Bjørn Stabell 白熊

This video is from our ExoSocial event at Nanshan Ski Village just outside Beijing today. It shows what the few people that went to the top were up to (most people stayed on the green slopes). Fun to see programmers, PMs, and sysadms basking in the snow.

(APOLOGIES: I’ve decided against making the video public, so the video below will not work unless I share the video with you; just tell me your youtube account and I’ll share it with you.)

This was my first edit using the new iMovie. It’s a very rough cut

I’ve been having so much fun listening to songs and watching music videos by Jonathan Coluton, an ex-software developer gone Internet music artist, or “Internet star”. He originally made headlines with his “Thing a Week” project in which he would make and publish a song every week. Merlin Mann has a good interview with Jonathan where he discusses what the process was like.

Want to hear and see his stuff? (more…)

In his article Jacky explained how to easily drill holes through to ports on machines behind a firewall. What I normally want is to have ssh access to machines behind firewalls, allowing me to do scp, and easily ssh in without a stupid stop-over on the firewall machine.

I came across this solution that does exactly that. After the super-simple set-up I’m able to do:

All that’s required is to tweak your .ssh/config. Mine looks like this on my laptop:

Warning: This is a rant.

With wifi came the promise of being online (almost) anywhere, but due to incompetent or misdirected implementation and management, it’s pretty much a patchwork of extremely unreliable networks. My experience is that there’s a 30-40% chance of actually being able to get online at an access point.

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I have good luck with this trick on several Sony Ericssons (including W800i and now K800/K800i):

• edit ABDeviceCommandSets.plist in the /Applications/Address\ Book.app/Contents/Resources/Telephony.bundle/Contents/Resources/ directory with the editor of your choice
• find K700 and create an identical line underneath it, replacing K700 on the new line with your (hopefully compatible) model number; in my case I added two lines, one for K800 and one for K800i, just to be sure

Restart the AddressBook, and SMS away.

GMail started rejecting my password when I accessed it through POP from Mail.app. This isn’t the first time, and since I remember how difficult it was to find the solution the first time, I thought I’d document the solution in a blog post for all eternity.

Certain activities will trigger the “you may not be human” alert at Google, causing them to lock your account for non-web access. Very annoying especially since non-web access doesn’t give you any user-friendly error message, and since your account continues to work through the web, you basically suspect your mail application is at fault.

The solution is to go to Google’s UnlockCaptcha page and do the captcha test there. I found this solution on Andrew Escobar’s site.

A while ago I discovered that by setting an HTML INPUT tag’s type attribute to search, Safari on OS X would show the OS X search widget instead of the standard boring HTML input field. Andrew Escobar has a good introduction and an example screenshot:

This search widget is extremely user-friendly and space-efficient; there is no need for a “Go” or “Search” button anymore.

It also downgrades gracefully to a normal input field for other browsers, but this is unfortunately not enough:

• There’s no placeholder text explaining what you can search for
• There’s no magnifying glass or special styling giving a hint that this is a search box

Taken together it means you have to add explanatory text and a “Search” submit button after it for people to understand how to use it, destroying the user-friendliness and space efficiency and offered by the Safari widget.

I’ve noticed that more and more sites were using the Safari search widget without any “Search” submit button, so I figured they must have found a way to make it cross-platform. I spent some time on facebook.com today and noticed they had the Safari search widget… and… sure enough, for Firefox and IE a nice JavaScript version!

I decided to do some reverse engineering…

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Getting MSN display names to appear in Adium wasn’t as easy as I’d first thought. Here’s the recipe I found to work:

1. Preferences -> Appearence -> Contact List -> List Layout
   Make sure “Show Status” is set to “Beside Name”.

2. Preferences -> Appearence -> Size to fit horizontally
   Turn off. Automatic Sizing doesn’t care about the status message.

3. Preferences -> Appearence -> Width
   Set to 250px to ensure there’s space for the status message.

4. Preferences -> Advanced -> MSN -> “Show display names as status messages”
   Turn this on.

5. Restart Adium.

You can set your own MSN display name in Adium like this:

1. Preferences -> Accounts -> select account -> Edit -> Personal
   Then edit the “Display name” field. Changes take effect immediately when you close the window.

Stuff expands to fill the space available for it, or so the saying goes. I needed more hard disk space, and after some Google’ing, this is what I found:

• sudo port clean --all all
• Remove printer brands you don’t need from /Library/Printers (~2.0 GB)
• Remove Garageband (~5.0 GB?)
• Remove iDVD (~2-3 GB?)

There are also programs that will strip your universal binaries (you don’t need PPC binaries if you’re on an Intel Mac) as well as unnecessary language support.

I didn’t end up running the programs or removing Garageband or iDVD, but I still managed to free up 4 GB relatively easily.

Or as programmers like to say: Hello World! After spending so much time investigating the blog engines out there I thought a “vrooom” might be a better title for this, the start-up post.

Although my favorite technical environment would be Django and Python, and Socialist Software has made a decent implementation of the WordPress K2 theme using Django, I still opted for a real WordPress installation so I can get used the the full power of a mature blog software. At least this way, when the itch of not running on Django gets too noticable, I know how to scratch it

I plan to write on subjects that matter to me at any given time, syndicating the whole or parts of the site (using tags) to other places. This include:

• General business, management, agile software development, and human resources issues relating to Exoweb, the outsourced software research & development firm I founded and am still working in. This will be syndicated to the Exoweb planet site when it is ready.
• Technology issues, generally open source, and mostly relating to web application development using Ajax, Django, Python, or Ruby on Rails. A post or two on Mac or Linux might sneak in as well, as I’m quite fond of the Unix family of operating systems. These posts may be syndicated to other technology sites once I figure out which ones and how to do it.
• Impressions on the incredible place I live in–Beijing, China–or memories of the even stranger place I come from–Havøysund, Norway. It’d be nice if there were some RSS aggregators for these communities.
• Ideas on personal development and lifehacking. I’m blessed with good sense of logic, but cursed with bad long-term memory. Without systems I just can’t deal with all the stuff thrown at me.
• Personal experiences that I want to share with friends and family. Pictures will be posted to my beorn flickr account.

Don’t hesitate to get back to me with comments. I expect the more feedback I get, the more I’ll write. We humans are funny that way.

Thanks for reading! This blog is on the roll…!