(By way of magnio)

Go through the list. Tick everything you have or have done. If you can tick 40 or more, you’re spoiled.

• ☑ your own cell phone
• ☐ a television in your bedroom
• ☐ an iPod
• ☐ a photo printer
• ☐ your own phone line
• ☐ TiVo or a generic digital video recorder
• ☑ high-speed internet access (i.e., not dialup)
• ☐ a surround sound system in bedroom
• ☐ DVD player in bedroom
• ☐ at least a hundred DVDs
• ☑ a childfree bathroom (well, no children yet)
• ☑ your own in-house office (I share it with Karianne, but it’s still my own)
• ☐ a pool
• ☐ a guest house
• ☐ a game room
• ☑ a queen-size bed
• ☑ a stocked bar
• ☑ a working dishwasher
• ☐ an icemaker
• ☐ a working washer and dryer
• ☐ more than 20 pairs of shoes
• ☐ at least ten things from a designer store
• ☐ expensive sunglasses (what’s expensive? I think mine cost about 400 NOK, which is about 50€)
• ☐ framed original art (not lithographs or prints)
• ☐ Egyptian cotton sheets or towels
• ☑ a multi-speed bike
• ☑ a gym membership
• ☑ large exercise equipment at home (well, an exercise bike, large enough)
• ☐ your own set of golf clubs
• ☐ a pool table
• ☐ a tennis court
• ☐ local access to a lake, large pond, or the sea
• ☑ your own pair of skis
• ☑ enough camping gear for a weekend trip in an isolated area
• ☐ a boat
• ☐ a jet ski
• ☐ a neighborhood committee membership
• ☐ a beach house or a vacation house/cabin
• ☐ wealthy family members (what’s wealthy?, affluent maybe, but certainly not wealthy)
• ☐ two or more family cars
• ☐ a walk-in closet or pantry
• ☐ a yard
• ☑ a hammock
• ☐ a personal trainer
• ☑ good credit
• ☐ expensive jewelry
• ☐ a designer bag that required being on a waiting list to get
• ☑ at least $100 cash in your possession right now
• ☐ more than two credit cards bearing your name (not counting gas cards or debit cards)
• ☑ a stock portfolio
• ☑ a passport
• ☐ a horse
• ☐ a trust fund (either for you or created by you)
• ☐ private medical insurance
• ☑ a college degree, and no outstanding student loans

Do you:

• ☐ shop for non-needed items for yourself (like clothes, jewelry, electronics) at least once a week
• ☐ do your regular grocery shopping at high-end or specialty stores
• ☐ pay someone else to clean your house, do dishes, or launder your clothes (not counting dry-cleaning)
• ☐ go on weekend mini-vacations
• ☐ send dinners back with every flaw
• ☐ wear perfume or cologne (not body spray)
• ☐ regularly get your hair styled or nails done in a salon
• ☐ have a job but don’t need the money OR
• ☐ stay at home with little financial sacrifice
• ☐ pay someone else to cook your meals
• ☐ pay someone else to watch your children or walk your dogs
• ☐ regularly pay someone else to drive you
• ☐ expect a gift after you fight with your partner

Are you:

• ☐ an only child
• ☐ married/partnered to a wealthy person
• ☐ baffled/surprised when you don’t get your way

Have you:

• ☐ been on a cruise
• ☑ traveled out of the country
• ☑ met a celebrity
• ☐ been to the Caribbean
• ☑ been to Europe (Well, I live there)
• ☑ BEEN TO HONG KONG
• ☐ been to Hawaii
• ☐ been to New York
• ☐ eaten at the space needle in Seattle
• ☐ been to the Mall of America
• ☐ been on the Eiffel tower in Paris
• ☐ been on the Statue of Liberty in New York
• ☐ moved more than three times because you wanted to
• ☑ dined with local political figures (actually more of a national
• political figure)
• ☑ been to both the Atlantic coast and the Pacific coast (Atlantic,
• multiple times around Europe. Pacific, in Australia and Hong Kong)

Did you:

• ☐ go to another country for your honeymoon (No, but we’re going to)
• ☐ hire a professional photographer for your wedding or party
• ☐ take riding or swimming lessons as a child
• ☐ attend private school
• ☐ have a Sweet 16 birthday party thrown for you

24, so a bit more spoiled than Magni. Not that much, though.

In Drammen, a bit outside Oslo, there’s a small brewery called “HaandBryggeriet” (meaning “The Hand Brewery”). Among their beers is a porter which I picked up some weeks ago. Today, I decided to taste it.

The bottle is not the same as the somewhat-standard Nøgne Ø bottles which have become common lately, but one which has a bit less of a neck and a bit rounder. The beer itself is bottle-conditioned, unpasturised and unfiltered, so the usual precaution of leaving the last cm or so in the bottle applies.

Dark beer, as a porter should be. It doesn’t have much fizz, nor does it have much foam. A bit too little, in fact, but I don’t mind too much about that. The taste is slightly bitter, with lots of chocolate and coffee. Somewhat sweet and very nice. Only a shame it’s just a half-litre bottle.

A fairly light beer made for Easter. Bryghuset Svaneke is a small brewery on the Danish island of Bornholm. They make tiny batches, just about 1000 liters. The beer itself is a somewhat-fruity ale. Not too much foam which lies down quickly. Carbonation is on the same level as most pilseners, so fairly carbonated, but it’s naturally carbonated on bottle.

All in all a nice Easter beer from a small and nice brewery. I had a bottle of it last year too, but can’t remember what it tasted like then, except it was a whole lot cheaper. This time, I bought it from Vinmonopolet (the state-run wine, spirits and strong beer monopoly) where it costs a whole lot more than in Danish supermarket.

-*- zone -*- in one of the first two lines of the file.

So, I did my first Ubuntu release today. Not a real release, but it felt real enough anyway. Flight 5, the fifth alpha release of Ubuntu 6.04 is out. Colin was nice (as usual) and helped me through the whole process and it was quite painless. Yay, fun. Even though it was work on a Saturday. Also a big thanks to Adam for tag-teaming with me and making sure that most of the issues were taken care of when I came in on Friday.

Also: PENGUINS. Even though “little penguin” is a silly name.

From evolution’s widgets/misc/e-dateedit, a custom date field:

    e_utf8_strftime (buffer, sizeof (buffer), _("%m/%d/%Y"), &tmp_tm);

You see that _("%m/%d/%Y") there? That means you’ll only have a sane (that is, non-American) date format if you’re running with LC_MESSAGES set to the format you prefer for dates and such. It also means extra work for the translator as well as possible errors due to translators having a personal preferred way to write dates. Using “%x” instead fixes the problem (verified by binary patching /usr/lib/evolution/2.6/libemiscwidgets.so.0.0.0, since I don’t have a very recent evolution source handy) and gives me nice and (semi-)sane dates.

Bug not yet filed due to me being aboard an aeroplane.

Now I just have to fix the way to write dates in nb_NO.UTF-8 into the same as ISO-8601, but that should be easy enough.

Update. I meant %x, not %c, of course

Eric Dorland wonders how to enable the Compose key just using XKB. Personally, I use my caps lock key for that, and using

        Option          "XkbOptions"    "compose:caps"

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, that’s easy enough.

Other options are compose:ralt, compose:rwin, compose:menu and compose:rctrl.

Adam Rosi-Kessel writes about humans failing Turing tests. Apart from speculating why this is happening, a workaround could be to use CSS (or javascript) to hide the input box, or possibly the same for disabling it. I imagine most spambots don’t parse the CSS or run the javascript. Of course, the text saying “please don’t write anything here” should be kept.

Everybody who has used an Ubuntu live cd over the last nine months or so has used casper. It started out as a special udeb, called by the debian-installer code to bootstrap a live environment. While d-i is fairly flexible, this was stretching the limits and not really a great solution. Amongst the problems were user interactivity halfway through the boot and a very slow boot.

In the middle of December, mdz asked me if I could take a look at implementing the SimplifiedLiveCD specification. As I had played a bit with casper already, I did. Casper is nothing like what it used to be, it now uses initramfs, so no user interactivity after the bootloader. It uses unionfs where available, which speeds it up a fair bit (compare to devmapper + cloop), and if the cd image has squashfs, it uses that too, which makes it even faster. Boot time improvements from around 368 to about 231 seconds is fairly good, but I hope to get it even lower.

What I really, really like about casper however is how hackable it is. I added cd integrity check in less than a day (modulo some bugs in usplash I had to fix). Today, I integrated it with the new usplash in initramfs, so we actually have progress in the initramfs as well. (Instead of “mounting root file system” taking about 40 seconds.)

Another neat feature is the persistence support. It will now look for filesystems with the label casper-cow (that will be changed to ubuntu-live-rw, I think) if persistent is seen on the kernel command line. This makes it easy to drag your setup around with just an USB key and any Ubuntu live cd.

Next out is getting keyboard selection better and more speedups.

I have no idea how happy can be a social dysfunction, but here we go:

Your Social Dysfunction: Happy You're a happy person - you have a good amount of self-esteem, and are socially healthy. While this isn't a social dysfunction per se, you're definitely not normal. Consider yourself lucky: you walk that fine line between 'normal' and being outright narcissistic. You're rare - which is something else to be happy about.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com Please note that we aren't, nor do we claim to be, psychologists. This quiz is for fun and entertainment only. Try not to freak out about your results.