Older blog entries for jonas (starting at number 36)

So it's been more than two years since I posted anything here. In fact, it's close to three years, since the 7th february entry 2002 was just a one line link. So what can one do here? Let's spend some time finding that out.

Two minutes into this I discovered an Advogato bug; the RSS feed bombs out when there's an entry with no content.

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Merry Christmas everone!

I wish I could even begin to describe how interesting the past few days has been, but I wouldn't even come close even if I tried.

It all started when an, shall we say, incident, occured at a company I have close connections with. I was outraged that something like that could happen to such a company and I wrote to a journalist aquaintance of mine to tell him to write an article about incident response plans in Swedish Internet companies. Foolishly, I mentioned the company I had just heard about by name. Little did I know what would come of that slipped note!

My aquaintance thought that the article idea was interesting enough to put it in their article database. But even more so, he was interested in that an incident had occured at the company, which shall here remain nameless. Without my knowledge, he wrote a snippet about it on the newspapers newsticker.

The morning after he did so, I got a call from my girlfriend telling me that a certain company president was rather cross with me for letting something like that slipp to the press.

Now, it should be said that I was to an interview to this nameless company about three months ago. I havn't heard from them about a job since then. I'm now perfectly happy at my new job and I hold no disgrunted feelings towards them; quite the contrary actually since a number of my friends work there.

My journalist aquaintance published an updated version of the story where the president of the company was quoted denying that an incident had occured. At least that's what the untrained eye would see. Carefully examined, the quote never denies that something happened. It only denies that any valuable data was stolen, which I never claimed and which I feel that the company can not claim before having evaluated all evidence from the incident.

That would have been the end of it, unless he also went on to claim that, and I quote (translated to Swedish); "The Jonas Öberg, referred to in the article, is, as far as I understand, a technician who recently applied but didn't get, a job here."

That quote completely blew me away! It was so completely unrelated and the only intention he can have had with it is to defame me. He knows perfectly well who I am and how I came into possesion of the knowledge I have about the incident.

Welcome to the sandpit everyone, and enjoy the upcoming new year!

This monday I begun working at the Department of Informatics at the School of Economics and Commercial Law in Gothenburg University. My tasks there involves taking care of their web services and securing the long-term issues related to those services. This suits me rather well since it's something I've been doing for the FSF for a long time.

It also means that I will spend a small amount of my time doing system administration on their GNU/Linux boxes (primarily those running the web server), which also suits me well.

All in all, I'm fairly happy with the tasks and the environment around the university. Much, much, better than Volvo where I used to work. Much more freedom and a much better understanding of what is important.

The only downside right now is that someone seems to be feeding for christmas. Feeding on IP packets that is. Roughly 47% packet loss on the network between two buildings, but hopefully that will sort itself out eventually.

Things have obviously slowed down in the community as christmas approaches. Many I know are taking a few weeks off from hacking and so some things that I thought I would have time to do this week will have to be postponed until after christmas, which probably is a good idea anyway.

It's amazing how much time you can spend christmas shopping. In two days shopping I've bought as many presents, and I'm not even halfway through my list. But it's a great deal of fun, and I've found almost as much stuff for myself as for others in the process! ;-)

I have been convinced again to accept a regular job, this time as an administrator for a departments web services on one of the local universities. The upside of this is that it removes a fair bit of economical stress.

This last weekend we had visitors from Stockholm (primarily). It was a great deal of fun, but hardly any hacking was done. This week I've been busy with a few deadlines, so I've been primarily busy writing and having horrible hiccups (two days straight now; I'm exhausted).

Other tasks that have occupied me as of late is some things related to the FSF Europe and getting my inbox down to a manageable size. Also wrote a patch for findutils that enables `rm' to accept a list of nullterminated strings on stdin which it treats as files and promptly removes. I think it's completely useless. It was caused by a friends innocent comment and my approaching deadline.

Burried alive under heaps of email. Spent a lot of time yesterday writing various bits and pieces for future work, and spent some time caring for my sick girlfriend who was home from work.

Other than that, I got around to playing with freeWAIS a bit more. I then got the idea that I should modernize it and spent some time on this. Then I asked myself, "why?" and stopped doing it :-) The reason is that WAIS is based on Z39.50 (I believe), version 1 or so. Version 3 is what most people use and advocate today and there's some free utilities to deal with that already, such as those by the Danish company Indexdata.

Monday. I think I'll leave it at that for today. I just want to note that I finally got around to installing a new GIMP, and of course I had to play around with it a bit. With inspiration from a friend, I managed to produce something utterly meaningless; Scripttease!.

Update: I found a copy of Norton(tm) AntiVirus / Personal Firewall 2001 (OEM Version) that I got with my motherboard. So I had to install it.

Yesterday I got back from my mothers place where I had been celebrating my birthday. Today I finished the C++ tutorial and then went on to learn basic Java. It's not really difficult at all. In fact, it's actually easy, but it will probably take some time until one learns all the packages that are available for use.

After that, I setup my computer so it's now able to play DivX ;-) files, which my girlfriend likes very much. We have a plan to put a terminal in the living room and store movies on our DLT tapedrive.

Birthday! And what do I do? Yes, I book a time with the dentist just after lunch. Hopefully that will not take too long though. Been listening a lot to Mike Batt's recording of The Hunting of the Snark lately. It's really very, very good. I'm looking forward for their new recording of it. I've also gotten a book with many of Lewis Carrolls' works, including The Hunting of the Snark. I think I've gotten Snark fever.

mpawlo: The issue of free software and democracy is an interesting one that I havn't made up my mind about yet. In general though, I feel that free software might be a tool to further a decmocratic society, but it doesn't necessarily promote democracy in itself.

I want to speak to you about some FSF Europe issues though. I'll send you an email about it or something of that kind next week.