JaranBlog

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.

No, not a plastic-fantastic Guitar Hero on the Xbox, but for real. The hero label can probably be discussed and quickly discarded, though…

I got a guitar for my birthday this year. Yes, I know, my birthday is still 6 days away, but I was home on Thursday and got the present from my parents then. A brand new guitar in a brand new guitar “backpack”, whatever you call those things.

I quickly found out that what little I knew about playing the guitar ealier, has been lost somewhere over the years. So I am starting pretty much from scratch, learning the basics, but will soon be touring the world!

A friend of mine have also just started playing, so we are planning a few jamming sessions, hopefully with some mentoring from a few other friends who are a bit more comfortable with the instrument in their hands.

I went downtown and bought a songbook today, so now I’ll play my fingers sore!

Found a great new tool for Linux through Tombuntu.com the other day: Terminator. This nifty little tool enables you split your terminal window into a grid of resizable terminals. I have tested it for a few days now and it’s a bliss! Instead of crowding my workspace and taskbar with terminals I now have them neatly organized within one window and I can have a log tail neatly next to my deployment terminal etc.

Here’s a screenshot to illustrate the goodies:

Download instructions for Ubuntu are available here.

I came across this post through TSS.com yesterday. This should set the standard for “at home sick today”-emails you send to your boss:

My immune system is being unkind to me again this weekend. My coughing fits had gotten so severe that my physician has seen fit to prescribe something unprecedented to the scope of over-the-counter medication.

Who would have thought that a moment’s respite from expectorating one’s own blood could find purchase in codeine-laced promethazine, the creativity flowing forth from one’s fingers like butterflies upon each keystroke? Every moment now transpires into an out of body experience, the luminescence coalescing freely from an LCD backdrop on a disembodied sensation, trying to discern the interpretive numina of the garbage truck ever-present outside my bedroom window. Flash. Flash. Lift. And it’s gone, further down the dark, to attend to another yet lonely garbage can. I can only weep at the significance.

The sum of my being is available over IM and phone and email, although it is unlikely that we will commune on the same plane of understanding until my medication has metabolized sufficiently out of my biological venue. (…which does not exist in my current frame of reference - the dangerous ramblings of Descartes loom ominously at the fringes of my attentions, all material existence is possibly a malicious manifestation of some mischievous higher power, or with some degree of enforcement of a supreme effort of one’s self epistemology, transgresses too closely to a soliptic weltanschauung of Rhonda Byrne proportions.)

As most of you probably have noticed, the blog recently got updated. Because I was running a version of WordPress from ancient times, it was no way I would get to import my old posts. Kind of like if I wanted to install a Ferrari engine in my carriage from 1780. It just isn’t feasible.

But don’t worry, I still have all the goodies stored away in a dusted cabinet! So if you are missing some of my old excellent writings, perhaps wanting to add them to the Library of the World’s Greatest Writings of All Time, they are available here

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.

Some of you might have noticed that my blog has been offline for a few days. I got an e-mail from my host last week informing me that some script on my site kept overloading their database server and they needed to perform frequent restarts to solve it.

Because of this I had to take the site offline untill I could resolve the
issue and now I am back up. I decided to start over, with a fresh new install of a newer version of WordPress and keep all the old posts in a backed up version (will be available shortly!).

The reason for this whole mess was apparently google bots continously requesting the CAPTCHA i protected my comment system with, according to my host. Whether this is the case or some spam artist consealed himself as a google bot, I don’t know. And I don’t really care.

Now I am back in a new format and hopefully with less load on my host’s database server