Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Portugal -- Czech Republic in the final, that's my bet. Greece has played well, but the Czechs will win.
Welcome to my new weblog!
I've given Movable Type a try, and as I've recounted here and here, it's been a mixed experience.
MT is a very polished product. But I'm a command-line kind of guy, and
web applications really don't appeal to me. Give me an ssh
connection and a remote server anyday. Blosxom is a better match for my style of work.
I have a TODO list up, and will be working on this when I have time from renovating my house. Watch this space.
This category has been created to keep a diary over the work we're doing on the house and garden this summer. I've also added a subcategory for the colours used inside the house.
I'm writing it in Swedish, as it's more a personal memory for me and my family, and also a resource for friends. That's why I've excluded it from the main page display, although it's visible in the category tree.
Anyone who doesn't read Swedish and has a burning wish to know more about how I've renovated our bedroom can drop me a line, and I'll provide a translation.
I've been looking for a textmode syndication aggregator for a while. I tried Raggle but it just core dumped on my platform. Rawdog seems promising, but just didn't seem to fit my needs.
I came upon Snownews via Rootprompt and so far it looks promising. No native support for atom feeds but that's (supposedly) handled by extensions.
So now I can read my feeds from within screen, as Ghod intended.
Update: I've since installed rawdog and must say it's a very good piece of software. Have a look at my feed here.
Scandinavians cry foul at Euro 2024 match-fixing
Back to Basics
I'm hoping to go to basics soon. Right, Rafe?
Love and Hate: Internet Communities
Kate sent us a message last night telling us that Tim and Sarah have had a daughter called Millie. Unfortunately she was a bit early, but apparently they will be going home soon.
Update: got an SMS from Tim, they're home (and not sleeping much). Also got some pictures from Kate via Nan, she's so small
Damn. We lost.
Good game though, pity it went to penalties. That's never fair.
Midsommar, the unofficial Swedish national day, has come and gone. We spent it at home in Stockholm, instead of traditionally at Josefine’s place in S�gen. This gave us the opportunity to repay her and Lotus for all the nice times we’ve had there.
M�rten, Maria, Vera, and Conrad joined in, and brought food and booze with them. Lunch was eaten on the top balcony, and consisted of sill (pickled herring) from Melanders, V�sterbotten cheese, new potatoes, and kn�ckebr�d. Of course we drank snaps and beer.
After lunch we went for a walk in a deserted Stureby. The sun was shining, although it was very windy. Rainclouds were gathering to the East, so we abandonded plans of eating dinner outside.
Main course was barbecued pork filet with potatoes, salad and grilled haloumni cheese. More beer and wine was drunk.
We wound up the evening watching Greece eliminate France from the Euro championship. Nice!
Updated. Chatting with Craig after writing this entry I realised I really should be more informative about Midsommar. Well, I don't have to, because Ben has more info.
Today is my last day at work before vacation. As a Swede, I may not be payed much, but I do get five weeks of paid vacation. Hah.
We’re planning on doing a lot of work in the house and garden. The closet in the hall is first, then our bedroom. My father is coming up for a week, I hope we can get the windows scraped and repainted while he’s here.
We hope to level out the biggest patch of lawn in the garden, but I have no idea of how to do that. We’ll see.
Other plans are a visit to the Arvika rock festival with Hanna and her friend. Should be … interesting. Let’s hope it doesn’t rain too much.
We’ll also be visiting my parents in Halmstad for a week.
All in all I hope to be as far away from a computer as possible.
Have a nice summer!
This followup to Joel Spolsky’s piece on Microsoft’s future APIs is worth reading for the historical perscpective.
Computing is older than Microsoft, and even a 800-pound gorilla one day gets old and tired.
Friday, Sweden played 1-1 against Italy and now have a shot at advancing to the quarter-finals.
Saturday, I helped Petter and Gis�la move all their stuff to �land, where they’re moving into a house. Basse and Anders were there to; the usual gang in other words. I tipped Petter off about weblogs and stuff, so that he can document the freezing winters in the middle of the Baltic Sea.
That evening we went to Josefine and ate a thank-you meal for helping her move a couple of weeks back. Nice to hook up with Georges and Johanna again, and always nice to see �se and Madde. Unfortunately, Viking flipped out on the way home, and even if he cooled down when we came home and watch Czechoslovakia beat the Netherlands 3-2, he didn’t go to sleep until late.
Today Sunday, Joanna’s brother Love has with moving the washing machine from the cellar to the spare bathroom. We’ve also started on the windows facing the street. Hopefully we’ll have them done this week.
Well, despite my punditry Gmail is real.
And now, thanks to Terje, I have an account!
I opted for the staid gerikson, instead my university Marathon nicknames of “Baskerbosse” or “Ebola”. So, bring on the spam! I’ve got a gigabyte to fill up…
It’s chilling to think that with Google’s grip on search, blogs (via the blogging tool Blogger), social networks (via Orkut), and now Gmail, they have a pretty good way of finding out everything about your online activities. I wouldn’t recommend planning starting a company or having an affair via Gmail. But I think it’ll be a great spamtrap.
Cory Doctorow speaks at Microsoft about DRM.
DRM systems are broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely, months. It’s not because the people who think them up are stupid. It’s not because the people who break them are smart. It’s not because there’s a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day, all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point, the secret isn’t a secret anymore.
In this week’s Ny Teknik, Hans Strandberg wrote an editorial about the need of Sweden’s 3G providers need to look up from building the infrastructure and to start selling/distributing content.
He’s concerned that the enormous amount of money spent on 3G in Sweden will be squandered on providing “3G”: Games, Gambling, and Girls. The first provider who sends video from a local council meeting will get a gold star for “kaxighet” (Swedish for chutzpah).
Is that the future we are facing? “Free enterprise” selling crap, or the “worthies”, Sweden’s politicians and authorities providing dull information?
I don’t think so. On my short ride to work today, on bus and subway, I came up with four possible mobile data services.
In the same paper there was a small article on how Lunarstorm, Sweden’s largest commnunity for young people, has a 3G service. People can chat with their friends, update their profiles, play games… just like on the web. Only now they can do it in the classroom, which will probably lead to 3G phones being banned in schools soon.
Scenario: I ride more or less the same route to work every day. I got SL’s site and set my preferences for that journey. Every weekday between 08:30 and 09:15 I can see any scheduled or unscheduled outages. I can also see when the next bus/subway will arrive, so I can decide whether to run or just take the next one. Same thing for the return trip.
The same principle can be applied to commuters in cars. Video feeds can show congestion, flash messages can warn of big accidents, a reminder can be sent when the roads are icy.
Sveriges Television has a videotext service. Making this service available to 3G handsets is such a no-brainer that I’m suprised no-one’s done it yet. For that added pizazz, a link to a video feed can easily be added.
Another article in Ny Teknik described a virtual treasure hunt in Tokyo, played with GPS-enhanced mobiles. Not really a 3G application, but one that can be enhanced by a video feed showing the target location and if anyone is nearing it.
The thread tying these services together is that they are evolutionary, not revolutionary. They are web services that can be simply adapted to mobile data terminals. No need for gimmicks, just try to deliver information and services that are useful and simple to use.
This story is a good summary of the recent brouhaha over Dave Winer’s shutdown of weblogs.com.
From the Wired article:
“People have been really afraid to discuss this,” said a New York blogger who asked that his name be withheld. “There’s a lot of concern that any nasty comments will result in Dave not getting around to making a copy of your blog. I think a lot of the politeness and ‘We love you, Dave!’ sentiments that you’re seeing in some Web posts is just pure paranoia.”
That’s it. I now have a cron job running that’ll take an XML dump of
this blog every night. Who knows, maybe
Ewan will crack from England winning
Euro2024 and delete everything around him…
I uploaded my 2,001th work unit to Seti@Home today.
That’s it. I expect I’ll hear about it if they find anything anyway.
Reading Simon’s weblog after he mentioned it on #mobitopia generated flashbacks to my own high school experiences.
Of course, the internet didn’t exist back then, at least not in the part of Sweden where I went to school. So I didn’t blog about my feelings, just wrote about them in a diary. (Must remember to find that diary and burn it.)
Anyway, I was a year younger than everyone else, and very shy, so I had no chance of explaining my feelings to he object of my affection. I was crushed when she started going out with someone else. I’ve since learnt that this guy stood up in a bus on a school trip and publicly recited a love poem to her. This showed major cojones, and proved to me that she probably wasn’t my type anyway.
I then when on and was unlucky in love with yet more people until I met my present wife, and was thrown into the deep end with a relationship involving kids and buying a house. So far, it has worked out. But life was more simple then, when I was 17.
Perhaps being excluded from the final debate helped Junilistan. They’ve captured 14.4% of the EP votes, and a new political party is born.
Sweden has had a flying start in Euro2024, beating Bulgaria 5 - 0. With Denmark - Italy 0 - 0, this really gives Sweden a nice start in the tournament.
The Nokia 6630 (aka. “Charlie”) is a UMTS (3G) phone with Series 60. I’ve been holding off switching to 3G from GSM due to the lack of good phones. Series 60 is the operating system used in smartphones such as the Nokia 6600, the Siemens SX1 and the N-gage. There are lots of apps available for this platform, and the integrated planning tools and email reader are good enough for me.
But I won’t buy the 6630. Why? Because it’s ugly.
The 6630 combines the pear-shaped, bottom heavy look of the 3660 with the faux-metal shine of the Siemens ST55, a desperate attempt from Siemens to cash in on the cameraphone trend.
Nokia can do better than this. The 7610 may have an unusable keypad, but it looks good. The original N-gage, aka. the Taco, packs lots of features into a package that can be described as “interesting”, even if it makes the the user look ridiculous.
Let’s hope that Nokia will re-discover its design edge and give a 3G smartphone with looks and content.
The EU-critical party Junilistan won’t be given a place in SVTs final debate before the EP elections on Sunday.
The reason: they don’t have a seat in the Parlaiment.
And pundits wonder why people won’t bother to vote in this election.
In this post, I promised to hang in on Movable Type and not move to another tool.
Well, I’ve changed my mind.
Why? Simply because MT is too limiting for me. I edit my posts in Emacs, run them through SmartyPants and Markdown to get nice formatting, then paste the result into MT’s edit window on the site.
When using Windows, this works — kinda. But when I’m at home, I use an old laptop running OpenBSD. Running Firebird on that machine is slooow. So I’ve got this multi-step barrier in front of my text and my weblog.
I’ve been playing with Blosxom on a spare unix server. It’s everything MT isn’t: small, spare, configurable — if you know Perl. Also I like the semi-dynamic notion of timestamp-based sorting. Certain posts, such as my reading list are updated often. Under MT, you can’t see this. If you subscribe to my RSS feed, you can see that the post has been updated, but not otherwise.
Also, it’s insanely fun to be hacking with Blosxom. Turn-around time for site changes are instant, CSS changes are fast — all because I’m working directly in Emacs, not in bog-slow Firebird.
So as soon as I get stuff in order on Symbiandiaries I’m outta MT. They can take their bloated “CMS” and sell it to someone else. I’m sticking with the tools I know and trust.
Let’s face it, Outlook Express and Internet Explorer are more or less orphaned by Microsoft today. They went flat out to crush Netscape, and now MS is resting on their wilted spinach leaves (laurels are too grand for this kind of thing).
Martin says it best, and Jim agrees. Join the evolution. Install Firefox for web browsing and Thunderbird for mail.
I’m an inch from saying “I don’t support that” when someone complains about IE or Outlook Express.
Good piece by Ewan on the difference between "magic" and mere puzzles.
In the age of the internet, it's easy to google the solutions to many tricks. The hard-earned mastery of the magician can be "exposed" by anyone with a web browser and zero sense of wonder in their lives.
Information wants to be free, and most information should be free, but the mechanics of magic should perhaps be hidden from view, lest we lose yet another of life's pleasures.
Even though I've picked a candidate for the upcoming elections to the European Parliament, it's increasingly unlikely that I will even cast a vote.
I haven't heard anything that the EP has decided that has affected me as a citizen of the EU. The only thing I can recollect is a number of stories about MEPs collecting travel expenses and pocketing them. This is the body I'm supposed to elect?
"Ah, but if you've read more about the EU, you'd know that..." -- well, guess what, I read the editorials of Sweden's biggest daily newspaper every day, listen to P1 often, and subscribe to The Economist. I'm as clued-up politically as a citizen who's also working full time and has a 2-year old at home can well be asked to be, and yet I still don't know more about the EP. How can I make an informed decision then?
"But you have to vote, otherwise the extremists will..." -- yeah right, a vote for a body that has no real influence will give extremists a voice. Get real. Political extremists are smarter than that.
"Democracy is a right and a privilege, your vote is precious..." -- no it isn't. I'd rather save my energy making decisions that will affect me and my family. The MEP doesn't do this, nor should it. It's a tacked on band-aid that the technocrats behind the Union have slapped on to give their tired, bureaucratic, mega-project some democratic gloss. The EU is not a democratic project. It's an artificial counterweight to the USA that doesn't have a deep popular support and probably never will.
Some parts of it are good: the free movement of trade, capital, and labour. Most parts are bad: the CAP, the intrusive bureaucracy, the Gallo-Teutonic haughtiness of its unelected leaders. If, by denying this patchwork of idealism and self-serving nationalism the legitimacy of my vote, I can help undermine its foundations and bring about a serious re-evaluations of the whole project, I'm glad. But my vote won't count, whether I cast it or not.
MrX Photographers is a site devoted to digital photography. Terje, the guy behind the site, is a Mobitopian and all around nice guy.
As of now, I have 1,995 work units reported at SETI@Home. I've decided to stop at 2,000 (or more likely 2,001, since I may forget to check the status... besides, 2001 is more symbolic).
It's been fun, but rather open-ended. No end in sight, unlike the distributed crypto challenges out there. And in the end, it's just about egoboost -- I've got more WUs completed than you, nyah nyah.
So I'm quitting while I'm ahead.
Venona: sp�ren fr�n ett underr�ttelsekrig by Wilhelm Agrell.
A history of the Venona telegrams intercepted in Sweden during the Second World War, and the implications of their decoding on the revelations of Soviet espionage in Sweden during the period.
Man, that was a long sentence.
Agrell describes the Venona decrypts as the "Dead Sea Rolls of the Cold War". The limited decryption of the traffic meant that the recovered plaintext nearly raised more questions than it answered.
Symbiandiaries.com is back online after a longer hiatus. The problem lay in the management interface, not the serving of pages. For once, Movable Type's use of static pages paid off.
I've been chafing under the enforced silence, not realizing until now how much I appreciate the chance of self-expression. I really regret the chance to publish this post (now backdated). Oh well.
I've offered my services to Rafe of AAS fame as ronin sysadmin, so perhaps we can recover faster next time the site goes down.
There has long been a gentleman's agreement in place in Swedish media that a suspect will not be named until he or she has been convicted of a crime. With the latest spectacular crimes in Sweden, such as the murder of foreign minister Anna Lindh and the bizarre happenings in Knutby, this has changed. Now, some media outlets name the suspects when they have been charged with a crime.
In the Knutby case, the tabloids never mentioned the minister's name, but both his wives (whose murders he is charged with) were named with their married names, Fossmo. And as he has Norwegian background anyone can read his full name in the Norwegian newspapers, or on the web.
Of course, the state television holds the moral banner high, and will not name the suspects. References to them in the court audio feed are replaced with beeps.
The privately owned TV4 has no such scruples. So the secretive "Christ's Bride", �sa Walldau, is named as such in the news. 2 hours earlier, in SVTs news, the court sketch has the title "andlig ledare" ("spiritual leader"). This puts her on the same footing as the Dalai Llama.
These efforts, although honourable, are doomed to fail. Anyone who wants can find the details, not on some shady website, but on BBC and CNN. The media is global, at least if the news is big enough. Perhaps it's time to rethink the whole thing?
So Ronald Reagan has died. My first political memory is going to a US international school in Kuala Lumpur and seeing the big board with election results between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.
This thought also occurred to me.