monsters we ate for our entree, as they absolutely dwarfed what I’m ashamed to admit are called Scallops back in Australia. Great food, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a nice mid-to-high-end meal in Trondheim.

After the dinner Anika and I went off to visit the local cinema to see the new Sherlock Homes movie, which was also great fun – the movie wasn’t as disappointing as I had feared it would be, given it was a sequel. Spoiler alert however, Steven Fry is in it and gets his kit off in one scene, which made me slightly regret the Chocolate Nemesis with Walnut Ice-cream dessert I had just eaten. The Norwegian ads they put on before the movie were a bit baffling, but it was interesting to try to work out what the heck they were trying to sell me while I waited for the movie to start.

” I miss sitting”. That’s something I’ve said a few times this week, and it’s still relevant – we haven’t managed to buy a table and chairs yet, so we’re still sitting on the floor half the time, much to the protestations of my backside. We really need to find some soft seating pronto, or a good local Chiropractor.

After weeks of no snow at all, Trondheim was looking positively barren – I was able to make out the street pavement under a nice sheet of back-breaking ice. However, that all changed Saturday morning, when I found myself watching a big snowstorm out our window. We managed to get a heck of a lot of snow all in one day:

Thanks to that, all the streets once again look like real respectable Norwegian streets in the wintertime:

Which also means I can think about going skiing again, as well as look forward to being able to walk around without worrying about falling over. Insert sigh of relief here.

Last night I went out with Anika to a “Basket Party” organized by our Ex-Pat office, which is the Norwegian equivalent to what Aussies call a “Pot Luck” dinner. Here everyone brought a dish from their country for everyone to try – and with so many people from different countries, it made for good (and interesting!) eating. I managed to stuff myself full of French Quiche, Norwegian Fish Soup (which was damned good), various dips and bread, and a ton of multicultural desserts. After scratching our heads for a while we ended up making Lamingtons, due to their simplicity – we haven’t got much in the way of cooking equipment yet – and their unique Australian origin. Here’s a chunk of the group after we all finished our meal:

Pretty fun night, and I am always in favor of anything that will leave me well fed. A couple more recent photos here, in my Flikr stream.

On to LUFA news: I’ve just released the new beta of LUFA-120219. This version contains far less groundbreaking changes than I would have liked, but due to the personal turmoil over the last few months owing to my completion of University and move to Trondheim to work at Atmel I haven’t been able to dedicate my full attention to it. That’s starting to change, as while I don’t currently have any development equipment with me at home, I should be able to resume coding and test it remotely through other means. That said, this release does contain a few critical fixes, a new Android Accessory Host demo and class driver, support for the Micropendous line of boards and a bunch of other useful stuff.

Again, since I can’t do thorough testing now that I’m half way across the world from my equipment, I’m relying on the greater community to alert me to any serious flaws before this becomes a “full” release. If you have the time, please download and try it out, and don’t forget to report back with any problems!

LUFA-120219 BETA Package: Download

Documentation: Download, Online

Support: LUFA Mailing List

Changelog: Online Version (Yes, I know I forgot to fix up the version number here)

Thanks again to everyone who’s helped in this release cycle, both through bug reports and new ideas.

So, busy couple of weeks – but that was expected, of course.

Two Fridays ago I was invited by my workmates to the fortnightly beer meetup after work, where all the Atmel Apps team (and partners?) gather to sample the local bar atmosphere and brain addling chemicals. That particular one happened to be somewhere in Trondheim I’d been to once before many months ago; the Trondheim Mikrobryggeri (Microbrewery). I was there on my last visit to Trondheim to see off the Atmel Sensor team, after their brief stay here in late December 2010 – a experience I thoroughly enjoyed, minus the jaw-dropping prices. This time I ended up splitting the somewhat cheaper jugs of beer with my girlfriend and Thomas, a rather nice German student who’s currently working in the local Apps department on his own University internship. I wish I had the forsight to bring my camera along, but alas, it was not to be. Not to worry; the next one is this Friday at a local pub called Den Gode Nabo (“The Good Neighbor”) which, coincidentally, happens to be located just down the street from my new apartment.

Speaking of the new apartment, Anika and I moved in last Thursday and out of our rather comfy hotel. We managed to fight the absolute hordes of people and brave the “Ikea Experience” last Saturday to secure ourselves a bed, which is now sitting in what is now our new bedroom (and, given that the frame is wider than the door, where it will stay until we move out and find a hacksaw). The construction of this bed was an experience itself, taking two nights, and resulting in sore hands, much tears and – worryingly enough – a pair of rather structural looking bolts being left over. Still, it hasn’t collapsed just yet, but if I don’t post here for a couple of days inform Atmel that an ambulance and/or crane may be required.

I’ve put up a couple of quick shots of the apartment and/or view from the windows on my new grand central Trondheim headquarters page, where I’ll automatically collate any blog entries, videos and pictures I make and take just like I did last time I was here. Given the length of my stay here I’ll probably break it out into smaller pages eventually, but for now that’s the easiest place to stalk me.

As for work, I’m actually enjoying it quite a bit. I’m now through all the mandatory inductions and trainings (with the gigantic Employee Information booklet to prove it) and I’m now performing general AVR, XMEGA and AVR32 support work as a new trainee. This means I’m now answering questions sent to the “avr at Atmel dot com” address everyone uses, which is actually reasonably interesting and gives a view of the broad spectrum of users of Atmel’s products. As on Monday, I’ll be moved up to the “Hotline” priority support line given to large customers, which is both terrifying and gratifying at the same time, since it’s apparently one of the fastest moves up from general support in the Apps Norway department. Seems I did have some useful skills after all. On that note, a general plea: don’t forget to include at least some of the basic information with your request! I’ve had a few support questions that consist of just four lines of code and a “it doesn’t work” explanation, without mentioning anything else. If you want help, don’t forget to at least include the chip model you are using!

In my spare time I’m now transferring all my old tutorials from AVRFreaks.net BBCode forum posts, over to nicely typeset LaTeX PDFs. This will mean easy access to the latest versions of past and (potentially) future tutorials, in a nicely formatted document. It also means proper revision management, which should be useful down the line for tracking changes. With the new system, we go from this travesty of a presentation, to this sexily formatted document. Keeping up to date is just a case of a wget or svn update.

Greetings from Trondheim, Norway! As I write this in my first full day here in the land of snow and coffee, I’m finding myself craving sleep. Sleep, something that both calls me and destroys me, as the nine hour backwards timezone shift has been playing absolute havoc with my internal circadian rhythm. Yesterday, the day I arrived here, I ended up falling fast asleep with my girlfriend at only 6PM, due to the jet-lag. Today my body seems to be threatening to do the same.

Like the last time I moved to Norway for my internship, the journey was both incredibly long, and mostly uneventful; an 8 hour flight followed by a 3 hour stop over in Kuala Lumpur airport (the only airport in the world with more shops than seats) then a 13 hour flight up to Amsterdam, another 5 hour layover and finally a short 2 hour “cityhopper” flight up to frozen Trondheim.

I was fortunate enough to meet up with fellow AVRFreak member Nard part way through my journey in Amsterdam, who was once again kind enough to brave the early morning weather and have a coffee with myself and my girlfriend in the airport coffee shop. The weather flying into Amsterdam was quite incredible; watching a lightning storm from the inside of a plane is both interesting and a slightly worrying experience. Here’s our exhausted and unwashed (well, I can’t speak for Nard) trio at Starbucks:

It’s always a pleasure to see Nard – and I was thrilled that Anika could meet him also – and I really do hope to find some time during the year to fly back down and spend a few nights in Amsterdam and look around. Before leaving Melbourne I was fresh, bright eyed and smelled like the man your man could smell like. After the long journey I was tired and smelled like the goat your man could smell like, if said goat had a severe stomach problem. Thankfully all our luggage arrived safe and I was able to take a quick “bachelor shower” in deodorant before our contact from the Ex-Pat office met us. This time I remembered to buy some alcohol from the duty free shop before collecting our bags, since the alcohol tax in Norway is giganta-humunga-normous. That’s a technical term.

While I find my feet here I’m staying in the local Comfort Part Hotel, located in the city center. I’ll be living here with Anika for the next two weeks courtesy of Atmel while I get a place to live and the associated furnishings sorted out. Yesterday I had my first consultation with the Ex-Pat office, and had my first rental property viewing. The apartments in Norway wouldn’t even classify as “Shoebox Sized” back home, but such is the European lifestyle of living, and this place was no exception at just 35m². Anika and I turned it down due to the inability to fit both myself and a double bed into the bedroom at the same time.

On the upside, I had my second viewing this morning, at a slightly bigger (40m²) apartment, which we have now accepted. I really fell in love with the place almost immediately; it’s a wooden building located right on the river edge, with (relatively) plenty of space and bizarrely enough, Salmon fishing rights from our apartment window. That’s right – I can literally fish for dinner from our bedroom window, if the need arises. The kitchen is small but includes a fridge and stove, but the bathroom is decent, the location absolutely excellent and the bedroom/living room well proportioned. I’ll take some pictures next week when I receive the key – the view alone from the windows is incredible, and we’ll be close to pretty much everything in Trondheim.

Tomorrow the plan is to take the bus to the local Ikea to purchase a bed and other items we’ll need to furnish the apartment. Right now I’m hoping the handyman will fix our hotel room’s cooking exhaust fan soon so we don’t end up having to just eat bread for dinner.

Time for another coffee to stay awake.

I’ve been a bit slack posting here around the last few weeks; first there was Christmas, then I managed to contract one of those horrible colds that just seems to linger and linger (yes, two in the same freaking month!). I’m a little doped up on the cold and flu medications at the moment, so please excuse any incoherent sentences.

Firstly, a belated picture of my shiny paperweight trophy:

Which I won in my University’s Hooper Memorial presentation night. I was actually quite looking forward to giving my presentation there as it would be good practice for my impending employment, but alas I managed to contract my first cold and had no voice on the night. I’m told Robert Ross, my (now Ex-) University lecturer did a decent job presenting my material in my absence, which is pretty remarkable given the sparse content he had to work with. Thanks Robert! With my prize money – actually a $250 gift voucher for Soanar Plus (great company, horrendously awful website that is shamed even by Atmel’s) – to buy this:

A fairly neat soldering station which I haven’t had a chance to try out yet. It’s no Weller or Hakko, but frankly I don’t need something of that caliber for the amount of soldering I do, and this one has a hot-air gun! Time to start learning how the heck to use said hot-air gun on Youtube. Now that I know where to get cheap PCBs made, I might have a crack at designing and constructing a small surface mount board during the year in my spare time.

Last week or so I met up with the Melbourne AVRFreaks members for the last time – for a while at least – to have a drink in the city and exchange the usual social war-stories. They’ll all a great bunch of blokes (except Ross, he’s an awful, awful person) and I was very happy to see Alan and Mike turn up, as I haven’t seen either of them in a while. I really will miss all the Melbourne freaks while I’m over in Norway and our fun little gatherings every few months, but I hope I’ll be able to stay in touch over Skype and email. I guess I’m exchanging one set of awesome guys for another once I leave for Trondheim, as I also really want to see the Atmel AVR Applications group again. Just kidding about the above Ross, since I know you read this ;).

On the LUFA front, I’m afraid I have some bad news; I haven’t managed to complete the re-design I planned. That’s not for a lack of trying; I currently have three internal branches trying different tactics, but so far I’m unhappy with the results. Going to a full interrupt solution to match Atmel’s own V2 stack (and make the code more architecture-port friendly) is proving to be harder than I thought, and will take quite a bit of time to get right. For now I plan on releasing the current trunk out in the new year just before I leave, as it contains a variety of bug-fixes both small and big that I want out in the wild while I concentrate on moving to the other side of the world. Speaking of which, I start my move in a week’s time, and I’m both very excited and completely terrified. Right now I’m busy packing and trying to stuff my face with as many different foods as I can before I go into a land where a night out to dinner costs as much as an engagement ring.

We had a really bizarre Christmas this year, although it was really good to be back with my family – next year I’ll definitely come back for a few weeks to spend Christmas at home. While my last Christmas looked pretty much like this, the same day here in Melbourne this year looked like this:

Keeping in mind that this is Australia. Here in the Greensborough/Diamond Creek area we got hailstones the size of walnuts, and rain/lightning of the truly biblical variety. I was in the car when the hail started and we had to pull over under shelter to prevent the windshield from being smashed in, and afterwards it looked like some prankster had jammed open the switch on the great drink ice dispenser in the sky. I’ve never seen anything quite like it – and it led to some pretty serious flooding. This isn’t my video, but it’s pretty much exactly what I experienced myself. I think I like light fluffy snow better.

Since I’ve received a number of emails asking for more information on my internship at Atmel (what I did, where I stayed, what it was like, what Norway is like, how did I apply, etc.) I think I’ll write up another post tomorrow with a FAQ. I can’t promise my own experience will mirror everyone else’s, but I think there’s some value to getting it in a public place anyway. UPDATE: Internship Q&A post located here.