Windows 7 and Google Wave

Okay, it's been a while since I've written about techy stuff here. Mostly because, as I mentioned in my last post, I've been waiting to create a separated blog for that. However it takes some time, especially since I haven't been able to work on it. So here is a post to feed you tech-hungry people. With Microsoft launching Windows 7 almost two months ago I guess at least some of you have tried it and started to get familiar with it. For those of you who haven't I'll here give you a small update. I changed from my dual boot of Windows XP and Windows 7 to a only Windows 7 setup on the 2nd of November 2009, the first thing I noticed was that the task bar had changed. You probably all know the standard Windows taskbar with it's tiny icons and text, apparently Microsoft figured that it was enough of this extremely simple and effective system. The new system is consistent of larger icons without the text. Looking something like this:

Of course there's an easy way to change this by right-clicking and going into options quickly giving you back the familiar taskbar:

I prefer to use the last one simply because it robs less room from my workspace and gives me more information. What's cool with it is that you can pin objects to it. So if you've got a program you use all the time while you're on your computer you can simply pin it to the taskbar and now it'll stay there even if the program is closed. But as I use Objectdock and Launchy I don't really have need for another program launcher option. The next thing you'll notice is that if you let your mouse hover over a taskbar icon you get a tiny preview image of what the window look like, so hovering over Opera would give me this:

And if you then hover your mouse over the preview image it brings the window into focus until you move your mouse, great option if you want to take a peek on some info while working in another window. E.g. for checking Facebook while writing in word or checking on a copy status while watching a movie. Another new taskbar feature is the right click. While this normally brought you a tiny menu where you could close the window or other simple features the Windows 7 version brings a more feature filled flyout menu. So far it doesn't seem like a lot of programs have a lot to put in this menu but Google Chrome for example puts it's recent visited webpages and open new window options there. And of course the pin to taskbar option is also located here.

But what you probably will notice most on a first look is the improved graphics. I've never been one for killer graphics, always saying that it's the content that matters and not the looks, but good looks are always a plus. A lot more now moves and flies around on your screen instead of just appearing and disappearing like in older versions. But one thing which really annoys me in Windows 7 is the UAC. When I first sat there with a fresh install of Windows 7 and was about to install a bunch of programs it was really a pain to be asked numerous times for every single install. And as I've already got antivirus software I trust and never really visit untrustworthy websites I figured I was better of turning it of. The next thing I noticed was that I couldn't alter all my files! As I know what I'm doing I would want to be able to delete, change and add files anywhere in my system. But after searching for a solution to my problem I can't find anything! It seems like Microsoft for whatever reason have figured out that no one should be able to edit the files in for example "Program Files". While I can kind of see where they're coming from I would wish that they would at least leave an opening for the people who know what they're doing to modify stuff on their own computer.

But there is more! The standard programs which is shipped with Windows have also got an overhaul. Paint, for example, is one of them. But while they've added lots of new features, like drawing triangles, hearts and other figures, it still lacks basic rotation and layer support. But the calculator have finally got square root in scientific mode along with n-th roots, something which I find pleasing. Along with this there is of course a lot of other functions and tweaks, and while it's still a lot better than Vista I'm not sure I would have left XP just yet if I still had the chance. Mostly because of the inability to modify everything and some incompatibility problems with old software(like Worms and the drivers for the Internet here..).

But enough of that, if you really want to know how it works the best way to do go is to simply create a new partition on your hard-drive and install it there. Now for something completely different:

As some of you might know Google have launched Google Wave, a new tool meant to replace the e-mail. As Google say, e-mail was created about 40 years ago. And while e-mail is a lot easier than regular mail for managing multi-person projects it's not really optimal. Just think about trying to arrange a BBQ per mail, regular mail, with letters. That's more or less what you do when you do it by e-mail, just a bit faster and easier. Google wave on the other hand is kind of a mix between mail and Wikipedia. Everyone can add, edit and change info. Add maps, images, upload files and comments. A good, short video describing Google Wave can be found here, or if you've got lots of time you can watch the full 1h20 video here. At the moment it is in a preview state meaning that you would need an invite to use it, everyone who's using it at the moment got a few invites so if you want to try it just contact me and I'll see if I've got any left. Even though not a lot of people have it yet it seems like this would be a really neat way to plan stuff and arrange projects. So far I've tried it with a couple of friends and the result so far are great. But I'm not as sure about it as a replacement for e-mail. While it surely have some great advantages it's got one major disadvantage over e-mail. It's only for Google. While I use Google services(G-mail, Google Wave, Google Earth, Blogger, YouTube etc), not everyone does. And while e-mails can be sent between all different mail clients, from the tiniest home-made mail servers to web-mails Google Wave only exists for Google. And while this might be a good idea for marketing I'm pretty sure that we'll soon see companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft and others creating similar solutions. Also they working only for their users. So if I want to create my BBQ I would have to create a Google only BBQ or work as a link between the technologies to synchronize everything between them. So as nice and shiny Google Wave seems I just don't see it replacing anything anytime soon. It will just join the ranks of cool solutions that never caught on for other than us techies. And as another sidenote is does not work in Opera yet, and in Explorer it forces you to download a so called Chrome Frame. But Google Chrome works perfectly(obviously) for Google Wave ;)

Wowzer!!

As usual it's been a long time since last post (unfortunately). But that only means there are a lot to write about, hurray. So as I still haven't split my blog in two I'll start by splitting this post in two. First I'll tell you all the stuff which have been going on lately and then the stuff which will go on soon and then I'll tell you about stuff like Windows 7 and Google Wave. So lots and lots to look forward to ;)

So, I visited Brussels two weeks ago for a so called Oxfam breakfast. For those of you who don't know Oxfam is pretty much the same as fairtrade (might even be the same thing). My job there was to walk around with a Norwegian flag and talk about Norway for those who where interested, turns out that was about zero people.. So what I ended up doing was to walk around and talk with the other exchange students which were there in the same service. Here's a picture of two of them (from Egypt and Italy if my memory doesn't fail me completely) and one of the other people there:

From Peter's universe: The Peterverse

From Peter's universe: The Peterverse

After that we went to visit mini-Europe, which is a place where they have made miniature models of famous buildings from Europe (in terms of the European union, so no Norwegian stuff). I got approximately 200 photos from there before my iPhone first ran out of storage space and then battery, after that I took some with my host fathers camera. A lot of them are to create high quality panoramas though so I'll get back to you whenever (if ever) I get that done. But here are some samples, including two photos of my host father standing in some funny suits:

I'm just wondering, if Norway was in the Union what should they make a miniature of The castle would be a good idea, but don't we have any other cool buildings? And of course we visited some of Brussels landmarks, the Atomium picturing an iron (that's at least what they say, haven't checked) molecule symboling strength between the regions of Belgium. And of course also the small peeing boy, which seems to be somewhat of a symbol of the town (for reasons yet to be known :P)

From Peter's universe: The Peterverse

And I also found a Norwegian flag! There was apparently some kind of competition where you could win a trip to a Scandinavian country or something like that.

From Peter's universe: The Peterverse

Talking about Norwegian stuff (smooth transition), tomorrow is so called Potluck, meaning that everyone are supposed to make one dish from their country and bring it for everyone to taste! Fortunately for the other I chose not to make fermented fish or fish in lye, but rather some "fiskekaker" or directly translated "fish-cakes". I just hope they'll like the Norwegian food better than my host brother, when I made "risengrynsgrøt" he went to bed hungry. But I have to say that the food here is pretty good, however they eat way too much for me :P For lunch for example it is completely normal to buy a Mitraillette, which is a baguette with a special kind of sausage in it and all buried in a pile of fries. I'll be sure to take a photo if I buy one, probably have to starve myself for a few days to be able to eat it though..

And soon it's Christmas :D That is of course after St. Nicholas, which is on Sunday, the tradition here is apparently that all the students get a cup, get out in the streets and beg for money, then goes to the supermarket and spends it all on Alcohol :P And if people don't give you money you are supposedly meant to throw eggs and flour on them.. Kind of like one-upped Halloween for older people ;) Got exams the week after though, so probably not a good idea to get too hammered. Doing math in French with a hangover just sounds like a really bad idea. But of course, Christmas here is not like Christmas at home. We're already at the fourth of December and there's no snow and it's light during the day.. I actually thought I would never say this, but I actually miss the 24 hour darkness. It's just so Christmasy :P

But as I've got to get up early tomorrow to make my fish-cakes I should probably have gone to bed a few hours ago. I'll try to write the tech stuff someday soon ;)

Amsterdam!!

Okay, the small posts thing failed miserably.. It was definitely a good idea (I think) but I ran into some problems. First of Facebook was obviously not able to take the feed data from the blog feed and prefix a counter link from my server so that I could monitor the traffic to my posts. This of course rendering my short-post experiment pretty useless an there was no true way of monitoring the effect. Another problem was that Facebook didn't check my feed often enough leading to my posts being published there at about 6 PM instead of the scheduled 11 o'clock which would correspond better to classes back in Norway. But what in the end put the project on ice was simply my decision to split this blog in two. One technical blog and one more personal blog. Thing is that I wanted to write something here about my recent change to Windows 7 but I felt like I should wait until I'd set up the tech blog. Only problem is that I would want to program the entire blog system myself to ensure that I can control every aspect of it. Something which leads to me having to learn some more php(sorry to all of you who didn't get that statement :P) I've figured out though that I'll write something about it here after this post and I might post something about it on the other blog as soon as I've got that together.

So yesterday I went to Amsterdam with AFS! Getting up at 5 o'clock on a Saturday is never a favorite but we all have to make some sacrifices ;) So after a three hour train ride we finally arrived. Here is a picture taken as we waited outside the train station:

From Amsterdam

The first thing we did was to walk through the streets watching the coffee shops and tilted houses. Here are some photos from walking around town:

From Amsterdam

From Amsterdam

From Amsterdam

From Amsterdam

From Amsterdam

From Amsterdam

And also an extreme suspicious add:

From Amsterdam

Along with regular Amsterdam stuff like a Cannabis seeds store :P

From Amsterdam

Then we visited something which was apparently like a Monastery in the way that women lived there and prayed but it was a lot more liberal than a Monastery. I took some photos from there and created these two synths:

And we also visited the Red Light district but as we were not allowed to take pictures of the prostitutes it was kind of hard to take any photos at all. But I ended up with this one:

From Amsterdam

Not really a good photo but one step further into the Red Light district and you couldn't take pictures without a prostitute in it.. The store on the left hand side says "Cannabis College" by the way :P

After this we had a break were I watched a magic/comedy show by a Canadian street performer, even though his magic was kind of lame and I'd seen some of the tricks before I enjoyed the whole comedy thing even though from time to time it got a bit tedious.. After that we went to Madam Tusauds and looked at the freakishly realistic sculptures. I took some pictures which can be found in my Amsterdam album here:

But I'm going to bed now so I'll have to fill you in on the details some other time.

Going to England!!

Okay, everyone, new day new post. I'm so excited because my school have figured out that if 90% of the 5th grade is in on it we'll go on a trip to Normandie and England! In Normandie we'll of course visit Omaha Beach as expected but the cool part is when we go to England. What will happen there is that we get a host family! That's right, I'll be on exchange on exchange :P How cool isn't that :D

If you want to give me a call

This weekend I was sick, something resulting in me staying in bed until 5 o'clock PM on Saturday and trying to relax as much as possible on Sunday. Therefore it obviously haven't happened a lot to me since Friday, apart from that my neck now hurts as I've been lying too much. And I have to say, when your head hurts when you perform sudden movements and your neck hurts if you turn to fast, sneezing is an unfortunate event.. The guy who invented disease had to be an evil genius. Not only do you freeze while you're in fact so hot that you sweat, but you also get random pains in your body, like someone hitting you out of nowhere (and when those randoms hits the more sensitive parts.. Well, it hurts, a lot. You know what I'm talking about). You need all the energy you can get but you still don't wont food, and the list keeps growing longer. Though this time around I didn't loose my appetite. The worst part was that they had no understanding of why I wouldn't take any medication against any of this, and I couldn't really explain them why. I ended up just saying because and leaving them wondering :-P

And by the way, I've got a Belgian phone number now (actually got it ages ago but I've forgot to tell you). However I'm considering to change to a plan instead of pre-paid cards as it's getting expensive as I text a lot here :P But anyways, my phone number is 0032-49=92*53^27/5. I've added some semi-random mathematical signs so that bots wont notice it's a phone number and start spamming me, just in case. Anyways, life in Belgium is going awesome, just went to Bruxelles last Wednesday and I might go to Namur this Wednesday. As everyone here ends school at 12:00 on Wednesdays it's a tradition to go out after school. And I even start late on Thursdays so it fits my schedule perfect :D Talking about schedules here is my time table for school for you who are curious about what I do down here:

From Peters universe: The Peterverse

Sorry if this isn't the most interesting post in the world, I promise Wednesdays post will be better ;)


And here is todays XKCD strip (They're commemorating geocities shutdown by redesigning their page, probably just for today but have fun :-P):

Lots and lots to come :D

Okay, so as you might have noticed I haven't posted anything here lately (except from my still unanswered question). I've done a lot of stuff lately but I've just not had time to share them with you, until now ;) But to save you from reading a tremendous post, which would probably be a few pages long if printed, I've decided to write a lot of small posts and set them to auto post over a longer period of time. So the first one (this one) will be visible to you on Friday, the next one will appear on Monday, then one on Wednesday and another one on the next Friday and so on until I run out pre-written posts ;) But for those of you already familiar with XKCD you might notice that that is the exact some frequency as Randalls awesome comics. So I figured that, as his comics are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License I figured I should share them with you here ;) Not only will it save you time, but it will also get Randall a bigger audience. Unfortunately I have no way of telling the exact link of the future strips so I will have to put his entire site in an iframe here. So here is Fridays strip:

If I figure out a way to read the information from a given point in an html site and then use that information here I will make sure to update the posts.

Sorry for the delay

Okay people, long time no, uhm, read? Anyways, I've been pretty busy lately (I know, worn out excuse). I've got lots of stuff I want to share with you, but first I've got a question for you: Should I split my blog? So far I've had a mix of tech stuff and personal business. But I just feel like it creates some dilemma in sharing. On one side I want to share my thoughts and ideas with as many as possible, especially on the "geeky" side. But I don't want to share my entire life with the world. So I've been giving it some thought and I'm considering to split this blog in two. One personal blog (probably stay here). And one technology/ideas/thoughts etc blog, this will probably be moved away from Blogger as I want full control over what it looks and works like. Anyways, tell me what you think ;)

Life on the farm

Over the last few days I've really got to feel how it is to live in the country. First it was the pumpkin fest. Which was a cool event, lots and lots of pumpkins and other different stuff. Amongst other things the local alcohol "Peket". This is a drink which is about 20-40% and is flavoured with an extreme variety of tastes, from Absinthe and Cannabis to chocolate and Speculoos(a cookie which tastes kind of like gingerbread). The whole repertoire can be seen in the photo album below. And the people here are awesome at making sculptures as you can also see in the album.

And today when me and my host brother was on our way home he told me that I would have to help them capturing two of the sheep as they were going to slaughter them. And to your pleasure and amusement I didn't film this one. But if you really want to have an idea, picture the spray from when you cut the throat of a fish combined with a small garden hose. But as they sheep was killed two things came into my mind: Does sheep ever realize that this is the end? It certainly didn't seem like it as one of them started eating just before his head got pulled up and a bolt was fired into his skull (sorry for the lingual image there, but that's how you kill them). Another thing which struck me was how close in reaction the sheep were to a fish. If you've ever gutted a fish you know how it have got post-mortem muscle spasms. But with the sheep it is a lot more, real. Like you see the sheep in the back of the garden just walking around and suddenly they are lying there blank eyed (yes, that actually happens, kind of creepy) and their feet are running on in thin air. And I also wondered, does all house held animals suffer from the Stockholm syndrome or do they actually like it?

I've also figured out one of Belgium cultural differences, which almost got me in trouble. The thing which I'd done was to not ask for permission to go somewhere, as normal I just told someone in my family (in this case my host brother) which apparently didn't suffice. And for some reason which is still not clear to me they called my counselor to say that I was gone instead of calling me on my cellphone and ask where I was, with who, and when I would return, which is apparently the information they need to let me go places.

But as I've done lately I'm going to stop here. Keeping it within reading length ;) So if you want to have all my photos and stuff before anyone else be sure to subscribe and make sure to comment ;) Oh and a mini-vote, if you like the short posts better than the long ones, thumbs-up, otherwise thumbs-down (please judge solely on length and not on content)

Oh and I added two photos of the AFS students at a water-pipe bar to the my Liege album (don't worry, smoking is not my style, just went with them as we was out on the town):