I recall "blogging" being born out of the first Content Management System (CMS) switched from being used to operate a whole website to being used by just one user. It may have come about in some other way, but that's not really important. What I'm driving at, though, is that in those days it was the most casual, uncommitted kind of writing/ranting, which noone took for anything else.

Of course there were people writing long before they started doing it with dynamic pages, just by composing static html and publishing it. But that's not blogging, blogging is closely tied to the idea that you have dynamic pages, which allow you to easily publish new content from anywhere, and allow you to receive comments. For anyone to create static html, there is a bit of a barrier to it, it almost seems like there should be a purpose to it. As such, html scribbling never was as widespread as blogging. Blogging made this so incredibly easy that people who had things to say, but never would even consider touching "the geeky stuff" were empowered. And it is so easy that you can effortlessly rant and rave without ever having to do any work to publish it or lay it out on a page. Consider that the way in how you use something impacts how (and for what) you use it. That's what blogging has changed.

But the status of the blogger has changed too, since then. Beyond the Atlantic, "the bloggers", as they are called by the media, have become a political entity with some influence. It's strange to hear about "the bloggers" in that context, because I'm "a blogger" too and I have nothing whatsoever to do with that. Blogs aren't about people's lives anymore, they are political influence, social commentary, artistic and commercial promotion, they are all kinds of things. Which is why you see stories like "Bloggers can make money, but most keep day jobs" and it looks out of context. Why wouldn't they? What is it that they do that is so valuable to society that it becomes their job? That's the thing, some people take blogging seriously. Which is something I've never done. :P

Does "blogging" actually mean something else now? Are bloggers actually writers with a lesser title? If you're a writer I can understand that it's your job.

If you've ever had to qualify for going to school abroad, you've probably had to take the silly TOEFL or IELTS language test. Or the silly equivalent for whatever language you need to prove yourself in.

Instead of taking those tests, wouldn't you rather boast about how many languages you speak? Sure, we all would. So the next time a guy asks you "do you speak a foreign language?" followed by "which?", you can say "yes".

That's why we're introducing the newest in language proficiency today: the Paco standard. That's right, Paco is officially certified by at least one qualified linguist and will determine just how good your cv is going to look. The Paco standard determines your proficiency in a given language by the ability to complete the given Paco. The more Pacos you can do, the higher your Paco level in that language.

Each Paco consists of a number (the level number), a popular name (what we all know this level by), and by a silly name (to translate between other proficiency standards).

Allow me to demonstrate how the Paco standard works with an example. What follows is the Paco level of proficiency for yours truly.

Paco 1 - did I hear something?
(would move out of the way of someone with a gun and yelling very loud)

Russian

Paco 2 - it's just like language x right?
(understanding the Emergency Exit sign)

Catalan, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Afrikaans-, Latin

Paco 3 - somo tehm words re no tspel correct
(one in five-ish in a sentence)

Spanish, Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Czech, Slovak+, German

Paco 4 - small subset, no grammar
(can read the sports section-ish)

Italian

Paco 5 - kinda sorta wanted to learn it once
(could speak three sentences in a row if my life depended on it)

French, Dutch

Paco 6 - heard it on the telly
(roughly got tone and grammar but have to translate words from a related language)

Swedish, Danish-, Nynorsk+

Paco 7 - omfg pwnage
(native)

Polish, Norwegian, English

UPDATE: The wonderful thing about Paco is that it's easy to compare notes. Here's how. Add up your Pacos to a total score. You get as many points for every Paco as the Paco level, so for example..

1 x Paco1 + 5 x Paco2 + 7 x Paco3 + 1 x Paco4 + 2 x Paco5 + 3 x Paco6 + 3 x Paco7 = 85 Paco
UPDATE2: Added German. What does it say of the language that my mind had repressed it?

When I moved to Holland I got myself a local cell phone subscription. I had no idea which one to choose so I went with the one that seemed to be fairly cheap, the vodafone prepaid deal. Prepaid means (in case the terminology is non standard) you buy cards with credits and only pay for what you spend.

I rarely use my phone at all, so it had been working fairly well for a while. (I noticed cell phones work the best when you don't use them.) Then I went to Poland for Christmas with about 20+ yuros of credits, and calling from inside the terminal to a Polish cell phone outside the building ate about 15 bucks in a minute and twenty seconds. I would have made the call much shorter, but the connection was rubbish. Then I noticed to my chagrin that sending an sms back to Holland cost me about a buck each. Insanity. In contrast, with my Norwegian cell phone subscription sending an sms from Barcelona to Holland cost me about 30 yurocents.

So when I got back I was on 5 yuros. And that's not a lot, so I was going to buy some credits, only to realize that they don't sell them anywhere anymore. In Albert Heijn they have a variety of cards for other providers (€10, €20, etc), but for Vodafone they only sell cards of 40 bucks. What the hell is that, a down payment on a house? I'll retire before I use up those credits.

Yes, this is one of those sweeping generalizations. Doesn't apply to everyone, of course, in fact the professionals don't fit into this profile, but it describes the casual practitioners (and the semi-serious ones) to fairly wide extent.

It's a Norwegian saying that "you're born with skis on your feet". This sounds silly, I have the feeling that skiing is losing ground and going from completely universal (as it was when I grew up) to more of a special interest discipline. Mind you, going that way, I'm not at all suggesting skiing isn't popular anymore.

Now football is the biggest sport, everyone's played at one point, most boys have played on a team as well. But when you see people play football, they approach it as an exercise, less so as a game where you play to win. I was out Saturday night on the astroturf by the Rosenborg stadium, great field, we've played there for years. With us, two young (~15-16) kids, looked maybe Turkish. Out in the rain and wind, playing for almost 2 hours, just like we've done all these years. Commendable, they have the drive for it no doubt, and judging by their skill they do this often.

So how did they play? You could see from far away that they play at a club, and they've had that Norwegian football influence shape their concept of the game. It's uncanny, Norwegians treat football as a stamina exercise. A way to get sweaty and feel good about yourself. No wonder they dress up for football just the way they do for cross country skiing, because what they're doing out there is very reminiscent of it.

The mindset has changed, it's more about ball skills now. You see little kids out there with waay more skills on the ball than my generation had. The pitches are better too now, we used to play on gravel. The Norwegian classic is the corner kick. If you see about 7-8 guys playing, with one guy taking a corner and the rest stacked in the box, waiting for the ball (and not really caring whether it comes to them or not), you can be sure they're Norwegians.

But in a sweet kind of irony, those kids with ball skills and decent general ability still play like it were cross country skiing. There's intensity to the game that comes from running and keeping up a pace, but there's no explosiveness, there's no sprints, no real athletic kind of desire to win. These kids that played on the other side of the field from us, what were they up to? They passed the ball to each other, ran around in small circles and took shots on goal. But not once did they accelerate at full pace, not once did they take a really strong shot, not once did they launch a forward pass way ahead for a real run. It was all so casual and shy, so Norwegian. It's almost as if there's more aggression in cross country than in football with these people.

It's like, if I run at full pace, then the guy marking me will too, because it's his responsibility (and Norwegians have a very strong sense of that) to not let me go past him. But he will *never* sprint on his own account, because it's just not in his blood.

Of course, when you play competitively for a club then you don't do this, when you run you actually run. But when it's casual and "just for fun", that real instinct never comes out, and that's something I've never been able to understand. If you never run at full pace in practice, how are you ever going to do it in a match? Are you saving yourself or something? If so, why? The whole point of playing is to do the best you can, that's when it's the most fun. So why hold back?

Sometimes you just want an application to run in the background for whatever reason. One that tends to crash. Well, if you're not there when it crashes, you can't start it up again. So what to do? The obvious answer is "fix the damn application already!" But maybe you don't have the source code. Or you don't know how. Or you can't be bothered. Or whatever. And you just want a way to automatically restart the application whenever it crashes.

I didn't know how to do that before, so I never had a solution for those rare cases when this was needed. But it's very easy to do.

#!/bin/sh

if [ "x$1" = "x" ]; then echo "usage: $0 <application>"; exit 1; fi


app=$1
echo "Running $app"


$app &
pid=$!
while ((1)); do
	if ! ps $pid; then 
		echo "Restarting $app"
		$app &
		pid=$!
	fi
	echo "pid: $pid"
	wait $pid
	sleep 30
done

Here's how keepalive.sh works.

1. It starts the application.
2. It captures the pid.
3. Now it starts an infinite loop.
   1. Check the pid to see if the app is running.
   2. If the app is not running, start it and capture the pid.
   3. Otherwise just wait for it to finish.
   4. Goto 3.1.

It doesn't matter if you stop the application in a standard way, if you kill it, or if it dies on its own. Within 30 seconds it will be restarted. The short delay is included so that an application that dies instantly won't keep restarting and dieing all the time, bringing your system to its knees. Until you stop keepalive.sh, it will keep looping forever.