English version:

{“%title” }(%length){ by %artist}
{track %track }{on «%album»}{ (disc %discnumber)}

Norwegian version:

{«%title» }(%length){ med %artist}
{spor %track }{på «%album»}{ (plate %discnumber)}

Paste the above codes into the OSD tab found in Amarok’s preference interface. The type face (font) is 16 pt. Lucida Bright with dark blue text color #051f33, and light blue background color #2b8ce0. Enjoy.

The braces are a fallback mechanism for files with missing information. The layout only presumes that the track has at least a length.

Even though Opera currently accounts for just a few percent of the mobile browser market its servers deal with about a quarter of all of Norway's data traffic.

Wow! Opera’s web to compressed-mobile-version to phone servers must really be running like crazy!! Norway offers one of the worlds fastest broadband connection to private homes, and has the worlds best broadband penetration. Everyone uses the web. Using a quarter of all of Norway’s bandwidth is quite something!

I wonder whether Opera will team up with telecos around the world to try and decentralise their service. Maybe the business plan is to sell and implement their compression technology into the telcos’ own systems?

Since most cookies are transmitted back and forth between the server and the browser with every request for every resource…they tend to slow down everything. The requests can be speed up by blocking unnecessary cookies such as cookies from advertisement, session and user identification cookies, preference cookies that repeat the information available elsewhere in the request (HTTP content negotiation), and so on.

Konqueror enables quick reviewing of each cookie before they are stored in the cookiejar. Thus allowing users to expose what cookies really are necessary. The only web browser I know about with better cookie management is Internet Explorer 7 with high privacy settings.

I have been studying cookies set in my web browser for a three months. I am shocked by how poorly cookies are implemented on many popular websites. For example, about every website sets cookies globally instead of limiting them to a path. If they where limited to a path—like, the path to the single resource required to know the contents of that particular cookie—they would only be sent when requesting that particular path. Most websites instead find it most effective to send every cookie with every request. Thus slowing down every request with a couple of unnecessary extra bytes in the requests.

Until website developers start thinking of their cookies, I recommend experienced web users to start looking at their cookies.

Do you monitor what information is stored in your cookiejar?

PS: I apologise for the new analytics cookies set by Mint being pushed trough this site. They are not efficiently designed at all. I have contacted the developer of Mint about the matter. I will stop using Mint analytics if a new cookie-efficient release is not made available very soon.

It really did take a reinstallation to fix this problem. Or, it took a reinstallation for me to bother to fix it. Anyhow, there were no documentation of the issue, so I though I would post it in my blog.

Apparently only your non-battery powered external harddrive shuts off during a power outage. Your battery powered notebook computer stays operational. What a fool I must have looked like to the consumer support guys at Western Digital in the Netherlands. Somehow I am glad their support department was in another contry.

This incident did however remind me of how fragile my data is. But really, how do you back up a 2 TB drive?

The advantage to Windows’ approach is that the menu line is always available, kept in context, and you have one for every of your open windows.

Illustration 1: Windows’ menu line

The advantage to Mac OS’s approach is that the menu line does not take up so much space; thus allowing for smaller windows and easier window management for multiple windows. Apple keeps the menu line out of the way by giving it dedicated space.

Illustration 2: Mac OS X’s menu line

In both approaches the user always know where to look for the menu line.

I personally feel that the menu line takes up too much space. Microsoft seams to agree with me as many Windows Vista applications does not have a menu line at all! However I disagree with their practise of removing it all together. It is a way of interacting with applications that users are familiar and comfortable with. Even though it is clunky and have not changed much since the early nineties.

I think the menu line should be kept within the window it is supposed to be used by. So I disapprove of the top-of-screen approach on Mac OS. However I usually have a lot of applications open so managing large windows is a problem. Uncluttering the windows by removing the menu line does help solve this problem.

Collapsing approach

The golden middle way is having it both ways. By having it underneath the window titles, and not having it underneath the window titles. I am not contradicting myself, but I am talking about collapsing (or hiding) the menu line when it is not in use. Imagine:

The menu line would be collapsed by default. By clicking on the title line or holding Alt on the keyboard; the menu line would expand into the window from the black line separating the title line and main area of the window. Then the menu line would collapse again when the user had preformed the action or selecting something else. Double clicking on the menu line or pressing Alt twice would toggle the menu line as expanded for that window.

This behaviour could be expanded into less useful toolbars by user configuration too.

Expanding/collapsing would maybe have an icon next to the minimize, expand, and close actions; and the toggle would maybe have an icon on the right side of the menu line/toolbar.

Illustration 3: My proposed collapse interface, expanded with icons

What do you think? Would you like to hide the menu line? Do you even use it!? –if not, what do you use instead (keyboard shortcuts, toolbar icons, written commands, …)?

ENSO is a simplified command line interface for launching applications and preform basic operations with simple commands. You hold down the CAPS-LOCK key, then start writing your command; and ENSO obeys. In recent months I have found ENSO the only application making working on Windows bearable.

I contacted Humanized a few months ago with feedback and feature requests. I also requested that they make a for-pay Linux version. The reply back then was not overwhelmingly positive, but they did not reject the possibility for a Linux version either. I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that they have set their code free, and teamed up with an amazingly helpful volunteer named Guillaume Seguin who have made the core for the Linux version already.

I hope ENSO Launcher for Linux will be as good as it is on Windows XP. I also hope that it will integrate well with KDE (and Gnome). It would be a shame if it did not!

I am really looking forward to getting ENSO on my Linux desktop!!

Telenor lets me forward my mobile phone calls to the VoIP phone at home for free. So I can turn off my mobile phone and then I am only available when I have got the time to be available; when I am at home. It is good to let go of the connected world sometime. Most you will hear is just nonsense anyways.

I will get the VoIP service plan and the phone up and running in the beginning of May, along with a faster 8 mbps. broadband connection. But before that I will get another gadget… Ironically enought, this is also the time when I choose to buy a new and much more fancy mobile phone!

The new Nokia 6500 classic is beautiful. It has got everything: email client, web browser, Bluetooth, 3G, 2 megapixel digital camera, … I cannot wait to start planing with it!

I picked this mobile phone because of it connectivity features (Bluetooth and 3G) and professional/business look. I dislike all the toy-like mobile phones on the market. I wanted something sleek and elegant. I also have had pleasant experiences with phones from Nokia in the past.

…but I am sure you, as well as I, am wondering how my disconnecting from the mobile phone world with a fallback to a home based VoIP phone-project will co-exist with my new and beautiful mobile phone? Well, I guess the mobile phone will win the first two months before I get tired of it and want to disconnect again. Time will show.

Do you feel like turning off your mobile phone and disconnecting sometimes? Then why do you not do it more often?

great posts from Open Source Notebook

all posts as usual

I noticed a couple of users from the service, and thought I would share the feed link with the rest of my readers. Enjoy the full feed or grab the selective version focusing on number of comments and other factors of the PostRank algorithm.

Debian only includes static releases as repository sources by default. But when running Linux on a desktop, you will probably want to update as soon as new stable release is available.

Changing # /etc/apt/sources.list to refer to stable instead of etch will keep the system up‐to‐date with the current stable release; instead of holding it back at one specific static stable release.

# Current stable release’s repositories
deb ftp://ftp.no.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb-src ftp://ftp.no.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free

Run # aptitude update afterward to make the system aware of the changed paths (or possibly even update it if needed). Note that you still have to make a #aptitude dist-upgrade when new stable releases are made available. Chaging the repository will only make you aware of when the stable releases changes, and not change anything by it self.

I want a fresh installation to make sure I will get rid of all old problems when I do it all over again. By doing everything from scratch, I hope to remove all the misconfigurations I have made and left lying around on my system.

I also want to manually spesify options when creating the / and /home partitions. By default, EXT3 reserves 5% for the root user. This is a lot of unusable disk capasaty on a 0,1 TB+ disk.

Update@10:15, this can apperently be changed by # tune2fs -m 0 <partition> too.

This is going to be fun.

I dislike this practice. It is fine by me if someone wants to sell their knowledge of implementing an open source tool. That is the way it is supposed to work! But more and more frequently I stumble upon web portal/publishing agencies that are taking all the credit of creating something they are only implementing.

The open source blogging tool WordPress is very often ripped off, renamed, and claimed to be our very own product. I can understand the desire to do so, but it does not make me feel any better about it.

I hope these companies run out of business and disappear very soon. In my eyes, it is much better to claim that a company is an expert in deploying a technology rather than claiming they created the technology. I would rather talk to an expert than an adventurous lonetick any day.