µblog - archive for 2007-09

I’m at IKEA by my own free will OMG!!

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Öllegård is a Swedish girl’s name I didn’t even know existed until today

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The Macalope:

When you bought and activated your iPhone, you entered into an agreement. When you hacked it, you ended that agreement. Don’t try to crawl back into bed and attempt to spoon Steve Jobs just because you want the iTunes WiFi Store to work on your unlocked iPhone.

Pretty much nails it. Have an unlocked iPhone? Don’t update it. TANSTAAFL.

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Idly wondering what my old nemesis is up to nowadays

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Pondering getting some Pratchett audiobooks. Are they as funny as in print?

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I just realised that most of Stirling’s latest works is mundane SF: http://tinyurl.com/275nsw

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Grabbing a couple of fries at Max

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brain eating amoebas, scariest thing I’ve read today http://www.kpho.com/news/14214579/detail.html

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Russ:

Like the codependent spouse of an abusive alcoholic, the Apple zealots just keep coming back for more.

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trying hard not to blog about the minor layout changes I just implemented

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IM IN UR BUGZILLA, CLOZIN UR TIKKETS

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http://isitfriday.gnapp.org/

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man sour grapes from iphone unlockers after the latest firmware update… TANSTAAFL

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Apple products: think different, look the same

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Ridley Scott:

You know, Alien is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by a great monster.

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Eurogamer reviews Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts:

The Brits are an incredible turtle race. Weak for much of the early game, digging in and setting up a defensive line is critical. Their build-‘em-anywhere trenches, for instance - such a simple technology, but you can’t really beat a dirty great hole in the ground for keeping bullets away from your face. Even the most basic infantry becomes devastatingly effective in a trench, as only incendiary attacks can realistically clear them out. Otherwise, they’ll just keep on chipping away at whatever’s fruitlessly trying to blow them away, an often insurmountable barrier to a vital victory point.

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Digesting a pseudo-Oriental meal

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wonder if joel spolsky really is as nice and amusing as he seems to be in his blog

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proof that slashdotters are part of eternal september 2.0: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/27/1541252

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playing FPS games on consoles sucks

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I did something similar and had to pay for it: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/09/26/5131601.aspx

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excel 2007 bug: 850*77.1 is displayed as 100000! http://tinyurl.com/2plptr

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It’s funny because it’s true:

some guy was complaining that we (systems and support) didn’t do anything but always pointed to SOX we told him to shut up and submit a ticket instead

(n.b. we’re due to attend a brainwashing course to learn how to be more customer-oriented, this thing will be a thing of the past.)

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Fred Clark:

We can only conclude, based on the figures they provide, that the Treasury Department has secret classified knowledge of a coming scourge of baby boomer vampires. This generation of Americans will begin retiring in three years and, instead of moving to Florida to play golf, or volunteering with the local library, they will become bloodsucking immortal creatures of the night, an army of the soulless undead, hiding from the sun, preying on the weak, and cashing their monthly checks throughout the unending centuries until the system racks up a deficit of $13.6 trillion.

Either that or the Bush administration is just lying about the numbers. Again.

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Testing Jottit: gerikson.jottit.com

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at home, sick

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DaveW actually makes a lot of sense in this post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/09/23/theYearOfTheSocialNetwork.html

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don’t you just love trying to grok your old code?

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The cold has ambushed me! I have given up hacking on the Frankenstein script for the day

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I always have to look up the documentation about using the Find::File module.

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On our way home after a visit to Blecktornsparken

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considering buying a cheap older nikkor to develop my manual exposure/focusing skillz

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man this new Swedish daily soap is shaping up to be a turkey

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The latest Springsteen sounds like a return to his old form at first listen

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enjoying some vintage Swedish punk-pop from the band Lolita Pop. Karin Wistrand’s singing is electric

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Increasingly, email is for work. I don’t use it much outside the office

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IT IZ CATURDAY??

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In Kågerån at Elin’s 20 year party

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making progress with the frankenstein script for grabbing images from my gallery2 install into blosxom

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I know it’s old news in Net time, but I just have to say how thrilled I am that SCO has filed sued for bankruptcy protection. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

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hmm my list of unheard songs in itunes is below 1,000

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wtf suddenly the pivot table creation in Excel 2k7 is fscked up

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faffing about with a new minimal web design

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shoving off home

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On my way in to work. Tele2’s data net seems to be down, sigh. Last time this happened I actually called and complained, but today I’ll try to survive.

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Stephen Fry is a mobile geek. Who knew?

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Via James Robertson, an online quiz on American civics.

I scored 53 of 60.

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You know it’s a bona-fide meme when two people link to it. Both Rui and Gruber link to Wil Shipley’s criticism of the “new Apple”, more concerned with sucking up to the content companies than delivering great products for users.

John writes in a comment:

The best thing that could happen to Apple this year would be for Microsoft’s Zune 2.0 to be a kick-ass product, both technologically and in terms of being designed to make customers happy, not entertainment conglomerates. Apple needs competition.

I wholly agree, but I don’t think we’ll see anything that will make customers happy from Microsoft. They’re deeper into the content companies’ pockets than Apple.

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Nice, James Robertson gets a recommendation from Rogers Cadenhead. I love it when my good taste is validated by others.

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man my blog needs a facelift

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pondering a photoblog for blosxom

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I have some ideas for a photoblog as an unholy union of blosxom and Gallery glued together with perl and cron

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Avast me mateys! Today be International Talk like a Pirate Day! Arrr!

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Joel Spolsky:

As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could [spend] six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.

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IM ON UR FLATPANEL, TOASTIN:

It’s all fun and games until she changes the channel or maxes the volume…

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Loads of stuff found in bloglines this morning on my way in. Having a touch of infostress

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working on the old link-fu with the UK iPhone launch. The usual suspects have pitched in

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Stuck on the tram

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chillin’

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Uh, I think a cold is coming on. Needless to say, I do not have time for this shit

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following the UK iPhone launch on #mobitopia, it seems pretty underwhelming

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Bloglines down?

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Mark Dominus:

One lesson to learn from all this is that those early Royal Society guys were very smart, and when they say something has a mysterious (0.4)x in it, you should assume they know what they are doing. Another lesson is that mechanics was pretty well-understood by 1668.

Mark’s blog is well worth reading, by the way.

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Erik:

Corn-based Ethanol is a wonderful political tool. It allows politicians to pretend to care about the environment while actually tailoring to one of the largest lobbyist group in the US.

So true. Whenever you find something that politicians whole-heartedly endorse, you don’t have to look far for a lobbyist.

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Just spent 75 minutes getting from St Eriksplan to Gullmarsplan. “Signalling error” at Gamla Stan, a real chokepoint for all traffic going South. It’s the kind of subway outage that’ll be front page news next morning.

Luckily the buses weren’t too crowded so we were able to route around the damage in some comfort, if not speed.

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hopefully sorted out seller’s insurance mess I managed to get us into

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Kids on the lawn smoking a hookah with what I hope is flavoured tobacco

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up too late, up to no good

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Looking at dining tables

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Heading into town to complete the Bourne trilogy(?)

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Brooding on a post on the iphone as a footsoldier in the war between PC makers and telcos

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Bourne Ultimatum completed by Bourne Weekend

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Parents are back in Beijing after their visit to North Korea

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Enjoying a La Trappe Tripel.

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Overslept and running late

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loving this site: http://www.dantestella.com/technical.html

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I fscking HATE the stupid company that takes the school pics at Leo’s school.

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looking for a new keyboard

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Fred Clark quotes Mark Twain on Patriot Day:

We teach the boys to atrophy their independence. We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter – exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place – the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.

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damn twinges of RSI in my right hand. exchanged my kb, let’s see if it helps…

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new kb seems to have helped with the RSI

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I can’t believe I forgot my ipod again

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Michael Mace on the coming clash of Apple vs. Nokia:

[W]hen you stand back and look at what’s happening in the [mobile] industry worldwide, it’s clear that Apple and Nokia both want very badly to be the dominant mobile computing company for young adults. That makes a huge, relentless conflict between them inevitable. They’re like two armies trying to take the same hill. One’s coming from the west, the other from the east, so there’s not a lot of fighting at the moment. But as soon as they reach the hill, there’s going to be an explosion.

I don’t know who will win, but I’m pretty sure that the main losers will be all of the other device companies and mobile operators who happen to be hanging around on the hill.

My advice to them: Run.

Great post. It explains in some detail the challenges facing both companies, and the certain doom that comes to those (telcos, Microsoft, Motorola) who do not understand the future of the industry.

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clocking in, today is SOX day

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observing the “fight against incorrect apostrophes”-meme resurface at Daringfireball and Codinghorror

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At Dieselverkstaden in Sickla. Free wifi!

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drooling over DPreviews Nikon D300 preview: http://www.dpreview.com/previews/nikond300/

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I’m reminded never again to buy commercial photo mags. You get better info on the web

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I’m calling it a day. Hope to get some rest this weekend.

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Everyone and their dog has a pair of Koss Porta-pro headphones, including me. It’s the white ipod buds of this year

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Twitter is down, and has been for 7 hours. A “Skype moment”, or a simple snafu? They’d better get going, it’s already 9:30 AM on the US East coast.

In the meantime I’m playing with Jaiku. I snagged my username there for a while back but haven’t really played with it much. But now they have IM integration, which is the primary way I interact with Twitter. So it’s more usable for me now.

I created the #mobitopia channel too. Mobitopians, please join!

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Got this from Twitter IM:

very unexpectedly, 2.5 hours turned into 12. We apologize, and are working hard to make our upgrades less negative for everyone.

It would be interesting to know exactly what went pear-shaped.

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clocking in

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tap tap is this thing on?

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Parents called, they’re on their way to PRC and DPRK today

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moaning about our crappy energy price comparison “feature”, which should be taken out back and shot

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I can’t believe I forgot my ipod. Woe

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yawn new iPods. Wasn’t there someone predicting a new paradigm in this tired old format. I dunno if I can see it squints

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if the $250 price for the 80GB classic translates to SE prices it’s something to consider for my birthday

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hmm seems my cunning plan of mailing backups of my blog to gmail has been foiled

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our neighbors don’t like our cats. What to do?

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Maraton: Durandal confirmed on Xbox Live. I will try the demo levels tonight. If it’s worth I’ll set up a profile and hog the box

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for Twitter Blocks, read Twitter BOLLOCKS: http://tinyurl.com/3dzquk

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Damn, no milk. I hate discovering that after making tea.

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fsck you Facebook and your downtime too!

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Standing in line a burger at Gröna Lund

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relaxing with a Scotch and water

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wtf is Twitter Blocks, besides an exercise in Flash wankery?

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For the curious, I was attending a kräftskiva yesterday.

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Hmm Twitter IM down as I read about a Jaiku IM app? Is this fate?

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