Gemal's Psyched Blog: Interesting

What 99% uptime means

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:38:04 +0100

If your site's uptime is:
99% - it's down 3 days, 15 hours, 36 minutes
99.9% - it's down 8 hours, 45 minutes, 36 seconds
99.99% - it's down 52 minutes, 33 seconds
99.999% - it's down 5 minutes, 15 seconds
99.9999% - it's down 31 seconds
a year. Pretty interesting...

Nokia N95 updated to latest firmware

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:03:42 +0100

Last week I updated my Nokia N95 to the latest firmware. I'm now running version 20.0.0.015. You can check the firmware version on your Nokia phone by entering *#0000# when you're in the main window.

You can always check what firmware version is available by going to the Nokia Device Software Update page, where you enter your product code. The code is printed on the white label beneath the battery.

Remember to check the official changelog for the 20.0.0.015 version.

This update also gave me a chance to cleanup my installed programs. I had loads of installed programs which I never used. Now I only installed the programs that I actually use.

These are:
- Mail for Exchange. I can't live without this one. It's a push mail client for Microsoft Exchange. This way I don't have to sync to get my mails and calendar entries. It's done automatically and it's always 100% up to date.
- Windows Live. I use the Messenger client for IM. I dont use the Hotmail functionality
- Nokia Maps. I installed Denmark and Sweden as maps so that I don't have to download them over GPRS. The maps are used by the built-in GPS.
- Nokia PC suite. This one is mainly installed on the PC to be available to connect the phone to the PC.
- Nokia PC Phone. It's a beta software that gives you a possibility to use your mobile phone with your web browser. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox is supported. I use it for sending SMS from within my browser.
- Sports Tracker. A GPS based activity tracker that records information such as your speed, distance and time. Perfect when you want to know exactly how many km/miles you have run.
- Location Tracker. This one is new, so I'm not sure how much I'm gonna use it. It automatically tag your location data to your pictures. Perhaps I'll use it on a boys night out. The day after I can see where I've been.

I've tried a lot of other programs but these are the ones that I ended up with. Yes perhaps it's nice to have a weather application installed, but seriously how much do you use it. For me, never.

Migrating to Google Apps

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:49:06 +0100

I'm currently in the process of moving all my mail to Google Apps. I've been running my IMAP mail for most of my domains on a company server and it has been great. The server is administrated by Henrik Schack and I cant think of a better admin. But now that Google Gmail offers IMAP I think it's time to make the move. The move will give me easier control over mail aliases and mailing lists. Now I don't have to bother Schack to make changes.

I have around 10 domains which I use mail on. Some of them are purely mail forwards and some of the them have mailing lists. With the move to Google Apps it's also easier to offer real mail accounts to the family members that I administrate mail for.

The migration itself went pretty smoothly. I used the command line program imapsync to sync all of my mail to Google Gmail. Then I just add the new account to Mozilla Thunderbird and I'm up and running.

I administrate all the DNS information for my domains at GratisDNS. The interface is really really nerdy, but it works. I've create a Google Apps template in GratisDNS, so that I easily can move all the migrated domains to be using this templates.

First textpattern patch accepted

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 12:32:04 +0100

I'm slowly trying to convert my blog from Movable Type to Textpattern.
I'm already running two other blog sites (Mads Gemal and Altnok) with Textpattern and I really like it. It fits perfectly into my home grown PHP5 website framework.

Now the Textpattern developers accepted my first patch. It's a very very simple patch, but still a patch. It adds the ability for plug-ins to add custom things to the head part of a RSS and ATOM feed.

Textpattern is small and simple and works like a charm. It lakes some of the features from WordPress and doesn't seem to have as many plug-ins as WordPress. But it really easy to integrate into an existing website and that's what I was looking for.

Update: Now both blogs (Mads Gemal and Altnok) running Textpattern is using the feature to add a image to both the RSS and ATOM feeds. Check it out here and here.

Software on my Windows machine

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 15:03:56 +0100

Here's a short summary of the software I use on my Windows PC. I try to use as most free software as I can. Leave me a comment if you think you have a better alternative than the ones listed below.

Internet
I don't think I have to say that I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser and Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. Since I like living on the edge I use nightly builds of both.

Pictures
My picture viewer is currently FastStone Image Viewer which is quite fast and good at getting a quick overview of my pictures. I use FastStone rotating my pictures and giving them comments. I only comment my vacation photos. I've also started using Picasa as an experiment. Normally I never touches my pictures. Don't crop them and don't even remove those red eyes. Picasa provides and easy and fast way to do this modifications and at the same time has a nice way to preserve the original image and only saving the "diff" between the original and modified picture. But since FastStone saves the comments in the EXIF comment block of the picture and Picasa uses the IPTC standard I cant see my FastStone comments in Picasa and vica versa.

For editing pictures I use both GIMP and Paint.Net. I'm very close to giving up on GIMP since the program is a joke when it comes to GUI. Both GIMP and Paint.Net are freeware.

Office
As Office program I use OpenOffice.org. It reads all of the Microsoft Office documents I throw at it, but the GUI isn't perfect. Personal I think the Microsoft Office GUI is much better than OpenOffice.org. It's not perfect but much better. OpenOffice.org is open source and free.

Protection
For defending my system I use AVG Free as anti virus and Spybot - Search & Destroy for scanning for spyware. AVG Free is fast and works perfectly. Spybot is updated frequently and it updates automatically when I start it. Both programs are freeware.

Once again JWZ's Law of Software Envelopment is right

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 09:24:22 +0100

From Jamie Zawinski Law of Software Envelopment:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
and once again it's true. This time it's Corel WordPerfect 12 that takes the award:
Corel is cozying up to small business by marketing a value-priced productivity suite catered to the needs of organizations with fewer than 50 PCs. Corel says it is targeting small businesses with the applications that they must have and nothing more. The suite, named WordPerfect Office 12 - Small Business Edition, contains the newly minted WordPerfect Mail client and security software from Symantec.
Read more

Denmark Ranks 1st in Web-Savvy, U.S. 2nd -Study

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 15:37:55 +0100

We, the Danish people, are ahead of all of you!

Denmark remained No. 1 in taking advantage of the Internet, both connecting citizens securely over broadband and wireless networks as well as using its near ubiquitous hook-ups for Internet banking and government services such as tax returns. Denmark has also established a government Web site that pulls together ministries and other organizations, in which citizens and companies can access public services.

Google: A Behind-the-scenes Look

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 17:40:56 +0100

Search is one of the most important applications used on the internet, but it also poses some of the most interesting challenges in computer science. Providing high-quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computer science disciplines, from lower-level systems issues like computer architecture and distributed systems to applied areas like information retrieval, machine learning, data mining, and user interface design. I'll describe some of the challenges in these areas, discuss some of the applications that Google has developed over the past few years.
Watch video

Great Open Source summer

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 08:26:09 +0100

Is the summer gonna be hot/cold/wet/etc? I have no clue, but there's gonna be a lot of great open source software released.
- Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0
- Mozilla Firefox 2.0
- GCC 4.0
- MySQL 5.0
- Fedora Core 4

Source: Weird Al's blog

Windows utilities update

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 10:13:33 +0100

Yet another small update with some of the utilities I use on my Windows system:

BSPlayer - Download - Info
SecureCRT - Beta version with tabs- Download - Info
UltraEdit - Now with HTML toolbar and code folding - Download - Info
K-Lite Mega Codec Pack - Download - Info
Total Commander - Now with thumbnails - Download - Info
jv16 PowerTools 2005 - Now with AI in registry cleaner - Download - Info
OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta candidate - Download - Info

Da Vinci Mysteriet - den sande historie

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 13:43:48 +0100

Jeg er en af de mange danskere som har læst Da Vinci Mysteriet af Dan Brown og det er rart at der nu endelig er en der sætter ord bag hvad jeg hele tiden har vidst:
Den er også dårligt skrevet, løgnagtig, fyldt med fejl, og den promoverer endnu en absurd sammensværgelsesteori.

Læs hele kronikken på Berlinske

Google teaming up with Skype to launch a free telephone service

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 21:26:56 +0100

TimeOnline is reporting that Google could be rolling out a free broadband phone service that uses your microphone and home computer. The technology that will enable Google to move in on the market has been around for some time. Software by the London-based company, Skype, has been downloaded nearly 54 million times around the world but no large telecommunication firms have properly exploited it. Although Google is reluctant to talk about its plans, the logical use of such a network would be to help to support a new telephone service. The company would buy capacity cheaply, by taking up slack capacity left behind when the internet bubble collapsed in 2001.
Read more and more

Novell puts weight behind Windows e-mail client

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 21:42:52 +0100

Novell has thrown its weight behind a fledgling effort to develop a Windows version of the Evolution groupware client, a move that the Waltham, Massachusetts, software company hopes will give Windows desktop users an open-source alternative to Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) Outlook. Evolution, like Outlook, is a suite including e-mail, calendaring, and address book software. A version for Linux desktops is already available, and work is now under way on porting it to Windows. Evolution, Firefox, and OpenOffice are already included in Novell's Linux Desktop 9, which the company began shipping in November.
Read article

Open source plans for the Netscape servers

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 10:29:01 +0100

From Christopher Blizzard blog:
There's an interesting report on internetnews about Sun getting ready to open source a large chunk of code, which may include forked copies of all the assets that Red Hat recently purchased from AOL. I haven't seen anyone from Red Hat talk about these in any kind of public forum yet, other than the usual set of starch-filled press releases, so I thought I might use this forum to talk about some of the specifics of what Red Hat is doing. It should be very interesting for a lot of people out there in the larger software community. Red Hat has a history of being a pretty open company, and I think that I've been too silent on this issue for quite a while.

Apple Office, AMD and Wikipedia

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 20:10:38 +0100

Apple will launch its new iWork '05 productivity suite at Macworld Expo, Think Secret has learned. The software, code-named Sugar (as alluded to in our previous Expo report), will include Keynote 2 as well as a new application, Pages. It's unclear whether Pages will simply encompass a word processing application or whether Apple will wrap spreadsheet functionality into it as well. Apple's new word processing software had been rumored to be called Document, but sources say it appears that name has been abandoned, possibly due to the confusion a user might encounter when being told "this document is a Document document."
Read more

60000 AMD chips recovered in police heist
Over 60,000 stolen AMD CPUs were recovered by Taiwanese police last Friday after a raid on an electronics company in the southern part of the country. The pilfered CPUs were actually AMD rejects, headed for the dumpster, and were likely taken from one of AMD's plants in Asia. The recovered processors included both Athlon XP and Athlon 64 chips.
Read article

Wikipedia Criticised by Its Co-founder
"Wikipedia is under criticism by its co-founder Larry Sanger who has left the project. He warns of a possible future fork due to Wikipedia's Anti-Elitism and he presents his view on Wikipedia's (lack of) reliability. New wikis on various subjects have already emerged, with some of them being complete forks of Wikipedia. Critical articles on Wikipedia are also being published by other sources."