Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.

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Don’t fall for stupid hacks

Take a page from my book and don’t get drawn into “testing” stupid Bluetooth hacks. The only consequence is that your phone will be b0rked for no good reason.

Zainman posted a so-called tip on how to turn off any phone that browsed your phone via Bluetooth. The trick was to name your BT profile "<tab>1<tab>".

He pestered me to try this, and finally I relented. When I changed the name of my 6630 and browsed for it with my N-gage, the BT app crashed. The phone didn’t restart. But when I tried to open the list of BT access points on the N-gage, it crashed again. Obviously the string was cached somewhere and prevented me from browsing for new BT devices.

So now I have a crippled N-Gage. Great. Thanks a fucking bunch, Zainman.

Update: a full reset (key combination *#7370#) fixed this — don’t forget to back up your phone first, this nukes everything.

Updated on Friday, 2005-04-01. Posted on Thursday, 2005-03-31, in the comm » mobile category.

Yahoo! 360°

Thanks to Erik I got an invitation to Yahoo’s social networking effort Yahoo 360°.

I’m a bit wary about this, I got burnt a bit on Orkut last year. And a one-size-fits-all blogging solution (which 360° is, underneath the dazzle of picture-sharing and “blasts”) is not really for me.

The lack of themes is a bit lame, I know some people who demand pink…

Posted on Wednesday, 2005-03-30, in the comm » weblog category.

Holiday reading

Quick work was done of the following works this long weekend.

Newton’s Wake, by Ken Macleod.

Classic space opera. Less well-plotted than the author’s other novels. This feels more of a collection of cool ideas and scenarios (how do you get an artifact off a planet that’s smack-dab in the output of a pulsar?) than a real novel. MacLeod’s trademark politics is not really to be seen.

Ares Express, by Ian MacDonald.

Set in the same universe as the Hundred Years of Solitude pastiche Desolation Road, this is more of the same Martian future — anarchist, caste-ridden, and filled with BIG trains. A nice read if you don’t have to pay for it.

Zeitgeist, by Bruce Sterling.

A re-read. An extended riff on pop music and the seamy underbelly of the last days of the twentieth century. Rather light-weight, but filled with Sterling’s trademark zany descriptions. No characters actually exist, as they all talk in exactly the same way. That is, like Sterling himself.

Posted on Monday, 2005-03-28, in the books » read category.

Men and angels

Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis.

The first part of Lewis’ “Space Trilogy”. Interesting read. I may be older, but the religious themes are stronger here than in the Narnia books. Nice demolishment of a pro-coloniast straw man in the final chapters.

Posted on Wednesday, 2005-03-23, in the books » read category.

Sidebar links

I’ve relegated my del.icio.us links to the sidebar, and hidden the links category from the main page with the hide plugin. This is in keeping with other “mainstream” blog packages way of handling external links.

The solution is extremely crufty at the moment — this whole blog is aquiring behind-the-scenes cruft at an alarming rate. I hope to do something about it soon, in my copious free time.

Posted on Sunday, 2005-03-20, in the scrivener category.

Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett

A Discworld novel.

Posted on Sunday, 2005-03-20, in the books » read category.

Reading list

Reading

Shelf

To be returned

  • C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (due 2005-04-08)
  • Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (due 2005-04-08)
  • C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (due 2005-04-08)
  • Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum (due 2005-04-08)

Queue

  • David Allen, Getting Things Done
  • Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist
  • Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason: The Rule of Four (reviewed in NYRB, vol. LI, no. 14)
  • Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Pashazade: the First Arabesk
  • Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides
  • Graham Hancock, The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business
  • Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Emperor
  • William Langewiesche, The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (reviewed in NYRB, August 12, 2024)
  • John Ajvide Lindqvist, Låt den rätte komma in
  • Ken MacLeod, Learning the World
  • Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity
  • Ewen Montagu, The Man who never was
  • Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (reviewed in NYRB, vol. LI, no. 2)
  • Alistair Reynolds, Century Rain
  • N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815
  • N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World
  • Nick Sagan, Idlewild
  • Neal Stephenson, The Confusion
  • Neal Stephenson, The System of the World
  • Charles Stross, Iron Sunrise
  • Charles Stross, The Family Trade
  • Arkadij Vaksberg, Skjut de galna hundarna!

Updated on Wednesday, 2005-03-23. Posted on Sunday, 2005-03-20, in the books category.

CSS media profiles

I’m using a CSS layout with floats (essentially the one described here) which has a number of advantages for me. Chief among these is the fact that I can put all the sidebar content in the physical end of the HTML. This means that if you’re browsing with a text-mode browser such as lynx you get the content first instead of having to scroll down three screens.

However, some mobile browsers are too smart for their own good. They can access CSS stylesheets and use them. In this case, my nice semantically marked up page was all squished up on the screen as the device tried to overlay two divs with negative margins.

Enter CSS Media types. This lets you specify different CSS layouts for different “devices” (screen, print, handheld, aural…). I split my CSS into three parts, common.css, simple.css (the one with the floats) and handheld.css, which is essentially empty right now.

Then I added this to my <head> section:

  <head>
  <title>The occasional scrivener</title>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />  
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/common.css" type="text/css">
  <style type="text/css" media="screen">@import "/screen.css";</style>
  <style type="text/css" media="handheld">@import "../../../../gustaf-sub/handheld.css";</style>

Now my pages render nicely (i.e. no CSS at all) in the following phones:

  • Nokia 6630
  • N-gage classic.
  • Sony-Ericsson K700i.
  • Sony-Ericsson P800. Test conducted with the built-in browser, not Opera.

Phones that don’t work include:

  • Motorola A925. I think the browser here is a branded version of Opera.
  • Sanyo 8100.
  • Samsung SPH-A500. Internal browser error.

Thanks to Anthony Eden of dotMP for help researching this.

Update: this wiki discusses designing for mobile devices.

Updated on Saturday, 2005-03-19. Posted on Saturday, 2005-03-19, in the comm » mobile category.

Not aging well

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: a Trilogy in Five Parts, by Douglas Adams.

Some books simply don’t age along with you. When I first read the first two books in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide series in high school, they were the funniest books I’ve ever read (even in Swedish translation, which is excellent). Now, however, the lustre is gone.

Also, the last novel (Mostly Harmless) ends very strangely. Lots of loose ends…

I re-read this to freshen my memory of the books in anticipation of the upcoming movie. I think that it the movie is “Terry-Gilliamised” — I could totally see a movie in the same vein as Time Bandits — it should be a huge success. There’s a lot of action in the books, and you can get a pretty good movie by boiling them down to an hour-and-a-half of script.

Oh, and I finally grokked the meaning of SubEthaEdit…

Posted on Saturday, 2005-03-19, in the books » read category.

Brilliant scam

SaveToby.com is a site where a guy demands $50,000 or he’ll let kill and eat a helpless baby bunny.

According to his own accounts, he’s already got more than $18,000.

At first I was a bit shocked — not that someone would eat a rabbit, or even that someone would demand money not to eat it — but that people would actually pay him the money to not eat the rabbit.

After some thought, I’m still shocked. That I didn’t figure this out myself. Problem is, he’s hard to copy-cat. If he’s smart, he’s patented the “give me money or I’ll eat the bunny” method of relieving clueless idiots their hard-earned cash. And what’s cuter and more edible than a bunny? Nothing, that’s what!

I wish him the best of luck. At best, he gets a heck of a lot of money. At worse, he still gets a lot of money, and a nice, tasty meal! Tip: don’t forget the garlic.

Posted on Friday, 2005-03-18, in the alt category.

Deli-blogging

Not only Jim and I have started using del.icio.us as a quickie way of keeping up the blog count, exalted Swedish blogger Erik Stattin is doing it too.

Of course, this is just ersatz, compared to the master of linkblogging.

Posted on Thursday, 2005-03-17, in the comm » weblog category.

KP duty

I spent the morning at my sons daycare, preparing food for about 50 people. It’s a parent’s cooperative, rather common in Sweden, and as a parent you have to do stuff sometimes. Our place is pretty lenient, you have a week a year when you’re on standby for if someone is sick or on vacation. Then you’re in the kitchen, where you do the least harm.

With the help of the excellent instructions by the regular cook, I managed to produce quite a nice meal. A nice change of pace from the regular grind.

Posted on Monday, 2005-03-14, in the alt category.

Spy stories

The Haunted Wood, by Allen Weinstein.

A rather dry, factual account of Soviet espionage in the US around the Second World War.

Many interesting stories, presented in a workmanlike style. Spying as a not very exciting vocation. Non-judgemental, though. The Soviet operatives were just doing their jobs, so to speak. But the price paid by the agents was sometimes very heavy.

Posted on Friday, 2005-03-11, in the books » read category.

Minor classics

The Minority Report and other stories, by Philip K. Dick.

Dick is perhaps the only pulp-era SF writer who’s been absorbed by the US academe. These stories are short and rather political, with plenty of Cold War paranoia and nuclear holocaust angst to fuel them.

Posted on Thursday, 2005-03-10, in the books » read category.

Happy (belated) birthday, Jim!

Jim’s birthday was yesterday. I missed this… I blame the voices in my head.

Posted on Wednesday, 2005-03-09, in the alt category.

OpenBSD wi-fi hardware

This list is here so that I can check out hardware in stores via the phone.

  • ADMtek ADM8211 based CardBus/PCI adapters (atw) (G)
  • Aironet Communications 4500/4800 ISA PnP, PCMCIA and PCI 802.11b adapters (an)
    • Aironet 4500/4800
    • Cisco 340/350
  • Atheros AR521x based CardBus 802.11a/b/g adapters (ath), including: (G)
    • 3Com 3CRPAG175
    • Aztech WL830PC
    • D-Link DWL-A650
    • D-Link DWL-AB650
    • D-Link DWL-AG650
    • D-Link DWL-G650B
    • Elecom LD-WL54AG
    • Elecom LD-WL54
    • Fujitsu E5454
    • Fujitsu FMV-JW481
    • Fujitsu E5454
    • I/O Data WN-AB
    • I/O Data WN-AG
    • I/O Data WN-A54
    • Linksys WPC51AB
    • Linksys WPC55AG
    • NEC PA-WL/54AG
    • Netgear WAB501
    • Netgear WAG511
    • Netgear WG511T
    • Orinoco 8480
    • Orinoco 8470WD
    • Proxim Skyline 4030
    • Samsung SWL-5200N
    • SMC SMC2735W
    • Sony PCWA-C700
    • Sony PCWA-C300S
    • Sony PCWA-C500
  • Atheros AR521x based PCI 802.11a/b/g adapters (ath), including: (G)
    • D-Link DWL-A520
    • D-Link DWL-AG520
    • D-Link DWL-G520
    • HP NC4000
    • Linksys WMP55AG
    • Netgear WAG311
    • Netgear WG311
    • Proxim Skyline 4032
    • Senao NL-5354MP
  • Atmel AT76C50x based USB 802.11b adapters (atu), including: (G)
    • Acer Peripherals AWL300
    • Acer Peripherals AWL400
    • Aincomm AWU2000B
    • Bluetake BW002
    • D-Link DWL-120
    • Geowave GW-US11S
    • Linksys WUSB11
    • Linksys WUSB11-V28
    • Netgear MA101 rev B
    • OQO model 01 builtin wireless
    • Ovislink AirLive WL-1120USB
    • OvisLink AirLive WL-1130USB
    • SMC 2662W-AR
    • SMC 2662W-V4
  • Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 802.11b adapters (ipw) (G)
  • Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG/2225BG/2915ABG 802.11a/b/g adapters (iwi) (G)
  • Intersil PRISM-2-3 based 802.11b Compact Flash adapters (will be detected as PCMCIA adapters) (wi)
    • Buffalo AirStation
    • D-Link DCF-660W
    • ELSA XI800
    • Linksys WCF12
    • Netgear MA701
  • Intersil PRISM 2-3, Lucent Hermes and Symbol Spectrum 24 based PCMCIA 802.11b adapters (wi), including:
    • 3Com AirConnect 3CRWE737A
    • ACTIONTEC HWC01170
    • Addtron AWP-100
    • Agere Orinoco
    • ARtem Onair
    • BUFFALO AirStation
    • Cabletron RoamAbout
    • Compaq Agency NC5004
    • Contec FLEXLAN/FX-DS110-PCC
    • Corega PCC-11
    • Corega PCCA-11
    • Corega PCCB-11
    • Corega CGWLPCIA11
    • Dlink DWL650 revisions A1-J3
    • ELSA XI300
    • ELSA XI325
    • ELSA XI325H
    • EMTAC A2424i
    • Ericsson Wireless LAN CARD C11
    • Gemtek WL-311
    • Hawking Technology WE110P
    • I-O DATA WN-B11/PCM
    • Intel PRO/Wireless 2011
    • Intersil Prism II
    • Linksys Instant Wireless WPC11
    • Linksys Instant Wireless WPC11 2.5
    • Linksys Instant Wireless WPC11 3.0
    • Lucent WaveLAN
    • NANOSPEED ROOT-RZ2000
    • NEC CMZ-RT-WP
    • Netgear MA401
    • Netgear MA401RA
    • Nokia C020 Wireless LAN
    • Nokia C110/C111 Wireless LAN
    • NTT-ME 11Mbps Wireless LAN
    • Planex GW-NS11H Wireless LAN
    • Proxim Harmony
    • Proxim RangeLAN-DS
    • Samsung MagicLAN SWL-2000N
    • SMC 2632 EZ Connect
    • Symbol Spectrum24
    • TDK LAK-CD011WL
    • US Robotics 2410
    • US Robotics 2445
  • Intersil PRISM 2-3 and Symbol Spectrum24 based PCI 802.11b adapters (wi), including:
    • 3Com AirConnect 3CRWE777A PCI
    • Belkin F5D6000 PCI (a rebadged WL11000P)
    • Corega CGWLPCIA11 PCI
    • Eumitcom WL11000P PCI
    • Dlink DWL520 PCI revisions A and B
    • Global Sun Technology GL24110P PCI (untested)
    • Global Sun Technology GL24110P02 PCI
    • Intersil Mini-PCI
    • LinkSys WDT11 PCI (a rebadged GL24110P02)
    • NDC/Sohoware NCP130 PCI
    • Netgear MA301 PCI
    • Netgear MA311 PCI
    • US Robotics 2415 PCI (rebadged WL11000P)
    • Nortel E-mobility 211818-A
    • Symbol LA4123
  • Intersil PRISM 2.5/3 based USB 802.11b adapters (wi), including:
    • Acer Warplink USB-400
    • Actiontec HWU01170
    • AirVast WM168b
    • Ambit WLAN
    • Apacer Wireless Steno MB112
    • ASUS WL-140
    • Compaq W100
    • Corega WLUSB-11
    • Corega WLUSB-11 Key
    • D-Link DWL-120 (rev F)
    • D-Link DWL-122
    • I-O DATA WN-B11/USB
    • Intel PRO/Wireless 2011B
    • Intersil Prism 2X
    • JVC MP-XP7250
    • Linksys WUSB11 v3.0
    • Linksys WUSB12
    • Melco WLI-USB-KB11
    • Melco WLI-USB-KS11G
    • Melco WLI-USB-S11
    • Microsoft MN510
    • Netgear MA111 (version 1 only)
    • Pheenet WL-503IA
    • Planex GW-US11H
    • Siemens SpeedStream SS1022
    • Sitecom WL-022
    • Syntax USB-400
    • US Robotics 1120
    • Z-Com XI-725/726
    • Z-Com XI-735
    • ZyXEL ZyAIR B-200
  • Ralink RT2500 based CardBus 802.11b/g adapters (ral), including: (G)
    • MSI CB54G2
    • Surecom EP-9428-g
  • Ralink RT2500 based PCI 802.11b/g adapters (ral), including: (G)
    • ASUS WL-130g
    • Minitar MN54GPC-R
  • Raytheon Raylink and Aviator 2.4/PRO PCMCIA 802.11 FH adapters (ray)
  • Realtek RTL8180L based CardBus 802.11b adapters (rtw), including: (G)
    • Corega CG-WLCB11V3
    • Netgear MA521

(G): Drivers for hardware marked with (G) are only included in the GENERIC kernels, but are not included on the various distribution floppies (including the cd-rom boot image).

(Source: OpenBSD i386 hardware list.)

Updated on Tuesday, 2005-03-08. Posted on Tuesday, 2005-03-08, in the comp category.

Lost weekend

(The weekend was far from lost, but I can’t say the word “weekend” without associating to the Lloyd Cole song. That’s how far gone I am — Lloyd Cole overdose, indeed.)

Taking a break from the stress of daily life, we left the kid at his aunt and his two cousins and took a room at Torpa Pensionat in Södertälje. Heartily recommended. Our room was the one on the bottom right of this page. Respect four-poster beds, baby!

After a good dinner at Glashyttans Wärdshus we vegged out in front of late night TV. Breakfast was in a large, sunny room with a view of the frozen sound outside, brilliantly light by the morning sun. Stockholm is beautiful in this weather, strong March sunlight shining on snow-covered ground.

Posted on Sunday, 2005-03-06, in the alt category.

“English genius”

I took The Commonly Confused Words Test (after a tip from Michael’s blog), and received the following score:

English Genius

You scored 93% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 87% Advanced, and 88% Expert!

You did so extremely well, even I can’t find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don’t. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you’re not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!

There’s only one thing an English genius can say after getting this score: w00t!!!

Posted on Sunday, 2005-03-06, in the alt category.

My day

My day basically looks like this.

Posted on Friday, 2005-03-04, in the work category.