It has been a long quiet week on this Blog. I haven’t been able to find myself in writing mood, it just hasn’t felt right.
Tomorrow I am meeting with Jerker to discuss what I hopefully will feel after the meeting is OUR joint plans for the Media Technology division. As I wrote before I have gotten the feeling that he has totally put me aside and he feels that it is his responsibility to solve this, not mine. Also, it is now clear that he is leaving as prefect as soon as possible to attack the next step on his ladder as dean of the technical faculty. One possible candidate is Thomas, the current pro-prefect for Systemteknik and head of the control group division. I am a bit divided in how I feel about if Thomas will be good on that position or not. He is a very listening person while at the same time he can be very black and white. He is unfortunately not very pragmatic, very much the same way as the previous prefect, Bengt. Anyhow, the meeting with Jerker has been on my mind all weekend unfortunately.
During the week I have had the honour of attending another part of my management course and I had a very good interview with Sören. One conclusion is (it comes back over and over again) that I shouldn’t be afraid of conflicts, both in positive and negative meaning.
Tuesday evening our 18-group (the management course participants) plus the PMI coaches were all invited to Britta’s huge house. It is an old transformer building build about 100 years ago. It is three stories high and the top floor is just one large room with over 5 meters in ceiling height and the room is over 100 m2. This was one of the most beautiful houses I have ever seen!! I have tons of photos but I haven’t had the will to put them online yet. The party was very nice indeed even if the not the whole group came. It was also Sören’s 41:st birthday. Congratulations my friend!! Freddie was there in spirit and I really missed him not being there. He had been part of all our earlier sessions and it felt wrong when he wasn’t there.
This Sunday I spent almost entirely with Tovah. We played two Mulle Meck games, building houses and cars and the latter was of the two my favorite. A bit to advanced for Tovah to play on her own but I enjoyed it and Tovah enjoyed being there with me đ We also went for a magic story time at the Norrbotten’s Museum. 45 minutes of interactive store telling and Tovah got to play one of the main leads. I think she thought it was a bit scary to be up there because she didn’t really understand what she was supposed to do. Bruno, the magician was very good and entertaining for both young and old.
By the way, we have cancelled our winter vacation to the Phi-Phi islands because we thought it was to expensive. We will take a cheaper trip during the winter instead. Perhaps Madeira again? I really enjoyed it there. Or perhaps just a cheap trip to the Canary islands?! We’ll see….
Yesterday I played with setting up a new router for my Tele2 connection with automatic Tele2 login, firewall, NAT gateway, dynamic DNS etc. etc. It took some time to learn everything but I now have a fully working gateway and during the week I will migrate some of the computers to test how it works “in production”. There is nothing wrong with the bandwidth (about 10Mbps down and 8-9 Mbps up towards LTU).
I also found a new great gadget blog, Gizmodo (yes I am a gadget maniac even though it is not as important to me anymore).
It feels good to write again, I don’t know why I stop when I feel down. It is just the same with my physical training. As soon as I feel infirm I stop training, but I know that if I train I will feel better. I just have to push myself harder. This weekend I have cycled about 20 Km in two days which at least something but way to little for me to get that good being feeling about myself.
I saw the Hulk earlier this week and it was very good actually, at least the second part. Also finished 24 season 2 last week and I am really looking forward to season 3 which starts in two weeks in the US. Haven’t decided yet if I want to wait until the whole series has been aired and then watch it in condensed form (as I did with series 2) or see each episode directly as they “leak” out on the net. The one that lives will see đ I highly recommend this to anybody that enjoys action movies. During the whole season 2 I only felt one episode being “series boring” and that is a very good grade coming from me regarding a TV series!!
Book wise I have finished the trilogy about Arn, the Temple Knight and I am now in the middle of the fourth book in that series, the Arn Heritage. I enjoyed the three first books very much but the fourth feels from time to time more like a history facts book than a novel.
Well, it is time for another night in bed with the lovely wife. Good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite!
Category Archives: Techstuff
The Science Blog
Found new great blog, The Science Blog.
Windows Messenger 5.0 beta
Just tried out the new Windows Messenger 5.0 beta and the cool thing is that it supports Ink, i.e. the writing with your pen on a TabletPC and then sending it as an image. He draw back is that the receiving end must have Windows Messenger 5.0 as well. If you want to receive ink messages from the contact me for a copy of the program. I guess they are going to work more on the beta as the ink part is rather limited still. You cannot change pen or color.
Hacking DP-500 PC-Link
I was just about to start reverse engineering the DP-500 PC-LINK protocol when I found this, the OpenDP-500 project. It seems like the protocol is totally http based and open-dp500 has already done the job for me in figuring out which commands are used.
My next project is then to write a real-time Divx3->Divx5 converter.
KISS DP-500 initial thoughts
I have had the KISS DP-500 for a day now and here are some initial thoughts.
The machine looks rather nice but the CD sledge is gray plastic and looks very cheap when opened.
- The Divx3 support comes first in June (they announced yesterday)
- You cannot stream any other movies than mpeg4 avi. I.e. MPEG1/2 cannot be streamed.
- The webradio feature is rather nice, where you select radio channels at their site and design radio menu. The player “hanged” after playing radio for about 20 minutes though. Not so good.
- You cannot fast forward in MPEG4 movies but they claim to have a time search function instead. On some movies this alternative comes up but after doing a seek the video is all choppy, and in other movies it doesn’t come up at all (i.e. nothing happens when you press the button on the remote).
- The remote has way more buttons than are used. Rather confusing.
- The menu system should be looked over by someone that knows UI design.
- You can zoom in the video which is nice.
- I added my whole MP3 collection (several thousand of MP3s) to the KISS PC-LINK software and now I have a very good MP3 jukebox.
- They state that DVD+R/RW aren’t supported but at least DVD+RW works fine for me.
- The photo album part needs more work. It scales the images to way less than PAL resolution and you cannot zoom into the pictures.
- Support hasn’t still answered my email I sent them 4 days ago. Big minus!
All in all, I think it is a very good machine and if they could release the Divx3 support then it would be perfect.
KISS DP-500
Got a KISS DP-500 today. I can see the box in my office (I am at home right now). It is a networked MPEG player (audio, video) designed by B&O.

New camera? Pentax Optio S

The new Pentax Optio S looks very good. It is the first ultra compact camera to have 3x optical zoom. It is about half the size of an Ixus and weights 115 g (with battery and memory). Links: DPreview, Pentax USA, CyberPhoto.
No network
The network is down and I feel totally isolated. Everything I do relies on resources on the net. E.g. 3 minutes ago (14.00) an online meeting regarding Stefan Elf’s and Jeremiah Scholl’s PhD work should have started. Sigh, why can things just work? I cannot even post this message although the server is in my garage but unfortunately it relieas on a DNS server at the University (which I cannot access right now).
The net came back after about 50 minutes after 4 calls to the support department đ
New Additions to the Sidebar
Added Today’s word and quote in the sidebar! These are automagically updated from time to time đ
I am an Apple Un-switcher
I just realized that my Apple G4 DP (2*1.25MHz) hasn’t been turned on for over 2 weeks now. The reason is two fold, it is too loud and it generates so much heat that it gets overheated in the closet. Come on Apple, make better hardware.
Performance wise, I have made some comparisons between the Apple Tower DP and a Intel 2.8GHz machine and the PC is more than twice as fast on almost all operations including graphics programs, CD to MP3, games (they have identical graphics cards). MacOSX is great but it doesn’t work to well in a mixed Windows and Apple environment. Just to much things that take longer than necessary to accomplish.
I am an Apple Un-Switcher!