Call the cops on your neighbor, get a cookie

Try as I might, I can't keep myself from posting delicious nuggets from Bruce Schneier's blog. If your not reading it every day you should be ashamed of yourselves.
This current one is about the war on the unexpected. How citizens are encouraged to report everything that they see that doesn't seem right to them.
In this day and age, that basically means everything.
You really need to read this article. It is very insightful, and it gives further proof that society as we know it is going to hell. The terrorists have won. Shit, they don't even need to kill another person ever. We are already terrorized by our petty fear. Terrorists don't need to blow up planes to shut down airports. Just call in an anonymous tip, and you'll terrorize the travellers and authorities for hours or even days.
This has got to stop!
People, refuse to be terrorized! Refuse to believe that everything outside your own kitchen is out to hurt you. The world isn't as bad a place as people make it out to be.
Sure, people are assholes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are out to destroy civilization as we know it.
A bright example of this fear mongering (that was also linked from Bruce's article) is this campaign that you're supposed to call the cops whenever you see a parent holding a child's hand. Does holding your child's hand automatically mean that you're sexually abusing it? I'm going to go for "no" on that question, but if the societal tendencies today are to be believed, the answer to that question is "yes".
I used to think that people's stupidity was what would bring about the downfall of society, but I was wrong. It's people's unfounded fear that will ultimately cause the world to collapse.

Maybe if people weren't so dumb, they wouldn't believe in all this crap that the media machine churns out.

Webstats and popups

I've changed the visitor statistics tracker I use to Google Analytics. Hopefully this will work better, and not show any ads.

New Features in Google Maps

Google maps has some new added features that will absolutely blow your mind.
The primary one is drag-n-drop re-routing, but also traffic information (I can assume that this is only available in selected cities), and all sorts of other new GUI features.
As seeing is believing, I will refer you to this other blog post with a lovely video of the entire thing in action.

You have got to check this out, absolutely amazing.

Trying Windows Live Writer beta 2

Seems to be pretty nice. I told it the url of my blog, and it analyzed it, told me I was using blogger, and installed the appropriate components. It will also allow me to edit in more of a WYSIWYG than the default web-based blogger tool will. It will let me edit in a way so that I will see what the final post will actually look like. No doubt this is because it just downloaded my style sheet from blogger, and is now using some edit-enabled version of some Internet Explorer control to let me do my editing.

While the blogger tool is great, I sometimes suffer from a poor internet connection, and then semi-offline blogging is a good idea.

I don't know if I'll actually use this in the end. It depends on what features it has, how well it works, stability and so forth, but I'll try to do a couple of posts with it to see how it works.

It is quite obviously made for vista, and it looks less than stellar on my XP system, but I don't see myself switching anytime soon. I tried a Vista beta this summer, and I was not impressed. It wasn't stability or anything like that, windows killed that beast years ago. Rather it was the completely unusable "interface" that they have equipped vista with. I love the way Explorer (Windows explorer, not Internet Explorer) works. They threw that out completely and instead gave me some useless search-like tool. If I wanted to search, I'd install google desktop. I organize my files and folders. I know exactly where to find things. I don't use the indexing stuff in xp either.

It's going to be interesting to see how it handles spelling and tags (called categories) here too. I really like the way it is done in the blogger web tool. (Hmm, not nearly as good as blogger, but it's just one thing. We will see).

I can't insert pictures, because it has some weird "upload to ftp"-functionality, which blogger doesn't use. Good thing I don't publish pictures that often then.

How about adding links? (This is a really nice photo blog, you should check it out). That's something I do from time to time.(That seemed to work fine.) Shortcuts for text formatting seem to work fine too.

I also do quotes, from time to time, and I must say that I find the blogger tool lacking in this respect. Things like empty lines before and after quotes show up weird. Also, the (blogger) preview leaves a lot to be desired, since it doesn't take in to account your font size or column width when showing you your preview. Blogger should just load up your style sheet and present the preview via that. That would be much better.

Nicely done of them to put the buttons in the same order as in the blogger interface. Someone up in Redmond is thinking. (Yes, much better quote handling than blogger). That is it for now I guess. More things will follow...

(The last thing I do before posting is spell check. WLW does NOT have this functionality! What a waste. They've been doing it in word since forever. It should be included.)

Going to blogger let me do some spell checks, and I had been somewhat naughty.

Strange ways of reaching me

I was going over my statistics just now (of course I track who visits. I get so happy when I see that people have seen, even if they might not have read, what I have written), and I saw that I had a visitor from Korea. (Wow, that was a horribly incorrect sentence, but you all get it).
They were looking for "ioftpd cubnc", which is a fair search string (via google, btw).
It is true that I am the author of cubnc, but this is not the best way to seek support (but you are still welcome to leave a comment to that end).
Normally, the #cubnc channel on EFNet would be a better place to look.
If I can't answer myself, then I'm sure someone else can.
Right now I've got a lot of exam stuff to take care of, but after that I should be on irc with more frequency.

EDITED TO ADD: Since the search engines are indexing this thing, I might as well be a link whore and link to cubnc and say that cubnc was primarily designed with glftpd in mind, but that it also works perfectly with ioftpd. Ok, that's enough of that.

Captain's Log

It just came to me, I could have called this place "captain's log". Not because I'm a Trekkie or anything (but I do like star trek), but because my nick on the internet for the past 12 or so years has been "captain". It would be correct, and at the same time a star trek joke. I would personally chuckle every time I read it.
But after a while I guess it would get old. I don't think you'll see a change like this any time soon.
Ohh so witty...

Pi

My last post was apparently number 314.

I'm a bit annoyed right now, because my internet has gone back to sucking ass. During exam weeks it was fine, but now, for some reason, everything takes ages to load, and I have slower response times than on a GSM modem.

Another thing that pisses me off was that google decided to introduce the possibility of having blogger in a variety of different languages, so I was greeted with a dutch page when I went to log in.
Not only that, but when someone else from my ip range visits my blogger profile, it's in dutch, even though their google settings indicate English. I hate localization of software. I know a lot of other people like it, but I feel like more of a victim than a beneficiary.
Also, why the hell does google's spell checker think internet should be spelled with a capital I? It's not a fucking name, it's a concept.

Looking on the bright side of life, however, we've had a nice temperature of 28 degrees here all weekend. I've been walking around in shorts for 3 days, and I'm absolutely loving it.
I had a solero ice cream today. When they were introduced, there was only one flavor, Mango with vanilla ice cream. About 1-2 years after the introduction, they removed this flavor and started adding all sorts of other outlandish flavors. This went on for years, without the best mango flavor ever returning. Until now. When I went to the store today, I found a "solero exotic", which turned out to be exactly the old mango taste that I enjoyed so much.
I also saw that the liberal party in Norway is moving towards passing a law that would make both file sharing legal for private use, and ban DRM. Both very cool things. Definitely steps in the right direction. I foresee DRM being all but extinct within 5-10 years.
I have heard about similar bills in Sweden and the EU, but I can't remember where.

"If it's not what you love, don't do it"

True words spoken by Mr Jeremy Allison of Samba fame. Currently employed by Google, he tells us about talking to his new office mate, what he does, and what he would have like to have been told when he was fresh out of college. If you are in Computer Science or any related area, you should really read this. Even if you're not, there are some points that are applicable to any job you'll ever do.

EDIT: I had a link here to what I thought was Jeremy's blog, but it was a collective kind of thing. Without it the comment below seems taken out of context, but imagine a link to a blog here.

Come to think of it, many big names in software blog on a more or less regular basis, and I don't read many of their posts unless they show up on other outlets linked by someone. Maybe I should make a habit of reading what these people deem worthy to say. They are, after all, where I want to be down the line. (i.e. working their dream job, doing what they love to do.)

Post Time

Why the hell won't blogger let me format my dates properly?
I want the post date below to read something like: 2007-02-14 21:35:09
Possibly without the seconds though.
The only thing blogger will let me do is use only time, or some asinine imperial format where they mix up month and day, and only allow the time to be shown as AM or PM.
Why?

I can get 2007-02-14 OR 21:35, but not both. What gives?
I've even tried to change the language setting, but to no avail.
This blows...

Labels

I just realized that I use labels for these blog posts like keywords. That might not be what's intended, but it's damn handy.
It dawned on me when I looked at my label list, and it was huge and there weren't more than maybe 5-10 labels that were connected to more than one post. It's not like I categorize my posts anyway, so we'll see where it leads. Who knows, maybe when I have 10k posts, then the list will look a lot different. How do you use your labels?

Back to Life

So, I guess school starts again tomorrow. Granted, I don't have class on Mondays, but it's officially on again. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as we will later see) I've been too busy playing World Of Warcraft these past weeks to a) do something productive and b) write new posts.
The good thing about playing wow is that I've grown tired of it again, so now my only hope is that TBC (not tuberculosis) will bring some new joy into the game. If not, then I'm screwed.
It's especially good that this happens now, as I have exam weeks coming up, and I don't want to be preoccupied with slaying foul demons and whatnot.

Three of my roommates arrived home yesterday with eerie timing. I was expecting only one of them, but they all arrived within one hour of each other, so now the house is full of joy and merriment again! It was really great to have the house to myself for these last two weeks, but I can't say that I haven't missed having them around. The remaining two are due sometime this week, and sometime next week. One of which has been to the eternal darkness or Norway for two weeks. It's going to be interesting to hear what she has to say.

I also got a link from my brother yesterday about a new blog I should check out. It's at http://indexed.blogspot.com, and it's full of truths and laughs.

Other than that, very little has happened. I've become very tuned in to CNN, as it's what I watch for breakfast, lunch and dinner when I'm downstairs, so I now know in detail what's going on around the world. Not that I didn't before, but my knowledge isn't normally accompanied by moving pictures.

Me and one of my roommates spent an inordinate amount of time on youtube today. We started watching some SNL skit, which quickly got followed by some nudity (of course, it's what the internet is for, is it not?), a bit of Chad Vader (hilarious stuff), and then I showed him the wonder that is LonelyGirl15. He had not seen this before, and was not familiar with the concept of vlogging (terrible word for video blogging, I know).

All in all a good, fun, and completely useless day.
Now we're all having a delicious dinner together. Fried chicken, potatoes and vegetables. Gotta run!

Some links

A List of Heroes (Top 20 Hackers in Film History)

The Seven Phases of Owning an iPod (almost entirely true!)

I think I've found two new blogs to add to my daily list.

http://www.drivl.com/ (EDIT: This site is awesome, I love it!)

and

http://monkeysforhelping.blogspot.com/

Bringing you much happiness in the way, yay! \^_^/