Boblycat has gotten a new shine, and we hope the tribe will be happy with the new technology which we hope will be a good platform for the months ahead. Some modules are not quite ready, so please do as our friend here and call me if you encounter problems or miss particular features.

In other news, my sturdy old siemens phone has died and become an ex-parrot. It looks battered and beaten after living in a homeless existance with me. I feel a bit left out without a phone, but in a way it's also refreshing not to have a phone and not have to do any support. I am also surprised to find that Siemens went belly-up in the mobile business. It's obvious to most people that I don't really follow new technology. I need to get my hands on one of them ifones.

Another thing that struck me is that a new Sony game, which hasn't even been released yet has gotten a three letter acronym. It's LBP of course. Impressive to be known with a TLA before release. But then again DNF did it before them, and it might be finished this year too. As if.

Espen alerted me to a recent phenomenon that's ravaging them intarwebs these days: Anonymous, an underground culture whose slogan is "We are Anonymous. We do not forgive. We do not forget. We are legion." It's a self-organising, emerging, hacktivist culture that employs flash mobbing to great effect.

Their goal is to focus on the dubious practices of the Church of Scientology ^TM®© (CSI) by arranging protests all over the world every month. Many of the videos from these protests are available online on vimeo. Most of them are even more hiliarious than the originals, including the one starring Tom Cruise.

This weekend, their protest was called Operation Sea Arrrgh, and focused on the CSI navy. More information about CSI in general is available at xenu.net, xenutv.com and Wikipedia (excerpt):

Xenu (also Xemu), pronounced /?zi?nu?//?zi?mu?, according to Scientology founder (and speculative fiction writer) L. Ron Hubbard, was the dictator of the "Galactic Confederacy" who, 75 million years ago, brought billions[1] of his people to Earth in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and killed them using hydrogen bombs. Scientology holds that their essences remained, and that they form around people in modern times, causing them spiritual harm.[2][3] Members of the Church of Scientology widely deny or try to hide the Xenu story.

What's especially entertaining about Anonymous is their repertoire of great memes, like the longcat, a relative of the lolcat (how long is Longcat? looooong!), the V for Vendetta mask, and their great logo:

As some of you probably noticed, the last couple of months, and especially the last few weeks, have been rather unstable here at boblycat.org. The reason for the former has mostly been some severe network hiccups in Nextgentel's Laksevåg switch.

These incessant network outages combined with our own aging and increasingly unstable hardware, finally forced us into finding an alternative hosting solution. We ended up subscribing to a VPS (virtual private server) service in Stockholm.

The initial migration went rather smoothly, though we ran out of inodes (one of the resources severely limited by the VPS). The hosting company was kind enough to bump this limit for us. Unfortunately, at some point, the limit was reset, which caused last week's outage. We didn't report the problem as we mistakenly believed it was due to payment issues (we were transitioning from a trial service to a fully paid service).

In any event, things are up and running now. There are likely to be many small issues lurking about, so don't hesitate to contact Stig or myself if things need to be fixed. As usual, Stig manages Drupal and the gallery, while I do most of the other stuff.

Jeg har alltid lurt litt på hvordan Oracle så ut. Ikke det at dette har tatt opp store deler av min tilværelse, det må vel sies, men likevel... Nå har heldigvis hardware.no vært så elskverdige at de har avklart dette for alle oss undrere.

Etter sigende er dette nemlig Oracle Norge:

(Hvis man graver litt videre, viser det seg dessverre at dette nok er Arne Løvold, som jobber i Oracle, og ikke Oracle selv, slik hardware.no så feilaktig utbasunerte på sin forside i dag.)

(Skjermskudd hentet fra hardware.no i dag, kl 17:30.)

Da jeg kom hjem fra jobb på torsdag kveld hadde Newton og van der Waal rottet seg sammen for å gjøre livet surt for meg.

I det jeg åpnet døren til badet var jeg nær ved å tråkke ikke på en kokeplate, men et sønderknust speil. Jeg la kjapt et par naturlige tall sammen og kom frem til at dette måtte være døren på badeskapet som henger over toalettet. Denne døren er (var) i sin helhet et speil som har (hadde) pålimt to hengsler. I mitt fravær hadde åpenbart enkelte (noen vil kanskje til og med si kritiske) kjemiske bindinger i dette limet opphørt sin funksjon, og døren hadde deretter begynt sin fatale ferd mot gulvet, godt hjulpet av gravitasjonen.

Jeg bemerket også at toalettlokket hadde fått seg en kakk, et hull og en lang ripe. I det jeg løftet lokket for å inspisere videre ble det klart at porselensringen av toalettet hadde mistet enkelte biter som nå hadde sunket som små Vasaskip til bunnen av vannlåsen.

Mitt korrespondansekurs i åsstedsetterforskning forteller meg at limet på den nederste hengselen har løsnet først, og deretter har døren glidd ut og hengt skeivt lenge nok til at den øverste hengselen har blitt noe vridd, før også limet på denne har gitt opp. Etter dette har speilet truffet toalettlokket med hjørnet først, før det må ha tatt ferden diagonalt over baderommet til det hjørnet hvor jeg først oppdaget mitt knuste portrett.

Jeg tillater meg å stille spørsmål ved bruk av lim som eneste festningsanordning på glassdører, og ber om en verdensomspennende folkeaksjon for å få rette opp i denne ingeniørmessige uretten.

On Saturday evening, I noticed that connecting to the wiki on projects.boblycat.org was extremely slow, and when I sshed into the box, Apache was eating about 100% CPU. A peek in the logs told me that I had a few requests coming in per second for comment submissions in an old copy of Moveable Type we had left running.

After some digging, it turned out that the requests came from two subdomains of powerstorm.ai.net, namely www143.powerstorm.ai.net and www142.powerstorm.ai.net. These two hosts were hamming us with the usual spam comments as fast as they could.

I consulted Håvard and we quickly decided to firewall those machines out. Since ai.net is a know bad guy (Google a bit and you'll see), we did not bother to inform them that we'd notices their evil machinations.

As usual, spammers should be castrated. People near 11700 Montgomery Rd, Beltsville in Maryland should feel free to pay AiNET HQ a visit.

Today seemed to be "Elderly Man Day". I have about 3 or 4 more nice shots of different elderly men but Im not sure how many I can post at once ^^;

I have been running 2.6.12 for quite a while now on my IBM X31 laptop. I came to realize that since 2.6.10, the stability had improved quite nicely.

# uptime
23:32:36 up 25 days, 4:27, 1 user, load average: 0.21, 0.22, 0.29

There are still some nasty and intermittent crashes with suspend, xorg and dualhead that I cannot seem to reproduce in a sane way, but since I've not used dualhead in quite a while, it's not much a problem these days.

On my way home from the lab this evening, I decided to drop by the university radio station. Barry was at the helm and had already invited me. He held an open house party, and encouraged his friends to bring their own music. I don't make my own music, but Espen does, so I brought his instead.

After introducing the tunes (woo, my first radio appearance [I've already been on national TV]), we played Bitech (Boards of Android), The Reality Dysfunction and Two Hours (23:31 - 01:31). I suspect TONO will sue us.

Det har lenge vært slik at ordblindhet var et minimumskrav for å jobbe i nettaviser. I den siste tiden har enkelte aviser også trappet opp med andre tiltak mot rettskriving, som for eksempel å forby stavekontroll (eller bruke Word sin), og å skrive artiklene med bind for øynene.

Resultatene har ikke latt vente på seg, men som publikum er vi enda ikke fornøyd. Jeg har den siste uken sett opptil en håndfull artikler uten nevneverdige språklige blemmer.

Heldigvis går vi mot juletider, og da har avisredaksjonen den vestlige verden over alltid hatt et siste, ultimat våpen å falle tilbake på i denne evige kampen for språklig fordervelse: Julegløgget. Det ser ut for at Aftenpoften er tidligst ute med å tanke sine skribenter med sterkt julegløgg i år, hvertfall målt ut fra tilstanden på artiklene denne uken.

Mitt favoritteksempel (trolig skrevet av en insider i saken) følger: