This Mind Intentionally Left Blank

(Playing Kraftwerk - The Telephone Call.)

Warning: This is a long-wound complaint post. The only reason this is going to the Planet is because I have no method yet of disabling individual posts for syndication. Please skip, with my apologees for the noise, if you don’t want to listen to complaining. May contain nuts. May drive you nuts. Drove me nuts. Mmm, pistachio.

When I was around 11, I got my first cellphone. I was very proud. This was back when being 11 and having a cellphone was a real novelty; pagers were still being sold, and the NMT network was still running. Like many things I appreciate, I found it in a dumpster. It was ancient, even then: a Motorola MicroTAC brick, missing its antenna. I borrowed one of my grandmother’s hairpins, and voila, working phone - as long as you didn’t leave Oslo. It had a certain cyberpunk look to it, even then: I loved it.

I remember that I first bought a NetCom pay-as-you-go card; I don’t quite remember the number, but it had “283″ in it at the end, if you want to wardial. For some reason, Dad needed a SIM card so I gave him mine. So I bought myself a new one, a Telenor card, pay-as-you-go, number 91 85 95 08. I must have been around 12 at the time. And that number served me very well.

Fast-forward 6 years, to late March, 2006. I had just turned 18, and one of the first things I wanted to do was get a massively cheaper, proper subscription. I’d been procrastinating it for a bit - as I am wont to - but when a nice gentleman at the subway station told me about a nice new company called SEA Norway and their wonderful prices, I accepted. Big mistake. Here begins the saga of woe…

For a good while, I was very happy with their service - even though GPRS data never worked, I never used it anyway. Their name changed to Vitel somewhere along the way. I received a phone call from an enthusiastic salesman who told me how much cheaper Vitel’s power subscription is. It seemed very reasonable, so I went for it.

One of the arguments he gave me was that I could collect all those utilities into one bill. I told him that I couldn’t have this: Since I’m a live-alone student, my power bill is covered entirely by the city council, so I need a proper bill to hand over every month. “Sure, that’s no problem”. I check and double-check that, and I stress it. Sure, no problem. OK, deal.

Big, big mistake. They draw 2700 Kroner from my account, using the automated pay system (AvtaleGiro) that I had set up for the phone bill. 2700 Kroner (530 US Dollars) is a lot of money, especially when your monthly income, 5000 Kroner (1000 US Dollars) barely covers the necessities. So I cancel the autopay system. (I still have not received that money!)

23rd of January, my subscription is cut, since I hadn’t paid the bill. They hadn’t mailed it to me, and I’d told them I’d cut the AvtaleGiro, but I simply did not receive the bill. So I call them up in February some time and try to figure out a solution. “You didn’t pay the bill, so the subscription is closed.” -”So if I pay the bill, will you reopen it?” -”No, sorry. It is closed now.” -”So then I’ll have to transfer the number to another provider?” -”No, you can’t do that; it’s closed now.” -”You can’t refuse to transfer the number, that’s simply not legal.” -”Sure it is, the subscription’s been closed.” Urgh.

So some time in the middle of March, before The Gathering, I call NetCom up: I want to transfer my number to them, please. Sure, no problem. No, this number is registered as active in our system. All is well. We’ll make the switchover on March 28th, and you will get your SIM card in the mail: It should be in your box by then. Fantastic!

The 28th of March came and went with no great ceremony, not even a SIM card. No switchover occurred. I give them the benefit of the doubt for more than a fortnight. Some time in April, then, I get sufficiently annoyed to call them up and ask what had happened. “Oh, no, it seems Vitel is using the old transferral system”. -”OK?” -”Yes, you will have to send us a form with your signature by fax to carry this transfer out.” -”Sigh, alright. Where can I get this form?” -”I’ll email it to you.” Great. So I get the form.

May was very busy, so I didn’t get an opportunity to fill the form out,  and by now I was getting fairly tired of the whole thing anyway!  The thing that finally got me, however, was a bill from Vitel - on the “closed” subscription - for not only the monthly fee, but also several kroner of SMS “content services” (Read: ring tones) and GPRS data (Which never even worked even when the subscription did!)

So last Tuesday, June 3rd, I send them the damned fax. Wednesday, June 4th, I call NetCom up and ask what the status is of my subscription. “Oh, yes, this is now active with us.” -”Really?!” (I was happy in the way that only someone who’s gone 5 months without a working phone could be.) -”Sure, we’ve sent the SIM card to Bekkeveien (something).” -”…Bekkeveien? But I’ve never lived at any Bekkeveien. My last name is Bekkedal, but..” -”Alright, then that’s probably a mistake. What you can do, though, is go to a NetCom dealer and pick up a new SIM card.” -”Perfect! I’ll do that, then.” (I stress “pick up” for a reason which will later become apparent.)

Goodie. I’ll get a working phone! I was very happy as I took the tram down to Aker Brygge and looked everywhere for the damned NetCom dealer. Having finally found it, I happily stride inside and ask for a SIM card for my subscription. “Sure. That’ll be 200 Kroner.” Argh! I hadn’t brought enough money! She did say pick up. Oh well. Aker Brygge is a center of business, I’m sure there are other shops. So I ask to use one of their phones to call NetCom. Sorry, no phones you can use. Sigh. Fine. Do you know of any phone booths around?

They didn’t, but I found one anyway, finally. I deposit the necessary $1 for a local call (See, this is the problem with having a cellphone company run the phone booths!)  and dial NetCom customer service. They take my number and - Sorry, that number isn’t yet active, it’s still registered to Vitel. ARGH! Fine. So what’s standing in the way? Well, Vitel can’t refuse it - (thanks, I know that already) - but the form that I was sent wasn’t the right form. The form I need to send is from Vitel to Vitel, authorizing the transfer.While I’m trying to hold a conversation with the customer support guy, some drunk guy is accusing me of stealing phones, and begins reading out loud the sponsor company names on the back of my DebConf T-shirt.

But Vitel has already told me that I cannot transfer this number, under any circumstance! They consider it closed! “Yes, but you have to talk to Vitel.” -”I have!” -”Well, we can’t really do anything…” Alright. So I hang up and I try to call Vitel. But that doesn’t work: They closed at 3 PM!.  So finally tired of Netcom failing to port my number for a while, I call Telenor.

I talk to a very cheerful and helpful lady who admits to not knowing about the particulars of that situation. Fantastic! At least she isn’t going to fib it! She says that she has a vacation Thursday, but she can call me back on Friday after discussing the matter with the number transfers department. Wow! She’s actually going to confer with the relevant expertise! This is too good to be true! So she said she’d call me back Friday at 1PM with a status update. As I am writing, it is Friday at 11:01, I am anxiously awaiting the telephone call.

But now I get a funny SMS message:

From: NetCom 

Message from NetCom: Your number has been ordered by another operator. We would like to remind you that violation of the commitment period will be billed to the order of 1500 kroner. For questions, call 05050.

My subscription with Vitel was made in 2006, more than the 12 months I and knowledgeable friends believe to be the maximum legal commitment period (I doubt I would have agreed to more anyway!). Besides, the text message keeps saying that it’s from NetCom. So my deduction is: It’s from NetCom, who I have registered an active subscription and are now complaining that I’ve moved the subscription I’ve opened with them (but which they have not successfully moved from Vitel), over to Telenor. I don’t think this is an unfair conclusion.

So I call NetCom customer service - which to NetComs infinite credit is a number you always can call, almost like 112 (technically it’s accomplished completely differently, but you get my point. The number is never blocked in a blocked subscription.) And they say it’s not from NetCom, even though it says it’s from NetCom.

So I’ll keep both of my readers posted on the developing situation. At least the text message indicates that something is happening with my subscription.

I just want the dialtone!

Those of you who know me might be aware that I have a fondness for cool and neato hardware which is possibly a tiny bit above that of the average geek. I have more nodes on my ThinNet than on my TP network, for example.

Back in February, I had the random idea to call SGI Norway and ask them if they had anything they were about to throw out. I knew that they were working hard on moving from MIPS to Itanium, so perhaps some hardware was disappearing along the way.

Oslo didn’t have anything, but when I called Bergen I found out that  they were about to throw out a large amount of hardware, including some really nice boxes like an Onyx2 deskside workstation, and some Origin systems. For those of you who aren’t into SGI machines, I can sum it up by saying that these are really cool computers: Big, noisy as hell, heavy, and in terms of performance, nearly on par with a normal desktop nowadays. In short, fantastic educational toys.

So, this was in February, and we were making arrangements for transport to Oslo, until one day I stopped receiving mail. I didn’t think much of it; email is asynchronous, and I figured he was busy doing something else. I was certainly very eager to get at the machines, but didn’t feel like nagging at him either. Finally, recently I sent him a polite reminder, and I get the rather rude response:

Diagnostic code: smtp;550 cuda_nsu 5.7.1 <****@sgi.com>: Recipient address rejected: THIS USER IS NO LONGER WITH SGI. CONTACT help@sgi.com IF YOU NEED INFO.

I tried calling the Bergen office, but the number was out of service. So I call the Oslo office - and I am told the Bergen office has been shut down, and all the equipment has been thrown out.

This is the bummer of the century, for two main reasons:

1. I’m not getting cool hardware that I was totally looking forward to getting,
2. Great hardware has now been ground up for use in car tires.

For some odd reason, the second reason is infinitely more grating than the first. I feel like a museum curator being forced to watch someone feed a Picasso painting to a paper shredder. This really, really screwed up my day.

When I code, one of the tools I use which I like the most is GNU screen. My current project involves the editing of a bunch of different source files, and often jumping frequently between them. I was spawning windows and trying to edit files that I had already opened in a previous screen, and often ending up with a bunch of windows with files I wasn’t using much at the time.

So I did some research on how to optimize use of vim and screen together. The first thing I came up with was getting screen to display a nice bar at the bottom by adding this to my .screenrc: (Thanks, Red Hat Magazine!)

hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= kG}[ %{G}%H %{g}][%= %{= kw}%?%-Lw%?%{r}(%{W}%n*%f %t%?(%u)%?%{r})%{w}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}][%{B} %Y-%m-%d %{W}%c %{g}]'

This gives you a neat and coloured (mmmm… colours…) status bar at the bottom of your screen display, including some info on whether other terminals are attached to that window and such.

One thing which would vastly improve the usefulness of this would be if I could get vim to set the screen window title. The escape sequence for doing this is the same as for other terminals, but vim’s terminal information database does not include the relevant entry for the “screen” termtype. So (with help from “frogonwheels” and “godlygeek” in #vim) I put an entry in my .vimrc specifying the escape codes for setting screen’s window title. In addition, I abbreviated the window title string to contain only the file. Here is the relevant snippet from my .vimrc:

if $TERM=='screen'
exe "set title titlestring=vim:%f"
exe "set title t_ts=\<ESC>k t_fs=\<ESC>\\"
endif

A casual glance at my school grades chart will immediately reveal that I am not a structured learner; I’m not the type of user who will, when adopting a tool, begin by reading the manuals. I’m more of a gradual, ad-hoc learner, and I tend to prefer to stick to the defaults whenever possible. Since vim and screen are probably my primary tools for doing work, I should probably do some more research on things like this.

These suggestions may be somewhat trivial, but I’ve found them to be quite useful, so I thought it might be useful to someone. Please leave a comment if it was, or if you have any comments (duh!) or suggestions.

Today in Oslo, Wednesday April 9th, 12:00 AM, there will be a demo against the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard.

I’ve not got the time at the moment to elaborate on this, but adopting OOXML as an ISO standard is a really, really bad idea, mainly because it will weaken ISOs standing as a serious standards organization. I’ll whine at length about it in another post.

http://blogs.freecode.no/isene/2008/04/07/demonstration-outside-iso-conference

Be there, or B²!

Today, in a fit of fool-Hardy-ness, I upgraded one of my computers to the most recent Ubuntu development release, codename Hardy Heron. Amongst the several other bugs I encountered (the kernel not booting was a rather noticable one…) was this adorable little bug in tracker.

(Some background info: Tracker is a file alteration monitor - like Apple’s Spotlight, and …whatever the Vista knockoff is called. ImageMagick is an image processing utility, invoked with the command “convert”.)

So - picture this situation: Tracker is searching along, and encounters a graphics file. Being a graphics file, Tracker realizes it wants a thumbnail. Tracker calls convert. Convert creates a temporary file. Tracker notices a file has been created. It notices that this file is an image file, and therefore wants a thumbnail. Tracker calls convert…

You can guess what happens from here on.

This lovely bug reminds me quite a lot of a story I read a while ago which had been uploaded by Eric Smith to his wonderful PDP-6/PDP-10 resource and folklore website, “I/O Deja Vu, A Farce in One Act“. Worth a read.

Update: Within ten minutes, the very helpful Saleem Abdulrasool (”compnerd” on IRC) helped me debug it and comitted a change to upstream, so it’s fixed in the next release (expected in a few days). Filed a bug on the Ubuntu package. I love FOSS.

A Norwegian company, apparently a second-hand car company, named BUS A/S. I almost wonder if it is intentional?

Check out their web site, here.

Update: Actually, it’s apparently not a used car company, but they write software for used car companies, like failure statistics, etc.

…BECAUSE I DON’T THINK YOU ARE!

This is probably the funniest image I have ever seen on Wikipedia:

UPDATE: It seems that Wikipedia editors (Humourless bastards!) have deleted this as a non-justifiable use of a Fair Use-licensed image. Hrmph.

I recently attended the Play! concert in Oslo, with a friend who was visiting Oslo from Bergen.

The concert took place in an expo hall just outside Oslo, which was being used for the Electroworld electronics exposition. Wow, has that ever changed! I was there the first time, three-odd years ago, when it was arranged in Oslo Spektrum, and I was bitterly disappointed! It was nothing but a slightly larger Expert Electronics store. I was angry that I had actually been conned into paying for this.

This year, it was completely different. They had a gigantic venue, with lots of interesting booths. Yamaha showed off some truly gorgeous digital pianos, and electronic drum sets, NRK was there, to show off their beautiful HD-1 HDTV production bus, and all kinds of interesting things. Even so, it was very clear that Expert was trying to get you to buy stuff. Something just doesn’t sit right with me about paying money to enter a store which is marketed as an expo.

My previous experience with Electroworld meant I was not at all interested in repeating it. I wanted to catch the concert which was being held there. But they wouldn’t let me in unless I bought a ticket for the expo. Having already paid 70 EUR for a concert ticket, I was not enthusiastic about paying 15 more EUR to be allowed to enter the venue. But I relented, and was duly fleeced.

I only got around 30 minutes of time before the concert started, so I didn’t get all that much time to look around.

The first part of the concert started. The orchestra was the wonderful KORK (AKA Kringkastingsorkesteret, AKA “The Norwegian Radio Orchestra”). They started off with a beautiful fanfare by Nobuo Uematsu. However, their choice of music frustrates me deeply. They played some of the obvious classics, like Mario, Sonic The Hedgehog, some Zelda, but most of the time was wasted on some really lame music.

It seems that their repertoire was not chosen based on the musical merit of the games, but on the current popularity. Why else would they be devoting time to some dull, insipid incidental music from WoW, Halo, and Silent Hill, without even an identifiable motif, as opposed to more of Koji Kondo’s wonderful Mario or Zelda tunes, or - damnit - Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy music?

This is the thing that has left me the most disappointed. They practically ignored the elephant in the room of game music, Nobuo Uematsu. His compositions are absolutely beautiful, and they really shine when performed by a classical orchestra. You can practically tell that they’re meant to be performed by them, rather than some dinky Super Nintendo synthesizer chip. The Final Fantasy VI Opera, most of the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack…

They then proceed to play One by Metallica. …WTF, you ask? WTF, indeed. Their justification was that it’s in the soundtrack from Guitar Hero. That’s absurd. And it wasn’t even a very good performance. It was still pretty funny that this very serious-looking classically trained vocalist slowly walked up on stage and gave a really good performance - he really did sound like the Metallica vocalist.

Almost as an afterthought, at the very last, they play One-Winged Angel, one of the most dramatic and beautiful pieces from Final Fantasy VII. The audience breaks into absolutely wild applause. But - what - they bring in a METAL BAND on stage. A GODDAMNED METAL BAND! And they proceed to absolutely slaughter the whole piece! The choir and orchestra are drowned out by loud electric guitars with riffs that don’t make sense, and a drummer that can’t even keep the damned beat - the bass drum was all over the place!

Seemingly not content with simply omitting his music, they have to absolutely demolish the performance of it.

I actually have to say that this is by far the most disappointing concert I have ever gone to. Granted, my expectations were high, but just to witness a live performance by this wonderful orchestra of the Prelude, Anxious Heart, Tifa’s Theme, Eyes On Me, Fighting!, Still More Fighting! or Aerith’s Theme would’ve made the 85 EUR worth it. Judging from the audience’s applause when he first mentioned the Final Fantasy series, I think they agreed with me.

A party calling themselves Oslo Byaksjon this year entered the elections, with the tagline “På parti med byen” (roughly, “On the city’s side”, or “With the city”).

Their platform wasn’t horrible, and I briefly entertained the notion of voting for them. In the end I didn’t, for some important reasons; but that’s not very relevant.

A Norwegian tradition is for the political parties to set up stands leading up to the election, along Karl Johans Gate (Main street, the street between the Royal Palace and the Storting (the parliament building), and this year was no exception. However, almost a month after the September 10th city elections, Oslo Byaksjon still haven’t removed the fiber boards after taking the thing apart. They’re now an orange eyesore in the middle of Oslo’s main street.

Ironic!

(More pictures here)

Update: ZOMG, I am on Planet Debian. Hello, friends

Recently, I have found myself becoming more and more interested in politics. The Norwegian municipality and city elections finished yesterday. I was present at the Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet) election wake. The mood was one of quite tense expectation. As the votes ticked in from the schools around the city, it became clear that while Arbeiderpartiet had made a very good election this year, gaining nearly 5% of the vote nationally - still keeping its position as the largest party at 30% - but SV, the Socialist Left party, had made a disastrous election, losing nearly half of its vote in Oslo, going from 20% to 10%.

The mood there was less than stellar, as this meant that a social democratic majority in Oslo was not going to become a reality. Surprisingly, some say that this was largely because the former Conservative mayor Per Ditlev-Simonsen was caught for tax evasion of several million Norwegian kroner - through some kind of “all PR is good PR” justification.

A significant amount of the votes went to Venstre, a fiscally conservative socially liberal party, which has successfully branded themselves as an environmentally conscious party. Being fiscally conservative, it seems likely that the party will join in a coalition between Høyre (Conservatives) and Fremskrittspartiet (Far-right xenophobic populist) - meaning that the environmental vote ironically goes to support a party which doesn’t believe that global warming exists at all!

A lot is riding on what Venstre will decide when the dust settles down, but it is very likely to be some kind of a coalition with H and FrP, perhaps with a mayor from V. - In any case, we will have to wait another four years before the opportunity arises to change this situation.