Congratulations on your birthday honey. Hope you’ll get better for the
family-gathering tomorrow and the party on Satuday. Love you :-*

I TOTALLY love the feature that I discovered today when browsing the last few days of posts on Planet Ubuntu. Steven Harms has a GREAT post about things that you’d never think about unless you knew them or really really just looked into all the options available these days. His post unveiled a feature that I’m SO going to use! The "Connect to server" function in "Places" on the Gnome menu in Ubuntu for sure was somewere I thought about going when connecting to a Samba-server or Windows system, but never ever did I think that you could do SSH connections with it for easy file-transfers (yes ranters I do know about SSHfs, but this is graphical stuff). Cool! Thank you Steven!

Yesterday the Ubuntu developers released Ubuntu 6.10, aka Ubutu Edgy Eft as stable on date! Many congratulations go out to them all for a great piece of work. Lots of comments and weblogs from developers all over are located at http://planet.ubuntu.com/ (including a install walk-through for those who haven’t installed it themself). More news over at Ubuntu.com.

This morning Canonical Ltd., the company backing development of Ubuntu, announced that the first batch of users have been certified as professional users of Ubuntu. The three required tests, formally known as ‘Ubuntu Certified Professional exam’ are the LPI 101 and 102 exams and an additional Ubuntu-specific set of questions. As it happen to be; my employer, Visma Ajourit, are one of few sites in Trondheim, Norway that have this kind of testing available. If you’d like to do the test, contact me at work and I’ll get you a factsheet + the prices of the exams required. We allow testing on friday mornings at 09.00 local time.

Today I happened to stumble upon yet another of those tests that allow you to see what kind of Linux-distribution you *should* run. Really! The last time I did one of these I ended up with RedHat Enterprise Linux, so maybe this time I’d get something I’m more likely to use? Sure thing!

From the test:

We found the following perfect match(es):

That’s all fine with me since I run Ubuntu on my laptop, my workstation, three of my NetCore-servers (of the four others three others run Gentoo and one is still on good old Slackware), a heap of servers at work and I generally push Ubuntu on everyone + their dog and grandmother these days.

Good call. 17 simple questions to answer, and you’ll end up with something you might like. Try it yourself!

Today at about 12AM I was elected leader of FRISK (Fri programvare i skolen) (that’s: "free software in the schools" for you foreigners). The organisation are heading into a new year and lots of things are in stock for us to take upon us as a part of a global and local community. With me I have a board of four people: Andreas Bach (falxx), Jørgen Grønnlund, Klaus Ade Johnstad and Morten Werner Olsen. I look forward to the tasks ahead of me and hope that 2007 really wil become the year things changed in Norway. Fingers crossed!

When Microsoft release Windows Vista for the world to buy next year things will change in the software industry. Things will also change within the ranks of kiddies who run pirated editions of Windows, and last but probably worst, things will change for the thousands of legitimate users of workstations. In a weblog over at ZDnet the limits of the new Acceptable User License Agreement (AULA) are described. These contain a number of issues that most users will notice. Among them: You can only transfer (read: change your hardware (new motherboard, HDD or RAM anyone?)) the license once to another computer. If that was not enough, volume users, such as NTNU will have to do manual product activation on each copy, even of their volume licenced computer installations. (That’ll take some manpower from the already strained budgets.) The basic edition of Vista (Vista Home Basic) will actually forbid you to have .ISO-files on your harddrive. What the heck is that? If I want to burn a ISO-file or create an ISO-image of the pictures from last years new years party I’d like to do so! Not with Vista Home Basic, no.

I predict that 2007 will provide a bump in numbers of users of other operatingsystems. This could be Apple OSX, Linux or the *BSD-s. Prepare for the year that things will change.

This is an abbreviation of how I feel tonight. It’s not offen that I sit back and feel beaten, betrayed and unwelcome. Today I do feel like that. I don’t think I’ll be going into details, but when someone you have known for a long time punches your lights out, for all to see – it hurts.

Either you know who you are, or you don’t.

This might be old news to many people, but since I’ve read a weblog at ZDNet about the robotic Snakefighter developed by SINTEF Slashdot have picked up the story and I bet others will too. The robotic snake named ‘Anna Konda’ have been developed for fighting fires, subsea work and preventing explosions.

ZDNet bases it’s weblog on content from a report on the project and design written by SINTEF employee and media department journalist Åse Dragland. She’s also Editor in Chief of GEMINI who first published the article in the 2005/2006 english issue of GEMINI, almost one year after being published in the norwegian edition in february 2005.

I’ve read up on the project on SINTEFs webpage and this project is really cool. They’ve created a prototype that is powered by the water running through it, and it’s strong enough to penetrate walls. The robot moves at 30 to 60 cm/min and can even get across bumpy terrain (read: rubble within a burning house, rough seafloors, etc.). SINTEF together with several departments from NTNU are working on the project and are also looking for a commercial partner for further developments.

I should have written this a week ago, but ok:
We’re back from Sweden and Vättenrundan 2006. This time I did quite well I feel. Finished the whole thing, got a t-shirt, went home and bikeriding is still fun and all! Times and such can be found over at vatternrundan.se. Asbjørn ain’t really sane, but that we all knew; So when he did do Styrkeprøven 2006 too, and finishing in 20 hours and 40ish minutes just one week after the 300 km’s in Sweden I can only take my hat of to him. Cool. Way cool!

Pictures and other related stuff will be posted when due. Mr. "I-got-pictures" tend to be a bit slow with these things I guess.

Sometime this spring I got teased into joining up for another bikeride. This years task is not as huge as last years "Styrkeprøven" but yet, it’s 300 km of road, about 45000 steps on the pedals and 14-16 hours on the bike. So it’s with mixed feelings I’m getting ready for "Vätternrundan 2006" in Sweden.

One part of the getting-ready stage is to take atleast two bikerides of 100 km’s. That equals 1/3 of the distance of Vätternrundan and is a good pointer at how your own shape is. Yesterday we had our first ~100 km bikeride. The ride took five members of On.Wheelz.Biz plus one non-member to Orkdal and Orkanger, a small town about 45 km south-west of Trondheim. After making a brief stop at the local Esso gas-station we turned and went back home. To be fair, the weather was >bad<. The rain slaped me in the face and from time to time there was little visibility beyond 100 meters.

Yet I had fun and today I’m going to spend the day doing a slow bikeride and some workout at the local gym (3T Pirbadet) to make sure my legs are not hurt. Enjoy these days of rain people, summer will be all too hot anyway.