I had originally planned to write a long review of the year that’s been, containing things that have happened to me and Ann-Sofie, weighty analyzes of the world around us, criticism of governments and corporations, a warning of impending doom for humanity, my never-ending love for my girlfriend, my respect and love for friends and family, happy thoughts about the winter that finally seems to have decided to move here.

Etc etc etc.

But right now, I’m just not in the mood for doing that. I’m feeling too relaxed to go off on a rant. Plus, you already got the compressed version up there.

Instead I’ll just wish good tidings for everyone, and hope y’all celebrate a safe and happy new-years eve in whichever fashion suits you best!

I previously mentioned my dissatisfaction with the HX08 that was housing my computer, and yesterday when me and Ash went downtown I decided to buy the NSK-6580 and replace it with. I waltzed into one of the local computer stores, decided that the price was acceptable and bought it.

When lugging the thing home I decided that I would make an attempt at writing a proper review of it. Not that any of the already existing reviews are crap or anything, I just felt like taking a stab at doing this. Also, this is a fairly image-intensive entry, so apologies to any modem-users. Full-size versions of the images in this review is available in my gallery.

Here’s the specs for the thing, borrowed from Antecs webpage about it:

* Quiet and highly efficient 80 PLUS® Certified EarthWatts 430 Watt power supply
- Universal input
- Active PFC and high-efficiency design for superior environmentally-friendly operation
- 80PLUS® Certification means you’ll save money on your power bills
* Advanced cooling system:
- 1 Rear 120mm TriCool™ 3-speed fan
- 2 Front mounts for optional 92mm fans
- 1 Advanced Chassis Air Guide, with mount for optional 80mm fan
- VGA vent
* 9 Drive Bays
- Front Accessible: 4 x 5.25″ (with one 5.25″ to 3.5″ adapter)
- Internal: 5 x 3.5″ removable HDD trays with silicone grommets in a removable HDD cage to isolate drive vibrations
* 7 Expansion Slots
* Front-mounted ports for easy multimedia connections
- 2 x USB 2.0
- 1 x IEEE 1394 (FireWire®, i.Link®)
- Audio In and Out
* 0.8mm cold-rolled steel construction
* Motherboard: Fits micro and standard ATX
* Dimensions:
- 18.3″ (H) x 8.25″ (W) x 18.6″ (D)
- 46.5cm (H) x 21cm (W) x 47.2cm (D)

First impressions are nice. The box containing the case is sturdy, and people passing by would give me a lot of curious glances while carrying the thing home. It’s very glossy, and does a great job at advertising what’s inside. Specs are listed on the box, and overall the packing is top-notch. No complaints here.

When opening it this is what you’re greeted with:

The manual is taped nicely to the wrap of the case, but not too tightly. This is nice, otherwise it would be sloshing around in the box during shipping. The manual itself is of the usual standard, it gives the information needed (in five languages, complete with illustrations) but isn’t overtly detailed. No need to either, anyone who’s built their computer before need only to glance in this thing occasionally. I only browsed through it and after that put it aside to never open it again.

Here’s a shot of the case out of the box, but still in it’s protective wrapping:

And one where I removed it:

Clearly visible here is the back of the case. The fit and finish of this case is excellent, there’s no obvious visual deformations. Visible is the rear (included) 120mm tri-cool fan.

And the front of the case:

I must say, I really like the design of this case. It’s a bit understated and elegant, while remaining focused on functioning. I’ve never like the horribly overblown pre-modded cases that are popular with the younger crowd. I’ve modded a few cases, but always with the priority of adding function, not useless flair.

Again, the packing of the case is excellent. Not overblown, but protecting everything that needs protecting. Visible in the above photo is the protective tape on the top and bottom of the front, very nice. Easily removed without leaving a bunch of sticky gunk.

Here’s a shot of the side-vents and handles. There’s two thumb-screws in the back keeping the side firmly on, and after you’ve unscrewed them the side comes off easily after pulling the handles. The top of the vents is an “air-guide” for the CPU, containing a plastic tube you’ll see pictured below. It can be unscrewed and replaced with an 80mm fan if the inclination is there. The bottom vent is simply just a vent, there’s no holes to attach anything to it.

The quality of these vents are very high. Same goes for the rear fanvent as well as the intakes for the two (optional) front fans. They’re honeycombed and look like they’re cut out the metal rather than stamped. They allow for excellent airflow, which in turn minimizes noise from turbulence.

Here’s a better shot of the rear, with the aforementioned excellent vent. Other than that, it’s a completely normal case. No big surprises. The ATX-plate is completely bog-standard, and is useless to most motherboards who have additional connections. No big deal, most mobos ship with their own back-plate to replace this.

A nice touch was that Antec had taped the little bag of screws and miscellaneous stuff to one of the drivebays. This is nice rather than having it slosh around freely inside the case. The devil is in the details and all that.

Speaking of the insides, here’s a shot of what the case looks like with the side removed:

Nothing too crazy, but it’s a very well-built case. No sharp edges, and everything just breathes quality. This is not an aluminium case either, so it’s rolled steel. The structure is somewhat weaker than my old HX08 (which is a tank, in comparison) and this means that the NSK doesn’t make as good a butt-to-ground adapter as my previous case. In other words, don’t attempt to sit on this thing.

None the less, the engineering is good. The drive cage holds five drives, each attach to a removable sled. Each sled has nice silicone-dampened grommets to reduce the vibration. This is good, since vibrations reverberate to the case and cause resonance, which in turn means noise. Less vibrations, less noise.

Here’s a better show of the drive-cages and me holding on of the removable sleds. Note the silicone grommets mentioned.

Note also that Antec included a nice little bonus hidden inside the 5 1/4″ drive bays. An actual power-chord! Most cases I’ve seen never includes one of these, and even though I already have about fifty of them it’s still nice to see one included.

Speaking of power, the included PSU is one of Antecs own. I have good experiences with them, they’re quiet and actually deliver the power they promise without a bunch of inflated ratings. This one is no exception. It looks rather plain, but as far as I can tell the numbers on it add up to what it claims to be, i.e. a 430 watt PSU that does the job without too many frills. One frill it does have though is generous length of cables. Sure, it can’t compete with my old Enermax, but the cables are easily long enough for anything that goes inside this case. See for yourself:

There’s plenty of outlets as well. I counted to six regular “molex” style plugs and four SATA-plugs split over two leads. More than enough for most people, and giving no problem to fill every drive bay in this case if so inclined. Of course the usual plugs for P4-connectors, PCI Express and such are included. Thankfully though, Antec has not included the useless serverplug that’s never used. This is an ATX 2.0-compatible PSU, which means the motherboard-plug is of the 24-pin persuasion. A nice touch again is however the option for people like me with older equipment to simply unhook the additional four connectors and turning it into an old-style ATX 1.2 with 20 connectors. Very nice, even though it’s a very minor feature for people putting a brand-new computer into this case. It’s also 80 Plus-certified, which supposedly means it’s more power-efficient and won’t waste as much of your precious juice. Antec claims it’ll save you money on your electricity-bill, but I’m not as convinced about that as they are.

Here’s a better closeup of the PSU in question:

The back is a mesh to allow for better ventilation, but like most PSU’s these days there’s only the one fan in it to vent the PSU itself. It’s not expected to vent the rest of the case since that’s the job of the rear fan. The cooling in this case consists of the rear included 120mm fan and two optional 92mm in the front. Those, being optional, are not included and you’ll have to provide them yourself. For most boxes the rear will probably be enough, but I went ahead and put two Zalman 92mm in the front to aid cooling.

The rear tri-cool fan. Tri-cool meaning it takes it’s power from a molex-connector, and has a small switch with three settings for speed. On it’s fastest setting the noise is unbearable, on the slowest it’s virtually silent. 120mm fans are nice, they shovel more air yet are quieter than an 80mm moving the same amount of air.

These are the front intakes. They’re as well-made as the other vents on this case. The drive-bay for the harddrives is easily removed using two thumb-screws, and is very well-made. It slides out on two plastic rails, and this allows you access to attach the fans to these vents.

If you’re dumb like me you assume that you’ll have to remove the front bezel to attach these fans. This rewards you with feeling incredibly dumb when you discover Antec has included eight nice screws to attach the fans from the inside. It also rewards you with a frustrating half-hour trying to get the front back on, which sounds easy but turned out to be incredibly tricky and frustrating. So don’t be stupid like me, and realize that the absurdly long screws marked “9mm Fan Screws” are there for a reason. This is not mentioned in the tiny manual, by the way.

Assembly inside this case was a mostly painless affair. Take your time, do things the right way. There’s no nice slide-out motherboard tray like in my old HX-08, but this is a non-issue really. Installing any motherboard in this case is painless since all the edges are either rolled or smoothed out. You will not get a bunch of cuts and nicks from this case.

Installing harddrives is painless as well. Screw it to the sled with the provided special screws, slide the sled into the rack and it locks nicely into place. This is not the case with CD/DVD-drives, and this brings me to the only really big complaint with this case.

Installing CD/DVD-drives is done the traiditonal way, slide it in and screw it into place. And this is where one annoyance appeared. See, Antec rather rudely assumes that the only use for these drive-bays is a CD/DVD. They’re supposed to be slid into place and attached to one side. You’re not expected to remove the other side of the case.

But see, I had to do that. I have a Zalman rheobus for controlling fanspeed, and I wanted to use this in this case as well. The problem appeared when I tried to screw it in. The problem is that on the opposite side there are no screwholes!

See?

Where a screwhole would’ve been excellent there’s this tiny bit of metal preventing a screw to be used. I found this very annoying, and had to spend an additional twenty minutes modifying this piece of metal so I could attach my Zalman-rheobus. It still doesn’t sit very tight, but at least it’s now attached to the case.

But other than that, assemby is painless. It’s the same process as with any computer and case, and will take an hour or two if you do it properly. At least this case won’t slice you to bits while doing it, like some cheaper cases I’ve encountered over the years. Bang for the buck is very good with this case, it’s excellent value for money. Sure, there are tons of cheap non-name cases out there, some that cost as little as a third of this one - but they will be a long-term pain to use. They will cut your hands to ribbons when installing stuff into it, will have poorly laid out drive-bays and ventilation will be below sub-par. They will have thin sheets of metal that will give very little stability to your system, and if they include a PSU it will be an overrated piece of junk that’ll have problems supplying your computer with power.

The Antec NSK-6580 is not such a case. It’s not the most expensive case out there, but it’s excellent value for money. You could build any computer into this, it’s ventilation is excellent for any machine. There’s place for five harddrives, with plenty of space between them for ventilation. Add two 92mm fans in the front and even the fastest of 10krpm drives will be happy with the cooling. Nice touches include the excellent ventilation and the good quality of components - even the power-button feels like it’s a quality component giving a nice solid feel instead of some flimsy plastic. There’s connectors for front USB, Audio and Firewire. I connected the USB-ports to my motherboard and the Firewire to my Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS while leaving the audio-connectors unplugged. Speaking of audio-connectors, they follow both AC’97 and HD Audio-standards and will most likely plug into any motherboard following those standards.

Definitely recommended.

Pros:

* Excellent value for money.
* Great looks.
* Solid built, nothing sharp here. Hinged sidepanel on one side.
* Easy access using thumbscrews.
* Decent manual detailing everything you need to know.
* Front ports for both USB 2.0 and Firewire, as well as AC’97 and HD Audio audio.
* Rear 120mm fan is included and is quiet.
* Plenty of space for harddrives and hiding cables.
* Sidemounted airduct that can also be replaced with optional 80mm fan.
* Very quiet depending on components put into it.

Cons:

* Difficult to mount anything except CD/DVD drives in the 5 1/4″ drive bays.
* If you remove the front bezel it’s very difficult getting it back in place.

And finally, two shots of my finished product:

No funny comments on the cabling! I got a bit tired towards the end of the build, and later today I’m planning on restructuring them as well as fixing a few things I was too lazy to do yesterday, such as putting the Power-Led the right way.

As for noise this case is a lot quieter. Temperatures are roughly the same for the motherboard and CPU, but harddrives are a whopping ten degrees cooler (29 degrees) than the previous case. This is likely due to being right in the airflow of the two front-mounted 92mm fans. I also removed the fan from my graphics-adapter, which has one of those Zalman passive cooling units on it. Previously it was cooled by an 80mm fan, but that just felt redundant in this case.

Update/Edit: I originally wrote that the PSU had two SATA-plugs. This is wrong, I discovered my error when I sat down the other day and optimized cabling. The PSU actually has four SATA-connectors, split on two leads - i.e. two leads with two SATA-plugs each. My bad.

Or: What Really Irks Me With All The Shopping And Comparison Sites Out There

I got a fairly fat wad of cash for christmas. Part of it has been stowed away for future purposes, but I’m considering investing some of it in a new case for my computer. Yes, it’s weird spending money on a computer that I swore long ago not to spend any money on, but I’m getting really annoyed by the HX-08 that I have now, and I don’t have enough money to buy a new computer. This has been my main case for 7+ years, and it’s getting a bit long in the tooth now.

Despite my modifications it now fails at being the decent case it used to be. I don’t mind that it’s big, very heavy (16 kg EMPTY!) or almost painfully beige. That doesn’t concern me. What does concern me is that despite my modifications to the cooling system it’s now running quite hot due to bad layout and too many harddrives. It was fairly cool when I only had one drive in it, but two drives makes it a bit toastier in there, and this means that I need to run the fans a little too fast for my sensitive hearing. This is not helped by the fact that the office here at home is noticeably warmer than the rest of the apartment, due to all the electronics in here. So, the cooling of my computer is becoming painfully noisy. The HX-08 was kickass a few years ago, and it’s held up quite nicely over the years.

But the faults are starting to show now. It’s just not very efficiently designed, and my needs are different these days. I don’t need five full-size 5 1/4″ drive bays. I need two at most! And the interior layout of the HX-08 isn’t really doing the trick any more. Even when this thing was new I wondered who in the hell decided that most harddrives should reside above the PSU, and thus needing extremely long cables since this is a full-size case, meaning it’s quite huge. The drive-cooling also leaves a lot to be desired, and all these years I’ve been too lazy to make the needed modifications myself.

The end result none the less is that my computer case essentially has become a Hummer. It looks huge, looks like it has a ton of space inside and even though it does have a lot of space, most of it is wasted and you can’t seat a lot of people in it despite it weighing four tons and taking up two lanes.

And this leads me to the search that I’ve been doing for years now. The search for the ultimate case. These days, I don’t care about it being the ultimate case any more, just being quiet and more adequate for my needs than my huge honking HX-08. That’s more than enough. A few years ago I had a huge jonesing for an Antec P-180 and such. These days I don’t care about that. I want something that doesn’t cost my first-born child yet isn’t a complete hazard either.

In fact, the Antec NSK-6580 seems perfect. It’s not complete crap, yet it doesn’t cost a fortune. Plus, you get a seemingly decent PSU with it. I like the sound of that, since I know from experience that Antec PSU’s are fairly reliable and decently quiet. Even though my current Enermax (of 2002 vintage) is fairly quiet it’s getting noisier due to the fans wearing out.

So, the NSK-6580 is most likely to be the candidate for investment.

This in turn leads me to the irritation that I experience. I’m very fond of the web and the Internet. I use it several hours every day, in fact it’s very uncommon for me to not do something net-related most of the days. I’ve been “online” (whatever the heck that means) since around 1995. This all means I’m fairly net-savvy and know my way around a search engine.

I’ve been wasting the better part of an hour now trying to find a decent review of the NSK-6580 to get some kind of confirmation that this actually is a decent buy. The Antec-page is of course not very informative, according to them it’s the best thing to happen humanity since sliced bread, and not only is it a computer-case, it’s a cure for everything that’s wrong with the world as we know it. Hallelujah. Yeah, not exactly objective opinions from the makers of the case.

Fire up google, search for “Antec NSK-6580 review” and what do we find? Page after page hawking the services of shopping-comparison sites and retailers that carry it. Not one single review from any serious tech-page anywhere. In fact, I’ve gone through the first five pages and nothing except shopping-bots and assorted similar crap. I’ve given up on finding a review-site that has tested the damn thing. I’m tired of trying to tweak my search with different phrases and still finding the same useless crap.

I remember not too long ago, maybe two years, when that same search-phrase would have given me what I looked for in the first two or three results. I’m sure they’re in there somewhere, but they’re lost beyond Page Number Whatever and I’ll never find them. Why? Because the commercial shopping-sites spend A LOT of money on SEO and making sure they end up in the top results. They spend huge amounts of money hiring really smart people and companies to use the whole spectrum of techniques to make sure they’re at the top.

Which means me as a consumer is square out of luck. I don’t want to wade through page after page of shopping-sites who want me to go to them and use their service all the while clicking their ads and what-not. This means that the genuine tech-sites who have done good reviews of consumer-goods are buried beneath a thick layer of commercialized crud.

And people wonder why the web and the ‘net has become a cold and hostile place.

I’ll tell you why. Because of the sites who only care about making money, and has no concern about burying other sites in the waste created by that process.

I like living in the northern part of Sweden for a variety of reasons.

Among those are:

I grew up in this climate, and this is where I feel at home.
I like the surroundings.
I like most of the people who live here.
Most of my friends live within not too large a distance.
My parents live only a few hours trip away.
Etc etc etc.

But one of the major reasons I live in what people who’ve never been here imagine is an arctic wasteland is the winters. We usually get proper winters up here, and my childhood was filled with nothing but snowy, white christmases. Winter was a period of intense cold, I admit, but it was also a season of intense human warmth. When we ventured outside it was to go bobsledding or having snowball-wars.

For the last two winters there hasn’t been a proper winter. Even though Umeå is fairly high up on our globe the last two winters have been absolutely abysmal. Just a few days ago we celebrated christmas, and there was virtually no snow outside. What resemblance of winter existed was provided by frozen bits of water that just a few days earlier had been melting snow. The grey remnants of lawns accentuated this lack of wintery-ness.

I’m really tired of this. I have yet to subscribe to the most hysterical of hand-waving environmentals who claim the earth is dying, but something seems to be very wrong here. Yeah, I’m not so ignorant that I don’t know that we’re FUBARing our environment on a daily basis, but I take all the hysterical warnings with a fair bit of salt. I know that compared to a lot of people my own fossil-fuel footprint is virtually non-existent (I don’t own/drive a car, for example) but I do say that there’s something wrong when winters that used to be covered in a meter or more of snow now is covered in… well… no snow at all.

I’m tired of seeing snow falling, and knowing that a few hours later it’s just going to melt into slosh that’ll make my feet wet when I take the dog for a walk. I’m tired of knowing that at night, when the temperature falls ever so slightly over into freezing, that the same slosh will turn into dangerous icy areas just waiting to break bones and damage knees. I’m tired of knowing that this will only be exacerbated by the stupidity of the people in charge who insist that throwing rough gravel on top of the ice helps prevent slipping, when in fact it merely adds to the danger.

Whatever happened to the winters that I used to know when I move to Umeå about five years ago? I don’t recall my first winter here being anything like this one. Now, instead, the gray, boring snowless winters of southern Sweden has become a norm even up here.

I try to be optimistic about this. But I do wish that the weather could decide on what it wants to be, because I’m tired of the ice covering the walkways. I’m tired of not being able to take a proper walk because I’m too scared of breaking my neck or causing general injury to my precious body.

So, dear weather. If you’re gonna be warm, then BE WARM, goddammit! Don’t do the snow-thing for a day, then thaw it into muck and freeze it to ice the same night. Despite being a northerner by genetic and birth I do like warm weather. Maybe not Orlando, Florida-warm but none the less I like warm weather.

And snow and cold works equally well for me. I’m very adaptable. I like snow. I like walking in snow. I like well-plowed walkways and I like a bit of chill nipping at my nose. I like taking a good walk and coming home with a slightly numb face from the cold. That’s a proper winter if you ask me.

But I don’t like this inbetween-nonsense. It’s currently +5 degrees celsius outside. This is ridiculuous. It’s too cold to wear shorts, but it’s too warm to snow. Just this ice, with a layer of melted water to make it REALLY dangerous walking outdoors. On top of that, sprinkled gravel since some yahoo in charge (despite my angry emails to the contrary) still thinks it’s a good choice as slip-prevention.

Please, decide on a season and stick with it.

(I saw on the weather the other day that it’s +3 degrees in Jokkmokk, where my parents live. That’s absurd beyond description.)

One again I paste the picture from about two years ago when I slipped on the stupid gravel and cut a nice gash in my hand. I’m sure that this is going to happen again.

I Am Legend

Action/Horror/Drama from 2007 featuring Will Smith.

—

Robert Neville (Smith) is the last survivor of a man-made plague causing horrible mutations. The plague started off as a well-intended genetic cure for cancer, but for unknown reasons instead started causing mutations and killing 90% of the human race. The survivors of the plague was rewarded with extreme mutations, and turned into violent creatures needing to feed on the minority of humans who were immune to the plague. Robert Neville is the last survivor of these naturally immune humans, and he’s desperately working on finding a cure for the infected before it’s too late…

—

Man, I was so badly looking forward to this movie.

I’ve read the original novel by Richard Matheson a few times, and it quickly developed into one of my many favourite books. Essentially it was about how Robert Neville was the last survivor of a plague which turned everyone else into creatures essentially resembling vampires - they needed blood for sustenance and were vulnerable to sunlight. The two major things that fascinated me with the novel was partly the main protagonist (Neville) and his struggle to survive and remain sane in a world gone mad, but also the concept of scientifically explaining the symptoms of vampirism as a disease instead of something supernatural.

I’ve seen both the previous attempts at turning this book into a movie, and neither of them really caught me. I’ve never been much of a Charlton Heston-fan even though I accepted him in Planet of the Apes and thus felt a large ambivalence to The Omega Man, but the older adaptation (The Last Man On Earth) is, in my opinion, pure crap.

So when the teasers started to appear last year I felt that, yeah, this seemed like a much more worthy adaptation. With a proper budget, proper special effects and that nice post-apocalyptic feel that was sorely missed in the previous incarnations. Sure, I felt a little iffy at Will Smith as Robert Neville, but the fresh prince has actually developed into a fairly capable actor.

The teasers and trailers also gave the impression that they were sticking to the story and world established in the novel. Most obviously I felt that this was indicated by not altering the title from “I Am Legend” into something other like the previous adaptations.

But, unfortunately, I was wrong.

Before I continue, let me make clear that I don’t think this is a bad movie. Quite the opposite, it’s probably an enjoyable zombie-style flick to anyone who isn’t a fan of the book. I do think however that fans of the novel will be disappointed - just like I was.

The movie starts off quite promising. Visually it’s very impressive, and the mood is effectively set for the viewer. Smith is quite capable as Neville, trying to maintain his sanity and survive all the while trying to figure out the virus. He isn’t the usual Smith-character, he’s not fast-talking or cool, and there’s definitely a few cogs missing in the brain department. I was impressed by it.

Leave it to Hollywood to mess this up though, and they sure did. See, I really, really liked the novel. What really rubs my rhubarb with this movie is that after a while it descends into the usual Hollywood-happy ending. Also, most annoyingly, it cuts out large parts of the story of the novel, and messes up the reason why Neville is a legend, and to whom he is a legend.

In the novel, the infected were for all intents and purposes, vampires. They slept at day and awoke at night needing blood. During the day, Neville would go from house to house and kill the sleeping infected. However, what Neville doesn’t know until later is that there exist infected who have managed to keep most of the disease at bay. They still have the symptoms (vulnerability to sunlight, garlic, etc) but haven’t quite become the horribly disfigured and violent creatures that other have become. They have in fact established communities, and try to live normal lives. Neville doesn’t know this, and indiscriminately kills every sleeping person who’s been infected. This is what makes him a legend to these half-infected people, since he can walk in daylight and kill them while they sleep.

This is completely absent in the movie, and it seems that Neville instead spends his days working on finding a cure for the virus, as well as searching for other survivors and food. Any encounter with the infected is purely accident, apart from one which he captures to try his proposed cure on. The infected are instead violent zombie-style creatures who stay out of sunlight and only come out at night trying to find something to feed off of. Neville boards his house shut during the night, and stays out of trouble by not showing any activity then.

The movie descends even further into Hollywood-happy endings. After a while a girl and a young boy show up, claiming to be survivors of the disease, and that there is a community of survivors in Vermont. They want to go there, and bring Neville with them. Long story short, he dies and they take the cure (which all of a sudden miraculously worked) with them, tying up the movie in a nice Hollywood happy ending rather than the bleak and dark ending of the novel.

This really disturbed me. The ending was just too positive for me, and the girl and young boy serve as nothing except fodder to that stereotyped ending.

So, if you haven’t read the book then this will probably be a pretty decent action/horror-movie, with liberal doses of drama and good acting from Will Smith. But for me, I felt slightly cheated.

Well, this is a first for me and Ann-Sofie. We’re not celebrating christmas at either our parents places! We decided fairly early on that this year we would celebrate in our cozy apartment. If people wanted to celebrate with us, they’d have to come to us for a change. We’re adults now, and it was time to establish our own traditions.

So, it’s going to be a nice and intimate christmas this year. Just us and the animals. Hopefully some people will be showing up for new years party here, and in January I turn a whopping 30 years old, which I hope that people will remember and maybe even show up here for that event as well.

And now, for those who didn’t receive it via email, I present our christmas-card. We we’re originally planning to send actual physical ones out, but it proved to be a rather taxing project and instead we reasoned that we’d save the environment slightly by doing a virtual card instead. Plus, we make huge savings on postage! Ann-Sofie is the artist behind this masterpiece, it’s totally her creative spirit behind this one. It’s quite beautiful in my opinion.

(Note to self: next year, don’t do the emailing while tired, slightly malnourished and with a head throbbing from a headache the size of Alaska. Then you might actually manage to send it from YOUR email, and not from one of the dozen crap-adresses kept around for spam-thwarting purposes)

Enjoy, and happy holidays to all of you.

I just had a minor epiphany.

Me and Ash just finished watching Death At A Funeral (hysterically funny comedy, definitely recommended) and sat down for some brief mail/blog-checking before bedtime. Normally this includes wading through tons of spam, dutifully sorted as such by SpamAssassin. I get maybe 700 and up to 1000 spam-emails, so a good server-side spamfilter is really a necessity.

The spam I get consists of the usual nonsense. Nigerian kings claiming to need my help, shady people claiming to be online pharmacies equipped to supply me with drugs to enhance my, well… equipment. You know the drill. One of the more common topics of spam also seem to be software. Or rather, supplying me with high-quality commercial software at bargain discount prices. I’m completely convinced however that these sellers actually sell shitty pirated copies at outrageous prices, but none the less it’s a common theme.

The software offered is almost always the same. Microsoft Office, various Adobe-applications, 3D Studio Max and Autocad. The usual fare.

They also offer me Windows XP, in all kinds of real as well as imagined flavours. But the epiphany was that I’ve never seen one of these crap-emails trying to sell me Vista. I wonder how that might be interpreted?

(admittedly, I don’t spend much time actually reading these emails, so it might be that I missed the torrent of mail trying to sell me Vista. We’ll never know.)

Through the course of my life I’ve been a pretty firm supporter of FOSS (Free/Open Source Software). This basically started back in 1994, and since then my passion for this particular form of software has grown along with the strides made by the same. FOSS is in my opinion the most important type of software, and I’m certain that it will at some point overtake proprietary software as the dominant form of software on this planet. The matter of “when” is however up for debate.

One of the things that I constantly get reminded about from other users is one of the most fundamental differences between proprietary software and free software. I already know this difference, but other users seem to have a difficult time understanding these differences - differences which, when you think about it, quite obvious.

Proprietary software is closed software. It’s not debatable, it’s nod modifiable, it’s not verifiable and it most assuredly is not designed to be any of those things. FOSS on the other hand is open, available and verifiable in every way that proprietary software isn’t. If you have to draw a line, proprietary software cannot be trusted since you can’t verify it’s functionality or source-code. The most obvious example of this is Windows, controlled by one company who aggressively guard the source of their prize jewel. Despite the fact that Windows clearly is the dominant operating system on this planet, there is no way for anyone except Microsoft to know exactly what goes on behind the desktop. FOSS is completely the opposite, if you’re wondering then the source is easily available for scrutiny by anone who chooses to do just that.

An extension to proprietary software being closed is that the company has a tendency to play dirty in order to maintain that proprietary. Again, Microsoft and Windows are the prime examples of this. The whole Windows-ecosystem is designed to work best with itself. It does not extend a warm welcome to anything else except others just like it. Microsoft has designed it to do just that, using dirty tricks and undocumented tweaks to protocols. Even Apple has to reverse-engineer their stuff to understand it, since Microsoft only shares a small portion of the documentation with others. Everything else they keep close to their chest.

Linux and FOSS is steadily gaining exposure on the desktop. FOSS has virtually won the war as far as servers go, a vast majority of servers around the world run on some variation of Linux or BSD - the exceptions being those corporations with a PHB who has been swayed by the sales-talk of proprietary vendors such as Microsoft. This in turn leads to those companies making further modifications to entrench themselves into the customers datacenters.

Here the excellent example from Microsoft is Office. Do you ever notice how each new version of Word breaks the DOC-format for older versions? Newer versions can read files created by older versions, but not the other way around. Have you noticed that? Do you really think it’s a coincidence? If you do, then I’m afraid you’re very naive about the world of proprietary software. Of course no one can prove that Microsoft do this, but it’s just to convenient for them to essentially force users to upgrade to not be just a coincidence.

This strategy of making closed ecosystems is very typical of Windows. Everything from Microsoft plays fairly nice together, despite the large amounts of unreliability - yet integrating none-Microsoft/Windows systems into the ecosphere is very difficult.

And this is where I go back to what I wrote in the beginning. This is something that regularly baffles users who are new to the world of FOSS. They convert to something open, and then they get confused as to why it doesn’t play nice with the things from the closed ecosystem.

Now, I might be paranoid, but wouldn’t it be in the proprietary vendors own interest to make as sure as possible that their delicate little ecosystem stays that way, and thus implement as many tricks as possible to mess up things for users of alternate systems? To make things as difficult as possible and not play nice, in an effort to make the user say “oh screw this, it’s too much work, I’ll just go back to using the old stuff again”?

Well, I resisted it for the longest of times but now I’ve fallen for the temptation. Yep, I’ve gotten myself a Facebook-account now as well. I don’t really see it as anything else than yet another online community, but I have plenty of time and the curiosity about the place finally won over my cynicism surrounding hyped websites.

At least it’s a lot better than the putrid swamp that is Myspace. Wild horses couldn’t drag me into that place…