Now what's up with this?. The article title is translated as "Soon she will be lying floating outside the Opera house" and it refers to some sculpture or work of art that has the title "She lies".

Now, this looks more like a dead ship than anything else, so presumably the "she" is a ship and not a woman -- I am reminded of the West Pier in Brighton, which has been derelict for years, and it collapsed partially a few years ago. Now Oslo gets to have what looks like its own collapsed pier, right from the start.

First the Peace Price goes to Al Gore and now this? I don't know what to say, but I think the government needs to change come the election in 2009.

I can now say my age is the same as the telephone country code for Sweden... Just upgraded from Denmark's, and will be Norway's next year.

This is also a semi-prime, a composite number consisting of two distinct prime factors. This is not a very rare number, there are 30 of these below 100.

I got some books, so I'll be away reading...

Ah, finally, when there's two days left of the vacation, there is something looking like consistent summer outside.

I've used some of the previous days, in between rains, to cut down some trees in the yard, removing them with a borrowed trailer and scrape up the side of the car whilst backing with said trailer. Today I was supposed to back it into another driveway and then I hit and smashed the garbage box there (where the rubbish sacks are set up). Me backing up with that trailer seems to be an expensive activity... I had the repairs priced, it will be some 12000 kroner (US$ 2000 or so). Ugh. But it's gotta be done.

And tomorrow another friend is clearing out her place, as she and her daughter are moving to Bergen, so she's been busy packing her stuff. I've been helping her some, amongst other things, begging for banana crates from all the stores around here, fortunately bananas are in high season, but so are the crates -- a lot of other students are moving these days. Anyways, I'll be borrowing this big trailer for a final cleanup there tomorrow, so beware all mail-boxes, gate-posts, and dumpster sheds! Ashtead is at large with the big trailer again!

I've also got a set of new tires for the old Mercedes. We have its kind of weather here now, so I have been using it quite a lot. I still have another 2000 km to drive it this year -- it is insured for 5000 km per year, and it really ought to be driven most of these in order to stay in good repair, so that for example the brakes don't start rusting or seizing. After all the car gets to sit in the garage all winter. These tires probably will last another 8 or 10 years as things are.

As for electronic stuff, I've got another ten Picotux devices, and now I'm thinking of using them for putting various things on the network here. These are interesting units, I keep thinking up more and more kinds of hook-ups; the only drawback becomes that the little Picotux ends up in the corner of a big board full of chips, which kinda negates the size advantage... though it still beats having to keep some old PC hardware (Pentium 100 vintage) alive.

I also got me a new air compressor, so I have all the pressurized air I ever need. This is a big heavy unit, with 150 liters tank and a 5.5HP 3-phase motor. I found out, that on delivery, the compressor motor was connected for 400V, Wye configuration, so I had to change that to the Delta, to match the 230V that I have here. It is common to have 3-phase power in residential areas here, most older areas have 230V, but the newer ones are 400V. We use a lot of power to keep warm during the cold winters....

Which are months away. Right now it is 28 degrees C outside, that is nice and warm -- I think I'll go for a swim in one of the nearby lakes.

Even at the top of summer (the sun will be at its theoretical top point in a couple hours from now), there are talks about "ghost trains" showing up on the tracks in the Oslo Tunnel.

The phenomenon is that the track circuits that are supposed to detect trains present, get confused by electrical noise and fail as designed, that is, they indicate that there is a train present.

I guess the easiest way to fix this would be to add camera surveillance of the tunnel, so if some suspected ghost train were indicated, the controllers could have a closer look to see what was going on.

In related news, King Harald's model train set is on display.

The cucumbers are big and early this year....

Notwithstanding the fact that the world's oil extraction is more like squeezing a sponge than emptying a bathtub, that is, it only really ends when it becomes unfeasibly expensive to squeeze the sponge harder -- it is said in the news that the oil will end in 2047.

Well, so does the address-range of a 2416, 6116, 2716, or other 2K by 8 or similar memory. Although that tends to be more commonly seen as 0x7FF -- or 111 1111 1111 binary... so does that mean that the oil-years counter only has 11 bits in it?

The y0x800 problem? try explaining that one :)

Inspired by the signature of stuff and such, I began investigating the position of my own uid in pi. Googling revealed this site where one may try to search for some number as a substring of the decimal sequence of pi.

And so I found out that my uid, 654610, occurs starting at position 400314, counting from 1 at the 10^-1 position (the 1 in "3.14"). Guess one could then go ahead and find the meta-position, which for me would be where the sequence 400314 appears (at 159158 as it happens), then more meta^n positions following. I guess one eventually might end up in some kind of loop, or maybe at some location where the index and the value of pi's decimal sequence come out the same.

Another question then comes to mind: how long a sequence of digits of pi is required to be able to locate all 2-digit, 3-digit etc. numbers? The site has 200 million digits, how far up does that go?

The other day I noticed a stick with a little sign on it was placed in the dirt outside the gate by the road here. Further up and down the road there are more such sticks, outside of about 1/3 of all the houses here.

This is Viken Fibernett who is announcing that "fiber will be installed here", and presumably all the households that have placed an order for high-speed fiber to their house have such a stick planted outside their gate. Now for a little while it will be rather obvious to world+dog where the haves and the have-nots live...

Welcome to the fiber overlords anyways!

I've just read that the sun is going to have its most violent period for the last 460 years. Anyone care to remember what the weather was like back in the 1540s?

This is just a note to myself lest I forget to investigate the matter further.

A large regular hexagonal structure or feature or weather pattern, or something, on one of Saturn's poles has been re-discovered -- it looks like it has been there for years, and it remains in place.

Now, maybe it is just a giant version of the oil drain plug on my car which looks similar. Don't know about where to get such a large wrench as would fit here, as this is some 15000 miles across, and the largest wrenches they sell at Biltema are 65 mm or so.

And the oil drain plug is only 19 mm, but then the car is nowhere near the size of Saturn the planet either.

Chances are however, that this is some kind of long-lived, chaotic, semiperiodic stationary pattern of gas streams, just like the more commonly seen storms on several of the planets. But I find the drain-plug theory to be more interesting: what would happen if the plug was unscrewed, would the whole planet deflate and zip away like a giant balloon?

This one made me laugh, but I'm not surprised really, as I have long been of the opinion that defining a specific boolean data type never was a good idea. And here is Exhibit N, GetMessage(). To wit:

BOOL GetMessage(LPMSG lpMsg, HWND hwnd, UINT wMsgFilterMin, UINT wMsgFilterMax)

Now, BOOL was originally ment for the Boolean, two-state "Yes/No" kind of value, such as in the original intention of indicating progress or halt for this particular function. But this turned out not to be future-proof: Further down on the page there is:

Warning Because the return value can be nonzero, zero, or -1, avoid code like this [...] The possibility of a -1 return value means that such code can lead to fatal application crashes."

Well, I'll say! Nice of Microsoft to tell us this. Nevermind the original, and now ossified definition of BOOL, which fortunately was just the same as an int back in the day.

And note, this isn't MS bashing. I have never found the concept of explicit Boolean typed variables to be particularly useful anywhere under any operating system. Flags and bits in variables, being 1 or 0 or on or off or some other dichotomy, yes, but these are always very context-specific, much like the original pass/stop meaning of GetMessage() above. Booleans work fine for logic gates where all signals are Low or High, not for code where values appear as 0 or 1.

There is a fairly old meme, enum BOOLEAN {TRUE, FALSE, FILE_NOT_FOUND} which illustrates this perfectly on the Daily WTF site

(For some reason (very likely some corporate misgivings causing the site to be banned because of profanity) this has recently been sanitized from the traditional "What The Fuck" to the arguably safer for work "Worse Than Failure".)

While Steve Ballmer is making threatening noises, DELL has been listening to their customers, and found out that there is big interest for pre-installed Linux. Dell was having some problems with sales earlier on, so this appears to be an attempt to improve this.

Very interesting. Maybe the untapped market here is bigger than anyone thought?

King Harald of Norway is 70 years old today. Congratulations!

I've been reading many articles about how hard the Vista upgrade process is supposed to be for everyone.

So what? The word "upgrade", long before the computer people got hold of it, used to mean the uphill direction of a railway line or a road. My copy of "A Policy of Geometric Design of Rural Highways" is full of discussions about upgrades, which, for example, might require climbing lanes if they are steep enough.

So, upgrades, being something that makes things hard or complicated is not exactly a new thing. Why is everyone surprised then? T'was always thus.

In related news, the work computer I have here is just now getting the IE7 "upgrade" -- hopefully it won't be the same kind of uphill struggle that that word implies. The machine, one of the few that I have that is running anything from Bill Gates' company, has been verified by same company as being genuine. Thank dog for small favors -- now let's see if the thing will work or has died utterly in the process.

The freight ship "Server" which was due to go from Årdal to Murmansk, lost power and ran aground outside Fedje on the Norwegian west coast. Now the ship has broken in half, and an estimated 270 tons of fuel oil has leaked out and caused a major disaster for the birds in the Herdla reservation, and people living on this island.

Some links (in Norwegian, but the picturs show the extent of the disaster) On Hurricane "Per"
Oil spill picture
more links

The front part has been towed ashore, but the aft part is still out on the bank, in the storm, probably with more oil in it.

This is quite bad. Hurricane, 35 m/s (80 MPH) type bad. The strong winds and big waves has made it impossible to keep the oil sheet from spreading, and tonight we are expecting the storm "Per" to arrive. Though here, deep in the Oslo fjord, the storm will not be so bad, on the west coast and further south in Skagerak, there will be nasty weather. People living on the coast in Rogaland, Hordaland and Sogn are advised to stay indoors, and Swedish news sites tell us that they have stopped all rail traffic on the Swedish West coast.

People in Göteborg are asked to stay indoors tomorrow

Worst storm since 1994

Brr... I haven't seen much in the way of English-language links yet; and Aftenposten doesn't have much news about this at all, so mostly pictures for now, unless you can read Norwegian or Swedish.