JaranBlog

Dagbladet.no

A huge forest fire is raging in an area near Grimstad and Arendal these days. It has been going on for 4 days and only today the firemen hope to gain some control over it. According to Dagbladet.no it is the largest forest fire in Norway in modern times and it can even be seen from “space”.

Luckily no lives has been lost yet, but it’s still pretty scary. I am relatively safe about 40 km from the fire, but it’s still close nough to see the smoke and smell the burned wood. I woke up this morning to the sour smell of newly burned out wood. Yesterday around noon Arendal was completely covered in smoke and last night a cone of smoke was covering the sky above Grimstad. Aparently you could see the smoke as far south as Kristiansand. 10 000 acre has burned so far. That’s an area larger than downtown Oslo, and it will probably be more before they manage to stop the fire.

Dagbladet.no

Dagbladet.no

Dagbladet.no

Dagbladet.no

Agderposten

Agderposten

Agderposten

Agderposten

The official release of Opera 9.5 is just around the corner, and yesterday a release candidate was made available as a small teaser. I have usually been a eager beta-tester of Opera, but with this version I decided to hold off untill there was a more stable version out. So, this morning I took my chances with the latest RC!

Oh boy, is this great. When you didnt think a browser could become any faster, Opera goes ahead and surprises you. It is really incredibly fast. It’s amazing!

Another thing I love about the new Opera is the Link implementation. Opera Link is synchronization of your bookmarks, notes, speed dial and personal bars, which means that you will have the same setup on all your computers The synchronization is working silently in the background and you don’t even notice it. Now I have the same bookmarks etc on my computer and on beach with Opera Mini Geek!

Opera 9.5 also comes with a brand new skin, which helps freshen up the “new browser” experience. I love the new tabs, but have mixed feelings about some of the icons used in the Mail panel etc.

All in all, Opera 9.5 is just frikkin’ awesome!

*mip mip* WRRRRROOOOOOOooooooooooommm….

During Easter, many geeks like to come together and play games and socialize with a few thousand other geeks, instead of tumbling down-hill in a huge snowball and eating chocolate. I’ve been there myself and it was great, so no pun intended.

Dagbladet.no just posted a cool high-res photo of the Viking Ship at Hamar, where The Gathering is held. Pretty cool, and you get a quite detailed view of what people are doing. So keep away from the naughty stuff and concentrate on the game, cause people are watching you!

Swedish broadcaster SVT announced over the weekend (article in swedish, sorry) that they are planning to broadcast all of their live shows on the web. “Awesome!”, you may think - the Swedes are really moving along with the digital age, giving the consumers what they want! Well, curb your enthusiasm.

As Sydsvenskan.se reports, SVT are also planning on claiming broadcast receiver licence from anyone owning a computer capable of accessing the Internet! And Swedish SVT are not alone. Here in Norway, the NRK have been thinking about the same strategy since 2006.

What this means, is that the national broadcasting companies want to charge you an annual fee because they are making their content available on the Internet. You’re not interested in their content? Well, why should they care!

I am an opponent of the broadcast receiver licence. I find it a rape of the society to claim a fee of over 2000 NOK (~390 USD) for only having a TV, when I rarely watch the national broadcasting channels, or listen to their radio stations. In addition to this I pay the monthly bills from my satellite provider. But enough about that. This is not what this blog post is about.

What I find outrageous is that a national instance wants to claim a fee from everyone, simply because they have made their material available on the Internet. I mean… you simply can’t do that. I have my strong doubts that such a suggestion will ever get through and accepted, but just the fact that someone can suggest it is quite frightening to me.

What if newspapers should start charging you a monthly fee, just because they are publishing their articles on the Internet? Would you accept that? Of course not! What if I sent you a bill twice a year which read “Licence fee for JaranBlog”? Don’t like my blog, or find any of these ramblings interesting? Well, see how much I care… Pay up, b**ch! Or lose your Internet access!

If you want to get paid for your online content, you implement a closed system where users have to pay to get access. My theory is that these broadcasting stations know that much of their content have a very narrow audience in many older generations and thus very few would be interested (or perhaps capable) of using their online paid service. Therefore, they propose this riddicilous licence and hope that some ignorant smooth talking politician will speak their case.

Many of you have probably already seen the video where you can hear an Oklahoma state legislator from Oklahoma City, Sally Kern, express her belief that homosexuality is a bigger threat than terrorism and Islam.

I normally don’t have anything against people speaking their mind and expressing their opinion, even if it’s controversal. But, it has to be backed by facts! And especially when you’re a high elected official, you seriously can’t go around spreading bullshit which is not based on anything other than your sicko fears, originating from your father’s beating when you were little.

I mean, statements like “societies that embrace homosexuality has not lasted more than a few decades” and “homosexuality is a bigger threat to this country than terrorism and Islam”… I would love to see the background material and numbers that she bases these statements on. So I sent her an e-mail asking for it. Doubt I’ll ever hear anything back. People like these have a tendency of thinking that “God’s word” need no proof or ties to reality.

In connection with this case I also read a comment on dagbladet.no, which I found rather amusing. Got quite a lot of truth to it too, even if it’s put on edge: (translated to English from Norwegian)

I have a friend named Bob. The special thing about Bob is that he is an invisible friend, who only I can speak to. I want to take a day off from work now and then to see Bob. Bob tells me what I should think of other people, and who to like and dislike. They call me crazy. Had I only called him “God”, it would have been ok.

My two cents, and poke at, religion and ignorant people in high places.

A new cool Ubuntu-site has just launched: Ubuntu Brainstorm. This new site is a voting based tracker system where Ubuntu users can suggest features and improvements to Ubuntu and vote for those they find important.

The same idea was used by Dell in their IdeaStorm site, which led to Dell computers being shipped with Ubuntu.

Will be interesting to see how this will effect the coming Ubuntu releases.

I have just released a new version of iTunes Agent!

Version 1.2.2 is a small bug fix release, which addresses an issue with non-existing tracks appearing in a device’s playlist, causing iTunes Agent to get confused and giving cryptic error messages. This is now solved and you will be given a nice message telling you how to clean up your playlist and get the synchronization going

Also, logging facilities has been added which should enable me to get much more detailed information on future issues.

Check out the iTunes Agent web site for more information.