From thoughts to text

Earlier today it was annonced that The Piratebay might get sold to a Swedish company called Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) operated by Hans Pandeya, a man with a shady reputation (In Swedish).

For all we know, this might just be a PR stunt. But if so, it’s a bad one. I predict that if the sales go through, it will drive most of the users away and over to other file sharing sites. Just the idea of a corporation owning the TPB-user database is scary.

It’s been a nice 5-and-so years at The Piratebay, but I think I’ll go for a swim now, and I’m not sure if I ever will return. Also, this blows my “The Piratebay Preferred Partner”-joke I’ve been doing in the company for the last few years.

For the last few months I’ve been using  Twhirl to stay connected with the Twitter community, but my activity has of late  slowly been reduced next to nothing. Well, that’s until a good colleague of mine recommended TweetDeck last Friday. I’m back in the Twitter-sphere, and I’m loving it.

Both clients is written in Adobe AIR, which is a big bonus since it means I can run it both on my office Windows machine and my Linux machine at home. I think Adobe AIR is one of the most interesting technologies right now for web applications. Although all that come out of Adobe is slow and sluggish, it’s far better than the last “cross-platform” language that promised a trouble free world. Java. Java was also slow and sluggish, but unlike AIR, Java didn’t seem to work. If you got a application running on one machine, you could be sure it didn’t want to run on your next computer.

Back to the topic; Twitter is still going strong, and with the right tools it can continue to grow. The only question they have to sort out is how to make money. I don’t really see the Ad business as the right move right now. And as long as everyone can create a third-party client, such rubbish can easily be removed before it hits your eyes.

You may follow me on Twitter and read my rubbish. It’s mostly in Norwegian, but that might change.

Today I had a case where a server mounted the root filesystem as read-only during boot. To make a short story shorter, check /dev/null.

After doing some searching in the logs I found a few lines complaining about /dev/null also being read-only filesystem. So I checked the permission with ls -al /dev/null, and it turned out this had been changed into a regular file rather then the special file it’s supposed to be.

The fix is easy. Delete the file called /dev/null and re-create the special device with the command mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3.

You can also read about how to create this special file by reading the man-pages. Command: man 4 null.

This is how Norwegian nature looks like without power lines… (actually, you can still see some to the right of the picture).

The vignetting is because of a polarization filter. Didn’t use a leens hood on this trip.

A swine schnitzel with rosmary, basil, salt and pepper on a bed of rice.

An old Canon AE-1 with a 50mm f/1.8 lens. The reflection is mainly candles, but also includes me.

A half baked bread still in the oven.

A horse enjoying the sun at Eikeskog, Norway.

A self portrait taken with my new (second hand) Canon 5D.

What can I say other than ‘Wow’. This is an amazing piece of equipment, and definitely a step up from my four year old Canon 350D. Although the previous owner had it for almost 2 years (1 year and 10 months), it’s in mint condition.

One of the ‘rules’ in photography is to invest in good optics. But now that the marked is packed with people upgrading to Canon 5D MkII, it’s the perfect time to get the hand on a used MkI for a reasonable price. In fact, for the price I paid for the 5D, I couldn’t even get a new 500D. Sure, the 500D has more mega pixel and full 1080p video. But I’m not interested in video, and the camera is to small for my hands. And that is also my biggest regret on buying the 350D in the first place, but it’s also the only one. Always buy a camera that fits your hand.