I remind myself every year that there is NOTHING that can be trusted on April 1st. Yet I often forget about this rule, and get all worked up over something. Afterwards I feel really stupid. Which I suppose is why I really dislike April 1st, since the “tradition” of April Fools has mutated into some kind of “make people feel really stupid”-tradition instead.

So yeah, I bought the thing about Cheese hook, line and sinker. Silly me.

Note to self: next year, don’t even turn on the freakin’ computer. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t read anything. Just sit in a corner and listen to music.

None the less, my opinions on software patents stand strong. I also don’t think it’s below Apple (or any corporation holding large amounts of patents) to try something just exactly like that.

It’s a well-known fact that I strongly oppose software-patents. In fact, patenting software is one of the most (ahem) patently absurd concepts I can imagine. Especially since pretty much everything in software is de-facto concepts that have been built on previous concepts building on previous concepts and so forth and so on.

Couple this with a patent system that has passed every checkpoint on the road to insanity and you’ll arrive at the system we have today. The major software companies no longer invent software, they try to patent every tom dick and harry piece of code and then sit on them like roosting hens and sue the bejeezus out of any poor schmuck who comes along.

Patents have been granted for completely absurd things, but software patents are in a league of their own. Today it’s virtually impossible for a small company to develop software without bogging themselves down in a legal quagmire trying to research what they’re allowed to do with software without violating some inane patent. Adding even such obvious things as a scrollbar to your application might violate some patent, and some troll-company comes along and sues your ass for infringement.

So, now that I’ve set the mood, let me proceed.

There’s an application on the Mac called Photobooth. It’s a fairly trivial little thing that essentially turns your Mac into one of those photobooths you can find in malls or supermarkets. You can add some minor effects and such. Basically it’s a completely harmless and mostly useless little software doo-dad that Apple includes in OS X.

Recently a new application called Cheese sailed up in the Gnome desktop. It mimics the concept of Photobooth and is just as harmless and mostly useless. It’s fun for about twenty seconds, and then you get bored.

I just visited the Cheese homepage and found out that some lawyer-shark acting on Apples behalf was forcing the creator of Cheese to abandon his project and remove all known instances of it, or they would sue him into oblivion.

This is posted on the Cheese frontpage:

all hell broke loose yesterday: i got a phone call yesterday by a nice lady, which presented herself as a former advocate of apple. she told me that the objective of her team was to find copyright and patent violations and therefore she called me:

obviously i did something wrong by starting such a project as cheese, which is a pure clone of photo booth. this would violate the us patent IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: computer software used for image editing, image acquisition, and image viewing, which was filed on february the 28th 2006 and as gnome is registered and known as an organization of the usa, this patent would be applicable.

i thought, that such patents would just apply, if there is some commercial interest behind it, but she knew it better: as i created cheese in the summer of code program, i “worked” for google, which makes everything a commercial project, even if now i “probably” do not get any money. in addition the full us patent law applies, as i a) worked for google in the usa for the summer of code program and b) cheese is now included in gnome, which is an organization registered in the usa.

she also told me, that of course there are similar applications like photo booth, but cheese acts as a clone and therefore an illegal copy because it works on intel based macs and therefore would be a competitor of photo booth. the fact, that cheese just runs on linux on the intel based macs was worthless by her.

so it looks pretty bad for me now.. i got a deadline of 5 work days to remove cheese code and binary versions from all places i have access to (probably svn.gnome.org, ftp.gnome.org, …).

i already contacted a lawyer, which thinks he can help me, but of course it is david against goliath…

so, if you know a way out of this, please contact me!

Is this the right way to go? HELL NO! This is just as bad as Creative getting all huffy over modified drivers that actually ADD functionality to their products. Why do companies insist on doing this? It serves nothing positive at all.

About an hour ago the clock turned over to a new day here in Sweden. That means that today is April 1st, aka April Fools Day.

Today I’m not going to turn on the television, nor read any news of any kind. I’m tired of every yahoo on the planet trying to post lame things to fool their readers. It stopped being funny when I was about twelve, and it’s become even less funny since most jokes these days are outrageously mean and insulting to most who fall for it.

Instead, I’m going to publish a screenshot of my Hardy Heron-system. I’m a Gnome-man, so that’s my preferred desktop. In case you want the wallpaper, it’s Toucan by Vladstudio. It’s awesome.

… and for a change I’m okay with it. There’s a billion things I need to do, but I have no energy right now. And that’s alright, I’m not gonna worry over things I cannot control. It’s just a waste of energy. Maybe later today something will kick in and I’ll go back into overdrive again. It’s the uncertainty that’s the real killer for me, and right now the current uncertainty has been laid to rest and even though the results are less than optimal I’m okay with it. At least I’m not uncertain any longer.

I got really upset earlier today when I read that IFPI/RIAA and the rest of the mediamaffia wants 1.6 million Euros from Pirate Bay, and I got really close to writing about it. But I wouldn’t really say something new; I’d just be repeating the same things which are known to everyone not living in the sphere of corporate greed. I’m not going to waste energy rehashing the same old arguments that any sane person already knows. I’m just amazed at how you apparently can get sued for ludicrous sums even though you legally haven’t done anything wrong, and where there are such enormous gray areas it boggles the mind.

Earlier today I went for a walk, and even though the weather today has turned to gray mush I still felt refreshed when I got home. I’m not letting the boring weather bring me down. Instead, I enjoyed the surprisingly warm air on my face, and listened to the kids who for some reason was playing in the melting snow. Sometimes I wish I could go back to more innocent times.

My blog got updated last night. I updated it to the brand new Wordpress 2.5 and quite frankly I’m a bit ambivalent as to the purported greatness of it. Sure, it’s always nice with a new version, but I’m not completely bowled over by the new admin-interface. It just seems… wasteful. There’s too much empty screen real-estate, and I don’t even have a particularly large monitor. I can imagine that someone running at even higher resolutions than my bog-standard 1280×1024 will feel the waste is even bigger.

I just learned that the esteemed gentleman named Arthur C. Clarke passed away yesterday.

ACC was easily one of the most influential Science-Fiction writers to ever grace this planet. I always like his approach to scifi, trying to ground it somewhat in scientific reason, and I always enjoyed reading the notes on how he reasoned behind various inventions and technologies he presented in his literature. Add to that, his books always contained an interesting philosophical question, as well as excellent writing and thoughtful presentation.

If I have to decide on a favorite book of his it’ll probably be the Rama-series of books, especially the ones he wrote together with Gentry Lee. In fact, they were the first ACC-books I did read, even before I read his famed 2001-series. The Rama-books really set my imagination in motion, and I’ve read them at least five or six times since the first one.

Rest in peace, mr. Clarke. I’ll always be a fan of your books.

The relationship has ended.

I feel like handmade shit.

Unless I bring it up, I don’t want to talk about it.

It’s late at night here in Sweden, and I’m sitting here thinking about my review of the Antec NSK-6580 computer-chassi.

One of my “internet-heroes” or whatever you might call it is Dan over at DansData. I think he’s hilarious in his writings, and he’s also heck of a lot smarter than I am. None the less, ever since I first discovered his site I’ve been a little envious of his job. He gets to review neat stuff, and he does it quite excellently. I tried to emulate his style of reviewing when writing my Antec-review, but I suppose he has more experience at this kind of thing.

I didn’t expect my review to get any kind of attention, but a lot of people are reading it. Either they find it through Google, or go through Antec’s website. Yeah, that’s kinda neat - Antec added a link to my review of their product. I’m still pinching myself about that one.

Anyhoo. I really liked doing the review. So if you have a product you need reviewed, let me know. I’ll be happy to do it. Just ship your product to me, and I’ll give it a fair go.

*For Free, meaning, you don’t need to pay me to review the product, but if I like it I get to keep it.

I recently turned 30 years old. Supposedly it’s a milestone, but I feel just as silly as ever. In most cases, as far as I’m concerned age is yet another bogus measure of a human beings worth.

Anyhoo, one of my oldest friends, Magnus Lindholm (the same bloke who recently welcomed his first child) recently gave me the nerdiest gift ever. I was in shock for several minutes after being presented with it. I had planned to keep it a secret for a few weeks longer but I just can’t control myself any longer.

Without further ado:

“What the heck is that?” you might ask. Well, he’d found one of my old motherboards complete with shipping-label and slapped it inside a frame as a kind of monument or reward of some kind. The motherboard in question is my first 32-bit computer, an AM386SX-40 that I bought to upgrade my then-computer which consisted of an ancient 286. I can’t remember how long ago this was. We’re not quite sure that the shipping label is the right one, but it’s neat none the less. This thing dates from the early nineties, probably around 1992 or so.

How he got possession of this piece of computer history is rather convoluted. Apparently I gave it to a mutual friend at some point in time, which in turn passed it into his mothers computer for a cheap upgrade, and served there for several years until it transferred somewhere else and then somewhere else and somehow ended up in Magnus’ hands where it lay dormant for several years until he discovered it in an old box of stuff not too long ago. He then framed it with the supposed shipping-label and provided a helluva laugh for me.

This motherboard provided a lot of fun for me and my nerdy friends. Among other milestones, this was the motherboard that allowed us to try Doom for the first time.

I got a little creative and whipped up this simple wallpaper based on a macro-zoom of the (surprisingly dusty) F4 graciously given to me by my father. In a neat technical loop the camera I used to take the picture is his much-newer Nikon D40x.

It’s always a bit tricky making wallpapers of very detailed photos, since they have a tendency to becoming very “busy” and distracting. A good wallpaper should in my opinion be pretty but not too heavy on the details. This one seems to work.

On a sidenote, I’m becoming really fascinated by the sheer sturdiness of the F4. It’s an almost 20-year old camera, yet it works as well as the day it was new. Apart from some minor scarring it’s difficult to tell that this camera has seen a lot of action, being dragged through all kinds of weather from heat to cold. Also, it’s lightning-fast when snapping off a shot - provided that it’s all setup beforehand, since the interface requires virtually both hands to operate.

You can download the wallpaper from my gallery. Enjoy.

Well, me and Ann-Sofie arrived here in Jokkmokk a few days ago, and today is the first day of the famous winter market.

So far it’s been a interesting stay with some severe moodswings from all the participants. Hopefully this weekend we can get in touch with some friends.

I find it nice to be unplugged for a few days.