The occasional scrivener

Looking back on 2024 2024 was not a good year for our family. Two members have illnesses, one acute, one chronic. None of them are deadly, but they affect us all, leading to a high level of stress and uncertainty.

Yet for others the year has been much, much worse. For the thousands of Swedish tourists in Thailand these holidays, the year was ending in ease and comfort — until the tsunami came. Whatever problems this family has had and still has, we are still together, all of us are alive. Our differences and disagreements can be addressed and perhaps resolved. Bitterness and anger have a chance of being confronted and assuaged. Rifts can heal, if we let them.

I have no way of imagining how it is to lose a loved one — a wife, a son. My mind filled with the horrific images of children swept out to sea and drowning. I hope I can do something to help, but fear the inadequacies of my response to any requests for it. At least we have made an economic contribution.

Today, New Year’s Eve, we will be setting the house in order and preparing a meal for us and our friends. The pressure to make everything perfect is there, as is the possibilities for anger and irritation. I’ll try to keep perspective, not get stressed, and take the time to play around and have fun. Because that’s the one thing many many people are wishing they could do right now, and can’t.

Why should I be one of them?

Posted on Friday, 2024-12-31, in the alt category.

Victory’s handmaiden

Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda by John Keegan.

A series of case studies on the use of intelligence in warfare. Mostly centered around WW2. The Al-Qaeda reference seems a later add-on to boost sales.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-12-30, in the books » read category.

Back online

We’re back from Halland — I’ve trying to unwind from staring at headlights in the dark for six hours.

It’s been a very nice Christmas for us personally, but hearing the news from South Asia kind of puts a damper on the joyous tidings.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-12-29, in the alt category.

Offline Christmas

Tomorrow morning, weather permitting, me, the wife and the youngest will be heading south to my parent’s in Halland. We won’t be taking a computer with us, and connectivity in the boondocks can be a bit spotty. So I’ll probably be offline until just before New Year’s Eve.

Merry Christmas or (insert appropriate pagan ceremony here) to all!

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-12-22, in the alt category.

Brain candy

Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett.

A Discworld novel. ‘Nuff said.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-12-22, in the books » read category.

Learning to hate the Bomb

Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age by Margot A. Henriksen.

A sort of cultural history of the Cold War. Through dissections of popular films and books, especially Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Henriksen exposes the corrosive effects of nuclear weapons on American morals and society.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-12-19, in the books » read category.

Mobi-meet!

Jim and his wife were in Stockholm this weekend, so we hooked up and had a lunch/beer in a vegetarian place on Söder. Unfortunately, I was still affected by the Christmas party the night before, and was a bit under the weather. I’ll have to go to Whitstable to collect my pint from Jim.

Update 2024-12-18: here’s Jim’s write-up of the trip.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-12-18, in the alt category.

Eating my words

Humble pie time. A few months back, I said I wouldn’t buy a 6630 (on Mobitopia no less!) Well, I have to retract that. Publicly. In full.

In addition I’ve slammed podcasts several times. But I have to confess I’ve started listening to them. Mostly to the excellent ‘casts from IT Conversations, but also to Adam Curry. I’m trying hard to stay away from Dave Winer, but it’s like a scab that you have to pick — disgusting, yet strangely irresistible.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-12-16, in the alt category.

Flickr!

Now that I have a cameraphone, I can use Flickr as ghod intended. Check out my output at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerikson/.

By the way, Telia’s SMTP server is mail1.telia.com. I tried finding it from their site, no dice. Google is your friend.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-12-16, in the alt category.

Welcome to Charlietopia!

I broke down and got the Charlie, aka the Nokia 6630. I couldn’t stand Russ being the only Mobitopian with one (not counting lots of Finns who have them for evaluation), so I decided to get one too.

Telia has a deal that says you get the phone for free if you pay 100 SEK extra a month for 2 years on a UMTS contract. Telia’s the biggest carrier in Sweden, and have good coverage. The phone retails for 5,200 SEK without a contract.

I wasn’t the only one discovering that this was a pretty good deal, so the phone was a bit hard to get. The nearest store didn’t have it, but mentioned that the Kungsgatan store did. I phoned them and they said they had two left, and no way were they gonna reserve one for me. I decided to go there after work and let fate decide — no phone left, I’d give it a rest.

The store was full of Christmas shoppers (including a guy who bought a Motorola V3 Razr, and then decided not to go with his friends to the movies, instead going home to fondle his new phone…). The middle-aged man in front of me wanted to know more about the Sony-Ericsson Z1010, which is even more sold out than the 6630. My heart nearly stopped when the guy behind the counter hauled out a 6630 box and started hustling “the last one in the store”. Luckily the potential buyer was a die-hard S-E fan and left without it. I pounced on it instead.

I’ll post more soon about it. Until then, I can say that I used the Transfer app to smoothly move my data from the taco to the Charlie. Sweet!

• Rui’s 6630 resource page

Posted on Thursday, 2024-12-16, in the comm » mobile category.

New phone number

A new phone and a new network. My phone number from now on is

+46 (0)70 257 7860

I’ll be carrying my old SIM around for a while, and will be listening to messages for a while after that.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-12-15, in the alt category.

Beyond belief

So in this almost empty gin palace
Through a two-way looking glass
You see your Alice

You know she has no sense
For all your jealousy
In a sense she still smiles very sweetly

— Elvis Costello

Winamp threw this up when ramdomly walking through ~10 GB of mp3s.

I first heard this song covered by Suzanne Vega in Lund circa 1990, and it made me go out and buy Costello’s Girls Girls Girls double-CD “greatest hits”. Those songs kept me sane during military service a year later, and Beyond Belief was one of the best.

Anyway, the point is that I loved Vega’s cover, but I’ll probably never hear it again. That’s the charm of live performances I guess.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-12-14, in the alt category.

Findall utility

A supercharged grep. Haven’t tried it live yet, just posted here for future reference.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-12-09, in the comp category.

iPod a dinosaur?

Jim Hughes asks if the iPod is the new Newton in a speculative piece about the future of the mobile phone as a personalized music player.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-12-08, in the comm » mobile category.

Jack Womack

Gibson writes about Jack Womack, including this classic qoute, so appropriate for these gloomy times:

On the wall was stencilled the Army’s most enforceable antiterror edict:

SPEAK ENGLISH OR DON’T SPEAK.

— from Ambient

The “Army” above is the Home Army, primarily employed in waging war on Long Island and keeping New York safe for capitalism. The world is ruled by the megacorporation Dryco… named in 1987, long before Tyco became a household name for financial skulduggery.

The only real difference from the “USA” of Womack’s future and Bush’s America is that there is no Christianity anymore. The “Q scrolls” exposed Jesus Christ as a naive patsy of the Romans. The Americans turned to the next best thing, and the Church of Elvis is the official religion.

I first read Womack in the early nineties. I’ve read Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, and Elvissey (where agents of the Dryco are sent back in time to kidnap the Messiah). After that I kind of lost the taste for Womack’s dark future. It seems more and more believable every year.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-12-07, in the books category.

The Playlist Meme

1. Open up the music player on your computer.

2. Set it to play your entire music collection.

3. Hit the “shuffle” command.

4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.

5. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances. You don’t have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you’d like.

This is my list:

• Kelly Clarkson, Walk Away
• Ragnarok, Et Vinterland i Nord
• Suzanne Vega, Those Whole Girls
• Badly Drawn Boy, Take The Glory
• Suzanne Vega, The Queen and the Soldier
• Lars Demian, Det manliga beteendet
• Stiff Little Fingers, At The Edge
• Julie Roberts, Pot of Gold
• Avril Lavigne, Forgotten
• Curve, Doppelganger

Via Rui, he got it from Sergio

Posted on Monday, 2024-12-06, in the comm category.

Damn spammers

The old blog is being hit hard by comment spammers. Guess another Google dance is scheduled soon. Freaking lowlives.

As far as I can see, the only alternative is to go through each post by hand in Movable Type’s admin interface and manually disable comments. There must be a better way to do this…

Posted on Sunday, 2024-12-05, in the comm » weblog category.

Got.mp?

Anthony Eden has been working like a dog to get dotMP up and running. Congratulations! Russ weighs in on how cool this is.

Posted on Friday, 2024-12-03, in the comm » mobile category.

The Ukraine splitting up?

The eastern parts of the country are seeking autonomy.

I must admit I’ve totally missed the whole run-up to this.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-11-28, in the alt » politics category.

At the end of that handbasket ride

Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling.

Re-read this for the nth time. The prose and ideas are top-notch, but the story isn’t really up to scratch.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-11-28, in the books » read category.

Beer night out

David and I went to Akkurat yesterday to sample their extensive assortment of Belgian and British beers and ales.

We started with a Carolus Tripel, followed by a La Chouffe to the meal. Afterwards we each had a pint of real ale. Akkurat has a certificate on the wall saying that they’re at least as good as a British pub in pulling pints, so there was no doubt it was as close to the real thing that it was possible to get. Mine was a Sneck Lifter by Jennings.

I could use more practice in drinking British ales. The prescribed temperature is simply too high for my enjoyment, raised as I am on a diet of cold lagers. And the essential foodiness of the Sneck was a bit much after a full meal.

I’m looking forward to trying more, though.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-11-27, in the alt category.

ISBN database

Gotta investigate this. Maybe I should bone up on ISBNs first.

Via mobitopia, thanks Jim!

Posted on Friday, 2024-11-26, in the books category.

4th of July

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

Posted on Friday, 2024-11-26, in the alt category.

The road not taken

Everytime I see her face
On the street in the hollow of on the hill
Another time and another place
I feel her in my heart still
Everytime I see her face
On the street in the hollow in the bend
I see her in my mind and then
I go down the road not taken…again

— Bruce Hornsby

Posted on Friday, 2024-11-26, in the alt category.

The tech support generation

Should it really be like this?

Posted on Thursday, 2024-11-25, in the comp category.

Reason to believe

<JimH_Taco> There's a dead fox on the track outside my window

Seen a man standin’ over
a dead dog lyin’ by the highway in a ditch
He’s lookin’ down kinda puzzled
pokin’ that dog with a stick
Got his car door flung open
he’s standin’ out on Highway 31
Like if he stood there long enough
that dog’d get up and run
Struck me kinda funny
seem kinda funny sir to me
Still at the end of every hard earned day
people find some reason to believe

— Bruce Springsteen

Cassell Webb’s cover was the first version of this song I heard, and I’ve still got the cadences of that in my head.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-11-25, in the alt category.

Too good to last

After nearly a week of heavy snowfall and subzero temperatures — i.e., real winter — the temp is back over zero, and untold tons of snow is melting into slush. The sound you don’t want to hear this side of April is the sound of water, dripping from the eaves…

Posted on Thursday, 2024-11-25, in the alt category.

Happy birthday, Ewan!

Ewan is 30 today! Congratulations!

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-11-24, in the alt category.

Biting the bullet

Despite the misgivings detailed here I bit the bullet and upgraded from 3.4 to 3.6. I followed the instructions in the upgrade minifaq and added the new users for the privsep services in each step (3.4 to 3.5, 3.5 to 3.6)

I’m a bit vague on how NTP is implemented now, but the machine is simply a terminal and having the correct time is not essential.

The installing and upgrading docs on OpenBSD.org have much more emphasis on using packages (i.e. pre-compiled binaries) instead of ports (basically, a make skeleton for installing an app from source) than before. This is interesting, as I recently ran across this amusing page lambasting those clueless lusers who insist that compiling everything from source is the be all and end all if Un*x computing. I felt a bit stung by this page, because in the past I have enjoyed cding to /usr/ports and compiling from source. It’s been painfully slow on occasions, but it’s felt more real.

My guess is that the OpenBSD community, in its usual level-headed, no-nonsense way, realised that the docs were leading people astray and simply said “use the packages” more clearly. So from now on, I will.

Next up is the Ultra5, which needs a serial cable. Someone at work borrowed it a while back and now it’s gone, so I have to dig up another one in meatspace. Sigh.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-11-24, in the comp category.

Literature is a long game

William Gibson:

I would have liked to have gotten [Neal Stephenson] permanently out of the way shortly after reading Snow Crash, of course, but I could already see that I would need him one day to help battle Bruce Sterling. Literature is a long game.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-11-24, in the books category.

Model railroad

My dad came up from Halmstad to help out a bit with the house. In the car he had two boxes of old toys from my childhood. Among these were a Fleischmann HO model railroad (starter set + station expansion). Viking had a great time playing around with that.

He’s a bit too young for model trains, but I figured that this particular set is already payed for, so a little toddler vandalism can’t hurt.

I’m going to get a big sheet of plywood and screw the tracks in place so that he won’t knock them askew. I’m also planning to glue Lego plates around the tracks so that he can build tunnels and houses.

For my future reference, here are the track parts.

Starter kit (6315)

• 8 x 6024 curves R1
• 2 x 6001 straights (204 mm)

Station kit (6090)

• 2 x 6044 turnout
• 2 x 6032 curves R2
• 2 x 6005 straights (165 mm)
• 11 x 6001 straights

Update 2024-11-23: I laid out the tracks again today and found out that one of the turnouts didn’t work anymore — must have taken a hit when someone stepped on it. Also, minimally laid out, the tracks cover our dining room table, and that’s not a small table. I’m shelving the plans for a board for the time being.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-23, in the alt category.

Mobile Gmail

Tarek has written a nice article on how to access gmail from a Series 60 phone. Worth a look if you’re on the move.

Posted on Monday, 2024-11-22, in the comm category.

The dead can dance

Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett.

An enjoyable non-Discworld novel.

Also short, I finished it in a day.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-11-21, in the books » read category.

Mobitopia redesign

Russ finally broke down and redesigned Mobitopia. It’s now a communal linkblog, where the denizens of the #mobitopia IRC channel post interesting URLs, with comments.

Additionally, it now has a fresh look, with the classic Nokia 7650 as visual signature.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-11-18, in the comm » weblog category.

Gods and monsters

Ilium by Dan Simmons

An absolute corker of a book, weaving together Homer, Shakespeare, and the far future in a heady mix.

I haven’t read Simmons’ earlier Hyperion novels, but now that I’ve found he’s a great writer, I most definitely will.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-11-18, in the books » read category.

New feature: soundtracks

Sometimes when I read a book, I listen to a new album at the same time. This mostly happens on the subway on the way to and from work. The music becomes entwined with the book. I first noticed this a long time ago, listening to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony over and over again while reading The Silmarillion. Similarly, Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust is associated with Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer.

So now I’m going to add a Soundtrack note whenever this happens in the future.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-11-17, in the books category.

There’s something out there…

Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo.

A “novel of ideas” that still stays pretty suspenseful. Granted, some of the ideas went over my head. I think a practising Christian would have more enjoyment of those parts of the book. But still an effective SF thriller.

Soundtrack: Anna Ternhiem, Somebody Outside.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-11-17, in the books » read category.

A caul of tortured space-time

Revelation Space by Alistair Reynolds.

Space Opera in the hard SF mould. Full of cool neologisms (lighthugger, reefersleep) and well-written, despite a predilection for the word caul.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve read it before, but the scenes of carnage and mayhem seem a little bloodless, and the characters aren’t as fleshed-out as they could be. Entertaining none the less.

Soundtrack: Lisa Loeb, Cake and Pie and The Way It Really Is.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-11-17, in the books » read category.

Helpdesk software

Time for a new category, I think: work.

I was looking at the comments in Russ’ blog and found a comment by a guy named Ian Landsman. Apparently his company is developing a helpdesk package.

Let’s face it, I’m a one-person helpdesk. That’s not too much fun, I’d rather be a developer. But if I can find some software that makes that part of the job easier, I’m going for it.

We have a little perl hack that keeps track of all emails to the support box, and allows us to post comments, cancel, and close tickets. But the knowledge behind solving issues is buried in the email conversations relating to that ticket. It’s not very integrated, but then, not many things at work are.

So a package that can take a request from a mail message, plonk it in a DB, and track each and every response and annotation to the ticket would be a big help.

Some other packages referenced:

• MyHelpdesk — no incoming mail interface
• OpenIT — Same here

Posted on Monday, 2024-11-15, in the work category.

Working in the gaming industry

Well, my job may not be the must fun one in the world, but at least I’m not working in the gaming industry.

Posted on Friday, 2024-11-12, in the work category.

Disenchantment

Yesterday I realised that both the Stinkpad at home and the Ultra5 at work were running OpenBSD 3.4, 2 point releases behind the current release. Browsing through the upgrade minifaq I found that the time-honoured procedure of updating by compiling the source tree is deprecated.

So now I have to find a floppy and a serial cable for the Ultra, and try to find out which PC-card that I can use to upgrade the Stinkpad. Then I have to get the install floppy, upgrade the userland, then upgrade /etc, and finally re-install ports.

Sigh.

I’m so tired of this. No offense to the OpenBSD team, but I can’t be bothered anymore. But I also don’t want to go the Debian way on the lappy and lose all my customisations (X, desktop stuff, Terminal font…. the list goes on and on).

Maybe it’s time to get a Mac.

Posted on Friday, 2024-11-12, in the comp category.

Buyout

The company I work for has been bought by a much larger American company. No drastic changes are expected in the near future. Maybe the new owners will feel that flat screens are vital for the corporate image, but I doubt it.

Posted on Friday, 2024-11-12, in the alt category.

Men and Spiders

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.

An absolutely brilliant SF novel, with the right mix of hard science and sense of wonder. If it has a fault, it’s that the central love story is a bit weak. But the aliens are well realised, and the apparent anthropomorphism in the beginning of the novel is really part of the plot.

What am I reading now? The reading list has been updated.

Posted on Friday, 2024-11-12, in the books » read category.

Linux font primer

Good roundup. I haven’t played with fonts in Un*x for a long while. My current desktop only runs at 800x600, and I nearly only use terminals there anyway.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-11-10, in the comp category.

Fifteen years

Has it really been that long since the fall of the Wall? Already the memories are fading. My clearest are visiting my friend Björn in his student home in Lund, on a typical Skåne November evening. The fog was yellowish-orange from the streetlights, and Björn, who has a German mother, was dancing around in excitement.

In today’s DN there’s an article describing the bewildered reactions of the Swedish elite, confortable in the realities of the Cold War, suddenly adrift in a new unknown world:

Berlinmuren har varit öppen i nästan ett dygn. På kontinenten är det karneval med flygande champagnekorkar och segerdruckna DDR-medborgare som gör v-tecknet på Kurfürstendamm.

Men svensk nyhetsjournalistik, känd för sin nolltolerans mot allt som är uppsluppet, jublande eller partiskt, följer sin egen dramaturgi och därför ska vi nu höra vad en säkerhetspolitisk expert från Militärhögskolan har att säga om den hotfulla situation som uppstått i Europas mitt.

Han sitter där i sin uniform och är tämligen lågmäld, men hävdar ändå med viss skärpa att murens fall är början till slutet för Warszawapaktens dominans och Sovjetunionens herravälde över Östeuropa.

Halvt häpen, halvt chockerad utbrister reportern: “Men det är väl ganska farligt, det? Det är ju många som funnit ett slags trygghet och ro i kalla kriget. Man visste ändå var parterna stod. Nu är det slut på det och många känner sig villrådiga.”

Experten: “Ja, många längtar tillbaka till kalla kriget. Men det tycker jag är en idiotisk inställning. För då längtar man tillbaka till en tid då halva Europa hade ofrihet.”

Stämningen blir snart mycket infekterad, och intervjun slutar i osämja.

(Jens Christian Brandt, DN 2024-11-09)

Update Quick and dirty translation of the above:

The Berlin Wall has been down for nearly a day. On the Continent, it’s a carnival with champagne corks flying and victorious citizens of the GDR making V-signs on the Kurfürstendamm.

But Swedish news media, known for it’s zero tolerance of everything wild, crazy, or partisan, is following it’s own internal dramatic logic. We therefore have a foreign affairs specialist from the National Defence Institute who’s going to tell us about the new threatening situation in the heart of Europe.

He’s sitting there in his uniform and is quietly insistent that the fall of the Wall is the beginning of the end of the Warzaw Pact’s and the Soviet Union’s regime in Eastern Europe.

Half surprised, half shocked, the reporter exclaims: “But it’s rather terrible, isn’t it? Many people have found a sort of security and peace in the Cold War. You knew where the players stood. Now that’s to an end, and many feel bewildered.”

The expert: “Yes, many people are yearning for the Cold War. But I think that’s an idiotic feeling, because in that case you’re yearning for a time when half of Europe wasn’t free.”

The ambience soon becomes antagonistic, and the interview ends in acrimony.

In our disregard for the rights of East Germans, we showed the same callous attitude that has bedevilled Swedish realpolitik since the Second World War.

Leo, 12, asked me today about the picture showing people attacking the Wall. He didn’t realise it was ancient history. I felt wholly unable to explain the concept to him. I hope his school does better.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-09, in the alt category.

A visit to the dentist

I have bad teeth. Part of it is simply bad saliva, or at least saliva that’s less hostile to caries bacteria than the norm. Another part is all the fillings I got in Malaysia as the result of that sub-standard saliva.

Luckily, my dentist Jörgen Brandell is an old buddy and former lodger. He’s opened a new clinic, Gubbängstandläkarna, a mere 5 minutes away by car, and rightly sees my teeth as a sort of gold mine.

I’m going to try to cut down on the snacking, and to chew flourine tablets after eating. I’m also going to keep a close eye on Viking’s teeth and try to prevent him from having the same problems when he gets older.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-09, in the alt category.

Maciej Cegłowski

Idle words is a very well written, funny blog.

I think I got this via Dave Winer back in the day.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-09, in the comm » webloggers category.

The Shrub prevails

So it looks like four more years of everyone’s least favourite Yale graduate. I know a lot of people who are shocked and disappointed at the result, but, barring any nasty surprises coming out of Ohio, the outcome looks legitimate.

Americans will have to accept that their country is pretty deeply divided on a lot of issues. The Democratic Party hasn’t really risen to the challenge, while the Republicans have rallied around the leader with a “say no evil, hear no evil, see no evil” attitude. Both sides will have to develop their arguments and politics in the years ahead.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-11-03, in the alt » politics category.

New Nokias

The release of new Nokia models is a big event over at #mobitopia. Today Nokia announced three new models:

• The 6020 looks like a common-sense business communications device. “Just a phone.” Runs Series 40.

• The 7110 is the long-awaited Series 90 phone.

• The 3230 is an “entry-level” Series 60 phone with megapixel camera.

The 3230 especially looks interesting. As Christian Lindholm notes it has the potential for being the hottest selling smartphone ever.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-11-03, in the comm » mobile category.

When you’re a jerk, you’re a jerk

And no amount of legal blustering will change that.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-02, in the alt category.

Take that, RIAA

From the article:

“The Copyright Owners urge a re-examination of the law in the light of what they believe to be proper public policy, expanding exponentially the reach of the doctrines of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement,” the court wrote. “Not only would such a renovation conflict with binding precedent, it would be unwise. Doubtless, taking that step would satisfy the Copyright Owners’ immediate economic aims. However, it would also alter general copyright law in profound ways with unknown ultimate consequences outside the present context.”

Exactly.

However, this means that the RIAA/MPAA will continue to go after individual file traders, instead of trying to cut down the software behind the networks.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-02, in the comp category.

Content-Type soup

So here I am, validating all my pages as XHTML 1.0, when I read these links:

• Content-typing XHTML
• Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful

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?

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-02, in the comp category.

mOlympics.com

Russ has hacked together mOlympics.com with the help of Erik and Matt.

It’s a mobile-ready Olympic news aggregator.

Development time: 1 day. Go Mobitopians!

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-02, in the comm » mobile category.

Nigritude Ultramarine

Amusing

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-02, in the comm » weblog category.

New feed URL

The new URL for a feed for this site is http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog/index.vrss10. Thanks to Matthias for fixing the rss10 plugin!

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-02, in the comm » weblog category.

Ned Batchelder

Great blog, very interesting common-sense writings about the nitty-gritty of writing code. Nice design too.

Thanks Jim for the pointer to this one.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-02, in the comm » webloggers category.

Frank Hecker

Interesting approach to text-based design, using blosxom. I’m definitevely going to look closer to this site as it evolves.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-02, in the comm » webloggers category.

OpenNTP released

This just hit my inbox:

OpenNTPD 3.6 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openntpd.org/ shortly. This is our first formal release.

This is really cool. NTP is the Network Time Protocol, useful for making your computer as accurate as an atomic clock. Essential for logging stuff across the network, detecting net anonomalies, et cetera. But it’s also complex and hard to get right. I’m sure the OpenNTP team have applied their usual mix of code auditing, clear coding, and crypto integration as in OpenBSD and OpenSSH.

The OpenBSD project is fast becoming the OpenTLA project — freeing the world, one protocol at a time.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-11-02, in the comp category.

Mobiles and daylight saving time

So the switch back to normal time was last night, and I’ve reset my wristwatch, the two most visible wall clocks, the alarm clock, and two mobile phones, both Symbian based.

My computers, all 3 of them, are automatically correct (well, except for the Stinkpad, but the CMOS battery is flat on that one).

Why the hell can’t my phones get the correct time from the network, or at the very least keep track of when DST starts and ends?

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-31, in the alt category.

More questions for Bush supporters

Diego has more questions for Bush supporters.

The sanction of torture, “disappearing” of people perceived to be a threat, the skirting of the Geneva conventions and the creation of a shadow prison system in facilities worldwide doesn’t really match the rethoric of the Bush administration about “freedom and the rule of law”, but more importantly, it doesn’t match at all, in my opinion, the principles on which the US was founded.

These questions really articulate a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about too. I suggest everyone reads them.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-10-30, in the alt » politics category.

3.se’s approach to pay-as-you-go

When I bought the Brick I also got a tre.se prepaid card. But it’s not really a prepaid card. Most GSM carries here in Sweden sell you a fixed amount of money in a certificate, which you can call for until the amount is finished.

Tre have a two-tiered model. You can buy talk minutes (also valid for video calls), but these will expire in 30 days, unless you buy more minutes. In this, the card is not really a prepaid, but true pay-as-you-go. Instead of getting billed in the future, you pay in advance for the amount you’ll call in a month.

You can also buy traditional prepaid certificates that are only valid for data traffic (SMS, MMS, packet data, and games and ringtones from Tre’s mobile portal). These credits don’t expire.

As I’m only planning to use the Brick for data, this is a great deal. I already have a GSM phone with a subscription, and don’t want to switch numbers. Now I can keep a close eye on my data traffic without paying for calls that I don’t need.

It’ll be interesting to see how many people take advantage of the faster, cheaper data in Tre’s UMTS network and use their new phones exclusively for data.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-10-28, in the comm » mobile category.

Enter the brick

Tre.se, the Swedish division of the Hutchinson-Whampoa UMTS consortium, are launching pay-as-you-go cards, and as a promotion I could buy a Motorola A925 + pre-paid card for 750 SEK, which is like, cheap. Especially as they throw in a Bluetooth headset. The fact that you get 2 batteries too is not a plus, it just means that the phone’s battery life is like the half-life of some exotic particle.

Anyway, the phone is now known in the Erikson household as the Brick, because it’s a huge phone, even compared to the none-too-svelte Taco. The difference is no more than a centimetre each way, but that extra centimetre makes the difference between a phone that fits in your pocket and one that threatens to drag your pants down your ankles.

Here’s a picture comparing the two phones:

But hey! It’s a UIQ phone for about $100, and that’s cool.

Tre don’t have a walled garden in the same way as Three.co.uk, you can install apps on the phone and surf around. I grabbed Quirc (found via Ewan’s excellent guide to UIQ freeware) and was soon riding the subway, chatting in #mobitopia with both a S60 device (the Taco) and a UIQ (the Brick). I was in nerd nirvana.

But, there are issues.

Let’s take the pros first:

• Symbian UIQ.

• Bluetooth, IR, USB interface.

• camera (this may not seem like a big deal, but unlike the rest of the human race, I didn’t have a cameraphone).

And then there’s some cons:

• The pen interface sucks. I agree with Russ, you should be able to use a phone one-handed. And if you think this conflicts with the first item in the pro list, bite me.

• The handwriting interface is hard for me to use. I’m used to Graffiti on the Palm, and felt that hard to use, but this will take some taking used to. But the predictive feature seems to help.

• There aren’t as many cool features as on the Sony-Ericsson P{8,9}00, like the jogwheel.

I’ll be spending some more time with phone, strictly for data. I can’t see myself carrying this around as my primary phone. But as a fast data terminal, it has possibilities.

Random tips

• You change the PIN code in the phone application, not in some central place in the operating system. Maybe pretty simple, but there’s no mention of it in the manual.

• Generally, the manual from 3 sucks. There’s no mention of the handwriting system, for example.

• Quirc started crashing randomly, so I emailed the author. He suggested deleting the P-java specific file C:\System\libs\quirc.dll, which seems to have solved the problem.

• Only for users of Tre.se’s PAYG card: the tariffs are confusing. This article attempts to explain (in Swedish).

Posted on Thursday, 2024-10-28, in the comm » mobile category.

Any takers?

Diego has some questions for Bush supporters.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-10-27, in the alt » politics category.

The new isolationism

The incumbent president has denied the rest of the world access to his official website www.georgewbush.com. Putative Republicans in lands not yet conquered in the war against terrorism thus cannot find more information on their future Leader.

However, his minions forgot to include the HTTPS port in the block. So the curious can visit https://georgewbush.com/ instead, secure in the knowledge that their perusal will be unnoted by Echelon and other agents of the New World Order.

Tell him Hi! from me.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-10-27, in the alt » politics category.

Swedish media not impartial in US election

I catched the beginning of a segment in Swedish Radio’s P1 this morning where Johan Norberg, a “liberal” debater debater (this is translated as a right-winger in Swedish terms), said that Swedish media was overwhelmingly pro-Kerry.

This is true. Reading Swedish newspapers and following Swedish ether media would have one believe that George W. Bush was some kind of Svengali, holding the US and the world hostage through sheer force of will and some kind of evil emanation.

I don’t particularly like Dubya, but still, he has the support of half of the population that bothers to vote, and that has to count for something. But this fact is largely ignored in Sweden. Only yesterday, a large interview was published in DN with a nurse living in New York state. She was a Kerry supporter. No sh*t. Why are there no interviews with Texan doctors or Florida businesswomen? Because they might be Bush supporters, and these people simply do not exist in Swedish media.

Anyway, the person debating Norberg, Cecilia Uddén, has been removed from the coverage of the election. Because she came out and said the truth, that Swedish radio is not impartial in the coverage of this election.

Whatever one feels about George W. Bush, we deserve better better reporting.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-10-27, in the alt » politics category.

Satanists in the navy

Wow. The Royal Navy has recognised Satanism as a religion its sailors can practise. The days of “rum, sodomy, and the lash” are long gone — or are they coming back?

Predictably, the Tories (in the guise of Anne Widdecombe) are fuming. “Let’s hope this doesn’t spread” she says.

Well, if I were an aspiring Satanist, the fact the fuddy-duddy Royal Navy thinks my religion is legit would be a major turn-off. What will the angst-ridden youth of today use to shock society next?

(via Boing Boing.)

Posted on Monday, 2024-10-25, in the alt category.

A mystery explained

I found out today why US elections are held on a Tuesday.

In Sweden, elections are always on a Sunday. I felt that the US was much more observant of the day of rest than Sweden, so that’s why Sunday was ruled out. But the additional historical titbits are interesting.

Posted on Monday, 2024-10-25, in the alt » politics category.

Isn’t it ironic…

that Britney Spears of all people has released an album called My Prerogative?

Does anyone who listens to her music know what that word means?

Can they even pronounce it?

Update I’ve since been informed that it’s a cover of a Bobby Brown song. But that merely thickens the plot. Does he know what the word means?

Posted on Monday, 2024-10-25, in the alt category.

Shiver me timbers

The Pirate Wars by Peter Earle.

A well-written, comprehensive history of piracy.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-24, in the books » read category.

Gmail backup gotchas

Thanks to Rafe I have a shell account on symbiandiaries.com from where I host this blog.

I hacked up a quick script that tar-gzips my blog, the plugins dir, and some other files and mails the resulting file in an attachement to my Gmail account. After about a month, I delete backups that are too old.

This presented no problems, as the file was usually under 700 kB. Being a belt-and-braces kind of guy, I keep a copy of the file on the symbiandiaries.com account.

Today I received a warning mail from the system warning me that the account was nearing it’s quota limit. I quickly discovered a number of 35 MB files in the backup directory. I had backed up the movies from the cruise two weeks ago.

I fixed this via the --exclude directive to GNU tar, deleted the offending files in my account, then logged into Google to check how they were affecting my 1 GB quota there.

They weren’t affecting it at all. They weren’t there.

Obviously, Gmail blocks mails with attachments larger than a certain amount. I can’t argue with that, it’s their system, and sending big attachments via SMTP is evil. But it lulled me into a false sense of security, because for nearly a week, I had no backup of this blog.

The lesson here is don’t try to use a system for something it’s not designed to handle. I’ll continue mailing my backups to gmail, but I’ll be watching them carefully for size from now on.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-10-23, in the comp category.

October cruise

The alumni gathering went to sea this weekend when we were invited onto Johan’s 32-footer based in Värmdö. We set off into a chill (around 10C) but sunny archipelago and set course for Sandhamn. The crew was Johan as captain, David and Calle as able seamen, and Jonas and yours truly as ballast.

After one and a half hours leisurly cruise we docked at Sandhamn and had lunch in the cockpit. After a coffee in the yacht club bar Jonas left us to go back to town, while the rest of the gang headed east, out to open sea.

The wind being more or less aft, we decided to hoist the spinnaker. This bumped our speed up to around 6 knots, but when we turned up into the wind to make the return leg to our planned overnight anchorage we had to take it in.

The route to the west was strewn with those reefs and boulders that make the Stockholm archipelago such an interesting place to sail in, but we managed by dint of having 3 lookouts and a GPS. With the sun setting we thought of checking the coming weather, which of course we did by visiting SHMI with a mobile phone. Based on this information we decided to lie in a bay facing south, as the wind was going to be northerly.

After some backing and filling we managed to find an anchorage. Calle made the first course, asparagus wrapped in proscuitto with mozarella. After we’d eaten this, Johan and David ascended a steep cliff with the help of a rope to barbecue the steaks. We ate them with rice and a sallad of ruccola and tomatoes. The dessert was pear halves with dark chocolate and some nice cheeses.

Replete with food and three bottles of wine, there wasn’t much else to do except go to bed. Despite the cold, we slept well.

Morning was early, cold, and full of dishes. But we managed to get underway quite soon and made good time make to the harbour.

All in all a very nice experience. Maybe a yearly tradition in the future?

Update 2024-10-18: pics are online at Mr.X.

• A short QuickTime movie.
• A longer time-lapse movie taken from Calle’s camera taped, Ulysses-like, to the mast.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-10-23, in the alt category.

Neal Stephenson interview

A Slashdot interview with Neal Stephenson. Very funny.

I’m guessing Stephenson is the only best selling author on the planet that not only uses emacs and TeX but actually programs in emacs lisp.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-10-23, in the books category.

Used iPod

Seen in a Usenet .sig:

 -- 
 For Sale: Apple iPod, 15 GB model, lightly used, 167 songs loaded.
 The RIAA says it's worth about $25 million.
 I'll let it go for $5 million, plus shipping.

Posted on Friday, 2024-10-22, in the comp category.

No to iTunes

I tried out iTunes (on Win32) today, as I’m interested in adaptive playlists (a thing I’ve been waiting for a long time) and tracking what I listen to when. But a number of things made me go back to Winamp.

• No ogg support.

• No “always-on-top” for the miniplayer.

• Ctrl-M to switch sizes didn’t always work.

• No obvious way to send a file to a remote host containing info on the song currently playing.

• Totally random ordering of songs for some albums. Despite having id3 tags in order and track numbers in the filenames, the order was scrambled.

• Totally confusing id3 integration — you have to choose the precise version from a dropdown containing +6 entries. Granted, this may be because the id3 seems totally fscked, but still…

On the plus side, clean interface, and kudos for being able to remove all mentions of the ITMS.

I think I can gather stats on playing habits with the same Winamp plugin I use to post “now playing” info. Adaptive playlists will have to wait a bit.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-10-21, in the comp category.

Happy Birthday Leo!

Leo is 12 today. Congratulations!

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-10-20, in the alt category.

Double century

Wow, somewhere along the line I passed 200 posts. This will be the 207th.

There’s the drivel-generating power of emacs for ya.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-10-20, in the scrivener category.

Out of sorts

Sigh, it’s that time of year again. Autumn is segueing into winter, and the luminous light of the early period has turned into the grey, gloomy ambience of the late.

Driving home is a chore, there’s not enough contrast between light and dark to distinguish pedestrians and bicyclists, who all seem to think that dressing like a ninja is de rigeur. The office’s lighting scheme is revealed as the flashy fashion-driven abortion that it is, and I’m spending more and more time squinting at a screen that’s too bright for the surrounding room.

The air seems drenched with cold, suspended water. The day starts and ends in gloaming.

Oh well, got to try to find the happy place for Leo’s birthday tomorrow. In a while we’ll get real winter, and leave this half-measure behind us.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-10-19, in the alt category.

Saving Podcast bandwidth

Podcasting is all the rage, but what the early adopters are finding out is that it sucks bandwidth. To save this, I propose the following components:

• a BitTorrent tracker site dedicated to Podcasts.

• RSS feeds for these ‘casts.

• A RSS reader client that takes the .torrent files as enclosures, and hands them over to a BT client for download.

Ta-da! At least some of the bandwidth is shared among the downloaders.

Podcasts may be the first mainstream legal application for BT.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-17, in the comm » weblog category.

Raymond Chandler goes cyberpunk

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan.

A classic noir story updated with cyberpunkish themes. Full of sex and gore. Very entertaining.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-10-16, in the books » read category.

Brilliant plan

Truly great plan.

(Via Frank).

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-10-12, in the alt category.

RAF vs USAAF: two views of aerial combat in WWII

Damn Good Show by Derek Robinson
Goodbye Mickey Mouse by Len Deighton

Two very different books about the same period of time: the bomber war against Germany in World War 2.

In Damn Good Show, Derek Robinson writes about bombers, having written about fighters in Goshawk Squadron and A Good Clean Fight.. He brings to the story his trademark humour and nihilism. This time though, he doesn’t kill off all his characters by the end, instead leaving a little ray of hope that some might come through the horrors of war and make a life on the other side.

Along the way, he debunks many myths about the wartime RAF, but doesn’t subtract anything from the extraordinary courage that it took to bomb an enemy country in pitch-black, freezing planes.

Deighton’s book is much more traditional view — the cold, squalor, and fear experienced by the American pilots protecting the bombers in P-51:s is present, but somehow he doesn’t convey as much realism as Robinson. The love story, although detailed, is banal. The characters are from central casting — the brainy, handsome Eastener, the brash uncultured guy from New Mexico, the beautiful English girl who loves them both. Deighton fleshes them out, but they still look and feel like cardboard.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-10, in the books » read category.

the italian job

Love and War in the Appenines by Erik Newby.

Inspired by the Colditz book I re-read this classic of escape literature.

Of course, this being Newby, it is also very funny.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-10, in the books » read category.

Not a whole lotta bloggin’ goin’ on

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.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-10, in the comm » weblog category.

Blogging hiatus

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.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-10, in the comm » weblog category.

Bring on the spam!

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.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-10, in the comp category.

Junilistan wins big

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.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-10, in the alt » politics category.

Hell no, I won’t vote

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.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-10, in the alt » politics category.

another gathering of the faithful

Jonas hosted the next installment of our semi-regular alumni gathering. This time, he had a digital camera and was not afraid to use it.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-10, in the alt category.

Audio blogs redux

As Matt said, what if audio blogs are the Next Great Thing, and we curmudgeons missed it? So as to be able to snidely comment on this phenomenon from a position of knowledge, I pulled down yesterdays Daily Source Code by Adam Curry, and put it on the taco, my trusty N-Gage.

OK, step one was accomplished, and I didn’t need those near-obligatory accessories, a $300 iPod and a $1,500 Mac. That’s nice, because I can’t afford either.

I started listening on my way home (5 minute walk, 35 minute subway ride, 7 minute walk). The taco is a nice enough mp3-player, but it lacks a fast-forward feature. I pressed pause to avoid looking like a zombie and read a book instead, but when I tried resuming, it started from the beginning. Obviously, an iPod would handle this better, as would any dedicated mp3 player.

Adam is involved in iPodder.org which he intends to turn into a centre for podcasting. Well, that’s all well and good, but if he wants creating and listening to podcasts to become mainstream, he’d better get a better, less iPod-specific name. Now you get the impression that it’s only for Mac + iPod users. Also, Apple’s lawyers may have some things to say to him.

The post itself was entertaining, I’ll say that. It sure beats trying to find new music to listen to, and fills a niche that FM radio perhaps can’t fill. But still, the Net is about TEXT, goddammit. Audio is all well and good for music and entertainment, but for information, the bandwidth is wasted. I may be able to read articles and blog posts “interstitially” at work, filling those blank pauses when I task-switch from one issue to another, but I can’t multitask enough to listen to speech.

Also, the barriers to entry are pretty high, both for producers and consumers. A blog poster needs to be able to handle a web form and a keyboard. An audioblogger needs mics, audio software, BANDWIDTH, and audio nous, not too widely available. Lots more talented writers than talented radio artists, but that may change as podcasting becomes more popular.

Consumers need: a fast net connection, an mp3-player, a modern computer, an intimate knowledge of RSS (version 2.0, no less), and weird and wonderful “iPodder” software, which, despite it’s name, is not tied to an iPod. Go figure.

Who’s the audience? The web is available to perhaps 20% percent of the planet’s population. Of this percentage, maybe 15% wander outside MSN et al. Of these, 10% read blogs. Perhaps 5% of these listen to podcasts. But I bet 99% of these are white, and male, and live in the US and Western Europe.

However, for all its flaws, audio blogging is much much better than that next scourge, videoblogging. That will be scary. Until then, I’ll stick to text, thank you very much.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-10-06, in the comm » weblog category.

Hard boiling eggs in vacuum

Redemption Ark by Alistair Reynolds.

The second part of the Inhibitor trilogy. Nice enough read. Reynolds can’t do love scenes, or feelings at all for that matter, but makes up for it in plot and sense-of-wonder.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-10-06, in the books » read category.

No Piker

For some reason (probably because I feel an itch to hack) I was thinking about Plan 9 today. So it seemed an omen that /. had a call for questions for Rob Pike, co-creator of Unix and Plan 9.

I read some of the links in the article, and this pessimistic view left me thinking. Pike’s point is that (academic) software research no longer matters. We’re in a sterile wasteland of Windows, Linux, and the Web. No new ideas are being explored.

Well, that’s fine as far as it goes, but a meme that’s brewing is the coming dominance of mobile devices and content — quite different from desktop or server computing.

These points from the article show some possible fields for research:

Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s. (In some ways, it’s been getting worse; today the screen is covered with confusing little pictures.) Surely there are other possibilities. (Linux’s interface isn’t even as good as Windows!)

Ties in nicely with this post.

There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts.

Again relevant in the mobile space.

The future is distributed computation, but the language community has done very little to address that possibility.

Who knows? Mobiles are getting more and more powerful. GPS, encryption need processing.

The Web has dominated how systems present and use information: the model is forced interaction; the user must go get it. Let’s go back to having the data come to the user instead.

Also very relevant from a user perspective. Data must come to you, when and where you want it, with a minimum of fuss.

Will academia pick up the thrown gauntlet? Lets hope someone does.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-10-05, in the comp category.

Mobile user interface thoughts

Frank and Russell have pointed out some problems with the user interface (UI) on smartphones. Specifically, the Series 60 OS used in most smartphones today.

Background

For the purpose of this post, I define “smartphone” as a mobile phone that has an OS that can accommodate non-trivial extra applications. Examples of smartphones are the Nokia 6600, Siemens SX1 (Series 60), Sony Ericsson P900 (UIQ), Treo 600 (PalmSource), Orange SPV C500 (MS Mobile). “Phone” on this context is a traditional mobile phone. Examples are Sony Ericsson T610, Nokia 6620, Samsung E700.

What does the interface need to handle?

Phones have some core applications. Central ones are making and taking calls, handling addresses, and messaging (SMS, email, IM protocols). Cameras probably also fall into this category. Less central areas are Web browsing, calendars, etc.

Ideally, all phone functions should be accessible using the keypad one-handed. This means using the thumb of one hand. The Sony Ericsson smartphones use a jog wheel under the index finger of the dominant hand (the right one). Relying on this feature for accessing functions excludes all those who prefer to use their left hand.

An alternative to shoe-horning everything into “thumb-mode” is a two-tiered approach. Basic functions are accesses using a keypad, but an auxiliary keypad or stylus+touchscreen combo is used for more advanced features. But where to draw the line between basic and advanced?

I have had the misfortune to configure email on both a recent Sony Ericsson and a Nokia. Tapping in multiple server names without the benefit of copy and paste sucks. A PC-based app would help here. Another solution is a web interface that sends a SMS with the configuration.

But this begs the question: why do I have to do this? Why can’t I buy a phone where the data connections Just Work? Why is MMS and GPRS settings different? Why do I, as a consumer, have to care about whether my phone manufacturer and my service provider has their act together?

Alternatives

Speech recognition holds some promise, but will remain a complement to the keypad.

How about gestural interfaces? I did a bit of research about applications of gestural interfaces in the course of writing my graduate thesis. (For the morbidly interested, you can download it here). An example is scrolling through an image gallery by tilting the phone from side to side. Another is answering a call simply by picking up the phone. My guess is that inertial interfaces will be on par with speech interfaces; a complement to a primary interface which will still be keyboard + screen.

However, the keypad is often woefully underutilised. Usually there’s some buttons that are dedicated to navigation, or a joypad. The large 3x5 grid of numerals are used for inputting numbers and text. How about using the ‘3’ and ‘9’ as PageUp and PageDown buttons when browsing sites?

Who will be the mobile Apple?

Who will usher in the Mac Age for mobile phones? Not Apple, they can’t cover the mobile space (they outsourced the development of the iPod). Maybe Nokia can rise to the challenge. Another contender is Sony Ericsson, with the Japanese half in charge of making lots of tiny devices easy to handle. Another contender is Microsoft, if they’re serious about taking the mobile space to the next level, and not just treat it as an adjunct to the desktop space.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-10-05, in the comm » mobile category.

Bad air

I’m feeling unusually stupid right now, and I’m not alone. The fact is that the ventilation in our building sucks. It’s a converted turbine hall, very dramatic, but there’s no provision for providing fresh air to everyone who works here. Expedients of opening windows simply lead to draughts of Force 10 intensity and a rapid drop of the ambient temperature to Arctic levels.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-10-05, in the alt category.

Debian revisited

I need some way to backup the ailing windows box upstairs, whihc is suffering from an advanced form of WinXP palsy. So I grabbed an old 266Mhz box from the closet, installed a bigger disk, downloaded the sarge iso via Bittorrent and installed Debian for the first time in 2 years.

I’m using OpenBSD for the most part these days, but I couldn’t be bothered to find diskettes and boot from them, then install via the network. So I went the easy route and installed Linux instead.

Debian is still hard to understand. In some ways it’s more limited than OpenBSD — you can’t say that your box will get its network configurations from DHCP if you’re not hooked up to a network already, and the partition program is hard to fathom. The replacement for the infamous dselect, aptitude, is really just more of the same, but a bit less counter-intuitive.

But in general, I know my way around Debian well enough to get going. Now I have to decide whether just to copy everything in the “Documents and Settings” subdirectories over via FTP, or to trust the Migration wizard in Windows.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-10-03, in the comp category.

“Comrades! Embrace the dialectics of the post-scarcity economy, or be uploaded!”

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross.

An entertaining if uneven romp through a universe where nanotech disrupts post-Tsarist colony worlds and where an uploaded civilisation does all it can do to prevent entities from changing the past, thus editing them out of history.

A big part of the book (a bit too long) is a hilarious sendup of the kind of neo-Napolonic space navies as described by David Weber in the Honor Harrington series.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-09-28, in the books » read category.

More war

Blood, Tears and Folly: an objective look at World War II by Len Deighton.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. Deighton’s Goodbye Mickey Mouse didn’t impress me, but this is a nice “amateur” history of WWII. Contains nice backgrounds to the different conflicts, with and emphasis on the tech aspects of the war.

I’ve really read too much about the Second World War. The problem is that the war’s status (in the US at least) as “the last good war”, together with the “Band of Brothers” aesthetics and the multitude of video games set there almost make the whole thing like a comic book. Despite the blood and guts falling out, the war is still like those 50’s and 60’s comics where heroic Brits and Yanks fight against Krauts and Yaps.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-09-26, in the books » read category.

Text, text, beautiful text

news.readfreenews.net is back up! Time to catch up on those 12,984 articles in alt.sysadmin.recovery…

Posted on Friday, 2024-09-24, in the comm category.

Dealing with comment spam

Let’s face it: it’s a war we can’t win. But in the meantime, here’s how I handle the (modest, for now) amounts of comment spam on my site.

I’ve set up wbnotify to mail me when I get a comment. When spam arrives, it’s usually consistent in the form of included URLs, i.e. the same link is posted more or less at the same time.

I got a script called blog-grep.pl from somewhere (if someone recognises this as their handiwork, please contact me so that I can attribute this correctly). This script makes it very easy to search your writeback files for the offending string, and to optionally delete them.

This solution is dependent on you having command-line access to the writebacks themselves, but I suppose it can be used “offline” if you download the files via FTP and run the script locally.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-09-22, in the scrivener category.

Moved (again)

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.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-09-21, in the comm » weblog category.

You say “moblog”, I say “mo-blog”

Dave Winer has, in his inimitable way, defined moblogging for the rest of us. Oh, Scoble helped out too.

The definition?

Moblogging is any activity that occurs away from your normal blog-writing place whose purpose is to create content for your blog.

Hmm.

This is a bit too inclusive, if you ask me. For example, this blog is hosted on a server in the States somewhere (even Rafe, the guy generously donating space and server resources, isn’t sure where — ain’t outsourcing great?). I update it via tramp on emacs, running under screen on a machine in the server closet at work. I just fire up Putty at work, or on the Toshiba in the kitchen, or the Thinkpad while waiting for Viking to sleep, or on the Dell upstairs, or my dad’s computer at his place… So I’m basically moblogging all the time according to Winer/Scoble.

FWIW, others agree with me and have drawn the ire of the man himself. He was just being lighthearted, he says now. Just trying to start a discussion.

Far from me to define moblogging, but it seems to me as futile exercise. If I can blog from my mobile phone, I will (and I have); if I can blog from an internet cafe in Katmandu (or Norrtälje), I will; if I am incarcerated with only a i386 running Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock, I’ll blog with that.

In time, the artificial divide between “blogging” and “moblogging” will disappear. Only a few diehards will consider their

desk, fully supported by [their] normal high-speed net connection, laptop, multi-gigabyte external hard disk, second monitor, USB hub, mouse, etc etc.

as a “normal blog-writing place”. For the rest of us, the world will be that place.

Update I headed over to Scoble just to see that the link worked, and it turns out he’s dumped some guy’s feed, because he was fooled by a hoax. Well, so was Rich, and he admits it. Yet he’s “dumped”. Scoble “can’t trust what goes on his blog anymore”.

Wow. Talk about taking lessons from the master. No wonder they’re defining terms for the edification of the rest of us.

Posted on Monday, 2024-09-20, in the comm » mobile category.

Eye candy

Thanks to Frank for tipping me off to Macdesktops.com. I now have a classic nerd desktop consisting of a pair of colliding galaxies.

Posted on Monday, 2024-09-20, in the comp category.

Berlin 1936 — Beijing 2008?

The Olympics in Beijing 2008 will present a golden opportunity for the Chinese leadership to demonstrate the resurgent power of China. Expect the regime to pull out all the stops in the medal race, with Chinese athletes competing not just in the traditional events — swimming, acrobatics, table-tennis — but in the “real Olympics”: athletics.

Also expect ruthless crackdowns on any people or organizations that might try to harness this opportunity to challenge the leadership: Tibetan separatists, Falun-Gong, Muslim separatists in Western China…

Posted on Monday, 2024-09-20, in the alt category.

Yet another reason to visit London

The AAS pub meet! Where you can win a brand new, yet-to-be-released Nokia Communicator 9500!!

How the hell can I persuade the company to send me to London on the 4th October? I could plead the sorry state of the London branch’s PCs, but that would mean I would be expected to fix them, and there’s not enough time for that…

Posted on Thursday, 2024-09-16, in the comm » mobile category.

Disabled comments

My sanguine views about dealing with comment spam have proved to be too rosy. I’m hit bad by idiots posting spam. So I’ve taken comments offline until I can find an effective way of dealing with this shit.

Summary of the state of play so far.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-09-15, in the scrivener category.

N-Gage power tips

Steve Litchfield posts some tips for the serious taco user.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-09-15, in the comm » mobile category.

Google juice

Number 1 for “gustaf erikson”.

Number 6 for gustaf.

Posted on Monday, 2024-09-13, in the comm » weblog category.

Making it to the ships

The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod (re-read).

Fscking brilliant. ‘Nuff said.

Posted on Monday, 2024-09-13, in the books » read category.

Video games

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

Compulsively readable, like everything Gibson has written. But the beginning is much better than the end, which feels contrived and flat.

Like Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, this book shows that good SF is really about our own time.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-09-11, in the books » read category.

Dead blog walking

Blogs are like tamagotchis — a fitting metaphor. Incidentally, is our society in deep trouble when tamagotchis are the basis for new metaphors?

Unfortunately, we the Mobitopians have been neglecting our virtual pet. The traffic to the main page is down, and I myself find I’ve bookmarked the IRC links rather than the front page. Of course, I hang out in the channel all the time, having great fun, but we don’t communicate that fun and insight and commentary to visitors to the site.

A quick fix would be to move the IRC links to the front page, perhaps adding a moderation system so that not just anything gets posted. Also, being able to comment on the links would create a kind of Ur-blog (as in the original incarnation, posting interesting URLs), but with multiple commentators.

A way of submitting longer bits of IRC commentary would be nice too, so that visitors get a feel for the vibe of the channel.

Of course, the longer opinion pieces would remain, but they would be relegated from the front page.

Posted on Friday, 2024-09-10, in the comm » weblog category.

The stars are full of Reds

The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod (re-read).

Continuing my MacLeod jag. This is also not as good The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal, but as a plausible utopia, it kinda works.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-09-09, in the books » read category.

Long weekend

As Viking has started at a new kindergarten, I spent Thursday and Friday with him on inskolning.

On Saturday I travelled north to Djursholm to go to a kräftskiva at David’s parents place, he being the last of the gang to reach the arbitrary age of 30 (me, I’m counting my age in hex from now on…). A very nice time was had by all, especially considering that a Swedish crayfish party is where more alcohol is consumed per calorie food eaten anywhere outside Siberia. Pics can be seen here.

A nice surprise was that Martin and Ulrika have named their firstborn Frans Gustav, which is my first names. Their naming him that was entirely coincidental, though.

Sunday was spent nursing a light hangover, picking up fallen apples, and going to Margaretaparken in Enskede to hang out with Niclas, Lina, Teodor, and Pelle. Nice to see Viking and Teodor getting along so well.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-09-05, in the alt category.

Coast to coast in ‘66

Flight of Passage by Rinker Buck.

A well-written, poignant memoir about two boys and their flight from New Jersey to California, both honouring and removing themselves from their difficult father.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-09-05, in the books » read category.

Shit and Windows 98

Guess which is more fun to work with?.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-09-01, in the comp category.

More on audio blogs

The phenomenon of pointless audio blogs shows no sign of going away. The reaction has set in, however. Hear the manifesto here, or read it here.

I’d be tempted to call audio posts the ultimate ego-stroking, but that’s already been appropriated by weblogging itself…

(via Mark.)

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-09-01, in the comm » weblog category.

Spam with attitude

The usual spam arrives, sneaking past bogofilter with a headline advertising the usual stuff (I don’t even know what C1alis is). On a whim I open it. (To set the stage, I should mention I use gnus, a mail and newsreader for emacs that is, of course, text based).

The spam consists, in its visible entirity, of the following:

Your mailer do not support HTML messages. Switch to a better mailer.

Uhm, I’m pretty happy with my present “mailer”, thanks.

Posted on Friday, 2024-08-27, in the comm category.

The triumphant return of Sony Ericsson

A few years ago, Ericsson was losing it in the mobile handset space.

The phones it produced were technically excellent, but lacked the styling and ease of use of Nokia’s handsets. Finally Ericsson faced it’s failings and teamed up with Sony to form Sony Ericsson.

One of the first phones was the T68, later upgraded to the T68i. This phone was criticised for being slow, but had excellent Bluetooth support and quickly became a popular business choice. It also had a rudimentary email client.

Early last year, S-E released the T610. This trend-setting cameraphone set the stage for the triumphant return of Sony Ericsson. The combination of camera, large colour screen, snappy styling, email, and polyphonic ringtones made this a very popular phone choice. In Sweden, where I live, it’s not unusual to see 12-year olds with T610s.

The T610 was followed by the Z600, the T630, and now the K700, all upgrading the basic concept. Meanwhile, Nokia has stumbled, arguably missing the cameraphone trend and perhaps pushing the smartphone concept a little too hard.

At my workplace, a medium-sized tech company in Stockholm, the T610 “family” of phones is predominant. As a support engineer, I can attest that it fits our profile very well. The email client especially is appreciated by our sales force. And the ability to sync contacts and calender with MS Outlook is also a plus. Bluetooth support is excellent, and infra-red connectivity is included as a matter of course. The UI is colourful and stylish, although texting and text input is still slow.

For us, and for many other people, the latest S-E phones are “smart enough”. The additional bulk and complexity of Nokia’s Symbian smartphones can’t compete with S-E sleek styling.

Smartphones will remain a niche product for a few more years, but eventually, mid-level phones from S-E and others will gradually approach their functionality from below.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-08-26, in the comm » mobile category.

The dark century

Brev från nollpunkten by Peter Englund.

A collection of essays about the defining moments of the last century: the First World War, the Great Terror, the Holocaust, the Allied bombings of Germany and Japan, and the atomic bomb over Nagasaki.

Also contains an essay about the eery similarities of Nazi and Stalinist architecture.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-08-26, in the books » read category.

On tea

I found a link to George Orwell’s essay on the perfect cup of tea on Libby’s blog.

Reading the essay reminded me of why I drink coffee nearly exclusively nowadays. I don’t care much about how my coffee is made — hot, strong, and with milk, but otherwise I could care less about how it’s made. My taste in tea, on the other hand, is so outré, so outisde teh bounds of aceeptable tea-drinking behaviour, that I can only prepare and enjoy a cup of tea that I’ve made myself, in a peculiar manner.

I make tea like this: I put a pinch of Lapsang Souchong in a big cup. Then I pour boiling water in the cup. I wait a bit. Then I add milk.

The part about the tea and the water mixing without a strainer or a bag seems to freak people out most, although it’s endorsed by Orwell (in a kettle, but nonetheless…). In fact, I only break a few of his “rules” for a nice cup of tea.

I was reminded of all this when we woke up this morning without coffee grounds, and had to make do with instant. Also, something in the neighborhood smells exactly like Lapsang. So I’ve bought a packet of Twinings Lapsang for the first time in ages. Maybe I can kick to coffee habit, at least at home.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-08-25, in the alt category.

Kudos for share

clevercactus share, the brainchild of Mobitopian Diego Doval, has won the “Site of the Month” award by the Swedish magazine InternetWorld.

A scan of the article is available here.

Quick and dirty translation:

Share files with your buddies

Brand new site Clevercactus Share combines two of the hottest trends right now — file sharing and buddy networks — in one package. Imagine an Orkut or Friendster with file sharing, or Kazaa with buddy features.

After registration, you download a client (available for all platforms) and start inviting friends and acquaintances to a private file-sharing network. The point is that you only share files with people you know, thereby keeping pirate hunters and other unwelcome elements away. Additionally, all transactions are encrypted. In the client, you can decide who gets to download what, and you can also chat with your contacts. You can also categorise your contacts as “Friends”, “Family”, or “Co-workers” and grant different permissions for each category.

Clevercactus Share is still in beta, and there are some issues with it, but the concept is so insanely well-timed that we can only applaud.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-08-24, in the alt category.

A great weekend for Sweden

Wow! Three gold medals in two days:

• Karolina Klüft wins the heptathlon

• Stefan Holm wins the men’s high jump

• Christian Olsson wins the men’s triple jump

Go Sweden!

Posted on Monday, 2024-08-23, in the alt » athens2024 category.

Article from Örnsköldsviks Allehanda (in Swedish).

I especially like the way Agero is mentioned.

File from David, put here for all those TT/TU and ExAgero types out there.

Posted on Friday, 2024-08-20, in the alt category.

Wedding pictures

More than one and a half years late, here are some pictures from our wedding.

In our defence, we have had the pics since two weeks after the event, but now, thanks to Terje, they’re online.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-08-19, in the alt category.

Idiots

This so-called “linking policy” says that you can only link to the athens2024 site if you write (by snail-mail) and ask permission first.

Here’s some more random linkage, without permission.

• Medals
• FAQ
• Youth 2024

Oh, and Athens 2024? My cheque for your Google-juice is in the mail.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-08-18, in the alt » athens2024 category.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-08-18, in the alt » athens2024 category.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-08-17, in the alt category.

“The fate of this universe — and others! — is at stake!”

(Title shamelessly stolen from P.M. Agapow’s review of a different novel.)

Space opera in the Iain M. Banks mould, with bold sweeping vistas and more or less dysfunctional characters. Unlike Banks, this is hard SF, which means that the speed of light is still an absolute limit. Other than this, anything goes.

Reading this prompted me to re-read Revelation Space, the first novel set in this universe, and after just a few pages I can say that this novel is not up to the standards set by that one. Despite this, it is an entertaining read and more well written than most.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-08-17, in the books » read category.

Friday the 13th

I don’t suffer from triskaidekaphobia, but today I’m having doubts.

• I have the beginning of a cold, with headaches.
• It’s raining after a week of fine weather — and we had washing out.
• Our phones at work stop working.
• A key component of our site has stopped working, and the only one who can fix it is away.
• The coffee machine is broken.
• The database reports SIGSEGV.
• The mailserver reports “bus error” when you grep.

I’m wondering whether it’s a good idea to visit Petter on Åland today.

Update: the mailserver did in fact crash, but I was on my way by then…

Posted on Monday, 2024-08-16, in the alt category.

Amateur relics

You don’t have to be an amateur to compete in the Olympics anymore, but some restrictions remain. According to a radio show this evening, athletes can’t write a column or act as commentators for money.

Fair enough you might say. But the athlete who told us this is Stefan Holm, a high jumper competing on the Swedish team. He has an active home page/blog, which also has a lot of links to sponsors. If he wins a medal and writes about it in his own words, is he making money then? Could he be disqualified for that post?

No one knows. Understandably, athletes are reluctant to test the IOC on this matter. But with blogging gathering traction everywhere, someone, somewhere will post a ecstatic entry on his or her blog. Let’s hope it doesn’t cost them their medal.

Posted on Friday, 2024-08-13, in the alt » athens2024 category.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-08-10, in the comm » mobile category.

The Anti-Rhodes

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux.

This is the best book I’ve read in a long time. Partly because of the great writing, partly because my own background growing up in Kenya, and partly for the fact that Theroux has mellowed quite a bit. I remember his alter-ego in My Secret History as a prick, which is perhaps ungenerous as that book is a novel. His previous travel books have also left a sour taste in my mouth, but here he’s much more generous to the people he meets.

The chapter on Kenya is depressing, as my memories of childhood there are happy, and I could see a bit of what he describes when we went back some years ago.

Two books have been added to my reading list after this chapter:

• Graham Hancock, The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business
• Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity

A point Theroux makes when visiting Malawi, where he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Sixties, is that only Africans can help Africa. The vast influx of foreign aid and charity hasn’t helped much. I’m sure that Africa’s problems are not due to aid and charity — the effects of colonialism and unfair trade practices by the rich world are much bigger factors — but aid hasn’t helped.

Theroux paints a bleak picture of a continent that just can’t be able to get its act together. He offers no solutions, only observations. But those are made with such clarity that the reader is left with the feeling that things will get better, one day.

PS Cecil Rhodes dreamt of an railway from the Cape to Cairo. Theroux has no such dreams, and he travels in the other direction.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-08-08, in the books » read category.

Defragmenting madness

The desktop upstairs won’t start normally, and I’ve got a hunch that the hard drive is too fragmented. This is propably not the case, but Windows encourages the feeling that your system is getting crufty and needs to be cleaned. (Unlike Unices, which just putter along, maturing like fine wines:

[ ger@openbsd: ~ ]% uptime
 9:17PM  up 284 days, 13:04, 5 users, load averages: 0.21, 0.32, 0.32
[ gustaf@ultra5: ~ ]% uptime
 9:17PM  up 34 days, 14:45, 1 user, load averages: 0.23, 0.15, 0.10
[ gustaf@oddjob: ~ ]$ uptime
  9:18pm  up 42 days, 10:11, 16 users,  load average: 7.84, 6.61, 5.40

(I probably shouldn’t have used a parenthesis here.))

The question is: why do I have to defragment my hard drive manually? (and don’t mention Task Scheduler — I trust that app about as far as I can spit a rat). Why can’t the operating system — the piece of software I paid good money for, the prop keeping Microsoft’s profit margins in the double digits each freaking year, the “bastion of innovation” that each and every citizen of this planet should use instead of “viral, Communist” free software — why can’t this fabulous piece of tech handle this simple task itself?

For crying out loud, Linux, developed by long-haired geeks in Finland, never neeeds to be defragmented manually. Neither does OpenBSD.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-08-03, in the comp category.

So true

You know you’ve been too long in Sweden when…

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-08-03, in the alt category.

Over

Vacation ends tomorrow. I’ve done quite a bit with the house, so the lack of good weather hasn’t been a determining factor. Saying this, a few more weeks wouldn’t have been unwelcome.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-08-01, in the alt category.

Fore!

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.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-07-31, in the books » read category.

Beware of brainwashed alien visitors

Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks.

Although Banks’ Culture novels are always enjoyable, this one feels like he’s coasting.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-07-28, in the books » read category.

Strange attractors

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick.

A well written popular history of nonlinear dynamics.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-07-22, in the books » read category.

“A bunch of guys on IRC”

… is the modern equivalent of “a couple of guys in a garage”.

Inspired by the latest “hush-hush” biz discussion on #mobitopia.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-07-21, in the alt category.

Cold beer, you wish

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?

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-07-21, in the alt category.

Short tales

Boys and Girls Forever by Alison Lurie.

A collection of essays about childrens literature.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-07-21, in the books » read category.

Windows braindead wireless

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?

Posted on Monday, 2024-07-19, in the comp category.

Dark Swedish plans

Svenska förintelsevapen 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.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-07-18, in the books » read category.

Arvika — band and music notes

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.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-07-18, in the moblog » arvika-2024 category.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-07-18, in the moblog » arvika-2024 category.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-07-18, in the moblog » arvika-2024 category.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-07-18, in the moblog » arvika-2024 category.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-07-18, in the moblog » arvika-2024 category.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-07-18, in the moblog » arvika-2024 category.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-07-14, in the comm » weblog category.

Away to Arvika

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.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-07-14, in the alt category.

Legacy

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?!”

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-07-13, in the alt category.

The BSD license explained

A concise definition of the BSD License.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-07-13, in the comp category.

Audio blogs — why?

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.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-07-13, in the comm » weblog category.

A break in the ritual

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.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-07-13, in the alt category.

Evening out

After a long day fixing windows, we went down to Enskede Värdshus 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 rosé. 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.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-07-10, in the alt category.

The worst form of blogging

… 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.

Posted on Friday, 2024-07-09, in the scrivener category.

Finished

… 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

• ripped up the plastic floor, exposing a nice pine parquet,
• demolished a closet and created an alcove instead,
• painted the ceiling and walls
• planed and sanded the floor,
• and oiled and polished it (today).

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…

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-07-07, in the alt category.

Klara

Mail from Anna: they’re now proud parents of Klara, Jonatan’s little sister.

Also, they’re moving “back” to Sweden — to Lidingö.

Posted on Monday, 2024-07-05, in the alt category.

Below average

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.

Posted on Monday, 2024-07-05, in the comm » mobile category.

Greece wins!

Amazing result. Methodical, defensive football. Boring, but effective.

This is definitively Greece’s year — first this, then the Olympics.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-07-04, in the alt » euro2024 category.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-07-03, in the books » read category.

It’s official, I’m an anti-Microsoft fanatic

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.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-07-03, in the comm » mobile category.

Working

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.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-07-03, in the alt category.

Greece in the final!

Wow!

A very surprising result. The same teams that started this tournament will end it.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-07-01, in the alt » euro2024 category.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-07-01, in the alt category.

Holland out

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Portugal — Czech Republic in the final, that’s my bet. Greece has played well, but the Czechs will win.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-06-30, in the alt » euro2024 category.

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.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-06-30, in the alt category.

We was robbed!

Scandinavians cry foul at Euro 2024 match-fixing

Posted on Monday, 2024-06-28, in the alt » euro2024 category.

Posted on Monday, 2024-06-28, in the comm » weblog category.

The value of forgetfulness

Love and Hate: Internet Communities

Posted on Sunday, 2024-06-27, in the comm » weblog category.

Millie

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

Posted on Sunday, 2024-06-27, in the alt category.

Sweden out

Damn. We lost.

Good game though, pity it went to penalties. That’s never fair.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-06-26, in the alt » euro2024 category.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-06-26, in the alt category.

Last post before vacation

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!

Posted on Thursday, 2024-06-24, in the alt category.

Historical perspective on Microsoft’s APIs

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.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-06-24, in the comp category.

A productive weekend

Friday, Sweden played 1-1 against Italy and now have a shot at advancing to the quarter-finals.

Saturday, I helped Petter and Giséla move all their stuff to Åland, 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 Åse 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.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-06-20, in the alt category.

Why DRM is bad for everyone

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.

Posted on Friday, 2024-06-18, in the comp category.

3G services

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.

Existing communities

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.

Traffic information

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.

Videotext

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.

Location-based games

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.

Conclusion

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.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-06-17, in the comm » mobile category.

Backups, backups, backups

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…

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-06-16, in the comm » weblog category.

Goodbye, aliens

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.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-06-16, in the comp category.

High school blues

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.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-06-16, in the alt category.

Sweden - Bulgaria 5 - 0

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.

Posted on Monday, 2024-06-14, in the alt » euro2024 category.

Posted on Monday, 2024-06-14, in the comm » mobile category.

We don’t need any new parties

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.

Posted on Friday, 2024-06-11, in the alt » politics category.

Join the evolution

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.

Posted on Friday, 2024-06-11, in the comp category.

Magic and puzzles

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.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-06-09, in the alt category.

Pictures at Mr. X

MrX Photographers is a site devoted to digital photography. Terje, the guy behind the site, is a Mobitopian and all around nice guy.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-06-08, in the scrivener category.

Near the end

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.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-06-08, in the comp category.

Ancient secrets

Venona: spåren från ett underrättelsekrig 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.

Posted on Monday, 2024-06-07, in the books » read category.

Swedish media and criminals

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”, Åsa 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?

Posted on Sunday, 2024-06-06, in the alt category.

Ronald Reagan, RIP

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.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-06-06, in the alt » politics category.

Your operating system is your girlfriend

Charles Miller has written a funny post on why the Mac is so desirable. That post, and this, makes the implicit assumption that you are male.

The Mac as mistress metaphor is very good, but I find it mildly offensive to use the metaphor that Windows is a prostitute. I don’t disapprove of prostitution per se. It’s just that for this metaphor to work, 90% of the computer-using population of the world would be having most of their relationships with prostitutes.

I would rather say that Windows is a female co-worker. Not unattractive, reasonably efficient (in her Win2000/XP guise), but prone to gaffes and embarrassing behaviour that kind of makes you dread meeting her in the hall or having lunch with her.

Linux on the desktop could well be a psychotic girlfriend. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never used Linux as a desktop system, and I’ve never had a psychotic girlfriend. I do know that my laptop running OpenBSD and blackbox is a female co-worker that I would feel very comfortable with, even though I am married. Perhaps a hyper-efficient personal secretary.

Windows as a server is a female relative in a old peoples’ home who calls you in the middle of the night and rambles senilely. You’re happy to pay other people take care of her, and secretly wish that she would just die quietly.

Linux or *BSD as a server, on the other hand, is like a grandmother who is a world-class cook with a physics degree. You can always drop by her house, she is endlessly supportive and helps you with your life, without asking much in return. You love her all the more for it.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-05-27, in the comp category.

why I know perl

I learned Perl in my first real consulting gig at Agero. A large business directory company in Sweden wanted to synchronise their print catalogue with the Web. Additionally, they wanted an interface for customers to create their own ads on the Web. This was the sexy part of the project. I wasn’t involved there.

The synchronisation didn’t work yet, so every Monday my colleague had to take a 650 MB XML-file and feed it to a Java program that inserted the contents into a big old Oracle database running on a Sun Starfire. She was much more billable than I was, so as I incautiously admitted to Un*x knowledge I was asked if I could take over this job.

The XML was full of errors, unescaped ampersands, invalid characters… The Java program choked if it couldn’t parse the file, so you had to manually search for the error and fix it, then try again. A successful run took about 9 hours.

I started by chopping up the file into the component entries and checking for bad stuff. This is trivial, just set $/ to whatever end element suits your fancy, but it took some reading of the Perl Cookbook before I had it nailed.

Then I started looking at how to automate this stuff. I eventually wrote a sophisticated run-control program that could be started with at, and that sent email when something went wrong.

Just when I had cut down the effective load time from three days to about 11 hours, the whole project got axed. I later learned that this was the third attempt to integrate the print version with an online database.

The contractor more or less blamed the whole debacle on us, even though it could be fairly laid at bad project management and unrealistic promises from the client to its customers. Oh well.

In the middle of my next project, I was cding up from a directory over a slow ssh link and accidentally rmd all my perl code. When I called the admins of the machine they helpfully informed me that as the machine wasn’t in production it didn’t have backups.

So now I know more Perl than I really want to. But I’m still learning more every day.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-05-26, in the comp category.

boyfriend needed

Mildly amusing (in Swedish).

Quick-n-dirty translation:

Hi! I’m going to a yearly dinner with my relatives at the end of May and need someone to play my boyfriend. Long story… You should be around 25, “normal”, and be polite. Free food ;-)

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-05-26, in the alt category.

mall reflections

Some thoughts after a visit to the mall:

• You can now get a SIM-free taco for SEK 1 349, 1 100 less than what I paid for it four months ago. And that was with a subscription.

• Electronic stores now run a DVD on all their TV screens with commercials and snippets from coming releases, instead of just showing MTV.

• Kids and sugar don’t really mix.

Also, IE doesn’t handle   entities very well. I used them to format the prices above. Removed for now.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-05-25, in the alt category.

random linkage

Thomas C. Greene on Abu Graib

High school teacher fired for not censoring poetry

The ultimate timewaster for the taco

Posted on Monday, 2024-05-24, in the alt category.

democracy in action

Ho hum. MEP elections are coming up. Booooring.

I feel strongly about one thing in the EU: that the CAP must be abolished. No-one I can elect to the parliament will make this happen. Probably only a combination of global warming and a massive die-back of French farmers will bring this about, in a century or two.

I feel less strongly about software patents. They affect lots of people and the future of free software, but compared to growing food they are unimportant. However, they maybe can be banned in the EU by the EP.

So I’m looking for a candidate who’s opposed to software patents.

I’d like to vote for Christofer Fjellner (m), but his party supports software patents, and who knows what kind of hold they have over him.

So I’ll probably vote for Olle Schmidt (fp) instead.

Posted on Monday, 2024-05-24, in the alt » politics category.

the dark side of java

Anyone who reads Erik’s linkblog will be astounded about two things:

1. damn, there’s a lot of Java projects, and

2. how the hell does Erik do it?

The list of projects is impressive, and for me as a novice Java maintainer, a bit daunting. How can one person keep up with all this? And everyone seems to be on first-name basis, not just with the developers, but with the projects themselves. What the heck is Maven, anyway?

But it’s not just one happy family. There’s a dark side to the Java development scene, and it rises to the surface here.

This person probably has a name, but I prefer to consider him or her as a cry from the collective subconscious of those Java programmer who’re having trouble just staying on top of Java, never mind all the whimsically named frameworks and tools.

Both Erik and Russ are on the Bileblog’s shitlist. But so is everyone else.

Posted on Monday, 2024-05-24, in the comp category.

blogging tools and productivity — a personal take

I really enjoy weblogging. I didn’t think I would, but I do. It’s the return to the personal web circa 1994, when everybody with a web page put up their hobbies, reading lists, collectors items etc. for all the other people out there to discover.

Now, after nearly a decade, we’re back where we started, but with better tools. You don’t need a unix account anymore, and you don’t need to grok HTML. Anyone can update a web page, a.k.a. a weblog nowadays.

Every day makes me a day older, and even though I find it hard to believe, it’s now seven years since I first installed Linux on a 386 by floppy. Now I’m using a IBM Thinkpad running OpenBSD to access mail and IRC on a UltraSparc 5, also running OpenBSD. The company I work for uses Linux on Intel for nearly all its infrastructure. I spend nearly all my days in two or three terminal windows. I read mail with emacs.

So I’m a unix kind of guy. I’d rather write a 20-line perl program to do some data munging than fire up Excel. My windows are handled by screen. I browse the web with links and w3m (lynx is sooo 1998). I believe an app should do one thing, and do it well.

Yet I’m using Movable Type, the CGI version of Word, a bloated, opaque web application that definitely puts style over substance, a blogging tool for Mac users and other artistic types. It straddles uneasily across the Unix/Perl world, with its (nowadays) strong open-source bias, and the corporate make-a-buck world of proprietary source code and expensive licensing.

Well, I’ve grown to know a lot of people on the mobitopia channel, and one of them, Ewan Spence has a site called Symbian Diaries where just about anyone can get a blog. His installation has a lot of authors, a lot of blogs, and would probably cost $1,200 to license from Movable Type… but that’s another story.

Don’t get me wrong — MT is fine for anyone comfortable with web based tools like Yahoo Mail and Google. However, I don’t feel comfortable with it. I would rather have a system like blosxom or even my own crude perl hack.

But the central question is: would I post more entries? Would new software make me more productive?

I don’t think so. So even if I would have a lot of fun migrating to another system, and even if I can do that while keeping the symbiandiaries.com address, I think I’ll stick around MT for now. I’ll try to kvetch less, and write more.

And be more interesting.

Posted on Friday, 2024-05-21, in the comm » weblog category.

the islamic century?

I first encountered the belief that Europe was heading for an inevitable Islamic takeover in a most unlikely place: this post by Philip Greenspun.

This entry shocked me, because from what I’ve read of and about him, Phil is a smart guy. If this is how well educated Americans living in Boston view Europe?

I couldn’t really put my finger on what was wrong with his analysis. This article does just that. Recommended reading.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-05-19, in the alt » politics category.

serendipity

Googling around for an emacs implementation of the Blogger API, I stumbled over color-mode.el by Don Knuth, and pmwiki.el by my old university friend Christian Ridderström.

Knuth violates the emacs interface guidelines, but I guess he can get away with it. On the other hand, a celebrity deathmatch between RMS and Knuth would be something I would see on Pay per view…

The world is a small place, at least if you like emacs.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-05-18, in the comp category.

things to do in stockholm before you’re dead

dwlt will be in Uppsala/Stockholm this weekend. Here is a short list of suggestions of things to do.

• Uppsala: visit the cathedral (Domkyrkan). The town itself is a very nice place, Sweden’s Oxford.

• Stockholm: the Vasa Museum is well worth a visit.

• The museum is on Djurgården, a park to the east of the centre of town. Waldermarsudde is an art gallery at the other end, with a very nice walk in between. Fans of Edvard Munch and Nietzsche will enjoy Thielska Galleriet in the same general area.

• Visit the Stockholm Archipelago with a trip on the Vaxholm boats. Many different destinations for different timescales.

• Stockholm Old Town, Gamla stan, in the middle of the city. The Royal Palace is here. South of the Old Town is Söder, literally South, the more Bohemian of Stockholms neighborhoods. Lots of bars, galleries, parks…

• Eat traditional, if expensive Swedish food at KB or even more expensive seafood at Wedholms Fisk.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-05-18, in the alt category.

behind the wire

Colditz: the Definitive History by Henry Chancellor.

An entertaining history of the famous WW2 POW camp.

The most interesting thing about this book is the fact that Colditz, despite being the “prison of last resort” for repeat escapers and Deutschfeindlich, was actually more humane than many other places in Nazi Germany. Compared to concentration, extermination, and slave labour camps, it was a “bad hotel”.

Posted on Sunday, 2024-05-02, in the books » read category.

yet another reason mark is my hero

Essentials [dive into mark]

Posted on Sunday, 2024-05-02, in the comm » weblog category.

secret war

Action This Day, Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine, editors. Bantam Press 2001. ISBN 0593 049101.

A collection of essays about Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

The most entertaining one is by the late John Chadwick.

This is how he describes his arrival in Heliopolis following the evacuation of Alexandria in 1942:

My arrival created administrative chaos, since I was a lone naval rating attached to an Army Intelligence Unit, itself attached to an RAF station.

He was later promoted “Temporary Sub-Lieutenant (Special Branch) RNVSR” because the material he handled was classed ‘Officers Only’.

Later, after the Italian Armistice, he wanted to promote code discipline in the Aegean:

[…] I volunteered to go on the next mission to act as liaison with the Italian Navy in Leros, in the hope of preventing any further breaches of security. My suggestion was rejected, and I was told brutally that my superiors did not mind if I were killed, but they were unwilling to take the risk of my being taken prisoner.

Chadwick later deciphered Linear B along with Michael Ventris.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-04-28, in the books » read category.

more on dave’s trip

Here’s another strange thing about David Winer’s trip to Europe — he’s started a temporary weblog for the trip.

Why can’t he update his regular blog, the one read by millions each day? He seems to have a laptop, and connects through internet cafés. So he should be able to update a server somewhere.

I don’t get it. I can update this blog from a web interface or from Emacs on a remote box. I’m nobody. Dave Winer is a respected internet personality. Go figure.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-04-28, in the comm » weblog category.

chutzpah

David Winer has some strange idea on how SMS works. So the gang at #mobitopia discusses a little, and David writes a post about it.

But how do we let Dave know about it. He’s travelling in Europe right now. With a mobile phone.

So now he has an SMS on it from yours truly. Hope he can read it.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-04-28, in the comm » weblog category.

today’s microsoft rant

Part of my responsibilities is taking care of new computer installs at work. We have recently purchased several top-notch Dell Inspiron 8100s. These have 15” widescreen displays.

To prevent ridiculously small font sizes, Dell ships with the DPI settings set to 120. This means that fonts look bigger, but also that Internet Explorer also scales the images on websites. These appear blurry and jagged.

Not surprisingly, this is a top issue at Dell’s support forums. The “solution” is a registry hack: change the value of the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\UseHR from 1 to 0.

Additionally, when I tried to read an article on MSDN about this, IE froze when trying to load the page.

I will recommend Mozilla for our users in the future.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-04-27, in the comp category.

linklove

Well, this should help my PageRank. Thanks, Jim!

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-04-27, in the comm » weblog category.

weblogging

Somehow it’s difficult for me to write on this blog sometimes. Part of the problem is lack of time. I have a family and a full time job. I usually compose rather nice entries when walking to the subway in the mornings, but they vanish when I arrive at work and a terminal.

Of course, I could become a T9 god and tap out screeds on my taco, but I prefer reading and listening to music when riding to work. If I’ve forgotten reading matter, I’m usually too pissed off about that to be able to write anything good anyway.

Work provides almost no convenient times for advanced composition. What free time I doi have is spent reading other peoples weblogs, which are much better than anything I could produce. So that too is a barrier.

So why have a blog then? Egoboost of course. And sometimes you write something or think about something that’s worth communicating.

Posted on Friday, 2024-04-23, in the comm » weblog category.

going down in a spiral

Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald.

An excellent history/reportage about Vietnam during the American War.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-04-20, in the books » read category.

skiing

First day skiing since 1997. I’m whacked.

Posted on Friday, 2024-04-16, in the alt category.

ordering email

After a tip from Rui, I’ve started to sort my work mail (mail addressed to me personally, and the support box) into quarterly archives.

Long experience has told me never to throw away mail, and the quarter seems to be a good time period in which to ask yourself “when did I get that mail?”

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-04-14, in the comp category.

mirrorshades

First sunny day in the city, the Sisters of Mercy playing on the Taco, and the irresistible urge for new sunglasses came over me. So now I’m the proud owner of a couple of Ray-Ban Sidestreets. Mirrorshades. I’ve wanted a pair since I read Neuromancer in 1985.

Of course, if Ray-Ban didn’t have an all-Flash site, I could link to them. But they do, so I can’t. Less linklove for them then.

They will adorn my handsome mug when I go skiing in Åre this weekend.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-04-13, in the alt category.

thoughts on gmail

Gmail is a meme spread by Google to help improve their search algorithms.

By tracking references to this enticing service, they can see which news sources and weblogs are influential. By launching on April 1, they can also track arguments against the belief that the service actually exists.

Posted on Friday, 2024-04-02, in the comm » weblog category.

war is hell, and boring too

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War by Paul Fussell.

A blend of personal memoir, history, and literary criticism centering around WW2.

”(…) what time seems to have shown out later selves is that perhaps there was less coherent meaning in the events of wartime than we had hoped. Deprived of a satisfying final focus by both the enormousness of the war and the unmanageable copiousness of its verbal and visual residue, all the revisitor of this imagery can do, turning now this way, now that, is to indicate a few components of the scene. And despite the preponderance of vileness, not all are vile.”

Posted on Thursday, 2024-04-01, in the books » read category.

dilbert newsletter goes html

The Dilbert newsletter has gone HTML. I guess that’s so they can sell more adverts. I wouldn’t know, because I read my mail in gnus. So this just means I have to resize my ssh window so that the text doesn’t wrap.

But the really bad thing about it is it isn’t funny.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-03-31, in the comp category.

fudgeability

Kasei: The Importance of Fudgability is an interesting “common sense” view on how to design an application.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-03-30, in the comp category.

“precision bombing”

The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-1945 by Robin Niellands

A “fair and balanced” history of the Allied bombing campaigns during World War 2. A book similar to The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain by Stephen Bungay.

Niellands doesn’t make any excuses for the Allied bombing. As he writes, there was a war on. And it is worth remembering that area bombing of civilians was initiated by the Germans, in Guernica, Warzaw, Coventry, and London. But the futility and horror of the bombing still remains. The point is not that area bombing was immoral. The war was immoral. But it still had to be fought.

Arthur Harris and his Command fought and died for the right of others to vilify their memory.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-03-30, in the books » read category.

heroes and villians

I’m pretty new to weblogging. I guess what I did in 1997 was weblogging, but that was what everything was doing then.

“Returning” to personal publishing, then, is entering a world where people feel strongly about things. Issues that outsiders such as I find arcane, like syndication formats, escalate quite quickly into religious wars.

In these wars, two protagonists stand out. They are Dave Winer, the grand old man of weblogging, and Mark Pilgrim. I haven’t really found out what they stand for, weblog-politically. But they are antagonists.

When I enter a community, I instinctively choose sides. I don’t know why I’ve chosen the side of Mark. Maybe he represents the young Turk side of the debate. Maybe Dave’s ego is just that much bigger. But there it is.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-03-25, in the comm » weblog category.

adding links to category archives in entries

Thanks to Gadget17 I’ve got links to the category to which the entry belongs working. See below, to the right of the permalink.

The vodoo code needed is this: <a href="<MTEntryCategories glue=","><$MTCategoryArchiveLink$></MTEntryCategories>"><$MTEntryCategory$></a>

The first triplet of MT tags (within the HREF attribute) construct a hyperlink to the relevant category archive. The <$MTEntryCategory$> tag shows the name of the category to which the entry belongs.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-03-24, in the comm » weblog category.

a global market for TV broadcasts

Funny how things come together. Today, I was discussing the following things IRL and on IRC:

• Automatically grabbing TV broadcasts from the US and distributing them as BitTorrents for consumption here in Sweden.
• Getting HBO to send to the EU.
• Paying a fee to see shows that are shown in the US but not in the EU.
• The lack of EU soccer coverage in the US.

Bottom line: there is a market for TV on both sides of the Atlantic. Who will exploit it? Or will this fill the gap?

Rightsholders in TV space are accustomed to wholesale marketing. They sell programming to networks, and the networks are in the mass market. To enable the scenarios above would entail retail marketing and pricing. Where are the new business models coming from? Or is everyone in the music, TV, and movie business more interested in protecting their profit margins than giving people what they want, and what they are prepared to pay for?

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-03-24, in the alt category.

HTML typography

Learn about the fifteen spaces defined in Unicode at this page.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-03-24, in the comp category.

Microsoft and mobile phones

I think MS is making a strategic mistake in focusing on “corporate” phones. They bet that if you use a MS phone to sync to Exchange at work you’ll do that at home too. The strong focus that Microsoft has on mobile developers is part of this too — it’s going to be easy to create vertical applications and enterprise-specific solutions.

So corporate users of phones will influence other buyers, and MS smartphones will slowly but surely infiltrate the mobile space.

But I’m not sure that the average phone customer has quite the good picture of Microsoft’s products that MS seems to think.

Having a monopoly on desktops doesn’t mean that your users like you. In fact, Microsoft is shielded from normal market pressures in the desktop space.

In the phone space, there is still competition. Nokia has a very strong brand and a product line that spans from simple black-and-white phones to communicators. This is true for Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and Samsung too.

Microsoft phones have a minimum spec — there has to be enough oomph in the phone to run Pocket Explorer etc. Soon enough Moore’s Law will ensure that every phone will be able to do just that (but the power supplies may not follow the same development). The question is: do people want a PC in their phone?

I don’t think so.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-03-23, in the comm » mobile category.

how not to panhandle

Generally, I appreciate that people who want my money in the subway do something for it. Selling the Stockholm version of “The Big Issue” is the best, I usually buy that.

Music is a distant second in my wish for something to reward.

Outright begging is at the bottom.

However, I’ve had to build a cellar. Playing the accordion and singing on the subway will never ever be rewarded by me.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-03-23, in the alt category.

moved

So now I’m on a Moveable Type weblog, just like everybody else on the planet…

I’m running around looking at all the options, and I’m really happy I didn’t do that before I decided to write my own home-grown blog. I wouldn’t even have started.

When I first started writing my old blog, I rediscovered the feeling that I had when I first made a homepage back in 1997. The wonderful feeling of seeing your words out there for anyone to read. That feeling was behind many people’s websites. Then the web got really big, and the small people got lost.

Now we have Google and easy-to-use publishing software. So now there’s less of a barrier to just write something, and your words will perhaps be noticed.

We’ll see if mine are.

Posted on Monday, 2024-03-22, in the comm » weblog category.

the phone as a business tool

The taco earned it’s stripes today as a business phone. When I answered a job call at home (for the first, and I hope the last, time), I needed to login to the firewall. No probs, I used the handsfree set. Until Viking decided he wanted to play with that.

Hmm. The taco is impossible to hold between the cheek and the shoulder like a normal phone. But it does have a loudspeaker. Presto, I could check logs, talk, and hang out in IRC at the same time.

The only thing left to use is the games in a boring meeting.

Posted on Monday, 2024-03-15, in the comm » mobile category.

the great war

The First World War by John Keegan

A history of WWI.

The opening and closing chapters are eloquent in their condemnation of this horrible conflict, the defining event of the twentieth century. But the intervening ones are dry history, failing to convey the horror of the fighting.

For a novelist’s view of the war, read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-03-11, in the books » read category.

wizard prang

Piece of Cake by Derek Robinson.

A brilliant book about fighter pilots in France and England in the beginning of World War 2.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-03-11, in the books » read category.

the litany of hate

In the interest of my co-worker’s sanity, I have resolved to concentrate my hatred and loathing of Microsoft products to a five-minute period each morning.

This way, they will not be upset by my outbursts of anger at the crappiness of MS products, business practices, advertising, or general view of computing.

The actual litany is not finished, but I find the following to be restful:

We hates them, hates them forever!!!

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-03-03, in the comp category.

software wishlist

From now on, my Nokia N-Gage will be referred to as the “taco”.

I’ve looked around a bit, and while there is a lot of software available for Series 60 phones, I still miss some simple things.

Most of these things would be easy to do if the following conditions were met:

1. I would learn Python
2. Nokia would release Python for Series 60 with hooks for Contacts, Calendar, SIM-card etc.

This is what I would do if that were the case:

• write a converter for importing/exporting CSV files from the Contacts application
• the same for the Notes application
• A SyncML client/server for any platform

Posted on Friday, 2024-02-13, in the comm » mobile category.

McKinsey meets the CIA

Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow.

20 years in the future, IRC pals from the same timezones help each other out to try to further their Tribes way of life — easygoing PST, hard-hitting EST, and stodgy, state-loving GMT. Each Tribe has agents in the other’s territory, working in management consultancies, trying to undermine the enemy’s competitiveness with hare-brained theories.

When our hero comes up with a great P2P scheme his friend and lover conspire to put him away in a mental hospital so that they don’t have to share the profits.

Not as far “out there” as Down and out in the Magic Kingdom by the same author, but still a great read. Especially since it’s free.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-02-11, in the books » read category.

boy’s night in

Yesterday I had five friends from KTH over for dinner. We had herring (“sill”) sandwiches with akvavit and beer for starters (thanks Henrik), followed by lamb roast with rice and Chateau Musar 1997. This pretty far-out wine (astringent I guess you could call it) went along famously with the lamb, and made the Haut-Médoc that followed taste like it was watered.

Calle and Jonas had picked up a selection of cheeses. We drank a bottle of my birth-day port, a 1960 vintage. Famous taste, like a really rich and alcohol-drenched caramel.

For dessert, David made strawberry- and plum knödel. Johan bought cigars, accompanied by rum and whiskey (Talisker). Altogether a very nice evening.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-02-07, in the alt category.

new phone

I got to use an [1] MP3-player a few days ago and re-discovered the joys of riding the subway with a soundtrack.

But I couldn’t keep the player (a nice, but DRM-crippled Panasonic) and instead looked around to buy one. There are lots of USB-stick form-factor players around, but I’ve been thinking about a Series 60 phone for a while, and most models can play audio too.

The Siemens SX1 was my first choice, but then a local phone store had a deal on an N-Gage for an extension on my plan. So I picked one up [2] today.

First impressions are mixed. I discovered too late that you need a Bluetooth connection to sync and install files, but that can be fixed pretty cheaply. I already have a 64-MB MMC card, so I can listen to at least one album at a time. And bigger cards are pretty affordable too.

I got 3 games included, but none of them were in stock, so I’ll get them later. Until then, I enjoy the music and the radio.

So now I’m a kid wannabe. All the guys at work figure I’m having age-related anxiety.

[1] “a” or “an”? Probably “a”, but “an” sounds better.
[2] I love this phrase — carefree consumerism!

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-02-04, in the alt category.

the lonely espresso machine

We’ve got an espresso machine on the counter, but I don’t use it as much as I’d like. Workdays both J and I want lotsa hot coffee, so it seems a waste to spend precious minutes fiddling with the machine. You never know when Viking needs more sandwiches, so the savouring of the perfect espresso is far away in the mornings.

In the evenings, an espresso is a bit on the strong side for easy sleep. So the machine just stands there, slightly accusing.

I need to add “drink more espresso” to the list of Things To Do each day. “Dagens i-landsproblem”, as Tobias would say.

Posted on Wednesday, 2024-01-28, in the alt category.

Coldplay everywhere, all the time

Sometimes Swedish state television (I love saying that — it sounds as if I live in a third world dictatorship) has a couple of minutes to spare in their schedule. Every time, without fail, they play a paralysingly boring Coldplay video.

Coldplay must be the most overrated band in the Western hemisphere. Why does my hard-taxed license money go to them? (To be fair, the dough probably goes to some paid-up member of the RIAA, which doesn’t make it any better.)

Updated: Patric at work confirms that Coldplay are in the cusp of sellout. First they were underground. Now they are “hip” to people choosing music on state TV channels. Next their music is in commercials.

Posted on Tuesday, 2024-01-27, in the alt category.

rude site design

I believe that other people should be able to benefit from my organs if they need it. (Obviously I’d like to be dead first.) So I went to livsviktigt.se to sign up in the national organ donor registry.

I nearly left in disgust when the site kidnapped my browser and resized it — for no apparent reason! Just because they felt their site appearance was so important… more important than the time and convenience of the people they’re trying to persuade to donate their organs to total strangers.

This antic is so 1990s.

Posted on Monday, 2024-01-26, in the alt category.

the anti-Biggles

Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson.

This is Robinson’s first book about war in the air. The dogfighting over France in 1918 is presented as just as bad as the fighting in the trenches. Powerful stuff.

Posted on Saturday, 2024-01-24, in the books » read category.

compiling 3.4 on a sparc64

So I need emacs 21.3 to be able to use ange-ftp to update this blog. I just can’t go around ftp:ing by hand, losing all sync, missing one measly comma and having to do it again.

I download the src and run configure — it can’t figure out which arch I’m on. No problem, I get the package from the openbsd server. Hmm, can’t run, missing some libc .so file. Huh. Well, the machine should be running 3.4 anyway.

I get the src and ports packages, untar them, run the whole CVS update thing, and start to read the upgrade minifaq. Lot’sa stuff to do, but I follow the steps. Config the kernel and try to compile. Won’t even let me run make depend. Seems to be expecting a file swapgeneric.c somewhere — but that file should be somewhere else entirely.

So now I’m waiting for reply on the sparc64 mailing list. We’ll see what happens.

Update: turns out to have been some kind of problems with my CVS update. Works now after a fresh get.

Posted on Friday, 2024-01-23, in the comp category.

a modern classic

The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.

Re-reading this for the n-th time. The final episode of the film trilogy inspired me. I was pleased to find out that my internal movie was still the same. I was also impressed that Jackson was so faithful to the book.

Too bad the Swedish translation is so flawed. I would really like Leo to read this. He’s old enough but his English’s not good enough for the original. Viking will be old enough when the new translation is ready.

Posted on Thursday, 2024-01-22, in the books » read category.