I'm on my winter vacation this week, which has been of.. varying quality. I've had days where i've been able to rest. And i've had days where i've been totally swamped, or unable to calm down. I'm a bit of an ADD case, really. I have trouble sitting down just doing nothing, even if that would be the best course of action for any given moment. I need to be doing something.

I sold some old stuff this week, just to clear the inventory a bit, and to make a few extra bucks. In fact, i've made about 70 this week selling old crap that i had no use for. I sold a WAP54G access point, an old Acer laptop which was lacking most parts, but worked pretty well considering. And I sold my broken 30GB iPod Video. Someone got a cheap 1.8" drive out of that deal. I had no use for it, and it had been sitting in storage for at least a year, maybe more. I still have some stuff that i'm trying to unload, but i all in good time.

I have a Leatherman Surge. A nice big hunking block of metal which does most things that you would ever need to do in life. It, however, broke down a while back. Just a part of it actually. A spring that holds the screwdriver in place got.. lost. Somehow, somewhere, it sprung lose and now the tool won't stay in place anymore. So, i found the original receipt, and found out the place that imports and services Leather..men.. in Finland is in Rovaniemi of all places. That's around a thousand clicks north of Helsinki. I emailed them about my problem and they said "Sure, that's covered by the 25 year warranty, send it in!"

Brilliant.

So, i find a suitable box, wrap it in some bubble-wrap, and ship it over to Rovaniemi. I hope to get it back next week, better than ever. I love that tool.

I'm on page four hundred and something of REAMDE, and it still manages to be an interesting book. It has taken some weird turns from the somewhat curious  start. The premise is wild. Chinese gold miners for an online RPG turn rogue and screw with the wrong people. Reading about this plot made me order the book instantly out of sheer curiosity. I think i saw it on  Boing Boing or something.

While sorting through my old stuff, i found a box of old processors. Well not "old" old. But still. Pentium 1 and onwards. I'm putting them back in a box. Where are all my older bits and bobs? 486's? 286's? 8088's? Lost! Lost i say.

A bobble-head Storm Trooper is looking at me. Bobbing away. Oblivious fucker.

I'm going to order some tickets to New York for July. Hope 9. It will cost an arm and a leg. Luckily, the Euro is getting stronger vs. the dollar, which makes the trip cheaper. I'm kind of scared to travel there again. Reading about the recent incident where someone was sent back from the states because he wrote some Tweets which were interpreted as threats. Just.. surreal? I guess. Anyway, i calculate the trip will cost me a cool 2500 euros at least. Not accounting for food, travel in NY and so on. Oh boy.

Next week i'm going to be at a Cisco course. Imagine that.

The weather today was the shittest it's been in years. We had a huge dump of snow, combined with cold weather which played havoc with traffic. We had huge pile ups, traffic stuck up the wazoo. I picked up my son from daycare, which is a 10km trip, it took me well over an hour. And i tried to be clever, and took the long way around. So did a few thousand other people apparently.

The largest accident saw some 30-50 cars get wrecked. Some people even had to be cut out of their vehicles. Just insane. There's a video of one of the crashes here. You can see people are driving way too fast, considering they can't fucking see in front of them. Oh shit! 30 cars are wrecked and there's no way around! Screeeech! *Bang*. One would think that since we've had winter in these parts for a few hundred thousand years at least, or like.. ever, we'd get the hang of it already. But no. We still manage to fuck it all up.

Trains are not running, buses are stuck and crashing into cars. Since, after all, we're living in this cold and arid part of the world; surely we can't buy trains that run during WINTER. And we have a state run railway, which means, we're paying out of our asses for a service that isn't even designed for this country. "Oh boy! We didn't anticipate ice and snow...". Great going. And who would we complain to? Our representatives at parliament? Oh that's a good one. I mean, this is a problem that can be solved after we throw enough money at it. Design rails and junctions that work in cold weather. Heat them. Spray anti-freeze. Whatever. Get trains that have sturdier undercarriages and brake systems that don't freeze. And if  you think they don't exist, talk to the Russians, or the Norwegians, or something. Or put some people on the problem. Get a research team and pay them enough money to solve the issue. Then order new trains and rails with these specs. But no. Instead, we just keep on doing a bad job, and raising prices while we're at it. We should be sitting on sold gold thrones with the way ticket prices are going. Maybe a foot massage on the way to work? Yes please.

Ok tomorrow is a new day. I intend to start it with hot coffee, bacon and eggs. Looking forward to it. And for once, i'm actually feeling tired! I've been having some issues sleeping lately. I have two types of sleeping pills. Ones that work always, but leave me too groggy to operate the next morning; and ones that kinda-sorta work, and take about 2 hours to kick in. But now i think i might go to bed, au naturelle, and perhaps, if i am extremely lucky, i'll be able to sleep a solid.. 8 hours, and wake up without a head ache.

Good night, and good luck.

I remember having a Canon MP500 which was a nice multifunction printer back in the day. Well, this was in 2006 maybe? So not *that* long ago. But still Before that i had a Canon.. something or other, A3-size printer. Neither of these had any support. They were both initially listed as "Paperweights" on the Linux Foundation OpenPrinting list. I think it was that. Whatever equivalent we had back then.

Canon was absolutely unrelenting. They would not support Linux, even if the foundation offered to make drivers for them, if they would only send some hardware to them. Kind of hard to make drivers without specs or hardware. Eventually we got some generic drivers, and the MP500 started working, somewhat. Resolution was limited to about a third of what it was supposed to be, but it worked. A great day. Many times i considered just throwing the Canon out, and getting an HP, which have always had impeccable hardware support under Linux. But, that didn't seem right. I was having a first world problem.

Reading the OpenPrinting page today i see that Canon is still somewhat of a troubled vendor when it comes to Linux support. Oh well. The MP500 broke down, and printers are usually not worth fixing out of warranty (hell, they are usually not even worth using after the initial bundled ink runs out...). I decided to get an HP, and settled on a cheap multifunctional called F4580, probably no longer for sale. Works great. There are several driver to choose from, and they all seem to work great. Now though, the scanner seems to have broken down Oh well. The printer still works...

So we've come a long way in a little over 10 years. Devices we hadn't even heard of are now supported under Linux, and you really don't have to think about what you are buying, unless you need specific fringe devices that are not say.. consumer grade. Most of the stuff you can get out of Verkkokauppa will most probably work when you plug it in. Some vendors even have Linux-sections on their support sites, but mostly it's all built in to the OS, if you're using one of the mainstream distros (some .deb or .rpm based one).

To follow my distro-hopping, I'm currently running CrunchBang on my desktop, and Debian 6.0.4 on my work laptop. I have a windows 7 virtual machine if i need to use something that absolutely need windows. Debian was a bit of a hassle to set up so that i'm pleased with it, but it's mostly done now. I started with a net-install which had pretty much nothing built in.

I've also been working on preseeding an Ubuntu installation. Basically an automated install of ubuntu that configures the system in a certain way based on a .seed file (well you can call it whatever you want, really), which contains answers to questions that the installer makes, and other settings. It was about one work day or so to have everything running smoothly. I now have a 11.10 .iso which can be booted, and it's completely hands-off. When it's done (within 20 minutes or so), you're at the login. Might come in handy at some point. The most difficult part, for some reason, was the keyboard layout and locale-settings. They just wouldn't stick, or it'd interrupt the otherwise automated installation by asking me some question. Eventually, i started from scratch, using the 11.10 preseed example, and got everything working. So it was probably a brain-fart on my part at some point.

The next step will be testing various distribution methods, the first being a PXE-boot type installation, where a TFTP-server dumps the image onto the installing computer and runs it. Should be interesting.

Still waiting for ICS for my Desire Z. CM9 is rumored to be supported on that phone too, but there isn't so much as an alpha out yet. I've seen some videos of this particular phone running CM9, but they are probably self-built firmwares or some CM developer trying things out. So i'll have to wait a little while longer on this one. I'd even appreciate a nightly for the 2.3.5 series android that i'm running now. They halted all nightlies for the CM7 series while CM9 was being developed. I've been looking at the changelog for the next nightly, and it's already like 2 pages long. So they could just release something in the meanwhile for us tinkerers to play around with. Pretty please?

First of all SOPA, PIPA and the less known global fuckbuddy, ACTA. So there isn't going to be a vote on SOPA. Great. PIPA is still moving ahead and it, or some re-titled successor will probably end up passing and becoming law. The protest were great and all, but how about ACTA? Where's the blackouts and protests against ACTA? It's a more widespread evil uncle of SOPA. It doesn't just apply to copyrighted software or media, but would basically make ISP's liable for stuff that their customers do, and by doing that, force them to enact draconian logging and archiving policies. Imagine being a small ISP, and having to build a whole new infrastructure to log what all your clients are doing. Either you do that, or you get sued to hell when one customer does something funny. And is someone paying for all this new logging-infra? Probably not. So it's either goodbye for the company, or then we're going to have raised prices everywhere for all kinds of on-line services. The other alternative is that we're either going to end up with state-run communications companies, or a few big monopolies that control prices and services throughout the industry.

Not to mention what it'll do to personal privacy (what little there is left). ISPs can already monitor what you do if they want (for technical reasons, mainly), but they may *have* to start doing that, just to protect their business.

Why wasn't there more noise on ACTA? Perhaps because of SOPA and PIPA, and the noise behind that. Perhaps because ACTA was basically drafted and signed behind closed doors. No public discussion, no expert witnesses or commentators. Just good old politics. The agreement was signed on the 22nd, in Tokyo, in case you missed it. It now has to be ratified by each member state, but the pressure is on. You didn't sign ACTA? Oh well, then I guess we'll take our business elsewhere! Sounds like the way to go.

Poland is among the only countries that have had any large scale protests (correct me if I'm wrong here). Where's the Internets when you need them? I hope we'll have more protests as the member states start to try and ratify the law locally. I know where I'll be. (The first one against the wall when the revolution starts?). I also hope that Finland will have the decency to put it up for a public vote, or at least a parliamentary vote. Not that I have much faith in those fuckers. It's going to be "I'm 12 and what is this?" *signs paper*. Some Wikileaks stuff on ACTA here.

Some highlights:

• In its article 27.3 the ACTA agreement calls for "cooperation" between rights-holders and the Internet service providers. The very same mechanisms are called by the European Commission as "extra-judicial measures" and "alternative to courts". It means that police (surveillance and collection of evidences) and justice missions (penalties) could be handed out to private actors, bypassing judicial authority and the right to a fair trial.
• In article 27.4, ACTA will allow rights-holders to obtain private data regarding the users of Internet service providers, without a decision of a judge. This is a dangerous breach to privacy. The article is non-binding (using the "may" verb), but this could be changed further, by way of amendment (see below). This would generalize a much criticized procedure included in the 2004 IPR enforcement directive.

Civil sanctions could also weight on technical intermediates and be used to pressure them to accept "cooperation". The “damages” section of the civil chapter validates the "lost-sale myth" whereby the industry claims enormous profit losses using biased methodologies. The text requires "pre-established" damages, as well as "additional damages," which means damages not based on any actual proof of harm and akin to a criminal sanction.

• Article 23.4: Criminal sanctions for "aiding and abetting" infringement (it sounds just like IPRED2, which is not part of the EU acquis). These could also be used against Internet technical intermediaries and technology providers as a way to force them into accepting "cooperation" with rightsholders.
• Article 27.2: This reference to the enforcement of “means of widespread distribution for infringing purposes” is very worrying. It could be interpreted as justifying the implementation of provisions indirectly criminalizing blogging platforms, P2P networks, free software, and other technologies that contribute to dissemination of culture and knowledge on the Internet.

My friend Macandron is leaving for a round-the-world trip with his girlfriend. Good luck, and have lots of fun. And remember to see all the places!

I'm now starting a week of winter vacation. I think I'll try to read my book, and rest a whole lot. Not.. doing..much. Then it's back to work. Lots of good stuff going on there, also lots of tough stuff going on.

It's dead of winter now. Not terribly cold, yet, but we do have some snow here. Not as much as last winter, but some. January-February tend to be the coldest months in Finland. On average.

My grandfather is still in the hospital, and not doing well. My father is getting rather tired, because he's kind of keeping it all together. It's been a long few months. I saw my grandfather at the hospital in December, but he was kind of a shell at that point already. Partly there, partly not. Hope he's not in pain.

OK, from these cheery subjects onwards! My son just fell asleep after a grueling 1½ hour battle.. He'll turn five soon. He's a great sport, but after a long week at work, you kind of wish he'd just..sleep? You know? Sometimes? Because I know that come 0800 tomorrow, he'll be dragging me out of bed to turn on the TV and make breakfast. No problem. Nooo..problem..

I'm now going to stop typing, get a cup of coffee and watch Inception with H.

Ta-ta.

We had a major storm before Christmas, which hit our country home pretty badly. We had 15 trees fall, most of them huge. They managed to mostly miss the different houses and buildings, but the cleanup is going to take months. It ripped up 100+ year trees with roots and all. Along with that, we had some collateral damage to the water-pipes that were underground (now not underground), and some TV-coax-antenna cables. I have some pics in my Google+ account. If you wanna check some of them out, check,  http://grelbar.net/damage/

My grandfather is in bad shape. He has been in the hospital for like two months. He's 91. I think he's getting close to the end here, but i don't really like thinking about that. He is afraid at the hospital, because he is cut off from everything. He hasn't lost his mental functions, but he's on a lot of medication, so he gets confused. He doesn't know what time it is, or what's going on. It was kind of sad to visit him there. But he's had a good life. He's a veteran of the Winter and Continuation Wars (he doesn't talk about his experiences, perhaps because he lost all his brothers to the wars). He was a pharmacist, as was his father. Born in Viborg, which is no longer a part of Finland (lost to Russia). Anyway. Good guy. Lots of respect.

Planning for Hope Number 9 has begun, and as it looks now: I am going. With H. So it's New York come July! Again. I got a mail from the volunteer-organizers asking if i would be helping out this year again (as i did last time), and i think i will. Such a cool experience. I calculate that the trip will cost around 2500 euros. Which is not a little sum of money. It's about what i make a month after taxes and stuff.

Work is still good, though a bit rough. I'm going to get VMware certified this month. Also some new interesting internal and external projects.

I'm also planning to get my ham radio license with B. It will happen this year. Planning to get some hand held Yaesu radio to start off with.

The distro i'm using as of today is Debian 6 with openbox (built from the ground up by me), and on my home machine, Crunchbang. Which is.. the same thing, only pre-configured. I went through trying Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu. I was on Arch for many months, also Archbang. It's just not for me anymore, Ubuntu and it's children that is. Arch is kick ass, nothing to complain, but it's a bit more high maintenance (since it's a rolling distro) than the .deb-based ones.

Let's see what else. I'm reading REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. It's going to take a few more months to get done, since it's 1100 pages. Also, i bought my first E-book! The book is called: "SSH Mastery: OpenSSH, Putty, Tunnels and Keys", and i bought it from a site called Smashwords. Based on the experience, i can recommend it to anyone interested in getting an e-book or two. They offer a variety of formats, the price is right, and the site is easy to use. They also support Paypal (who, despite their shitty behavior in regards to Wikileaks and others) is an easy way to handle online payments. Unfortunately. I wish they were worse. I wish they killed baby seals more often. The book cost 10 dollars. So less in euros. 130 pages of solid SSH knowledge. I'm gonna devour that fucker.

Oh, and the presidential elections. We, luckily, had a sane result for the first round. In Finland, the presidential elections work so that if no candidate gets over 50% of the votes (rare), there is a second round between the two candidates that gathered the most votes. This time around, we will have Sauli Niinistö, and Pekka Haavisto on the second round. Niinistö is from the Coalition party, and Haavisto is from the Green (!) party. Neither one will piss me off too much. Pleased with the results, mainly because we ran the risk of getting a nationalist, Timo Soini, as a president. Luckily, the people who would have voted for him were either drunk, or temporarliy sane, and he only got 9.x % of the votes. He had wanted a two digit number, but he didn't even get that. The people have spoken, now shut the fuck up.

A thing of note, to all the conservatives reading this blog: Haavisto, the Green candidate, is a vegan and openly homosexual (and in a registered partnership with a man). I love this country <---> this much more than yesterday. Thank you to everyone who showed that we are not all redneck yahoos with 20th century values. If a gay candidate can get nearly 20% of the vote, we still have some hope. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

One more thing! My good friend Macandron, is embarking on his round the world trip. Good luck to him, have fun, and learn a lot!

That's all. For now.

Another thing that will be interesting to see is: will the next generation of pensioners be as grouchy as the current ones? So opposed to technology? I mean, pick a random old lady or geezer off the street, and look into their wallet. I'll bet that they have more cash on them than you do. It's because they don't really use cards, and if they do, it's to get money out of the ATM. It's like they don't trust cards at all. Just take a look at the store. The majority of old people will roll with cash only. Most old people are not on the internet. They do watch TV-news however. Perhaps, because TV is an older invention than the internet. By like. 60 years.

But what about the middle-aged and older people now who do use the internet and credit cards? Will they become increasingly scared of it later on in life? Will they become bitter peeping-toms who spend the entire day watching their neighbors take out their trash? Listening through the walls and marking down what TV-shows their neighbors watch? Or will they stay pretty much the same? I hope they stay the same, so we can finally move on as a society, and not be burdened by people who are unwilling (unable is simply not an argument anymore) to use technology?

How much do we as a society spend to accommodate for these people? Keeping legacy systems around and such?

TV-news are probably dead in the water, as are daily newspapers. They will be around for maybe 20 years, but i don't see an everlasting future for them. People will keep on wanting to get their content current, even if they themselves are getting older. TV as such will remain, because people want to sit down and numb their brains every day for a few hours. They need that. Constant exposure to the harsh realities of the world we live in would drive most people insane.  I should know! (Ha haa, he hee)

I'll start by telling one of my favorite anecdotes. When our son was born prematurely (on week 27), we were at the ICU for weeks, because he didn't really have any lungs to speak of, and was kind of the size of a carton of milk anyway. He made it fine, to those not in the know, but still, it was touch and go for weeks.

While they were doing sterile operations, like changing incubation tubes or other such stuff, parents were asked to leave the ward and go to a waiting room. The room had a TV, a couple of sofas, a guestbook (filled with the most horrific and the most brilliant stories). Just a room to spend half an hour in while you couldn't be with your child.  One day in the waiting room, we were joined by a middle-aged woman. We talked for a moment, and then she asked, as an aside, if our son had been "emergency-baptized" as soon as he was born prematurely. Apparently, this is something where your child is baptized right away by a priest or whoever, so that if the child dies, his/her soul goes to heaven. A kind thought, but since neither of us, the parents, belong to any church or subscribe to any system of belief, we answered "No, our son has not been baptized".

What does this charming example of the human race do? She stands up, fire in her eyes, and nearly shouts "Your child is going to hell!". She then promptly storms out of the room, leaving us, literally, gasping.

I had no words for the situation. Now, mind you, i wasn't a "new" atheist or agnostic (more on this later) at this point, so i wasn't stumped by her reasoning. I was simply amazed that someone would do this at a children's ICU-ward. I rarely have good comebacks when people say something "smart". I'm also not a violent person by nature, though, if i could go back, i would probably beat the everliving crap out of her for the sheer fun of it.

So what made her do it? Her religion. Her beliefs. Her conviction. She was absolutely sure that an unbaptized child will go to hell. She was not angry at our child, but at us. The non-believers. We had, with our ignorant actions, condemned this poor young-soul to hell. How dare we?? We had no right. I saw this.

But then, I don't feel pity for people like this. I feel hate. Anger. That's the kind of person I am. So sue me.

Uh okay. So what do i believe in? I don't believe in a god. Or gods. Or the Bible, or the Koran, or the Talmud or anything else of that sort. I believe in science. I believe in scientific methodology. By definition, that makes me an atheist. Something that is counter to the theist idea, that include belief in a god or gods. I do however accept that there are things we do not understand. That doesn't make it supernatural, or imply the existence of a mythical god-figure. There may very well be a force beyond our current understanding, that manipulates what we perceive as reality. But it still doesn't make it a god. It just makes it something that we do not yet have the terminology or science to grasp.

Atheism, to me, is not a belief system, though a lot of people want to say it is. It's a way of thinking based on rational thought. I don't believe there is no god, i know there is no god. It's the difference between belief and knowledge. I think that sums Atheism well enough for me.

Then what is science really? It's a current best guess. Theory, based on theory, based on experiment, based on theory. We're constantly revising what we know, because we accept we are not perfect. We accept that we know a humble tiny little piece of how the universe works, and we're trying our best to figure things out. Some theories last longer than others. We do not need absolutes, just current estimates and theories.

Religious people work with absolutes, as far as I've been able to understand them. An age old adage says, "If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people". If there's something you don't understand, you consider it, ask other people, look at other angles and so on. Or do you just say "no, god did it". Or "god works in mysterious ways". That's just a piss-poor way of saying "I don't want to understand" or "I don't need to understand". "These things are not meant to be understood by me." You're essentially saying you are too stupid to understand how things work, and that you're okay with it. If that's okay for your, to not be able to reasonably look at things then... I'm very sorry for you.

I used to think that I'm an agnostic. An agnostic does not make up his mind, but waits for evidence to either side before making up his mind. But since there is not conclusive evidence toward either side; and how could there ever be conclusive evidence, ever in an issue as complex as this, you don't make up your mind. But this is pretty much a cop-out, as I've come to understand it. Even if there isn't evidence that conclusively proves that there is no god, can i really honestly accept that possibility? Can i honestly accept into my world a supernatural being that created and controls everything? No. I can accept a force beyond our current understanding that may to the uneducated mind seem omnipotent. But anything can be explained through science. Just not current science.

So I've perhaps come to understand that I'm purely an atheist. If i need the label at all. But i definitely don't accept the possibility of a deity of any kind. The mere concept is ludicrous.

So what about the afterlife. Dying. Creation? Evolution? Let's look at my thoughts on these issues.

When you are born, in fact, before you are born, your consciousness is born. This can be proved by looking at EKG from a fetus. At some point, when enough stem-cells have been tasked to form brain cells, a chemical process happens which triggers electrical activity in the clump of cells that will be your brain. They will eventually take over involuntary and voluntary functions that you need to survive and act. The fetus will move it's hands. It will kick. It will toss and turn. When the child is born, these will be augmented by a whole host of amazing feats that us humans take for granted.

We know there is electrical activity happening in the human body. When you die, this activity eventually ceases, within 24 hours or so [uh edit here, after the brain stops getting oxygen, it stops working after a few minutes or so]. Don't quote me on this, by the way, but let's say that for the sake of conversation at the moment. According to physics, energy doesn't go anywhere. It may transform, but it exists just the same. You burn a log and you get heat. Same way, the energy that kept you going has to go somewhere. It may just dissipate into the surroundings, or the tissue, or it might do something else. There's no evidence for any of this, so it's just speculation. As far as we know, when you die, you cease to exist. You don't conceive anything anymore. Ergo, there is no afterlife, because there is no you there to comprehend it.

Creation..well can we just put this to rest already? It's 2011. If you believe a magic fairytale-guy created the world by thinking about it in a week, or even thousands of years, you're crazy and you should be institutionalized. There is enough conclusive evidence to say that the universe was created some 13.7Ga ago, and we have visual evidence of other solar systems that are in the process of forming planets to say that this didn't just "snap into existence through some magical fucking being". It's still an ongoing process that we have the privilege to study and look at.

As for life, well, we've already created 'artificial bacteria' in labs. We've created something that wasn't created through natural process. Sure, we haven't yet simulated how life came to be from a goo of amino acids, water and various elements, but we have enough supporting evidence to say this is exactly what happened. We have evidence for evolution. Sure, there are holes in a number of species and how they came to be, but that doesn't negate the other, valid evidence that we have. We can point to a rock or a fossil and say with a high degree of certainty that it is n years old.

And because our knowledge of evolution isn't complete, as few things are, it's still just a theory. And that doesn't bother me in the least. It can be a theory as long as it has to, but theory doesn't make it any less real than something written in a book 1800 years ago. Theory just means we don't fully understand everything, so we make certain hypothesis based on research and empirical evidence, until we can fill out the gaps with enough confidence. Which we may never! And that's the great thing about science.

I don't get scared of the unknown, i take it as a challenge. I want to learn more. I don't settle for explanations that take away an amazing process, and instead explains the end result as magics created by some guy in the sky?

One of my favorite quotes is 'Epicurus' Trilemma' (paraphrased by me and summarized by David Hume) :

If God is unable to prevent evil, he is not omnipotent

If God is not willing to prevent evil, he is not good

If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, why is there evil?

This is the best god damn evidence that there is no god. If you want to worship a god that is petty and childish or downright evil, like a child killing ants with a magnifying glass.. well..

Went to an Oracle event for Solaris 11. Tech content was good. Some of the highlights include improvements for Zones and ZFS, and best of all, an actual package manager that talks to actual repositories and packages that can be upgraded with one command, while keeping dependencies in check. This alone is worth the upgrade for all Solaris toting maniacs. There's also an option to install a very bare bones system, that you can then build up using the package manager. The image was like 300 megs (compared to the full install of 8GB for Solaris 10). Patching has also gotten revamped, and now can contain metadata that creates a cloned environment as a part of the upgrade. Or at least suggests the creation of one. This way you can test how the patch behaves in a cloned environment, and if things go pear-shaped, go back to your original system.You can also create a local mirror for packages if you don't want to use the Sun.. Oracle provided ones, or if you are on some limited bandwidth (which shouldn't be an issue in most countries that want to use Solaris for something). While it's fringe, it still has it's uses, and does some things pretty well.

They are also toting this as the "First Cloud OS". I have no idea what they mean with this, honestly. Sure, it can serve as a host OS in a cloud based service, but uh.. First?

I'm still running Arch, with a 3.1.2 kernel. I've also done some testing on the 3.2 branch (up to RC3 as of this post). Linus has taken to announcing new kernel builds on Google+ which is cool. These threads also get loads of (mostly useless or off-topic stuff from ignorant techno-dweebs and Linus fanboys) comments. I've reported a few bugs so far; among them a few kernel panics (while returning from suspend), and the lack (apparently) of an iwlwifi kernel module, for Intel wifi-cards, which is need for my Thinkpad T410s. Also there was some crash when plugging in a powercord, but that might be related to entirely different stuff like pm-utils or some powersave feature gone awry.  The reason i wanted to try the 3.2 builds is that on at least the Thinkpad T410s, the VGA output on either the computer itself or the dock does - not - work. It gives you are wavering picture that will give you instant brain cancer and severe blindness if watched for very long. Now all this has something to do with the intel drivers, and a specific signal that is sent. This is fixed in the 3.2 rc2 and rc3 at least. Which is a great little bonus, especially if i want to hook up a projector (usually VGA) or something when you want to show some schematics to a client or your boss....

As i described in the previous post, i rooted and upgraded my Desire Z to Cyanogen Mod 7.1 (nightly 263). There hasn't been a nightly since 263, but that's apparently because there are too many damn devices, and simply the build time for each nightly takes over 24 hours in worst cases. Also i think Ice Cream Sandwich, which had it's source code released recently (along with the previously unreleased Honeycomb source in there somewhere). So far, things have been running great. Only a few problems so far, the most serious being that the launcher disappeared once, and wouldn't come back without a reboot. Phone worked fine otherwise.

What I've been watching:

We've been watching some select Anime series lately. Right now we're watching a show called 'Samurai Champloo' which is a bit more on the light comedy side. It's refreshing compared to the serious, violent anime we've previously watched.

Some movies also, but nothing worth mentioning. Well actually, there was a rather good crime-serialkiller thing starring Scott Speedman and Willem Dafoe. It was called Anamorph. Don't buy it for 10 bucks, but consider it for 5-7 bucks.

What I've been listening to:

Podcasts mostly, Caffination, The Ardent Atheist, TechSnap and the Linux Outlaws to name a few.

The Ardent Atheist is a new one, to me, which had a really funny bit that was featured on the linux outlaws. Basically a short demo on how.. uh..well Siri works. Check that episode out here.

I recently got the HTC Desire Z. Slightly older, but it has the qwerty slider, which i wanted. Anyway, the HTC Sense UI default "shell" put on top of Android is great. By far better than the Samsung uh.. Touch Wiz thing. Smoother, and smarter. But i won't get into that. What comes with Sense UI on this phone (and i'll bet a lot of other HTC phones), is a bunch of applications. Applications that i didn't need. So obivously i tried to remove some of those applications. Turns out, to remove apps like Facebook or Twitter (that i do not want on my phone), you have to have root. I didn't find any smart way of getting rid of the apps without root, because it requires modification or removal of files that are in directories that are not world or group-writable.

So, after some internal debate between me and myself, i decided to root the phone. I quickly realized that the operation would not be as easy as on the Samsung, which has a fairly established and easy-to-use toolset for doing both rooting and rom management. Samsungs can also be exploited on pretty much any version of the OS.

However, on the HTC, i found that i had to first downgrade the firmware, so that i could use an exploit to gain root. And to make matters worse, this didn't work on it's own. I had to turn my microSD card into a "goldcard", then do the downgrade, then the exploit to gain root, and then flash the new firmware on top. In this case, i ended up with Cyanogen Mod 7.1. again, since i had good experiences with it.

So, let's go through the process that i had to go through. Reading a bunch of forums, i quickly got the picture that your mileage will vary. First of all, let's start with what i had. I had the HTC Desire Z (known as the HTC Vision G2, i think, in the US). I had the latest firmware, which in this case meant uh.. Android 2.3.4 (or 2.3.5), called the HTC Sense version 2.1. Anyway, the latest version available through the HTC OTA update. The phone was bought October of this year.

I started out with the Cyanogen Mod instructions for downgrading the phone to an exploitable firmware version on this page. Or actually, i started out by installing the android sdk, but on arch linux it was as easy as installing android-sdk from the AUR. I use yaourt as a frontend, so i did a yaourt android-sdk. On a 64-bit system, i had to enable the multilibs repository, to get the necessary lib32 libraries.

I ran through the steps of  pushing fre3vo and misc_version on the phone, which went fine. I then did the chmods and the debug, which then got me a root shell on the phone temporarily. The next step has me setting the version for a misc_version, and then pushing the actual downgrade onto the phone. All good so far. Next step is to reboot the phone bootloader using adb (the android debugger). This also worked.... until i got a dreadful message. "CID incorrect! Upgrade fail!". CID? Wtf? Okay. Step back for a moment and google this fucker.

Turns out certain phones need some finetuning to be able to downgrade, due to either..carrier lockin, or some branding put on the phone, or perhaps an unknown reason (maybe hardware or software revisions?). I found this thread on the Cyanogenmod forums, which helped me onwards. The thread describes my exact issue, though with a slightly different downgrade firmware than mine. In any case, i decided to give it a try. The process involves the creation of a "goldcard", which is then used as a place to store the downgrade firmware. The goldcard is simply a microSD card, with the first few bytes overwritten with some new data.

The steps were basically:

• Download the goldcard helper application from the Android market. The phone was still bootable and fully operational, as no downgrade had taken place, so i was able to download and install this.
• Using the goldcard helper, get the reverse CID for your MMC2 card. That's your microSD card. MMC0 is your internal memory and can't be used for this, as far as i've read.
• Taking the reverse CID for your microSD card from the program, input it into the goldcard page (a link is also in the application).
• The site generates an image, which you will download
• Download also a hex-editor, such as HxD
• Take your microSD card out of your phone and put it into a memory card reader (i also read you can use your phone as the reader, but i used a Kingston reader instead), and open up the card from the HxD editor using the extra tab, then the open disk menu and under physical disk selected the removable disk which was the microSD card. Make sure that read-only is not checked when opening the microSD card.
• Open up another tab by opening from the extra tab "open disk image", and load the .img file that you got from the goldcard site. Also uncheck the read-only checkbox here. Use the default 512 byte sector size. You should now have two tabs open.
  
• From the goldcard.img tab, do a select all, then copy. Go to the microSD tab, and select offsets 00000000 to 00000170 and from the edit menu do a "paste write". This will paste the content of the goldcard.img, to the first offsets of the microSD card.
• From the file menu, save what you've done. Accept / ignore all warnings.
• Ok, now you have a gold card.

Proceed by copying over the downgrade image to the newly created goldcard. Continue with the CyanogenMod instructions.Following the instructions for the downgrade, you can safely redo all the steps to make sure. Once you are ready, reboot the bootloader again. You should now have great success, in the words of Borat. Navigate with the volume up and down keys, and select using the power or the navigation-touchpad thing-button. Select bootloader, then select fastboot. Confirm that you want to go ahead if necessary.

This will take a moment. You'll then be downgraded to an earlier version of the firmware, which has a known exploit, allowing us to root the phone. The phone will (i think) reboot on it's own, and give you an older looking Sense UI.

Continue with the rooting instructions here. Basically you are downloading and pushing onto the phone a bunch of packages that are needed. Then, you're running the actual exploit which should find a register in the memory, which we will use to sneak in (i think this is a correct analysis of what goes on, though i'm no programmer). Remember to match those md5 sums listed in the instructions before going on.

After this you have a rooted phone, hopefully with clockwork recovery mod installed. You can now keep using the Sense UI thing (i'm not sure that it'll OTA upgrade anymore?), or install Cyanogenmod, using these instructions. For some reason, i either failed some part, or something failed, but i didn't have clockwork recovery mod installed after this process. No sign of CWM anywhere. So, i headed on to the market, and downloaded the thing from there. I was now ready to install Cyanogen, which went without incident.

Note, that if you can't get into recovery mode using the restart into recovery (from the normal shutdown menu, after installing CWM), shut down the phone, and use Power, volume down and the navigation thing pressed all together.

Ok, so now i have Cyanogenmod 7.1.0 on my HTC Desire Z, with Android 2.3.7 on the bottom. Nice! Quadrant scores (yes yes, synthetic benchmarks..) went from 900 to about 1900 compared to the latest Sense UI. Phone feels snappy.

One thing to note was that market kept crashing! I was getting worried for a moment, but then i remembered the internet, found that thread, and fixed the problem. After downgrading, rooting and installing Cyanogen, i had the phone set to a language called English HD. I selected English US, and my problem was gone. So note this.

Winamp keeps crashing now, but it did that on the Sense UI side, so i doubt it has anything to do with Cyanogen. Version 1.2.6 is the latest as i'm writing this, and there is no later version available. The default media player, though, is pretty usable in any case, so i'm just using that for now.

Now, if i could just install this Cyanogen Nightly build...

Firstly, people behaving badly on planes (that's what i wrote down anyway). First of all, Finnish people (i guess this is true for many other people as well) are troublesome as soon as they wake up. When traveling, you see their worst sides, clearly. People drink excessively even before they get on the plane, and then once they are on the damn thing, they drink more. I may have written about a previous trip to god knows where, where a guy was arrested before even getting off the plane. Apparently he had been drinking, and then playing some ass-grabby-grabby with one of the flight attendants. He was sitting alone in the now-empty front section of the plane, singing to himself "who has the cops waiting for them outside!". And sure enough, cops were waiting for him right outside the plane. Great way to start a vacation.

Another thing i still can't understand after all these years traveling, is why people don't listen to the damn flight attendants. When they say jump, you ask: "how high?". On the plane, they are the supreme authority. If they tell you not to use electronic equipment, you don't. I know that most equipment probably don't interfere with any modern aircraft, but it's their damn plane. They make the rules as they see fit. If they tell you to keep your seat belt on until the sign is off and the plane has stopped, you do it! I don't care if it's your first or your fifteenth time on a plane, you don't get up and start unloading as soon as the plane hits the ground. You sit the fuck down and wait. You ain't getting off the plane any faster.

On that fucking note, why, when the plane has finally stopped, do you take your carry-on and go stand in the aisle? Why? You stand there with no space, and your bag in hand, and you wait 10 minutes for them to complete post-landing checklists and open the doors and so on. And then you get out. I sit down and keep reading my book, and i get out like 30 seconds after you do. I fucking hate that. But then again, what's it to me? Why do i care?

Well obviously, so i have something to write about. D'uh.

The next bullet point is 'Finland is taking over the Costa Del Sol. This is true! According to some shady source, 20 000 Finns populate the Spanish coasts at any one time. That's a lot. I've been to Spain maybe 20 times, and either i'm getting older and more cynical (is this even possible?), or there were more Finns there than ever. Up to the point of annoyance. Violent thoughts.

During one day, we took the bus up to the mountains, to Ronda. which is about.. 800 meters above sea level. The road is winding and dangerous. People die there constantly. It took nearly two hours to get there by bus (which cost 8,80, feasible). On the bus, there were Finnish people. The first restaurant we had lunch at had Finnish people at the table next to us. There was no escape. Except perhaps the 200 meter drop from the cliffs.

Every single mode of public transport, every café, every... well not every, but most restaurants. Finnish people. We (i'm ashamed to say) even have our part of town. Well, basically. It's a place where you can operate solely in Finnish. Stores have clerks that know Finnish. Taxi and bus-drivers are fluent in Finnish, almost. Signs at restaurants and such are in Finnish. There is a Finnish school. A church. Night clubs. Stores where you can get exclusively Finnish goods  (which these people obviously can't survive without). The store has anything from Finnish beer (which is shit), Long Drinks, rye bread, liquorice, and "sausages" (i use air-quotes because most Finnish sausages insult the word, containing scarcely any meat. Seriously. We have sausages with 0 per cent meat).

This brings me nicely into the next bullet point. "Ja mitä se on suomeksi??". Translates loosely into "And what's that in Finnish?". This was a sentence overheard at a local Jazz-club (owned by a Finnish person, and with mostly Finnish patrons). We listened to admittedly excellent Jazz provided by The Andalucian Swing Band. After the show, there was some kind of lottery going on for the mostly senior crowd. We were easily the youngest people there, by a margin of at least 30 years. During the lottery, the hostess read out the winning number. Sometimes she'd do it in Spanish, mostly Finnish, and whatever crossed her mind. Once she did not read out the number in Finnish, but instead in Spanish, Swedish and English. So, obviously, on of the esteemed patrons had to stand up and say, in a snarky voice: "And what's that in Finnish??". I nearly flipped out and shouted "It was R for Red-neck". We're 4000 kilometers away from Finland. Most of those people either live there permanently, or most of the year. But you can't be bothered to learn anything local. And then you make noise about it, as if you're proud of the fact that you're a fucking ignorant prick?

Ok, let's get out of Spain. The flight we took was through Zürich. That's a fucking expensive place! We had two meals at the airport  (ok, airport prices, but still!) Burger King. 26 euro. The same meals in Finland, if we had Burger King, would be like 13 bucks. Expensive place. Everything except booze was expensive.

Back to Spain. While i have nothing against Muslims or Islam, i noted that the amount of Muslims on the coast had increased greatly. There was even a brand new mosque that i don't remember being there in 2008 when i last visited. I guess Spain will also be a "victim" of the slow and creeping Islami..fication of Europe. Some study i read somewhere (tm), said that some countries in Europe would have more Muslims in 50 years than any other religion. That's kind of interesting. As long as they don't start enforcing Sharya or old traditions that don't sit well with the rest of the population, I'm fine with this.

Ok that's all.

Currently I'm reading Stefan Didak's posts on his new Home Office version 7. You should check them out. Inspiring.

Anyway, it was far from a clean job. The window was shattered to a million bits inside the car, and half of it had dropped inside the door. Cleaning it up just so i could drive it to work and put it in the garage was a bitch. So yeah, i decided, instead of taping a black plastic bag over the broken window, i decided to drive it to a safer place. Who know, maybe the same fuck would have come back for my 1994 Green Day "Dookie" cd that i still had in the glove compartment. He also left a 100 euro inverter. I guess it could have been anyone, but my money is on some junkie looking for his next fix of cheap drugs (Subutex or some such stuff). A GPS like that retails for 150 euros or so, and on the black market it ought to fetch 30 bucks? Maybe 40? And that gets you what? In Helsinki, maybe a fourth of a gram of cocaine (probably not his brand of poison), or a few pills of subutex or some benzos.

Sigh.

Anyway, as soon as i noticed what had happened, i pick up my Galaxy S, and call the insurance company to ask about what to do next. However, as i'm slightly shocked by the events, i fumble, and drop my phone, which hits the asphalt with a resounding thump. Perfectly flat on its screen. I pick it up, and next thing you know, i'm picking out small pieces of glass from my hand. Great. Broken car. Broken phone. Phone still works, so i make the call anyway. Insurance company tells me to call the cops, and take the car to a shop for repairs.

Now, all this hinges on the po-lice. The five-oh. Come monday, i look up from their site how to make a report, which can be done either at the station, online or over the phone. I'm adviced by the site that i should not use the electronic form if the crime involves someone breaking in somewhere. Someone broke into my car to steal shit, so i figure i'll call them instead. On the fourth call, someone picks up. Here's the dialog:

Me: Hey, i need to make a report. Someone broke into my car.

5-0: Yeah? Well you need to fill out the online form

Me: But.. it said..

5-0: We can't take reports like this over the phone. Either visit a police station, or fill out the online form.

Me: Fine.

I was stumped, but then again, my faith for our men and women in blue is .. minimal to begin with, so i was not altogether amazed.

So i look up the online form thing. I have to authenticate using my online banking codes. Fine, that's fairly standard in things like this where you need to be sure who's doing what. I fill in my info, and it says "Sending this information [insert name and social security number here] to the requesting site. Again, standard practice. I'm then taken to this 90's rendition of a website, with a simple html form asking for different kinds of information. The first bits of information requested? My name and social security number, which i just authenticated to be sent over for. But hey, okay. Can you make a report under some other persons name? Doesn't make sense to me why you'd authenticate as John Doe, and then make a report under the name Jane Doe, with her soc.security number. That smells illegal, you know?

So i fill in the fields, which are by the way, limited to like 50 characters. Try describing anything in 50 chars. Try writing the model name of the stolen items in 50 chars. There was also a field which asked how i wanted a copy of the report. The options were "by snail mail" or "i'll pick them up". I hit "by mail", and then decide to click the "info" button next to the field. It says "You can get it by email (but that's unencrypted mind you!), by mail, or you can pick it up". There's no field for "email", and since the buttons are radio-buttons, i can't de-select the choice i already made. I was stuck. Fucking sucks. I send it in anyway, and i get a date and time, a reference number. I then file a report with the insurance company. This is a PDF-file, with fillable forms. I then *print it out* because my insurance company doesn't offer an electronic way of sending in stuff. There are rumors of an email address that accepts stuff, but it's not public or i didn't find it. So i then proceed to fucking fax over the form to the insurance company. *bepbepbeeep* Hey look, it's the 90's calling. Yeah? Okay. They said they want their technology back.

Jesus fucking christ.

Then i drive over to the car repair shop, so they can take pictures and get an estimate over to the insurance company. So far all good. Two days pass. On the third, i get a call from the insurance company, who say they have not heard from the police department. I then call the police, who give me the run-around, and finally forward me to the documents department. They spend a good 15-20 minutes searching for my report. They ask for my name. They ask for my social security number. The date and time i sent it in. The city i live in. None of these apparently produce any results, and i'm left to wonder whether they ever got the report or not. I try to offer the clerk the reference number that i got after i filed the report. Her reply? "No that's useless. I can't do anything with that". So what, either she's incompetent, or the reference number is.. a random generated number to make me feel better?

Also, i've never made a crime-report. And there should only be one person with my name and social security number in the entire country. So how can it be this difficult to find my report? This is beginning to sound like the work of some big IT service provider.

I was also told that "No the documents are not sent to the insurance company unless they request them (which they also don't automatically). So i either have to ask the insurance company to ask the police to get the documents, or wait for the police to send the documents to me, so i can i guess..uh.. fax to the insurance company.

All this has yet to happen. No nothing from the po-po. The car guys are waiting for the insurance company, who are waiting for the police. So i'm stuck until they do their thing. Great.

..as for the phone

As i didn't have a company phone (or i did, but i gave it away to a colleague when i got the galaxy s), i decided to get one ordered for me to replace the now-fucked Samsung. I wanted the Galaxy S 2, but they didn't have it in stock, and i'm a very impatient man, so i got the HTC Desire Z (the HTC Vision elsewhere). That's the qwerty-slider. I'll write something about it once i've had a chance to use it first. It seems solid, and they physical keyboard is a nice thing to have around. Also, it supports Cyanogen Mod 7.1.