Archive for October, 2006

armed plastic

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

Why are plastic containers so hard to open? It’s almost as if they are meant to be a pain. You know the kind of packaging that potato chips come in? The bag is a rectangle with both ends sealed off. It is a sheet of plastic wrapped around with the edge glued shut. Those bags are pretty thin, but the same packaging style is used to package many other products in thicker plastic. Plastic that is really hard to open by hand. One day I was opening a bag of pasta in one of those and eventually the plastic ripped open and half the pasta poured out on the kitchen counter. Another tough one is the kind of goods that come in plastic shaped after the product. That plastic is 2-3mm thick and without a pair of solid scissors, you can only dream of opening it.

Convenient for the manufacturer apparently, quite a pain for the consumer.

Sunday night joyride

Monday, October 9th, 2006

I used to joyride more often, now I rarely do it. Back in Trondheim I basically stopped cause after 12 years I felt I just about knew every street in the whole of town and there was nothing new to see. And outside town there is just nothing to see, so that’s pointless. Then I moved to Utrecht and I bought this crappy used bike that turned out to be a piece of junk. But now I have my trusted bike back and although it’s not in tip top shape, it’s a big improvement. Tonight I felt like taking a ride to explore some new parts of town up north, where I haven’t been much. It ended up a pretty long trip, just over two hours. I thought I would map it out so I knew exactly what area I covered. I also marked down some highlights on the map with dots (click map for full size).

utrecht_joyride.png

As always with these things, when I start out I have nothing specific in mind, I don’t know where I’m going or how far I’m going. I was just out there to clear my head a bit, but I thought I would head north as I’ve seen most of south Utrecht already. I took the familiar road heading up to my old house, which is a ride I don’t really enjoy all that much normally, but tonight it was very nice out. It was 8 degrees, with a nice cool coming over me as I walked out the door. Very familiar Norwegian kind of weather, cool and quiet, I would take this weather every time over a windy day, which there are a lot of here. A light jacket and thin gloves, the perfect outfit. As I passed by my old house, I noticed there was a light on in the basement (which is a freak thing cause the basement was sealed off and looked like a bomb had gone off down there last time I looked). It’s not been torn down (as it was said so many times). I wonder if there are people living there now. I headed up north, the narrow little streets where I once took a shot at jogging (I did in all about 3-4 times before I realized it really doesn’t suit me).

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[un]wanted attention

Friday, October 6th, 2006

A lot of people seem to think there is some kind of balance in the universe at all times. Balance between.. I don’t really know what. But most people don’t think in terms of mass and energy at least. One kind of balance is the attention parents have for their children. Infants get lots of attention. When you’re an infant, parents watch your every move. Just as you’re about to stick a fork into the power outlet, parents intervene and you’re like “whatever, dude”. It’s hard to get a moment to yourself, and you’re too young to say “do you mind?”.

Then you grow up a little, you’re no longer an infant (in fact you probably have a new infant in your house) and suddenly you’re not so hot anymore. You’re 4 and your parents aren’t interested in what you do. You try to get their attention all the time, you climb up a tall tree and you want them to come out and watch and they’re like “whatever, dude”.

It is the way of the world.

source code indexed

Thursday, October 5th, 2006

Google have a billion different projects, many of which never see much success. But the latest thing is indexing source code and making it searchable. So say you want a sorting function in… Ada, and you don’t want to write it yourself, you can just search for it. It also has info for licenses, so you can look for code under a license that you can safely use.

On a far more trivial note, you can search for names. My name turns up what is probably the most trivial software “release” I’ve ever done, the two files in this blog entry. There is more code out there that has my name on it, like galleryforge, but that hasn’t been indexed. Other names, like Linus Torvalds turn up more matches (in his case only 50), whereas others still, like Bill Gates, only mentions the person in the source, but not as an author of the code. (Which is not that shocking, since Bill isn’t eminent for his open source activities.)

In any case, Google Code Search is a pretty cool resource!

slashdotted

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

The other day I had the idea to write an opinion of the Yahoo Mail Beta webmail service, which I found particularly disappointing, in a consumer oriented review style, which I thought would have wider interest than the average blog entry I write. I posted the story on digg and reddit, and noone was interested in it. Then I posted it on slashdot (they have an open submission policy, every submission gets reviewed by their editors to be either published or discarded) and it was accepted, so yesterday it appeared on the frontpage of slashdot.

Slashdot is the biggest technology news site, and one of the oldest geek establishments, so my review was destined for a lot of traffic. So much so that I used three times more bandwidth in a day than I did the previous month. I got lots of comments on the blog, and many many more on slashdot. So that was pretty interesting to see how people responded to something I wrote, which wasn’t the most controversial of viewpoints.

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