Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour by John Feinstein.
I now know more than I thought I ever wanted to know about professional golf in the US. Synopsis: it's damn hard, but if you're good and lucky, you too can fly to tournaments in a private jet.
The first sports book I've read, interesting experience. All aspects of society are filled with jargon. If you know nada about golf, read something else. If you know the difference between a birdie and a bogey, it's recommended.
Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks.
Although Banks' Culture novels are always enjoyable, this one feels like he's coasting.
Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick.
A well written popular history of nonlinear dynamics.
... is the modern equivalent of "a couple of guys in a garage".
Inspired by the latest "hush-hush" biz discussion on #mobitopia.
So here I am, validating all my pages as XHTML 1.0, when I read these links:
Basically, XHTML 1.0 isn't mature enough to use on the web. Use HTML 4.01 instead.
The problem is that I'd like my blog to be readable on mobile devices,
who expect XHTML content. And the mod_rewrite trickery mentioned is
way overkill according to me.
Who knew it was such hard work being a good Netizen?
In Sweden, you can't buy alcoholic beverages anywhere but in the state monopoly's stores, Systembolaget. This is to restrict supply and prevent us Swedes from descending into a permanent alcoholic stupor. For a long time, you couldn't buy booze on Saturdays. You still can't on Sundays.
The last couple of years, this company has moved away from lines in front of counters to self-serve style stores, where you can walk around and choose what you want instead of asking a clerk for it. This is because it's now cheap and legal to bring in lots of alcohol from other countries, so the monopoly needs to move with the times.
Well, things have moved in the right direction, but there's still some way to go. For example, I'm going to swing by "Bolaget" for some Kirin on my way to pick up some take-away sushi. But I can't buy the beer refrigerated. How would that look? Anyone could buy a beer and then go to the nearest park and enjoy a cool one! No way that would work. In Sweden, you have to carry your beer home first and put it in the fridge, then get drunk.
How long until we get cold beer, huh?
Boys and Girls Forever by Alison Lurie.
A collection of essays about childrens literature.
I admit it, the new Toshiba is way nicer to use than my pokey old Thinkpad. But one thing bugs me a lot. We have a wireless network, and every once in a while, I lose connection to it. This is in the exact same place as where I use the Thinkpad running OpenBSD, and it never has this problem.
When Windows loses the connection, it won't reconnect automatically
because the network isn't secure. This is a Good Thing, of course, but
still highly irritating to lose all the ssh connections at once. Thank god for screen . The
question is, why does the connection go away?
Svenska f�rintelsevapen by Wilhelm Agrell.
A history of the Swedish plans to build WMDs, specifically a plutonium bomb and VX and mustard gas.
Never got past the planning stage due to politics and a new sense of the term "international security".
The last chapter has interesting info concerning Iraq's gas and nuclear programmes after Gulf War 1.
Random notes about what I can remember right now.
Soundtrack of Our Lives -- as mentioned previously, greatest set. The finale, where the guitarist in a Who-like frenzy smashed his instrument and then, instead of hurling the deadly pieces out into the audience, climbs down and hands it to some lucky sod, was a classic rock-star sendup.
Kraftwerk -- amazing show. But these guys are still a relic of the Seventies, and it shows. Tour de France was all about television, how the race is transmitted into the home, but no mention of the Internet at all. If you don't cound Computerwelt.
Echo and the Bunnymen -- I enjoyed the show. Fun scuttlebut about them from their driver, who I met over a beer the day after.
Olle Ljungström -- pity I missed all but the last song.
Marit Bergman -- ditto.
Auf der Maur -- heavy stuff, too early in the day.
Keane -- prompted this.
Escobar -- boring
Weeping Willows -- booring.
Broder Daniel -- I went for a long walk. 'Nuff said.
Whew, we're back. Although tired and sore all over, I had a lot of fun.
Some things to think about for next time:
Accomodation. Face it, camping in a tent sucks. You have to be at least as pissed as everyone around you, and I'm too old for that. Some sort of better living next time.
Bring a friend. Even though it's great fun to meet a lot of random people, people who attend festivals alone are weird. I've been too much on my own when I was younger.
Cooler (i.e. hipper) clothes -- blend in.
Research. Find out more about the bands before you go.
I'm sure there's more, I'll update later.
There's something wrong with society when the first thought you have when hearing a new band is "I'm so downloading this."
Night even worse than last.
We went into town for a shower and coffee. Personally I can go 3 days without a shower (goes with living in a tent -- cue lumparhistorier, tall tales about Swedish military service), but the girls insisted.
Due to this detour I missed Olle Ljungstr�m, a 90s figure that I liked way when.
The day has been warm, almost oppressively so, but as before, can't complain.
Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least contentment. The camp, which presented a disturbing spectacle the first day, now feels like a (smelly) home.
Soundtrack of our Lives really live the rock star life. Their set was the best yet.
Kraftwerk next!
Night was pretty grim, cold and damp, but the morning was dry enough. Nearly too hot, in fact, but a Swede can't complain about the heat.
Today I've met lot's of fun people, seen Eskobar, Auf der Maur, and I'm waiting for Echo and the Bunnymen.
Arrived after an uneventual journey, and have pitched our tents in a spot that seems suspiciously vacant. Whether this is because the ground is utterly sopping or for some other reason, I don't know. Turf is damp, but passable.
Walked to the festival area, talked to a nice guy who's a functionary. He thinks there should be more hip-hop at the festival, which has a rock/goth leaning.
Representatives for SR wear grey hair streaked with black, aviator Ray-Bans, tight black clothes and Nokia 3310s.
Dave Winer is covering the Democratic National Convention in Boston, along with some other accredited bloggers. Good for him.
This post confuses me, however. I'm in Europe, and if I was covering this kind of stuff and could afford the GPRS charges, I'd get a laptop and a mobile to use as a mobile. Any half-competent phone manufactured in the last 5 years can do this. Of course, you have to dick around with cables, infrared, or Bluetooth, but it's definitely doable.
Some bloggers say they're the new journalists. I'd love to see a journalist say: "I can't cover that, there's no Wi-Fi there."
Tomorrow I'm going to the Arvika festival with Hanna and her friend.
It's my first rock festival, and while I'm going primarily as a chaperone, I think it'll be fun.
I'll see if I find anything interesting enough to moblog about.
Someday, some future owners of our house will tear down the wall in the new alcove, and blurt out in astonishment: "what the hell did he think he was doing?!"
A concise definition of the BSD License.
Dave Winer has had blog posts in mp3 format for a while. All I can say is: why?
Listening to a person talk is much less efficient than reading something. You can't skip back and forth, sometimes you miss a word or sentence due to differing accents, and if the speaker is talking in a language you don't understand, you can't babelfish it to get something vaguely understandable.
In Dave's case, it's not always easy to hear what he says. Part of the problem is his American accent. I speak and write English fluently, but I learnt it in British schools. I seldom hear "real" American accents, i.e. not those on TV or movies. This means that I find it hard to understand what Dave says sometimes, even though my English is very good. It must be even harder for someone who is more comfortable reading English than listening to it.
Audio posts are a step back. They don't encourage information exchange, like text does. You can't hyperlink to a specific audio segment. You can't quote it without transcribing it first. The bandwidth requirements are absurdly high for the limited amount of information they contain.
Let's hope the trend doesn't spread.
Usually I get The Economist on Mondays, but not today.
Damn.
Update It arrived today, so I could enjoy my post-prandial coffee with it. (Yes, snail mail usually arrived at 11:00 here in our part of Stockholm.) Nothing really attention-grabbing, though.
After a long day fixing windows, we went down to Enskede V�rdshus for a meal.
Both Jan and Joanna wanted fish (rolled lake perch), while I opted for lamb. To compromise on the wine, we asked for ros�. There was none in the wine list, but they had a bottle left since a wedding. This cost as much as the house white and was very nice.
Afterwards, we took a walk through Stureby and looked at other peoples houses and windows. This was also nice, until we came home and could once again note that we have Stureby's ugliest house.
But now at least the windows will look better.
... is the pointless day-to-day diary of your daily doings.
If you can read Swedish, you can read my form of this sin at huset, my daily recap of my "vacation" working on our house. (I'll leave the fact that it is impossible to afford to pay a professional to do stuff on your house in Sweden for another rant.)
My defence of this practice is that I want to try it out, and also that random thoughts occur to me when I'm sanding a wall or whatever, and I think: "I'm so blogging that". (Of course, by the time I turn on the computer in the evening I've forgotten all about it.) This helps me through the drudgery of manual labour.
Also, I rather like the idea of a free-form database of info like what colours we've used on the walls.
But I'm painfully aware of the blog-wankery involved ... we'll see if I'll keep it up.
... with the bedroom.
Well not quite, but I'm sick and tired of the damn room, so I'll fix the rest later (famous last words).
We've
Oh, and we spent a day at Ikea. Fun.
The alcove's left. But I'll do that later, I promise.
My father's come up from Halland to help out with the windows and the garden. Phew! I could use a vacation from the vacation...
Mail from Anna: they're now proud parents of Klara, Jonatan's little sister.
Also, they're moving "back" to Sweden -- to Liding�.
According to Engadget, Sweden has more mobile lines than people.
In our family, we're five. One is 2 and a half, he hasn't got a mobile.
Between us, we have eight working phones.
We have four active SIMs, which gives the Erikson-West household a mobile penetration of 80%. Below average for Sweden.
This is how I moved my blog from MT to Blosxom. The process is very specific for my case -- you mileage will definitely vary.
I had the following pre-requisites:
I installed Blosxom on my test system and played around with CSS and flavours until I was happy with the look of the site.
Searching Google led me to this post. It concerned moving from MT to Drupal, but mentioned an important thing: the default MT export format is hard to parse. The method used instead was to export to XML, and parse that.
I downloaded the XML export template and the Perl file used to parse it, and modified them for my needs. They are available below:
The changes to the XML template are fairly minor. I added a new Index Template in MT and called it "Export XML". The output file was set to "export.xml".
The convert.pl script was modified in the following ways:
I changed the output from printing SQL insert statements to writing to files. The timestamps were modified to reflect the original posting date in MT.
I constructed new Blosxom filenames from the entry titles.
I mapped my MT categories to new ones via a hash.
After I had debugged these changes, I ran the script on an export downloaded from MT.
After I had this running, it was a simple matter of taring the files
and moving them to the target server. After changing the relevant
paths, I was up and running.
A friendly sysadmin installed a redirect at my old blog which pointed to the new one. The original MT archive posts were left alone to cater to old bookmarks, but I'm working on redirecting those too.
Amazing result. Methodical, defensive football. Boring, but effective.
This is definitively Greece's year -- first this, then the Olympics.
Today's the 4th of July
Another June has gone by
And when they light up our town I just think
What a waste of gunpowder and sky.
-- Aimee Mann
((R) means "re-reading")
Body of Secrets by James Bamford.
An "expos�" of the NSA. This book has a hacked-together feel, as if it was composed of several magzine articles. The author veers from describing the NSA as an all-knowing threat to democracy and liberty, to telling us about glitches, catastrophes, and bureaucracy hampering the Agency's ability to protect the US from it's enemies.
There's some interesting information in here though (assuming that the information is accurate):
The description of how Israel attacked a Sigint ship during the Six Days War.
The capture of another Sigint ship by the North Koreans in 1969.
How the Viet Minh could monitor US radio traffic during the Vietnam war, as the Americans didn't bother to use communication security.
The sum of the book seems to be that, yes, the NSA can listen to every phone call and read every mail, but that they don't have enough qualified people to make sense of what they're picking up.
Must ... install ... GPG ...
Sometimes (not often enough, if you ask me) msmobiles.com goes off on a tangent and rants about how the world is unfairly hindering the progress of Microsoft in the handheld market. It's the only reason I have them in my aggregator.
Of course, I want to share these gems with the gang at #mobitopia, but we don't want to increase the ranking of these pages -- the author (or authors) are not above dirty tricks themselves, so why should they get Google juice from us, the Symbian Mafia?
Enter evilurl.com. This works just like tinyurl.com, but the generated URLs are ... well, evil. This is now the preferred way to link to msmobiles.com among the members of the Mafia. What goes around, comes around.
I wasn't the one who suggested using evilurl.com (I think it was Jim), but I was the first who used it in the channel. Now they've noticed, and I'm officially an "anti-Microsoft fanatic". I've kind of had that feeling. It's nice to get it in writing.
Even though I'm on vacation, I'm doing more work than usual (I hope my boss doesn't read this...).
Why? Well, we've finally taken gone to work on our bedroom (mini-diary in Swedish), and the nice thing about this kind of thing is that you see results. We've ripped up the ugly plastic carpeting and revealed a very nice pine parquet, started painting the ceiling and walls, and today we rippd out the old closet and turned it into an alcove instead.
I've also discovered that I have a critical mass of knowledge, tools, and materials to attempt quite ambitious projects. No last-minute , time-wasting trips to the hardware store. If I need something, I can usually do something else before going to the store -- thus enhancing efficiency. And the fact that I'm on vacation means that there's no time pressure.
A nice change from sitting in front of a computer all day.
Wow!
A very surprising result. The same teams that started this tournament will end it.
<JimH> Good news: Saddam Hussein is to face death penalty
<JimH> Bad news: David Beckham is taking it
From irc.freenode.net/#mobitopia.