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Towing a tractor

Anything but the other

On Tuesday evening Erik and I towed the old Ford 4000 from Vestreng and for more than 20 kilometers to the garage. The transmission is broken, and towing it in neutral was the easiest and fastest way to get it to the garage. It was a bit challenging I must admit, the rope could have been a bit longer. Since it was relatively short I had to watch the brakes and steer (off course). Much like riding the bike together with a team, close to the wheel of the guy in front of you.

Here is a video clip as well

[video:youtube:AZoOu5lYPUY]

Love me, love my doll

Leisure

If you enjoyed “The King of Kong” you really should spend some time watching “Love me, Love My Doll“:

Love Me, Love My Doll focuses on a group of men who have fallen in love with their life-size dolls, called “Real Dolls.” For these men, their $10,000 lifelike, built-to-order creations have replaced human women. Find out what makes these men tick, as they give you a peek at life with their synthetic dreamgirls.

Small scale logging and panorama pictures

Anything but the other

Last weekend I did some small scale logging with an element of high precision at home. A birch was about to grow way to large, and we could risk that it could fall and cut down the tv cabel or worse fall down on one of the houses if a day strong wind combined with heavy rain would occur. Was a bit nervous since the tree had to be cut down and fall very precise between two fences. If it would fall left or right it would hit one of the houses, and if falling completely the wrong way it would cut down the tv cabel. But, with the help of a rope and me doing it by the book everything went according to plan – no one got hurt…

Documented before and after using my cell phone camera and its panorama function. Pretty amazing how it works, but I guess using legs or something would be the best choice in order to create the best result.

Before

and after

Had to shrink the picture width, just click on them to view them in normal width

Entering special characters in VI/VIM

Work/Geek

Had an issue with the c with cedilla character and therefore needed to enter it in VI. Was using SSH to log on to a Linux-server with no other editors available so it was no option to use the character map to get the c-cedilla. After having spent some time trying various Google-searches I found a description on how to enter special characters on the Vim wikia. Entering diagraphs using ctrl-k was the solution to my challenge.

….pshhhhhhh….Puncture

Sport

On my way to work today, passing Havnelageret my bike suddenly became very soft, almost like riding on jelly. Stopped and checked my tires, rear puncture!! Damn, why does this happen on days when I have left home early to get to work in reasonably time? Took my time and spent 15 minutes, had no hurry out in the sun…

Not to bad, my first one this year, and it is my 63’rd time using my bike to work.

B2Evolution on my laptop and RTFM

Work/Geek

Spent a couple of hours setting up my blog engine B2Evolution to run on my Ubuntu 10.4 installation. The most tricky part of doing so is often to get your webserver up and running together with PHP and MySQL. That challenge is easily solved by using XAMPP, or LAMPP in my case since I’m running Linux. By installing XAMPP you get Apache, PHP and MySql (with PHPMyAdmin) together with a bunch more stuff just like that.

All I had to do was to copy my local blog folder to the /opt/lampp/-folder, then run /blog/install and voila, B2 up and running.

But then I had to provide the blog with content downloaded as a SQL-file from my “real” blog. Had to struggle a bit with that one. Using the PHPMyAdmin console to do the import failed, first by a timeout, then because the SQL-file was to big. Soon found out that the best option is to use command line to import data to MySQL. First I tried the command MySQLImport, but I never got it to work. A bit embarrassing to realize that this was a case of RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual). First of all, note that the filename of the SQL-file must match the table you want to import data to, then when realizing that I understood that MySQLImport was not what I wanted. I want to import data to several tables, so I had to use the MySQL-command like this.

Now I have B2Evolution running on my local computer with content from hellem.org, based on my latest backup, because I backup regularly and I’m also able to do a restore 😉

IBM – Open Source friend of foe?

Work/Geek

IBM has for a long time been a contributor to the Open Source community involving themselves in various projects, just take a look at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/ Eclipse, WAS CE and many more. All this in areas where there are many competitors, Microsoft being the main competitor I would guess. Point is, all this in areas where IBM are not alone.

But, IBM has monopoly of one area, and that is the mainframe. They have full control of the whole value chain, both the hardware and the OS and then many tools as well. So here comes Hercules mainframe emulator trying to let people run mainframe applications on other hardware…and the response from IBM…lawsuit of course. I would assume mainframe being the most valuable asset IBM has control over. But I won’t try to dive into all the nifty details here, but instead just provide you with my sources, see

The last one in the list above diving a bit into the details on why IBM is making the lawsuit (apart from protecting their money). I would assume that most people understand why they do it, but that they have chosen the wrong weapon to fight against competition.

From Lindesnes to Nordkapp with bicycle VI

Sport

On Monday I did use my bike for the 60’th time this year to work, not bad I must say, because this includes two weeks of paternity leave and a course for one week out at Kolbotn, and not to mention a lot of days of in May. Anyhow, now I’m all the way to Oksfjordhamn. Could not find much about that place, but a search using Google gives a few hits at least.

On my way to work I’m passing by Akershus Fortress where you can find these chairs. Art is sometimes hard to understand

Also, on Monday morning I started counting cyclists I met from Aker Brygge to Bygdøylokket, 2.2 km, …. 110 cyclists..!!

Reinstalled Ubuntu on my T60

Work/Geek

Yesterday I spent just about an hour reinstalling Ubuntu on my laptop, so now I’m running Ubuntu 10.4 LTS. Since I had tested so much on my 9.10 installation that I had lost control of what was running or not I reinstalled instead of upgrading. Used rsync to sync my pictures, videos and such to my external disk, then just booted with the cd and started the whole process of reinstalling. 7 dialog windows, then it installed itself in just about 30 minutes or so, and then it downloaded the updates from Internet. Really fast, compared to my previous windows installation that demanded about a day to be up and running.