The toman diaries

RSS vs CSS

tirsdag, oktober 28, 2003

OK thats it. Anyone have an RSS stylesheet that works with every thinkable version of RDF/RSS? I'm trying to make a suitable one for use in Opera, but it's a chore. In the end, the sheet will probably be larger than the avarage web-page. Sigh.

Opera seems to have very, shall we say, odd problems about the RSS tags <title>, <link> and <image>, but I'm still trying to figure out how exactly...
Check it out at my alternate site. Feedback wanted, address in the sheet :)

Oh, google

fredag, oktober 24, 2003

Try it yourself: ~Audio, ~Bicycle, ~Lady, ~Freud, ~W3C.

Seems to me like it is a Related pages search, applied to words. Very useful anyway, thanks again Google.

Go home plug!

søndag, oktober 19, 2003

I just found out about this new and brilliant system called homeplug. (OK, so it's old news, but living in Norway where noone sells these goods, it's hard to get a hold of new ideas before you need them)
It's a networking standard using the existing electrical wiring in your house for communication. Some has reported as much as 12Mbps throughput, while testing shows that 5-10 is more common. Here in Norway there are no such tests I know about, probably because of the lack of retailers...

We are stepping up our internet-connection soon, from two v.90 modems to one always on ADSL, so hey, we need either

1. A router
2. Meters of cable
3. Yes, another ethernet-card

Update 26.09: Thats it then. A Billion BIPAC-640AE 4+1 port router/SPI-firewall/VPN gateway, a Sunsway PCI-LAN8139D-4 Ethernet card and a mere 10+5meters of cable is on the way. A Speedstream 5100 DSL-modem dumped in our box friday. Homeplug will have to wait...

OR

1. A homeplug adapter (ADSL modem to mains)
2. A homeplug adapter (Mains to computer 1)
3. A homeplug adapter (Mains to computer 2)

So I'm contemplating, what will be the best solution? I know this package with 5 meters of cable(which should be adequate), two cards and a hub retailing for NOK700,-. But I can't compare that to anything, because noone I know of sells homeplug devices in Norway! Imagine!

Well, thats not really true... I'm confering with one very-well hidden retailer calling himself homeplug.no. What a genious. Not only is he the only one selling this stuff, he also has the domain right. So why arn't I able to compare the prices? Have a look at the site and you'll understand. It's seems to be nothing but an advertising-space for Gigafast. Yes, it's a Norwegian site, but all info is in English. Not a single pricetag anywhere. Oh well, perhaps it's really just engros..

What I do know is that such adapters retail for about 6-700 Danish kroner. So how does that translate into Norwegian kroner? 650DKK = 721NOK.
Thats one unit. The other stuff costs 700 combined. So we're looking at 721 x 3 = 2163,- vs 700,-

I'm still drooling at homeplug though. They come in many variants too, among them equipped with WiFi. I have yet to see any with bluetooth, which would've been superb: A potential bluetooth-link anywhere in the house! Internet in your bed with no (cables or) other equipment running etc.

Check them out if you haven't, I'm sure you'll re-recognize the plain coolness of your wires. IOGear Gigafast and Siemens were the ones I found the most interesting.

In other news

søndag, oktober 19, 2003

A high-standing russian delegation has visited a norwegian air-force base for the first time since the cold-war ended. "Chief-in-command" Vladimir Sergeevitsj arrived wearing a sweater and a leather jacket.

And whats worse, at least according to the press, the russian folks took many pictures! -Where the press wasn't allowed, of course. So the major newspaper here, Avisa Nordland, has run a series on this for a few days. Whats the fuzz about? If the RNAF have a problem, they'll probably tell them not to take pictures.

White water

søndag, oktober 19, 2003

Jup, it's snowing for the first time this year. And it's about zero degrees, so anyone travelling with tires on the ground are hastingly changing them. Except for me that is, cause I don't have a car(or a drivers-licence), but a bicycle. And I've never used winter-tires on it anyway, so why this year? Have a look at the webcam from a city near me, or better, a gallery of nordland, the county in which I live. Many stunning scenes.

Jabber has passed ICQ

onsdag, oktober 15, 2003

According to jabber.com, the total number of jabber users has passed that of ICQ users. This number includes 'normal' users like you and me, and corporate ones, which number is 4 million.

Corporate users find it easy to use because of it's well documented protocol, using XML. Like other IM's, you can do things like 'instant file-transfer' etc.
Anyone can set up their own server too, making it ideal for a cross-platform home network :-)

Superb! Open standards are rolling in, get on the wagon!

Opera 7.21 out

onsdag, oktober 15, 2003

Opera 7.21 is out. It turned out to be the same as RC6, which I failed to report.. - The RC's were coming tightly...

So summing up, whats new in 7.21?

• It is syncronized on Windows, Linux (SPARC, Intel, PPC), FreeBSD (Intel), and Solaris (SPARC). This means you can use Opera as a reference without rebooting ;-)
• Many bugfixes, see the changelog
• Reopen feature, lets you open closed pages. Very handy.
• Improved mime-type handling. Gives you the correct extensions when downloading something...
• Latest version of OpenSSL, giving improved security
• Made it possible to use CSS width on <button>
• Reintroduced KIOSK-mode, again giving Opera the head at electronic info-stands, public computers, etc.
• Sadly though, as I discovered just yesterday, a bug causing images to shrink in height if they have borders or padding, was not fixed :-(

In the end, it's a good release, very stable, and as always feature-packed. Get it!

Should Cannabis usage be illegal?

mandag, oktober 13, 2003

Many countries are concidering this. As you may know, it has been 'decriminalized' in the Netherlands for quite some time. Switzerland is actively debating it, and England has been loosing up, letting possesion of minor quantities go with a warning.

In Norway, March last year, a regularly gathering "Punishment law commision" (Straffelovskommisjonen) recommended decriminalization of cannabis-usage, based on the fact that so little damage is deriving from it, and that the current laws are not helping depress drug-usage. - To much resources are put into hunting the 'petty crime' cannabis user, stealing valuable hours from hunting the 'bad' drug-dealers of such substances as heroin and amphetamine/cocaine.

Today though, I read that most people disagree. Out of 1600 people, 78% aging between 15-29, thought it should still be illegal to buy, sell or use Cannabis-related drugs.

I myself agree with the commision. Cannabis-products may have certain down-sides to the community where users live, but many of those are side-effects resulting from stigmata. For instance, people I meet often say that users are very paranoid. While this may be true in some cases, most people don't concider the reason why this may be. Imagine yourself doing something on a weekly besis that you know is illegal, and you know will make people label you a drug-addict. How would you feel?

Much research has proved that cannabis has good effects on many illnesses. Moderate usage has never been proven harmful either, just like moderate consumation of alcohol hasn't. So think it over. How does cannbis make you feel vs. How does people make you feel.

CIA headquarters carbombed

søndag, oktober 12, 2003

CIA headquarters in Bagdad has been bombed by two martyr-bombers in cars.
They shook enormously and broke every window in the nearby streets.

Iraqi police enlightens us a little bit on why: Of course, CIA headquarters is one thing, but in the same hotel, several members of the US-appointed interim government also lived.
No wonder people are provoked.

Remember that nobody wanted this war but the Americans. Perhaps 2% of Iraqis wanted American troops to enter, but that number is decreasing as time goes by. Why?
Even though the US forces have toppled a tyrrant, they have also proved themselves to be tyrrants, only in the western disguise of 'hunting terrorism', where Saddam Hussein hunted deserters. It shouldn't be surprising at all that the targets of resistance in Iraq isn't British troops, it isn't Norwegian engineer-squads, it isn't anything but Americans. Why?

Boy meets Girl

søndag, oktober 12, 2003

In Norway, Boy-scouts and Girl-scouts have been separated in their fieldtrips and all other activites. They even had their own two organizations, called KFUM and KFUK, respectively.

Today, they merged into one organization. Affirmative action works! - Though in this case, I think it is the women that wanted it separate in the first place... Poor little girls.

The ISP journalist

søndag, oktober 12, 2003

Reporter Declan McCullagh of C|net news.com received a letter from the FBI on sep. 19, telling him to archive any material about "the homeless hacker", of which I know little about.
It interesting though, because only ISP's are under this obligation to a federal entity, like in most other countries including Norway, where I live.

Doesn't the FBI have any scrouples? It looks up this law, where it says specifically that:

"A provider of wire or electronic communication services or a remote computing service, upon the request of a governmental entity, shall take all necessary steps to preserve records and other evidence in its possession pending the issuance of a court order or other process."

-And then, in this letter on false grounds, they tell him not to talk about it. Not to anyone it said.

Does it smell Gestapo, ignorance, or what? - I think it's a nice combo, a little Gestapo when it suits the New Patriotism, and a little ignorance on top to make it look less lawbreaking if it's found out about. -- Or actually, I think it's amazing what Americans put up with from their rulers, as long as they say they're fighting crime or, gosh, cybercrime.
So it's more Gestapo than ignorance then.

The Opera Platform

fredag, oktober 10, 2003

We've seen how Opera can be used to vertically display any website on your mobile. - Opera today announced it's "Opera Platform", where they say standard Web-lingua is the essence to making it interoperate with other apps.

What is probably also happening here is a utilization of the current menu-configuration scheme. (I'm not sure about this though, cause Opera's mobile browsers are a little different that the others.)
Among other things, this configurability lets you send messages to other apps. On windows, and certainly Linux, you can use this to make Windows shut itself down or go on standby, or any other thing you can do from the operating system commandline/shell. And all of this can be 'integrated' with the current state of affairs, for instance by sending off some selected text or an URL to another program. And most importantly, you don't need any plugins!

An example from my status-bar; A button telling Windows to disconnect any open RAS connection.
Button8, "Disconnect"="Execute program, "rasdial.exe", "/disconnect""
If you're using Opera 7.1 or later, you can add this button right now! (Click or drag the link)
(More buttons over at nontroppo's Opera7 custom buttons)

Another example, telling Opera to open the clicked link in IE:
Item, "IE" = Copy link & Execute program, "iexplore.exe","%c"

The possibilities are endless, really.

Opera 7.21 Weekend edition

fredag, oktober 10, 2003

...aka RC5

Changelog:

• Fix for aggressive content guessing when MIME type is unreliable (if setting is chosen in Preferences). ISO files and others got extension WBMP and were loaded inline as if they were images. Content guessing is turned off for BMP, WBMP, XBM, ICO.

Non sequitur

fredag, oktober 10, 2003

I learned a new english phrase today. "non sequitur". According to Websters Unabridged, it means:
\Non seq"ui*tur\ [L., it does not follow.] (Logic) An inference which does not follow from the premises.

So how did I learn that? The allmighty salon.com ran an article about this amusing war of phonecalls in the US of A, where Republican party folks, and FOx and NY Post news-crew are in an open battle with the organization Moveon.org, which cites itself as working to bring ordinary people back into politics.
Moveon has called on people to call texas republican Tom DeLay's office to ask about an important case, while that office is now forwarding all calls about this case to moveon.org.

- There's that sick feeling again.

In the wake of this, salon is keen to interview those involved:

Opera 7.21 RC4

torsdag, oktober 09, 2003

...released

• Fix for:Opera crashes on zoom + back and forth

100MB free webmail

torsdag, oktober 09, 2003

Until recently (today in fact), I thought the only good free webmail was gone. I used to use runbox, a Norwegian provider for my mail, because it provided it's users with as much as 100MB of storage, and every access-option you could name, including imap and wap.
But, runbox had to catch up with reality and start charging a small fee for it's services.

Today, while I don't really remember what I was doing, I came across a page in the Norewegian broadcasting corp (NRK) network, where they surprisingly enough discussed their own free webmail. And guess what? - It's based on runbox!

Cool, so I signed up and set up the pop address for some of my other accounts with less storage. "Do not keep on server".
But doh? nrkpost.no didn't have pop access? What to do?

Hack-a-little.
Knowing how they were powered by runbox, and seing in my firewall that when I connected to nrkpost.no, I was really connecting to one runbox server, I started thinking.
What if I log on to the runbox server using pop? And so I did, but with a twist: It didn't accept my username alone, but bundled with the domain (@nrkpost.no), I was able to both pop and smtp at runbox' servers! (With the password, of course..)

Sadly, it doesn't work with imap, but who really needs IMAP anyway. I'm glad. 100MB! For free! And fast!

Opera 7.21 RC3

onsdag, oktober 08, 2003

...released.

• More mime-type tweaking
• Fixed crashes when adding a bookmark containing illegal characters in nickname.

Opera 7.21 RC2

onsdag, oktober 08, 2003

Opera 7.21 RC2 has been released, few bug-fixes this time too, and only a two-step increase in build-number, from 3211 to 3213.

Changelog:

• Fix for .lng files etc were saved as .txt
  (Comment: Caused by mime-type text/plain. Mime-types seem to have undergone some major changes, and in it's trail, some things went wrong..)
• Fix for some webpages being cached as .tmp instead of .htm
  Happened on url's that ended with / f.ex www.opera.com/
  (Comment: Great! Now SciTE has the correct color-coding without having to hit F12 :-)

1000% more internet!

tirsdag, oktober 07, 2003

Optimus, the first telecoms operator to ship it's phones with the Opera browser, has had an increase in network traffic of 416% since it first started shipping the phones.

1000? Yes, because only a tiny percentage of Optimus' subscribers have Opera on their phones. Why so much? Opera has SSR, letting you surf the entire internet on your mobile.

I didn't try it on a phone yet, but you can experience it by hitting Shift+F11 on your Opera 7 browser. Having a love for the plain functional and solid Siemens mobiles, I certainly know which phone I'd like next...

Sitefinder.com banned, communism prevailis

tirsdag, oktober 07, 2003

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society has released an interesting study of how the illegal sitefinder.com service of Verisign was blocked by ISP's as they discovered it's negative effects.

Verisign has by now shut it down itself, although "just temporarily".
When Versisign are asked to comment on it, and how ICANN, the Internet authority so to speak, asked it to roll back, they make it sound as if they've been "hit by communism". They actually compare grass-roots upheaval to communism. Common goals and interests are communism.

It's the all-familiar reaction (from certain people in a post-coldwar-and-9/11 country in perticular) when they commit an overzealous action. "Hey, they are worse than us, therefore we can do anything we want!"

You make me sick.

New IE, now with questions

tirsdag, oktober 07, 2003

Microsoft has now detailed how it will 'abide' to the ruling in the plugin-case, filed by Eolas. As expected, the main change is to display a popup box every time a user invokes an external ActiveX control or Java applet.

FBI paid Hamas

tirsdag, oktober 07, 2003

IN a strange twist, it has been uncovered that in 1998-99, the FBI tried to funnel 'smaller' ammounts of cash through charity organizations to Hamas and possibly other organizations resisting Israeli occupation using illegal methods.

The theory was as such: We give money to people we suspect are connected to terrorist activity, then try to follow the trail of money.

"Yeah, lets pay them to terrorize, so we can see who does it."
The results? No money went the wrong places, but were used for charity.

The US' intelligence community is still paranoid, probably because of it's lack of intelligence. In the broader sense of the term.

First visitor!

tirsdag, oktober 07, 2003

I've gotten the first visitor I know about! And not just any visitor either! - Can you spell DIA?

Jup, thats right, someone from the US Defence Intelligence Agency paid me a visit.
hmmm... Echelon?

Israel attacks the UN

tirsdag, oktober 07, 2003

Gawd. When are they going to stop?
The day before yesterday I said they were probably gonna call the UN a terrorist if the US weren't a member, and today they shot at one of the UN's water supply-trucks.

Is this a deliberate provocation from the Israeli government, or is it an ironic repeat of Ariel Sharon denying orders when he was a general? US' attitude towards Israel may be dripping on Israels own soldiers. Shooting is fun, I hear them arguing with their leutenants.

Airbag harddrive

tirsdag, oktober 07, 2003

IBM has relased ne notebooks, which contain a new technology they call APS, Active protection system.

It consists, they say, of a microchip that senses acceleration, which in turn freezes the drives' head movement.

The IBM's pressfolks use this analogy: the airbag in your car.

I'd say it compares more to the servo-steering in the same car. - Or the servo that is used to detect unwanted resonance in sound-systems. This kind compares the electricity fed to the loudspeaker driver with the movement the membrane itself exercises. If it moves too much or too little (as a result of sound-waves piling up in the cabinet or the room (think sex in your bathtub)), within a few milliseconds the electronics will try and produce a signal that cancels this pile without affecting the sound in a negative way. This is hard and requires some AI.
I guess thats why IBM only stops the head and doesn't try and compensate.

Really nice, I must say. Why didn't anyone think of it before? Why isn't all electronics fitted with this kind of, eh, electronics? Maybe the time is out for physically moving electronics anyway? -Hardware storage in the form of MRAM will become commodity storage in a few years. Swedish scientists are advancing towards higher temperature operation.

If the 2004 estimate is true for ordinary memory, I think we'll see MRAM used as the main storage medium in normal PC's only a few years after that.
Hard-drives as we know them will probably then be used the way tape-drives are used today: Backup.

Opera 7.21 RC1

mandag, oktober 06, 2003

Opera 7.21 RC1 for windows released.

Changlog:

• Fixed crash when pressing "." in transfers window
• Added mimetype application/x-msdos-program with same extensions as application/x-msdownload.

Hasty meeting in the UN

mandag, oktober 06, 2003

The UN security council has gathered to discuss Israels blasting of what appears to be an abandoned PFLP - General Command camp in Syria.
According to an [official] anonymous source, the camp is today generally nothing but a refuge to Palestinians.

The meeting, called upon by Syria, was wittily compared to by the Israeli delegation as, "If Usama bin Laden should have called upon the UN after september the eleventh."

So, what can I say? Israel is, by the face of it, desperate to label everything even close to being an obstackle a terrorist. If the US wasn't on UN's security council, I'm sure they would've called even the UN a terrorist.
But why do they continue their war of words, in this manner? Either they are stupid enough not to realize that the test of the world doesn't think of it like this, or they are too preoccupied with the falling hawks of the Bush-administration. Just think about it - has there ever been more violence from the Israeli side than after G.W. Bush became president?
I think not. I know Israelis better than that. They are not stupid.

Israel attacks in Syria

søndag, oktober 05, 2003

Israel has attacked what it calls a "terrorist" training camp in Syria, as a retaliation to the recent blasting of civilians in the town of Haifa.

They continue to blame Arafat, the elected Palestinian leader for all attacks on Israeli civilians, even though both he and every official around him denounce such attacks.

Further attacks in Syria may come, Israel said, claiming self-defence.

Israel and Palestine have two problems, in this order: Occupation of Palestinian land by Israel; and frustrated, occupied and suicidal palestinian people. Now where did the circle start spinning? When is resistance to occupation terrorism?

I agree that targeting Israeli civilians is bad. Very bad. It is worse than Israeli targeting of groups that resist Israels existence by killing innocent people.
But while the loop of violence keeps churning, we all seem to forget the reason behind it, namely 35 years of occupation. Israeli officials fail to (or pretend not to) realize that funding settlements is a provocation.

It amazes me that the international community (read the UN) allows itself to be held hostage by one of it's founding member nations, the US.
If the US had any integrity, it would promptly authorize UN forces to enter Israel and Palestine, and it would stop all funding of war.

- The total funding of Israel by the US from 1947 - 1997 was $84,854,827,200.
How can anyone watch and even pay a country to occupy another one?

Israel plans more settlement building

lørdag, oktober 04, 2003

More buildings are planned for the Jewish (make that Israeli) settlements in the West bank. This is a direct violation of the Roadmap to Peace, which was reluctantly accepted by Israel. The US says it has concerns about this.

What's the point of a roadmap if one party to it is allowed to breach it without more reaction than we are concerned? (Granted, concern here means concider US loan garuatees to Israel, but that's like telling Miloshevic not to kill that many.)

A true democracy like the US, no matter how "special" their relations are with key Israeli politicians, can't say it comdemns one part (dead suicidal Palestinians), while it is just concerned about the other part, a democratic state.

Or maybe this is the exact reason why they don't do more than that? The US is renown for it's totalitarian democracy, which is willing to secrifice it's own citicens, let alone any other citicen of another coutry, as long as democracy prevails. - In the words of Pervez Musharraf:democracy does not have a set formula.

It simply doesn't make sense, and it is time the papers, and not least the TV-stations start digging in the graves.

Opera 7.21 Preview 2

lørdag, oktober 04, 2003

After an intensive beta-testing preiod before releasing Opera 7.20, a new version is in the baking. 7.21 has gotten it's Preview number two. Preview 1 has the most important bug-fixes.

So why this hurry? 7.20 was releasaed just weeks ago! - In one word: Security.
Opera uses parts of the OpenSSL library, and as you may have noticed, a few security flaws have been found in it lately.

As always, Opera Software is swift to update their browser when security is at breach.

BlogThis! from Opera's Hotlist

fredag, oktober 03, 2003

Jup, blogthis! is very well suited for the Opera hotlist.
Only problem is, after posting somthing, you're expected to close the window (which isn't a window, it's a panel :), eg, you're taken to a page which only has the options Edit posts, View blog and Close window.That makes it kinda useless.

But wait! Proxomitron?! I loove proxo, and made a filter which will meta refresh that useless message back to the posting interface within 30 seconds.

The filter goes as such:

Name = "Blogthis panel Go Back!"
Active = TRUE
URL = "new.blogger.com/blog_this_done.pyra"
Limit = 256
Match = "<head>"
Replace = "<head>"
          "<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30;url=http://new.blogger.com/blog_this.pyra">"

Blogger or google, do you hear me?!