Tales of the ordinary » Everyday life

What I’m looking forward to in 2010

peter — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:01:23 +0000

So, 2010 it is then, what will happen in the new year? I don’t know, but here are some of the things I look forward to in 2010.

Books

John Resigs new book Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja

Music

The Depeche Mode koncert in Horsens in February. Depeche Mode AND Nitzer Ebb in one evening…wow! It’ll be the soundtrack of my youth….only 15 years to late!

Software

Better late than never! At work we’ll be switching to WebSphere Application Server 7.0 which means that I’ll finally start using Java 6.0, which the rest of the world has been using since 2006, hurrah!

Hardware

The new iPhone which I hope we’ll see in the summer of 2010.

Other

Watching our children grow older, Tour de France and Paris Roubaix (of course), Toy Story 3.

I’ve probably forgot a lot, but I’ll continue updating the list over the coming weeks.

Happy new year!

What an age we live in

peter — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:09:37 +0000

Just a quick post to test this fancy new iPhone app called Wordpress. Points to anybody who are able to guess what this app does!

It’s been a while

peter — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:15:51 +0000

Just another “I’m not dead” post.

So…yeah…I’m not dead and I can’t even use the “I’ve been busy at work” excuse, because I haven’t, not more than normally at least.

So how are things then?

Good, more or less. We’ve entered the winter term, which means that our kids are running from one cold to another. We’ve just spent the better part of two weeks being sick with H1N1 flu all of us. It’s frustrating when you have to stay home from work with a sick child for the third time in a month, but that’s just parenting I guess.

In other news, our son has startet walking now and our daughter is turning five years soon. Our kids are getting big now, which on one hand is nice, but on the other hand it’s a bit sad to know that they’re just getting older and more and more detached from us.

At work things are going so so, I feel that we’re standing still at the moment, spending all our time trying to nail production problems instead of adding new features and releasing new versions.

Finally , I’ve read a couple of great programming books lately. I hope to write more about them in separate posts soon(ish).

Anyhow, that’s it, just a quick ping to assure all my dedicated readers that this blogger is still alive and kicking.

Spam spam spam spam

peter — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:57:34 +0000

Aaah! The joy of blogging. Your thoughts are so important that you just need to share them with the world, so you sit down and compose your post (maybe you actually read it through after having written it). When satisfied with your Vonnegutesque/Dickesque (or whatever style you choose) marvel, you hit Publish and lean back, happy, knowing that you’ve made a difference and that from now on, the world will surely be a better place…..or, if you’re like me you know that nobody will ever give a rats arse about your thoughts and that the only one to ever read your masterpiece is…you!

But then what happens?

Comments start to arrive and you start thinking “My God, has anybody actually read what I wrote? I should have paid more attention to my spelling then!” But then you read these comments and are reassured that nobody actually gives a toss about your thoughts, because nine out of ten times these comments are…..spam.

After having read some of those spam comments you might start to think….why?

Allow me to illustrate. I’ve collected some examples of the various spam comments that I’ve received for my recent entry.

Example 1

This is an example of a spam post that does make some sense to me. A spammer wants viewers of his posts to click the link to visit his site where he sells various goods.

The spammer has at least tried to camouflage his evil deeds as a comment as can be seen below:
Name: xxxx Email: yyy Url: http://www.eurotablets.eu/ Comment: Thank you! You often write very interesting articles. You improved my mood.
Why thank you, glad to hear that my post about a Groovy error message improved your mood

Here’s another example of this type of spam comments, this one is my favorite!
Name: same as before actually Email: ditto Url: http://www.une-pharmacie.eu/ Comment: Are you a professional journalist? You write very well.
OK what gave me away? Yes, I admit, I am a professional journalist, I’m aiming for a Pulitzer Price, or, failing that, the Danish Cavlingpris!

Example 2

This is where I start to wonder:
Name: zzz Email: www Url: http://xpaemfijofzq.com/ Comment: A4xJZI usywshetpeyb, [url=http://miuicrcwoonx.com/]miuicrcwoonx[/url], [link=http://jsyikajwggja.com/]jsyikajwggja[/link], http://mufyuyavfnnk.com/
What’s the point? Link that points to nowhere? Why? Is this just some sort of grafitti? See how many blogs I can fill with nonsense! I really don’t get it. If anybody out there know what the purpose of these spam comments is, please let me know.

OK, enough of me. I really hope that anybody out there has an answer, and wants to share it.

Since this post is dedicated to spam comments, I’ll approve all spam comments that I receive for this post (and this post only). Gentlemen, start your spambots!

PS. When reading the title of this post, please do so in a “Monty-Python-tea-lady-like” voice

Confessions of a fanboy?

peter — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:08:43 +0000

About a year ago my bare communication necessities were:

Homebuild Intel Core 2 Duo based PC armed with a Ubuntu/Windows XP dual boot
Linksys something router with 802.11n network
Sony Ericsson z530 mobile phone
80gb iPod classic

Today my kit contains these parts:

MacBook Pro with Mac OS X 10.5.6
Apple Airport Extreme
16gb iPhone
80gb iPod classic
Synology DS207+ NAS server

Man I’ve put a lot of money into Apple products, haven’t I? What a brainwashed, narrowminded, naive idiot I am eh? (this is where you tell me: No, you are right, Apple make great products)

All work and no play makes Peter something something

peter — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:50:45 +0000

Well well well. You start out with this blogging thing, write a few posts and then….nothing….radio silence…another dead blog. Poor bloke! Couldn’t cope with it. Well…no! I’ve just been on the dark side of the moon, that’s why. OK, that’s not quite the truth, although I wish it was…mmmm space!

January and early February has been quite hectic at work. We’ve just released a new web framework based on JSF, Spring Web Flow and Facelets. This release included the framework itself, presentation, documentation (no really!) and a 3 day course which we had to arrange. As always with a project, you work long hours when getting close to release date, and this project was no exception. Combine that with a five month old son and the entire family hit by flu in Januar and the result is…well all work and no play.

Things are starting to cool down now (I hope). As said, version 1.0 of our framework is out and the days are now spent fixing Jira issues and preparing version 1.1 (with portal support) which will be released in a few months. This means not so much pressure and lots and lots of debugging, which is great fun if you ask me.

Therefore I hope there’ll be more time for pointless blogging about this and that, read by no one but myself (but commented by pointless spammers!)

Oh, and I’ve beome the very happy ovner of an iPhone, fantastic, perhaps more on that in another blog post.

Hello World

peter — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:48:40 +0000

Sådan ca. 10 år efter at de første blogs dukkede op, vurderer jeg nu at mediet endeligt er klart og modent til mig og mine udgydelser.

Lad det være sagt med det samme. Du skal nok ikke forvente revolution eller samfundsrevsende, historieskrivende, verdensændrende indlæg på denne side, beklager.

I stedet kommer denne blog til at fungere som afløb for dagligdagens trummerum, notesblok/facitliste for diverse (primært) IT relaterede problemer og anmeldelser af bøger, musik, film og whatnot, som jeg finder relevant. I min forfængelighed tillader jeg mig at poste anmeldelser og diverse løsninger på engelsk, idet jeg håber at disse måske kan være nyttige for folk uden for landets grænser.

Og lad mig være ærlig, jeg forventer ikke, at der er det store publikum til endnu en personlig blog der fungerer som losseplads for min hjerne, samt nogle tip som også kan findes andre steder hvis bare man gider lede lidt længere. Men, skulle der nogensinde dukke andre end mig selv op, så giv dig endelig til kende, det kunne da være sjovt.

Og angående titlen “Hello World” er den tyvstjålet. Når man skal igang med at lære et nyt programmeringssprog er traditionen, at det første program man skriver, blot skriver “Hello World” ud på skærmen (eller hvad der nu er tilgængeligt at kommunikere på). Formålet med et Hello World program er at teste basale funktioner i et sprog, samt at se om compiler og evt. run time environment er sat korrekt op. Hello World blev lanceret i bogen “The C programming language” skrevet af Dennis Ritchie og Brian Kernighan i 1978, og har hængt ved siden.

Og med disse ord, velkommen til.