Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
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Posted at 21:15,
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I’ve been reading a lot about SMS.ac lately. They sound like a scummy company with a litigious bent.
(See Mike’s post for background.)
Posted at 20:22,
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Posted at 22:24,
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Posted at 21:12,
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Posted at 21:48,
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Today was a day like the ones before my PFY started work. He’s on vacation, and an unbelievable amount of shit came down. Two computers reinstalled from scratch. One workplace set up, which entailed kludgily adding another 8-port switch to the networking cabinet because the Ciscos are full up. Three boxes delivered, me hauling them through the meeting room (with meeting in progress) that some idiot decided should be right inside the loading bay doors. I couldn’t just leave 30K SEK worth of computers lying around outside. On top of that two people from the London office with network connectivity problems to the home office, and a heap of other stuff.
But I still managed to end just under 20 issues in the queue, which is pretty good. We had around 80 on Monday.
Posted at 22:57,
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Faithful readers of this blog, all two of them, will have noticed a temporary interruption of service this weekend. I was in London and was in no position to do anything about it. But now the issue has been fixed and I can blog again! The freedom! The exhilaration!
Ahem.
Posted at 22:32,
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This is a re-read. Not as good as the earlier novels but Gibson is still a master of his own kind of tech-distilled noir style.
Posted at 22:00,
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My coworker and I will be in London on Friday to meet with the other EU minions of the mothership. The guys in the US are great people and they really try hard to make it work for us, but too often we feel a bit sidetracked when it comes to project planning and so on. Having all people in the same general timezone is a great advantage for problem solving. As we overlap only slightly with the US (a few hours every evening) it’s hard to keep track of stuff. Email only goes so far.
So we’re hoping to get some consensus from our part so we speak with one voice.
Sean in the UK office has promised us Guinness later (St. Patrick’s day!), and we will be staying in London on our own dime Saturday—Sunday. If you want to hook up, call or text me.
By the way, I’m looking forward to 3 days away from a computer, and I think both me and my family could use a break from each other.
Posted at 22:16,
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I picked up my new passport today, in the nick of time for the trip to London tomorrow. I asked if the new passport had an RFID-chip, and was told that it had. I guess it’s behind the little symbol on the front cover.
There’s not much info in Swedish about this. Specifically, I wonder what would happen if the chip is “accidentally” erased: is the passport still valid? (This is the case with US passports.) How do you check that as a citizen before being stopped at the US border?
Another question is what info the chip contains. Biometric data sounds pretty scary from a privacy standpoint, especially as it seems as though the encryption has been cracked.
I can’t believe that a contactless technology was chosen for this application. I’m gonna try to find a shielded cover for the passport as soon as possible. Too late for tomorrow’s trip, I’m afraid.
Posted at 21:48,
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Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 21:58,
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Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 21:37,
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Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 00:31,
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Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 21:00,
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Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 21:41,
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I installed Ubuntu again with an eye towards using it more often for work stuff from home. So I needed Java so I could run SQuirrel to access the ‘Orrible database. Of course you have to jump through N hoops to get Sun’s JRE installed, details here. Thanks to Matt for helping me out.
Another more serious issue was the lack of any sort of inetd on the
machine I was trying to migrate files from. This is also an Ubuntu
machine, stock install. It happily installed proftpd and tells it to
run from inetd, but the actual package is just a virtual one. I
manually installed the netkit-inetd package and got FTP
working. This issue looks like a bug to me.
This new machine has a higher-resolution screen, that makes Gnome much nicer to work with.
OK, enough geekery for tonight. Time for bed!
Posted at 00:19,
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Rogers Cadenhead (replying to Aristoteles Pagaltzis):
I’ve certainly heard from enough people the last month that the best way to clarify the RSS spec is to switch to Atom.
Boy, couldn’t see that coming, could we?
Posted at 21:54,
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I decided to try out Kubuntu on my new used laptop. I’ve been using Ubuntu (which uses Gnome) for a while and have grown comfortable with it, but I thought, “how different can it be?”. Answer: pretty different.
I’ve drunk the Gnome/KDE kool-aid, in that I now accept that you hunt around in panels to make stuff work instead of editing text files. I’ve been putting off using either system because I could barely grok what a window manager was, much less a “Desktop Manager”. But by using Ubuntu I could take the plunge all at once, so to speak, without having to assemble the parts myself. Of course, a certain amount of control is lost, but frankly life’s too short to get involved in all the minutae of modern Linux.
Anyway, back to KDE. It’s different enough for me to decide I’ll be sticking with Gnome in the future. (Also, the graphical style reminds me too much of a horrific Delphi app we had to try to maintain back in the day, along with every web app based on PHP I’ve ever seen.) Some apps that I’ve been getting fond of (X-chat and Quod Libet, for example) aren’t “native” KDE apps.
All in all, KDE is interesting, but I still feel Gnome is the better Linux desktop for me.
Posted at 21:49,
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Posted at 21:22,
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I’ve started documenting the podcasts I subscribe to in my podroll. I haven’t yet found a simple way of getting the subscription info out of iTunes, so I’m maintaining it manually for now. I’ll link to the the website of the ‘cast and to the feed, if applicable.
I have semi-serious intentions of reviewing the podcasts in the future, but right now I just want to get the ball rolling. Comments welcome!
Posted at 16:13,
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As a final exercise in thinking about risk, consider this: Folks at NASA estimate that your chance of being killed by a meteorite are on the order of 1 in 25,000. It’s not because you’re likely to be hit in the head. Nobody in recorded history has been killed by a meteor. It’s because really big meteors do come by every so often, and when (not if, but when) one hits the earth, it’ll kill just about everyone.
Posted at 13:59,
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I’ve started to amass a few blosxom plugins that I’d like to share, so I’ve created a new category plugins to keep them in one place. Most are pretty basic, and I haven’t had time to ensure that they’re as general or easy to configure as I’d like. Comments and patches are welcome.
Here’s what’s up now:
Coming soon: the submit plugin.
Posted at 13:35,
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This plugin allows you to define acronyms and abbreviations. When they
appear in a post, the acronym will be wrapped in <acronym> tags and
you’ll get a handy tooltip explaining what it means.
(Here is the original post about this.)
Posted at 13:25,
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This plugin allows you to add a description to your categories. I use it on category pages to explain what the category is about, and also in tooltips in the category links for each story.
(Here is the original post about this.)
Posted at 13:20,
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The plugin
rendertime
allows you to see how long it takes to render all or parts of a
blosxom blog. When I tried it, the default version didn’t work on my
site. So I updated it to use the standard Perl module Time::HiRes. You can
get the updated version
here.
(Here is the original post about this.)
Posted at 13:08,
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For some reason I’ve had Lloyd Cole’s Lost Weekend running through my head recently. But even though I haven’t had double pneumonia in a single room I’ve still felt pretty crummy. It started last Saturday and it’s been up and down all week. I went in to work on Wednesday: big mistake, Thursday I felt like death warmed over.
Yesterday I was convinced I had step throat or avian flu or something so I ponied up the double fee for a weekend consultation, only to be informed that it’s “just a cold”. At least I got that morphine-laced cough syrup to ease my throat. Basically I try to get a receipt when I visit the doctor’s since there’s nothing wrong with me every time I go there, and I like to feel like I’m getting some value for my money.
Anyway, it feels like I’m finally getting better, which is a good thing. I really need to get back to work, my poor PFY is inundated with issues, and there a couple of surdegar (lit. sour doughs, Swedish for stuff that’s been festering for far too long) that really need to be fixed.
I also feel that there’s a bunch of stuff that’s fundamentally b0rked in our processes, but I think I’ll have to take that up via official channels instead of just venting my spleen via the internal blog (or here).
Posted at 11:46,
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Inspired by this post by Dennis Forbes I whipped up a little plugin that provides quick links to del.icio.us, digg, and reddit submission forms, and also a quick way to search Technorati. You can see the horror at the bottom of each post.
The plugin isn’t ready for prime time: I’ve yet to figure out how to customize it for differing permalink schemes, and it lacks documentation. However, if anyone is interested I’ll post it as a work-in-progress.
Note: I have only tested this with del.icio.us and Technorati, as I don’t have accounts on digg and reddit. Feedback regarding these services is welcome.
Posted at 23:04,
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Grabbed from my del.icio.us links.
Posted at 21:11,
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I guess it’s not surprising a telco exec’s got no problem ripping off his own parents.
Doesn’t surprise me.
The last groovy thing anyone did with aggregation was in 2003 when Mark Pilgrim started Atom to piss off Dave Winer. That’s three years of interweb time, so could everyone please stop talking about the subject. No one cares anymore. Thank you.
That means you, Steve Gillmor.
Posted at 22:44,
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Posted at 21:46,
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OPML 2.0 is easy to understand if you’re intelligent, have common sense and are patient.
Sounds like a small market.
Posted at 21:33,
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