Daniel's thoughts about this and that

Efter jobbet satt jag och spelade Wipeout HD på Playstation 3. Ett av de bästa racingspelen i alla kategorier enligt min mening i alla fall. Jag spelade det en hel del på Playstation 1 när det kom (dvs Wipeout 2097 som kom 1996).

På Wipeout HD finns en global highscorelista där man kan placera sig med sina bästa resultat på de olika banorna i de olika spellägen som finns. Normalt sett har jag hamnat runt 3000:e plats på en bra runda, men nu lyckades jag på en bana hamna på plats 320, men märkte att det fanns fortfarande mycket att putsa på där. Så jag körde ca 80-90 varv i sträck och blev nästan åksjuk :-), men jag lyckades få en bra tid till slut och hamnade på 37:e plats på den globala topplistan på den banan i det snabbaste hastighetsläget, så det måste man ju vara nöjd med. Så nu kommer jag säkert drömma Wipeout drömmar i natt.

Så på svenska nu :-)

Här i Norge är inte hockey inte särskilt stort men jag testade att gå på en match för en stund sedan och sedan en till och jag tycker det var kul så jag kommer nog gå flera gånger. Publiksnittet för det lag i Get-ligaen (Norges motsvarighet till Svenska Elitserien) som har högst snitt (ca 2200) har lägre snitt än det Elitserielag som har lägst (runt 3000 nånstans). Norge har å andra sidan högre snitt i fotboll än Sverige trots halva antalet invånare, men det är extremt jämt. 2007 var snittet i Allsvenskan 10258, medan Tippeligaen hade 10473. Jag tycker dock att hockey är roligare att se på.

After blogging for 4 years in english I think I am going to change language and write in my native Swedish instead. If you dislike this shout out. Let's see how that feel for a while. Some posts might still be in English and I might change back, who knows...

Just for fun I bought some ferrofluid to play with. It's quite cool to see those spikes when moving a magnet around. Unfortunately even though I decided to try to be careful (because this liquid can stain things it get in touch with) I managed to screw up this experiment badly :-) I had poured the liquid into a different container (a glass) to experiment with it but when I was done and was going to pour it back into the original glass bottle I forgot that I had put the magnet a bit too close to the bottle (yes that was obviously stupid, I know) Suddenly they smashed together like a magnet do when it's close enough to something it likes to stick to, and SPLAT !! I got ferrofluid all over my face and around in the room... I fortunately managed to avoid my eyes, and I managed to get most of the stains out of my face.... Well so now I only got to play with it once :-( , but well it was quite an exciting single experiment !.

I read on the bottle that it's relatively safe, whatever they mean by "relatively". Too bad I had to wait for weeks to get this small bottle just to splash it all over my face...

But well, I also bought several other magnet toys so I have things to play with.

I might put up a small video of the ferrofluid experiment later. Unfortunately I had turned the camera off when the incident happened so you can't see that :-)

Update: Video (2:05 30MB mpg).

I just made a interesting discovery. My dad will turn 2 000 000 000 seconds old on the exact same day that I turn 31 years old. :-) Turning 2 billion seconds is of course much cooler than turning 31 so I guess I have to celebrate him instead of me on that day.

But this week I turned exactly 1600 weeks old.

The Nectarine radio that streamed demoscene music has been hacked. Apparently the person who did this managed to delete both the content on the server and it's backup. This is so sad because it was a really good site that I liked a lot and the guy behind it has put in a lot of work into it. I do not understand why people want to do things like that, so stupid. It seems that the person who run Nectarine is not going to put it back online, but hopefully someone else can take over and build it up again. There are many people who liked it and who have been listening to the station for years.

This was posted on the site:

This morning a script kiddie hacked nectarine.
He did post a hint on the vulnerability in the oneliner before trashing everything.
The whole Database is deleted, backup too. The only one i have is from august.

The vulnerability was coming from multipage class i used.

My motivation is too low to fight against lamers again.

If you are a donor, maybe could you unsubscribe your paypal donation.

Sorry guys, but i don't have enough free time to restore everything and i don't have enough money to pay hosting alone.

Friendly

Yes aka Christophe

Recently I visited Wrocław in Poland. This was a short work trip so I did not get very much time for other things. I took some photos one day after work. On my last evening I planned to see some more and take some more pictures but unfortunately it started to rain. Anyway it's a very nice city I think.

Some more images here.

To something completely different. Last week I got my projector back after being repaired so today I bought a Popcorn Hour media center. It's a small box that you can connect to a hard drive and your network so you can watch movies or listen to audio from those sources. As I have a HD ready projector this was the first time I have tried to watch 720p material, and it looks really great The user interface feels a bit slow but not that bad, and this media center is not so expensive compared to the alternatives. It seems to play most formats even though I have found some files that did not play. Also I got use for one old hard drive that was just lying in a drawer.

I made the first release of the small game I have made. I have a long list of things to fix and improve upon but at least it is playable so one can see the basics. I have currently made a debian package, but will provide rpm also later. You need linux, there is not any builds for other platforms available at the moment.

If you feel like trying it you can visit http://brainblast.sourceforge.net/

Old blog posts about the game can be found in the category.

During the Olympics in Beijing there have been quite a lot of discussion about the bad air in Beijing. And as I have myself visited Beijing several times I can say that the pollution is something that you definitely notice and can be quite bad at times. It's quite boring when you do not see the blue sky for many days in a row. But it's also shifting a lot, suddenly the air is very clear.

By the way here is an image of me in front of the olympic stadium which was under construction about one year ago:

There are official measuremnts of the air quality in Beijing that can be seen at MEP, while both BBC and Associated Press are making their own measurements.

The figures differs a bit and of course there can be big local variations, but until now AP has measured an average value of 326 micrograms per cubic meter of PM10 which is the most common measurement for air pollution. You can read more about PM10 at Wikipedia but one reason for importance of this measurement is that it measures particles with a size smaller than 10 micrometers, which is small enough to settle in the lungs and cause health problems. BBC's values are a little lower with maximum values around 300, also according to BBC the yearly average is around 89. The official government data is around 160 under the olympics so far. Nevertheless it can be interesting to compare these values with other cities and your own local area.

BBC also mentions that the yearly average for London is 21. The most polluted city in the world, Cairo has a yearly average of 169, thats almost double the average of Beijing.

I found an article with numbers from Linköping in Sweden which is not far from where I grew up, there the numbers for the yearly average ranges from 18-26 depending on location in the city. Perhaps the numbers can't be compared, but just looking at them it seems that London and Linköping is equally polluted, I find that hard to believe but anyway they are far from Beijing. In Sweden the yearly average can not be above 40 without actions being taken.

Looking at the city where I live (Oslo, Norway) one can see that the yearly average is around 25, and the report I looked at actually had data back to the 1970's and it's interesting to note that the PM10 values for Oslo are now only a third of what it was then, the average for 1971 for example was 74. In the 1980's it was around 40-50, in the early 1990's around 30. The same report also looks at SO₂ where the measurements go back to the 1950's with values around 300-400 micrograms per cubic meter, and in the early 2000's the values were down at only 4-5 micrograms per cubic meter. NO₂ was also down by the way. I was not aware that the air is so much better now (at least when looking at those three pollutants) then a few decades ago, interesting... But I am just looking at some numbers, how much of an improvement this really means I can't say. Anyway all reports about Oslo and daily measurements can be found at luftkvalitet.info.

Well enough numbers and measurements, I am going to watch some Olympics instead :-)

Last weekend I was out photographing a bit again since I got my camera back from reparation. I went up to holmenkollen:

This panaroma has many flaws, but it gives a nice overview. I also saw some people skijumping into the water:

After that I went up towards frognerseteren, I tried to make a very thorough panorama on one of the houses here in the image, but when done I realised that I had used a stupid setting on the camera and as I was quite hungry so I did not bother to redo it.

I walked down to Slemdal and took the subway back home.