On Monday I returned from The Gathering slightly tired, and slightly stressed. The day started with me waking up at 11:51am, with my train departing at 12:08pm. Luckily, Vikingskipet is very close to the train station, and my friend Chr|s was awake and offered me to drive me to the station. I arrived at the station 12:02pm, with six minutes to spare, so I was able to buy myself something to drink and eat. Nothing like a quick news stand breakfast :P.

The whole event was finished with a nice dinner served in the late hours of Sunday, which really did wonders. After a nice meal, we continued with a few speeches and patting ourselves on the back for the great job we had done during easter. The party was a success, and the people attending were mostly greatly satisfied. With the feedback we got we were really, really pleased. Of course, a dinner was not enough so we had to end the whole thing with a great party. I can promise you, there is nothing like a bunch of nerds tossing down alcohol like there is no tomorrow. There is bound to be a few events that makes you smile, and this party was no exception. But I just can’t deny that it was a good end to an eventful week. It’s been one of my best parties ever, and the people I worked with were all splendid people.

I spoke today with one of my fellow crew members, and I came to terms with something I’ve known for ages. Coming back from The Gathering and adjusting back to real life is a process, a process that can take days. Both me and her had spent most of our days doing absolutely nothing than sitting in front of our computers, one might even go as far as say we were quite indifferent to our surroundings. The whole event is quite intense on your senses, and it takes time to get back to the “real world”. I’m starting to come back well, and I think I might be able to get back out into the sun and back into town to meet people again. By all means, being in the crowd that is at the party is not in any way negative, but I got to admit that it’s rather good to just spend time with yourself after a week in the ship. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with my social antennas.

With the success of this years event, and the people I’ve met I can’t wait to do it again. A huge thanks goes out to my crew, info:desk which I was a part of. It was a pleasure and honour working with you all. And a huge hug goes out to my sitting-right-next-to-me-partner, Christine. Her smiles and being lightened up my day.

I arrived two days ago in Vikingskipet to attend a computer party as crew, and up until now it’s been really busy with lots and lots to do. Of course, organizing such a party of this size, with well over 5000 people attending there’s a lot of tasks to be done. Not only do we need to set up well over 400 Ethernet switches to make the network, but there’s also the issue of attendee security, attendee well being and information flow and organizing of event competitions. Everything is well under way, and as I write this I sit up on the tribunes looking out over the hall. It’s quite the sight, with over 5000 computer screens lighting up the horizon.

You just gotta be here to fully understand and appreciate the atmosphere and ambiance that construct the feeling of being here. But you can get a sneak peek of how it is, from directly to the left of where I am sitting currently. There’s an expression that goes along the lines of; “a picture is worth a thousand words”, but in this case it really doesn’t. Seeing as this hall is historic, even though just recently being used as a Olympic hall under the winter Olympics in 1994, it kinda adds to make the experience even grander. There’s something special with the sound that 5000 people, 5000 computers and almost just as many sound systems make. You just gotta be here to experience it for yourself.

As for the people attending, it’s all types of personalities. We’ve got people in all ages, both sexes, people from all around Norway as well as the rest of Scandinavia. But we even get more exotic attendees, as we have people from the rest of Europe and even visitors coming from all the way from the United States. The Gathering might not be the largest computer party in the world, but I can bet you that it is the one with the most atmosphere. I will try my best to keep you up to date. I wish you all the best for the rest of the Easter holidays.

As some of you may know, I’m attending as crew at a large computer party in Norway this easter called The Gathering. I just arrived after a two hour train trip, which was spent on IRC and sending off a few e-mails using my cell phone over GPRS. The party has almost 5000 people attending, and a good 200 people responsible for making the party happen. In just under 24 hours, the Vikingship will start to fill up with enthusiastic computer nerds of all ages, to attend the party for five full days. It will be a party filled with all types of different elements, that make up the computer scene as we know it.

You will have professional gaming tournaments, music competitions and the genre I love the most; demo making. For those of you that don’t know what demo coding is, I can sum it up with this definition. Think of a music video, think of computers games and 3D environments, add those two together and you have yourself a demo. A demo is a program that displays lovely graphics, stretched to the extremes of what is possible with todays technology added with catch, groovy music tracks. It’s all meant to entertain, and to amaze you of what can be done with today’s 3D accelerator cards.

Of course, an event of this size does attract quite a few people with vast computer knowledge, so the whole hall sizzles with people with good know how. For those that are interested, it’s a great chance to get to learn new stuff and to expand your social network. And this is the greatest aspect of the event itself, the chance to meet up with likely spirited people that love the same stuff that you do. And of course, with the way the internet works, you actually get to meet those people you chat with online that live too far away from you to meet on a regular basis. An event like this erases the borders that you have on a day to day basis. It’s just great to be with people that love the same stuff as you do, namely computers! It’s gonna be a great five days and I can’t wait to keep you up to date. And here’s a sneak peek of how the hall looks, just to get a feel of how it is.

It’s seems like Apple has a few bad apples in their ranks. Just the other day, a blow to the freedom of speech was forced upon a few bloggers that was given some unrevealed information from an inside source from within Apple. The information they got was for an up and coming product from Apple, and of course, Apple was not to happy about this. Instead of actually trying to pin down the source on their own, making a minimal fuzz to finding their own rotten apple, they instead opted for the option to go into court and have the courts flush him/her out. Of course, this process doesn’t really cost a multi billion dollar corporation like Apple much, for them this is a mere case of lunch money. But what about Joe Average? Joe Average doesn’t have as deep pockets as Apple.

But this is really not what concerns me, what worries me is the fact that it limits our right to freedom of speech. Granted, I do not live in the United States, but in Norway where I live we have the same right to freedom of speech. It’s a right that not everyone has, unfortunately, but given the fact that we are blessed with this privilege one should cherish it and make use of it whenever possible. As any journalist or blogger would say, if they were given a chance to a big scoop on the terms that their sources would have to remain anonymous, both parties would agree to this. It’s all based on the freedom of speech. But what Apple has done here, is to take away that right. And that scares me.

Ok, I can admit as much as this. If I was Apple, or any other company no matter the size, I would also be angry at the fact that someone leaked information about an up and coming product. It’s like a game of poker, you give away some aspects of your game, but you never give away everything. A good poker player doesn’t only know how to count cards, but a good poker player also knows to do a good bluff and to get away with it. This is pretty much the same when you are working in product development, you look at the market and give out indicators of what you might and might not develop, but you never reveal everything. When someone leaks information of this sort, that does damage of various degrees. And I perfectly understand Apple for wanting to find this source. But what I do not understand is their method of finding this source.

I do not approve of leaking disclosed information to the public, but I do not approve of people/corporations trying to limit anyone’s ability to perform our right of freedom of speech either. I feel like it’s taking steps backwards in evolution. It is entirely up to corporations to have good internal routines for the handling of confidential material, and to make sure that their employees know the consequences of mishandling of confidential material. There are many ways with today’s technology to ensure this, and a high tech company such as Apple should be able to implement such features. The question of whether or not these bloggers made the right call to publish this material is for me, not really an issue in this case. They just exercised their right to freedom of speech.

As a result of this, we might end up with people not coming to the media with information. Information that you would not be able to do anything with on your own, but would have a much higher impact given to the media that knows how to work it. How many political scandals would never have seen the light of day if it wasn’t for freedom of speech, and the ability to remain anonymous. What Apple has done with its crusade to find their own sinner, their own rotten apple, is to scare off future ’squealers’ from approaching the media in the fear that their own identity might be revealed and thus their own safety be jeopardized.

And that my friends is what freedom is all about, freedom to be who you are, to do what you want, and to say what you want. As a wise man once said;

A free society is a place where it is safe to be unpopular

Or should I say, on my feet again? Well, either one works I guess. Just been in bed since Saturday, was out “cold” with a high fever that knocked me down good. So I had no other option than to crawl in to bed and just play the waiting game. So it’s been a good few days just lying in bed, with vivid fever hallucinations battling everything from small Scottish midgets to green aliens trying to abduct me to conduct strange experiments on me. Thankfully I my light saber tucked away, ready to aid me whenever the situation got to heated, literally.

Late this afternoon, I was able to get my arse out of bed and into the shower and clean up. So now I’m all new shaved, smelling like roses looking like a million bucks. Had some soup, and later on some noodles. Everything needed to get you back on track, nothing beats a winning recipe. My head is even starting to come back to life, to a state where it’s close to “working”, but everyone that knows me that is a statement to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Ah well, none the less; it’s a good to be back! Back in black (or something similar)

Woohoo!

Last month I set a new visitor record to my blog, which makes me very happy. It makes it all worthwhile to continue writing all these articles. And it also proves that you, yes you, the readers of this site actually like what is being written. I would like to extend a thanks to all of you that have endured beta testing with me, private comments on different aspects of the layout and feel of this site, as well as a huge thanks for being who you are! I will not start a list of names, cause that list would be far too long, but again I say;

Thank you very much. Very much appreciated.

Today, another one of my domains went live. It has just started up, and the key people behind the page has yet to do the final talks. But the site is Cservice Sucks Dot Net, and that site too is a blog where people who all hate the group of people that run services on the IRC network Undernet. Here we can do as I do here, just keep on ranting and throw dirt. In other words, just as we would on any other given day.

Why!? Because I’m starting to become like my mother, that’s why. Recently, I’ve found out that I tend to have quite a bit of energy the day after I’ve been out drinking. In some cases, it’s so extreme that you can compare me to the energizer bunny on speed. Yup, not a pretty picture at all. So what have I done today? Well, I started with scrubbing down the toilet, sink and shower, so now the bathroom looks all shiny and nice. In fact, it sparkles so much that you can get temporarily blinded. :) Then went the turn over to the bedroom, changed the sheets and hung the pillows and duvets out to air. Dusted the whole place down. Then came the living room and kitchen, all made to look it’s best. Even cleaned out the fridge.

Then I took a short break, and made dinner. What was on tonights menu? Tikka masala, a great Indian dish with rice. Though, I was all out of chicken so I had to use pork instead. But personally, I think pork goes better to the tikka masala than chicken does, so I wasn’t really disappointed. Of course, after having done so much work around the apartment, I ate too much. I was barely able to move afterwards, and thus spent quite a bit of time in front of the telly. When things started to return to normal, all I could feel was fear, the fear of the revelation that had come to me earlier on today;

I’m starting to become more and more like my mom! YIKES!!!!!!!!!!

I had a really big fight against spyware yesterday. Recently, my boss had complained about sluggish performance on his office computer, and processes that started on its own and really annoying pop-up windows. When I was first approached with this scenario, I just told him in plain text. You are infected with the plague of the web; spyware. So what to do!? Well, here comes our good friend Ad-Aware in. It’s just like a virus scanner, but it scans for malicious programs running that virus detectors doesn’t scan for, but might do just as much damage.

The first scan revealed that the computer was infected with quite a list of different types of spyware. Some where key loggers, some where usage statistics gatherers, some were drone like processes, just waiting to be used in a coordinated DDoS attack. After three scans, and the removal of more persistent spyware the computer still showed signs of being infected, even though Ad-Aware was saying everything was fine. So I started to dig a little, and by a sign of good luck, the process that caused this havoc crashed, leaving a dialog that revealed my the name of the executable. I tried to delete the file, but that of course was impossible at first, since the file was in use by the system. So I had to dive into the system registry, and see what trails it had there, and of course to remove its startup presence in the system. So after having cleaned up the registry by hand, I was ready to reboot. The computer rebooted, and I was finally able to remove the persistent little bastard that caused the havoc on my bosses computer. Nothing like playing a digital Sherlock Holmes.

But what was really good about this whole thing was that I learned something new, I learned my boss to enforce a little more aware surfing pattern, he will now use Ad-Aware on a weekly basis to scan his computer along with his already existing anti virus solution. But, the best thing is of course, that I made him ditch Internet Explorer and move over to Firefox! Yet another follower added to the loyal user base of the best browser on earth! Go Firefox!

Yes, you’ve heard me. And it’s a phrase being used on the net more and more often, and with a good reason. Not only are we being spammed via e-mail, but spammers have found other ways to spam us as well. You’ve had spam on IRC for ages too, but it’s not that often you read about IRC in the press. But recently, you’ve been getting spam over the instant messaging service from Microsoft, MSN. The new trend for spam sent over instant messaging services is called SPIM. But the spam that is really getting on my nerves these days, is blog spam. Over the last years, blogging has become a wide spread phenomena all over the glob. The usage of blogs has become so widely used, that it has become an influence on politics and the media. You only need to look back to what happened last year, with Dan Rather from CBS who was fired after having been slightly trigger happy with announcing a piece of information that turned out to be false. The case was blown wide open by a blogger, that could prove with simple methods that the case documents Dan Rather had based the case on was falsified. But to get back on track, spam!

As I said, lately I’ve been getting an insane amount of so called comment spam to my blog. This means, it’s spam disguised as comments to articles posted on my blog. Of course, all these comments are bogus and contains nothing else than advertisements to online gambling sites. Ok, I gotta hand it to them. They’ve found an area where it is easy to spam, and exploited that weakness for all it’s worth. But for goodness sake, who really likes spam, other than those that gain revenue from them!? NO ONE! I’m getting fed up with deleting comment spam daily, so today I’ve implemented a solution in the form of a WordPress plug-in to rid my blog of this problem. The plug-in is called Spam-Karma, and is written by Dr. Dave. So far it seems to be working quite well, and I will have my eyes fixed on what it does and how well it works. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

And to all you spammers:

May you all die a slow and painful death, and roast on an open fire for all eternity. (reference)

I read in the news today that the Russian web page AllOfMP3.com was getting heat from the Russian government for their alleged crimes towards copyright laws. Allofmp3.com is a music site that offers the end user the possibility to download from a vast music library at a very low cost. The current price is two cents per downloaded megabyte, so for a full dollar you are able to download 50 megabytes of music, which roughly amounts to a full CD at a decent bit rate quality. They also offer you the music in the most commonly used formats, and at variable bit rates. Which means you as the end user choose what quality you want.

The situation in Russia has always been that the government has been quite liberal to what goes on at Russian web sites. They have never really bothered with strict laws, and the laws that were close to strict were really never governed. But given Allofmp3’s price line and their recent media coverage, I have a strong suspicion that not only the music industry has laid pressure on the Russian government, but that the likes of iTunes has a finger in this “game”. Because one of the many features Allofmp3 has to offer, is the fact that the material you download from Allofmp3 is not DRM protected. Which means you are free to do whatever you want with the music you download. One of the dreaded things about DRM is the fact that you are forced into limiting the playback of your downloaded content to the machine you downloaded it to. So that means that when you buy a new PC, you have to get all the music all over again. And as a end user, having paid for your music you for sure want to continue playing your content. I wish that DRM never emerged as a technology, and I’m happy that you have alternatives such as Allofmp3. But for how long!? I’m afraid not for much longer.

I smell conspiracy all the way!