Torfinn Nome - Life as a …

Rune started playing with Trixbox this week. Even got himself mexican and US based DIDs! So. As I’ve been planning on setting up an Asterisk SIP telephone server ever since I was inspired by Øystein Homelien when I worked for him at PowerTech sometime last century; Rune is to blame that I spent the last two days on doing exactly that. I signed up with a norwegian SIP provider, Phonzo, and got a nice deal on a Siemens Gigaset C450 IP DECT+SIP phone. And it works pretty well, it even has STUN support.
But. Why didn’t I know about ENUM before now?! I fell in love. Instantly. I enabled ENUM support on my Trixbox server, using Sipbroker, and registered my PSTN/GSM numbers at e164.org. Now, if only people could stop using that horrible Skype service (I refuse to link them), and start using services like Free World Dialup and Gizmo, and register the number in the ENUM database, we would all be able to call the the whole world for free. Regular telephone companies must be scared to death. No wonder the iPhone doesn’t have a SIP client - I bet Apple wants it, but I bet even more that AT&T refuses to accept it…
So. All of you: Get rid of Skype. Get a SIP (soft)phone. Get a free number. Register (ENUM) your current phone number. Make it point to your Internet SIP phone. Tell your friends.

Hm! As if I ever want to call people… (I still prefer e-mail for most communications. Good thing I registered my e-mail address with my ENUM entry!)

I recently bought an Apple Airport Extreme N. Mostly to get a more or less decent NAS. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it supports IPv6 out of the box; both automagical 6to4 and manual sit-type configured tunnels. As my trusty old IPv6-ISP PowerTech seems to have, temporarily (?), stopped caring about IPv6 (tunnel up, upstream IPv6 links down), I had to find an alternative tunnel broker. I ended up with SixXS. Got me a tunnel and a /48 net with reverse DNS to a low latency POP in Sweden. The tunnel terminates at a linux server (hosting this web page), from which I have delegated a /64 net to my Airport via a static sit tunnel. It’s working great, and all my hosting services are now multihomed. Not as great as if my physical upstream ISP (Lyse) would provide native IPv6, of course, but still. Now, if only you could nag your ISP to provide IPv6, maybe we could all finally get rid of that nasty NAT! (Oh, wait, that’s right, Apple was forced to firewall all IPv6 traffic by default after massive negative publicity. And there is no IPv6 NAT-PMP/uPNP yet. Here is an interesting read on the topic: Turning a feature into a flaw.)

Some months ago, my dad bought a Navibe GM720 (from Clas Ohlson, ~550NOK) to use with his laptop and AutoRoute while going on vacation to France. A couple of weeks ago, I started searching for an alternative to AutoRoute using my Mac. I found RouteBuddy. But I’m slightly turned off by paying $200 (program, maps for France and Scandinavia), when Autoroute is less than half that price. So I searched some more, and found Roadnav! It’s free, open source (GPL), and works with my Mac. Even the maps are free! For maps in Europe, Roadnav uses the OpenStreetMap database. Only … well, there is a high discrepancy between The World and OpenStreetMap, said gently. Some scattered roads, no street names, etc. Especially in places like Norway (excluding Oslo, the capital). Too bad. Well. Not really. I connected the GPS receiver to my MacBook, downloaded some software, and started driving around. GPSd while driving, to get the coordinates. GPSBabel to convert the raw file to GPX. And JOSM to map the coordinates into streets and upload to the OpenStreetMap project. I spent this evening listening to my favourite cellist, Truls Mørk, drinking whisky, and mapping parts of Fredrikstad and Ås. Not at all bad. Now, if I only spend the next 200 years driving, I might cover a fraction of Europe, to make the maps I thought I needed…

I recently convinced my sister to buy my beloved MacBook Core Duo, while I upgraded to the MacBook Core 2 Duo. Being lazy, I just swapped the hard drive from my old CD to the new C2D. I ran into two problems on my C2D:

1: The trackpad was recognized only as a mouse. I was unable to use all the life saving features like “two finger tapping means right click”, and “hold one finger, use the other to scroll”.

2: The function keys didn’t work. (To manipulate screen brightness and audio volume.)

Seaching the net revealed no clues. Except a linux kernel patch. It turns out the CD uses the Geyser III trackpad, while C2D uses Geyser IV. I dived into this, for me, rather unknown Mach/OS X-territory (altho I consider myself a long time unix zealot), and located the file /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBTopCase.kext/
Contents/PlugIns/AppleUSBTrackpad.kext/Contents/Info.plist. My old hard drive, from CD, contained no information of Geyser IV. Stupidly trying to edit this manually, and reloading the kernel extention (using kextunload and kextload) was, of course, unsuccessfull. But, behold!, copying the AppleUSBTopCase.kext-directory from the new hard drive fixed everything. I am now happily scrolling using a new MacBook C2D using the original OS X installation from my old MacBook CD.

Our lab environment is polluted by not only cancer inducing chemicals like ethidium bromide and the neurotoxic polyacrylamide. Even more disturbing is the frequent usuage of the radio. Or, to be more precise, the lack of a radio station that does not suck. Here in Norway we have a couple of commercial nation wide channels in addition to some channels provided by the public broadcasting institution. I can’t stand commercial channels, with the non stoppable annoying advertisements. But, even worse: The channels we listen to (we switch a lot) have one thing in common that annoys me the most. The repetition rate of some of the music. I mean, I don’t want to listen to the same tune 9 times during just a few hours.

Anyway.

Lately I have started wearing my trusty old DAP, which luckily carries an endless number of hours of music. After a few weeks I have come to the conclusion that I prefer some kind of jazz inspired music while doing lab work. Even tho my favourite band this week has been Gotan Project, which is a fusion of tango and electronica.

(Yup, Nat King Cole works pretty darn good for me.)

Før i tiden brukte alle refleks. Ok, ikke alle, men 30 prosent av oss. Det var den gangen vi fortsatt måtte gå til byen for å ta ut og sette inn penger i banken. I høst- og vintermånedene lå det alltid en skål med gratis reflekser ved skranken. Nå slipper vi å gå ut for å ta ut penger, og følgelig bruker nesten ingen av oss refleks. Ved å bruke refleks er det vistnok 85% mindre sansynlighet for å bli påkjørt. Men likevel er det ingen som deler ut gratis reflekser. For et par-tre uker siden var det Refleksdagen. Jeg var tilfeldigvis en tur i Oslo, og ruslet rundt i store deler av sentrum. Jeg hadde håpet å sanke inn minst 5-10 reflekser. Jeg fikk ikke en eneste refleks. Det var ingen som delte ut reflekser. Det var ingen som brukte reflekser! Ok, ikke helt sant: I tillegg til meg, var det én annen som brukte refleks. Og jeg gikk rundt i Oslo sentrum i minst 2 timer. Greit. Oslo sentrum. Kanskje ikke det stedet man er minst synlig uten refleks. Men refleksbruk er viktig. Det er en rutine som må vedlikeholdes. Er det ingen som har kjørt bil på en trang vei i høstmørket, med kraftig regn?

PS: Man kan få kjøpt refleks på apotek.

UPDATE: Du fra NRK: Mistet dessverre nummeret ditt. Ring meg på nytt hvis det fremdeles er aktuelt.

I’m attending a 3 week long course teaching different microscopy techniques. We are 8 people. Yesterday, I fell hopelessly in love. With their brand new scanning electron microscopy! I was kind of suspecting this to happen, having wanted to work on a SEM for along time, but I was really blown away. I definetly need to integrate it in my thesis. I have a hunch the confocal microscopy might not be too disappointing either…

Using intense lobbying (I believe), two … collegues (Lasse and Marthe) of mine got me a job at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, all July and most of August. Thanks!

My friend Rune made the switch close to 10 years ago. I’m slightly annoyed it took me this long. OS X is beautiful. Virtue, *nix, widges, Bonjour, Spotlight and Exposé. Not much to say, really, you just have to try it. I maxed out the memory (2GB, not via AppleStore), and I’m glad I did. She really does fly away! (I might be slightly biased, having lived with a 0.25GB Sony Vaio the last 6 years…)

It’s official. I’m a Switcher! May 17th, after having waited at least 12 months, I ordered an Apple MacBook (white, 2.0). Today, May 19th, it shipped from China. It may arrive prior to my exam the 31th. I really wasn’t expecting it being delivered this fast. Already, she is spreading despair and havoc; the beginning of a beautiful relationship. I can’t wait!

(MacBook review)

I want an alternative way to sort my music. When I choose what to listen to, my mood decides. If it’s music that I relate to the mood I’m in. Or a mood I would want to be in. A combination would be great. Guess I have to compile a heavy list of playlists to achieve this. Or find me a new player supporting these tags.