Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
Today, this kind of book would be called a mashup.
A little bagatell, as we say in Sweden.
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Posted at 23:02,
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[This post has been edited. Reasons for this are given below.]
(Warning, most links in Swedish.)
Fredrik Lundh:
After spamming hundreds of Swedish blogs with misspelled marketing messages, anonymous representatives for the Swedish company “[H— & N—] Consulting” are now mailing misspelled legal threats to any Swedish blog that mentions their name. While we
haven’t been threatened yethave only received a single incomprehensible threat this far, we just want to make it clear that we don’t have any plans, at this time, to publish their name, nor the names of “blogrankers”, “ppckungen”, “betalaperklick”, “carbzone” or any of the other sites run by this company, on any of our sites. — the administration
[Update 2005-11-04: the above has been edited in accordance to the wishes of H & N Consulting.]
[I’m as of this writing number three two in a google for the name of H&N’s CEO, hereafter referred to by the alias “XXX”].
This post by Stattin has been retroactively censored, which shows that the [redacted] XXX has some kind of pull in these matters. One wonders just what he’s trying to hide?
Update 2005-11-04: Someone calling themselves “Blogrankers” has a blog at blogrankers.blogspot.com. The one and only post made there has been removed. There is a cached copy on Bloglines (in Swedish).
There was a mildly interesting flamewar in the comments to the post, now no longer available. Someone calling him- or herself “stev” defended Blogrankers.com there, calling their detractors “Communists”. He used an English idiom in that he capitalized the initial letter of svenska (“Swedish”). Interestingly enough, this same quirk can be seen in the post referenced above.
Update 2005-10-28: Fredrik gets his letter.
Update 2005-11-01: I finally got my letter in the mail, threatening me with up to two years of prison for breaches of the Swedish data privacy law PUL, and my provider with legal proceedings if they did not remove the information. The letter was signed “H & N Consulting” but with no other contact information. The sender address was the same as the administrative contact for the domain “blogrankers.com”.
I agree with Bengt that these guys have no legal leg to stand on, but I am no lawyer. I don’t have time or energy to make an impassioned stance against the injustices of the situation. So I’m caving in to their demands. This also saves the legal community in Sweden a lot of bother they can do without.
I could say it’s scary that a company can use these kinds of scare tactics to silence valid criticism. The scariness is alleviated, however, by the sheer stupidity of their actions. They’ve managed to alienate a large number of influential voices in the Swedish blogging community, who, even if they will censor their posts, will never forget the name of the people who made them do it. I predict that the financial future of the company is bleak.
However, I did make an unwarranted assumption about XXX’s physical appearance. I wrote that he was covered in phlegm. As I have never met the person, this was uncalled for. I have no real way of knowing the what the physical aspect of the gentleman is. For any offense this comment may have caused, I apologize.
Update 2005-11-04: cleaned up and fixed links.
Update 2005-11-06: small edits and clarifications.
Updated on Sunday, 2005-11-06.
Posted at 20:29,
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Posted at 11:48,
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Posted at 15:08,
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An S-F novel not set in Bank’s Culture universe. Has good sense-of-wonder factors, but the characters seem a bit cardboard-like for Banks.
Posted at 14:19,
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Posted at 18:02,
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Well, the trilogy is done. It was never boring, but it takes a good writer to keep the reader hooked for three thousand pages. Stephenson does a good but not stellar job.
Update: the books are frequently funny, but not often laugh-out-loud funny. The following passage made me lol though. The hero, Daniel Waterhouse, and sir Isaac Newton are meeting with an informer in the pub of the Newgate prison, called the Black Dogg:
The Black Dogg was not the sort of tavern that contained a great deal of furniture — patrons either stood, or lay on the floor. There was a bar, of course, in the literal sense of a bulwark erected between the prisoners and the gin. This was now a palisade of burning tapers. […]
Updated on Sunday, 2005-10-23.
Posted at 09:15,
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Posted at 11:53,
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Hilarious article in El Reg:
If the latest news from the wonderful world of Pandemia has got your organisation running around like a headless Romanian chicken, then don’t fret: Gartner has released an essential guide to avian influenza, aka bird flu, aka Black Death II, which mercifully states that although you will most likely be lying dead among the smouldering ruins of society, your IT infrastructure can be saved for future generations.
The article supplements Gartner’s tips (“Assign someone in your business to track biological threats such as the avian flu. […]”) with the following:
- Bulk buy flowers and coffins as part of your business continuity preparedness for a permanent workforce outage scenario.
- Assign someone in your business to stand on the roof and shoot anything with wings.
- Set up email autoresponders to communicate: “Sorry, I’m out of the office due to death.”
- Lock infected employees in their homes with broadband access and then paint a red cross on the door.
- Leave a full set of instructions on how to reboot the servers for the next generation emerging blinking into the post-apocalyptic landscape.
- Try to stay calm.
Posted at 23:30,
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Posted at 14:15,
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Jakob Nielsen has a list of top 10 design mistakes by weblogs. Here’s how I stack up.
1,2 No author bio and pics
Well, I have nice (updated!) pic on my About page. The bio could be more extensive, but hey, who reads that stuff anyway?
3 Nondescript posting titles
Could get better there, I suppose.
4 Links don’t say where they go
Also something I could do better, but I have been aware of it.
5 Classic hits are buried
Hmm, nice idea. I need to find the classics though.
6 The calender is the only navigation
I have both date based and category based archives.
7 Irregular publishing frequency
Huh? First, this is not my job, second, get an aggregator and stop surfin’ like it’s 1999, Jakob.
8 Mixing topics
As before, this is my site, I post what I want to.
9 Forgetting that you write for your future boss
Always worth thinking about. I feel that the skeletons in my digital wardrobe are pretty few, but I haven’t really done a full scan Google on myself.
10 Having a domain name owned by a weblog service
No probs there, unless the guys behind AllAboutSymbian kick me out.
Conclusion
For what it’s worth, I think Nielsen is a bit of an ass sometimes. But most of the above stuff makes sense.
Update: removed the butt-ugly <h4> tags.
Updated on Tuesday, 2005-10-18.
Posted at 23:17,
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You can hear it in the beat they march to
and you can feel the earth shake when they start to dance.
You can tell by the way they move you
it’s not murder, it’s an act of faith, baby.
And as the world moves faster
whip-lashing us around and round
it’s quite a slow disaster
and people keep on falling down.
Yes we wait…— The Cardigans
Words don’t make this amazing song justice, must be heard to be believed.
Posted at 23:47,
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Russell knows about the evil stalker blog and outs Jacek Rutkowski as the author. Predictably, Jacek denies authorship:
Russell Beattie in his latest post wrongly identifies author of this blog and motivations that lie behind it […]
It would be interesting to run a author-comparison scan on sentences like that and the normal utterings of Mr Rutkowski:
I have seen lately very pathetic and lame movie “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” (strangely it is number one in USA now but it is because Americans love everything British and this claymation movie is British) […]
I know Russell gets up people’s noses and is certainly no shrinking violet, but being the target of so much venom must be pretty unnerving. How someone can summon so much hate for another person whom they’ve never met is beyond me.
That said, I’m glad Russ is cool about it. I would have called the cops.
Posted at 21:15,
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I’m returning the Nokia N90 tomorrow. I’ll miss the gorgeous screen but not the hefty size.
Posted at 18:40,
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We’re safely back from the demilitarised, Swedish-speaking region of Åland. Many thanks to Petter, Gisela, and the girls for making our stay such a pleasant one!
Posted at 18:39,
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We’re on our way to Åland again, “we” being me, wife + one kid. We’ll be giving a lift to Linus, our systems guy who hails from the archipelago.
Updates to follow.
An aside: I tried to find out from my previous entry the exact when I was there last time, but I think my blosxom entries have screwed them up. I really need a more reliable way to keep the dates static on this blog…
Posted at 13:25,
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Nokia sprung a surprise on us today with then announcement of the E-series business phones. You can get the skinny on the devices over at Jim’s wiki:
All phones share the following features:
With a line-up like this, the recently announced Sony-Ericsson P990 suddenly pales. Sure, it too has Wifi and a smartphone operating system, but it’s not part of an integrated business solution that Nokia has built around the E-series. It’s basically a stand-alone device, marketed by a company with a strong consumer focus.
The E-series can be used as VoIP terminals with certain commercial switches — and you can bet that support for open source products like Asterisk will follow. This opens up another line of attack for Nokia trying to gain market share. Think about it: you can have one device that works as a VoIP terminal internally; you can ensure that the mobile worker has access to email and data at decent speeds nearly everywhere; and you can get this product from one company that provides tools to manage the complexity.
Microsoft was supposed to clean BlackBerry’s and Nokia’s clocks with their Exchange server email push component and their plethora of Windows Mobile devices. But these devices are fragmented among almost as many manufacturers, none of which have the clout to make a concerted biz push like Nokia. And as for the server component, we still haven’t seen it where we are (we’re an Exchange shop.)
On a personal note, either the E61 or the E70 can be my dream device. Forget the Communicator; these phones have all I want and more.
So, once again, Nokia has sprung back, keeping everyone off their toes with a really strong product line. I must say I’m surprised at this — I thought Nokia had dropped the ball on corporate messaging and the biz phone market. But this changes everything. It’s up to the competition (I’m looking at you, Microsoft) to up the ante or fold and leave the table.
Posted at 22:51,
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[Note to self: don’t write future reviews as a series of blog posts — gather all this stuff up and present it in a coherent fashion.]
The N90 has a little joystick on the side of the phone. This is primarily used in camera mode to control the flash, exposure etc., but it has some nice uses other than that. If you have a reminder that’s due, the phone will make a sound and show the reminder on the cover screen. You can use the little joystick to stop the tone or “snooze”.
However, this doesn’t work for incoming Bluetooth connections. You have to flip open the phone to accept those.
Speaking of camera modes, there are two. One is the “camphone mode”, with the screen opened in 90+90 degrees. The other is if you flip the camera housing 90 degrees with the phone closed. Then the cover screen becomes a viewfinder, and you can use the external joystick to manipulate your shots.
Update: you can also read SMS text messages on the cover screen. Cool.
Updated on Wednesday, 2005-10-12.
Posted at 19:27,
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We’re entering an era in which something that Stowe has often written about is going to become an essential skill: “continuous partial attention”. I thought I was pretty good at it, but I am slowly-but-surely observing everyone around me slipping into a kind of cognitive quicksand, getting increasingly grumpy and stressed out, and I don’t like it.
Can we go on like this? Or will the knowledge worker of the future be perpetually 17 years old, capable of handling the continous partial attention that modern worklife demands? Where’s the time needed for reflection, plotting the strategy for the next big thing?
Posted at 20:56,
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More stuff I’ve discovered about the Nokia N90.
No vibrating call alarm. WTF!? This is worse than useless. If you’re working with headphones and you’ve happened to turn the phone upside down, you’ll miss calls, because you won’t see the external screen flashing. Ditto if the phone is in your pocket and you’re listening to some music.
The pop-port is on the side of the phone, which means that you can’t have it in a narrow pocket when using the headphones.
Image quality is decent, but not great. The pics are better than average for a phone, but they’re still camphone pics.
It’s not very clear how to handle video calls. This doesn’t bother me, because it’ll be a cold day in hell before I make a video call.
The “active” standby screen. This is the first thing you see. The shortcut icons have tooltips.
The main menu.
The images gallery. Pressing the joypad left or right transports you to some undefined place (head and end of image list?). Use the up/down directions.
The browser, with Bloglines mobile. The hi-res screen really shines here.
This is a screenshot from a normal S60, showing the difference in resolutions. The screens are the same physical size.
I tried to capture a screenshot of the phone in camera mode, but apparently the normal keypad buttons are disabled there.
Update: added bullet about video calls, and added a comparative screenshot.
Updated on Monday, 2005-10-10.
Posted at 20:24,
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Apparently Google have released a web-based aggregator, google.com/reader. I like gmail, so I thought I’d try this out, even if it seems to lack a mobile interface.
So I uploaded my blogroll in OPML from Bloglines, and waited… and waited… and waited some more. After 15 minutes it still said “Your subscriptions are being imported…” so I decided to let Google Reader cool down a bit and try again later, perhaps in a year or two.
Posted at 23:23,
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I got the chance to borrow the Nokia N90 for a couple of weeks. As I already have a 3G phone, the 6630, I thought I’d give it a shot.
At first I was put off by the phone’s size, and the fact that none of my settings would be on it. But it turns out that the latest version of Nokia’s PC Suite is actually pretty good. There was no problem syncing two phones at once, so I just loaded my contacts, calender etc. onto the N90 from my PC.
Another “must-have” app is Wireless IRC. I downloaded a trial version (good for 2 weeks) and could start chatting on #mobitopia on the way home from work.
Physically, the phone is pretty big. Even if it’s only a few millimetres bigger than the 6630 when folded, it gives a much more massive impression. Nokia haven’t been able to design a sleek folder model yet.
Despite the size, the new charger cable attachment it very small — so small and thin it looks fragile. Fortunately, there’s an adapter cable for old chargers supplied with the phone.
The memory card slot is hard to use. You can get the card out, but if you don’t have long fingernails it’s very hard to get it in again. A 64M card is included, same as for the 6630.
The screen is very nice, with a much higher resolution than other S60 phones. Unfortunately, my first impression was that the text in Wireless IRC was blurry. This is an artifact of the fact that Wireless IRC is a “legacy” app, and the text is scaled up to prevent unreadably small fonts.
When using the web browser, the screen came into its own. The text size was smaller, but more of it was fitted onto the screen. Using Bloglines was nicer than using the 6630.
The keypad is larger and easier to use than the one on the 6630, which is not surprising as the physical area is nearly twice as large.
This is the first S60 phone I’ve used with the “ready” or “today” screen, and I found it a bit confusing at first. This is the fourth S60 phone I’ve used, so if I found it confusing I hesitate to think of what first time users might think. This said, the today screen provides nice shortcuts to Contact, Calendar, Messaging etc. This is an improvement over earlier interfaces where you had to press the swirl button to get to the menu.
The camera is the showpiece of the phone, with a 2 mpx sensor and a Carl Zeiss lens with autofocus. I liked the fact that it has a flash. I haven’t been able to see how good the photos are outside the phone’s screen yet. See the reviews linked from the page above for the gory details.
When using the camera, you fold out the screen in a 90 + 90 degree configuration. Access to camera controls is via an extra joystick on the side of the phone. There are also 2 softkeys along the top of the screen, or to the left if in shooting mode. Using these was fairly self-explanatory, but not very “intuitive”. Read the fine manual for the details.
When the phone is folded you can swing the camera housing and use the cover screen as a viewfinder. More discrete than unfolding all the bits and pieces in standard mode.
All in all, this isn’t a phone I’d choose if I had to pay for it, and probably not if I got it for free either. The folding design is not something I like in a phone, and I’d rather pay more money for a real camera than one on a phone.
Posted at 22:52,
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Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 16:03,
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Posted at 12:51,
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Rui:
The last couple of hours were spent poring over a couple of Rails applications, and arriving at the (predictable) conclusion that Ruby can be just as incomprehensible as Perl when written by squirrels on the same kind of crack.
Shouts to Anders at ork…
See also www.GodHatesPerl.com :-)
Posted at 08:32,
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Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 22:19,
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Reading lots of feeds via http://www.bloglines.com/mobile? Only showing updated items can help.
Go to Account > Feed Options and check the “Show only updated feeds” option.
(Thanks to Mark Fletcher for this tip :-))
Posted at 12:04,
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Det verkar som om Nordeas kunder utsattes för en phishing-attack igår. Enligt en av det “drabbade” så var sajten imponerande, men brevet inte lika välkomponerat:
Lägg märke till!
Extraförnyelse av elektronbetalingars säkerhetssystem!!
Ärade kunder av InternetBank NORDEA. Vi låtar komma Ers kännedom de senaste nyheter om vår bankens säkerhetssystem.
Banken Nordea insisterar på det bindande förfarande att genomgå den upprepade autentifisering, för att få er personalinformation överfört så fort som möjligt på den nya, mera säker server av vår banken.
För att få ert kontots normal funktions fortgång, behövar ni ingå i ert konto på den nya server, som är skyddad, med utnyttjande av era diskontdata; i motsatt fall skall ert Internet konto blockeras provisoriskt under 24 timmar för er säkerhet för tillgångarsbortförande, för att undgå “Phishing”'s attackers stora antal, som stiger ständigt.
Man skulle kunna tro att detta inte skulle lett till några som helst napp för bedragarna, men medierna slog upp detta stort.
Expressen verkar utgå från att alla är korkade:
Joakim Eberlund, 29, från Malmö reagerade direkt när han fick mejlet klockan 21.56 i går kväll.
— Jag jobbar med e-postsystem så jag märkte ganska snart att något inte stämde, annars hade mitt konto varit tömt nu. Det är mycket oroande, säger han.
Ähem, jag jobbar inte med e-postsystem, men jag hade reagerat direkt jag med, eftersom jag skulle utgå från att Nordea skulle anställa någon som kan svenska för att skicka ett sådant mail…
Aftonbladet är något mer balanserad. Samma Johan framställs där inte som ett lallande fån:
Joakim Eberlund i Malmö, kund i banken, fick mejlet, men anade att något inte stod rätt till:
— Men jag är övertygad om att andra kunder kan ha lurats av detta. Hade exempelvis min pappa haft Nordea skulle jag ha ringt och varnat honom för att absolut inte gå in på den falska hemsidan, säger han.
Jag försökte förgäves se vad DN hade att säga om det hela, men sajten var nere när jag kollade (10:50).
Posted at 10:53,
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A UMTS Nokia Communicator would rock. Imagine being able to SSH into your screen session via 3G!
Ahem… excuse my geekiness.
Update: I should qualify the above, I think. I spend a lot more time online than on the phone with the 6630. A communicator is a qwerty smartphone married to a S40 Nokia phone. This puts the functionality squarely where I want it: data use and text input. And 3G is fast data that could and should be cheap, at least for modest data usage.
SSH means I can access an online Unix server from anywhere, using the apps (emacs mostly) that I want.
Updated on Tuesday, 2005-10-04.
Posted at 23:53,
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I had an unusual number of blog ideas today, but the implementation was spoilt by buggy software and non-existent connectivity. So I’ve saved those ideas for another day.
Posted at 23:11,
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Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 23:42,
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