The city of Oslo cleans its streets every spring. I’ve never seen this in any other city I’ve lived in–it’s quite amazing. And most likely friggin’ expensive.
This is how it works: The Road Services put up temporary “parking forbidden between timeX and timeY” signs. If your car is not removed at the designated time, they will kindly do it for you. (Not really, it is towed and you have to pay something like 2000NOK to get it back). Then, one street at the time, cleaning machines remove every trace of dirt, sand and gravel.
This phenomenon took me by surprise last year. I hit the street one morning, not quite awake. But that quickly changed when I saw that the street I lived on was completely empty! It’s kind of hard to explain if you can’t see it, so this year I took som pictures. This is what the street normally looks like and this is what it looked like during the cleaning.
I’m quite happy about the spring cleaning. Especially because one of my neglegted hobbies is in-line skating (skating on a dirty street is no fun). The ‘blades have been waiting in my closet after being brought to Norway (too) late last summer. This year, I’m not wasting my chance.
April 24th, 2006
Many Opera employees (Brian, Magnus, Henrik B and Charles to name a few) have created maps showing which countries they have visited.
Because everyone and their dog has created a map by now, I wanted to do something different. Thus, I created a map of all countries which represent an Opera employee nationality. There are 35 in total, and that is quite impressive considering the fact that Opera is a Norwegian company with less than 300 employees.
Without further ado: The Opera Nations.
(Oh, and if you really want to, you can check out my map. Spectacular, innit?)
April 21st, 2006
I often use the UNIX command line tool scp (secure copy) to copy a file to a remote server. However, scp has one major drawback: It doesn’t support resuming a transfer. So whenever I’m transferring a file and something comes up which interrupts my transfer–which is bound to happen–I’m cursing away at scp. The solution? Use rsync. It is overkill for most things I do, but when a transfer is interrupted, it is handy. Now, on to the doing.
I want to transfer the file “myFile” to the server “remoteMachine”, which I do with scp:
scp myFile remoteMachine:dirToPutIn/
(You should know this already if you’re reading this in the first place.)
(Muzak while the transfer is in progress; a loud wail and the sound of hair being torn out by its roots as the transfer comes to a grinding halt.)
Time to resume the file with rsync, which I do thusly:
rsync --partial --progress myFile remoteMachine:dirToPutIn/
The “–partial” argument is what does the trick. I added “–progress” because I like to see how the transfer is going; rsync understandably doesn’t show this by default as it is mostly used for purposes which don’t require live progress reporting (e.g. scheduled backups).
Because I know I’ll have this problem again at some point, I have created an alias in my shell’s (zsh) configuration file (~/.zshrc):
alias scpresume="rsync --partial --progress"
I know that rsync and scp are not necessarily related, but the name “scpresume” reflects the purpose of the task I wish to do. And getting it done is what matters the most after all.
Update:
Jan pointed out in a comment that rsync communication is not secure by default, and that you should use tunneling to achieve secure communication. Andi provides the solution which is quite simple: Use --rsh=ssh (use ssh as the remote shell). Thus, our alias from before would look like this:
alias scpresume="rsync --partial --progress --rsh=ssh"
April 5th, 2006
I randomly came a across this BT Broadband ad:
I understand the message they were trying to convey, but what an unfortunate way to express it.
March 22nd, 2006
I guess I was wrong:
Back to beautiful snow and people bitching about traffic!
February 28th, 2006
In System Preferences > Energy Saver, I have my display set to turn off after one minute. Since my iMac never goes to sleep, and it’s in my room, I prefer this setting. But it can get annoying when my display goes to sleep after one minute because I’m reading something and thus am not using the mouse or keyboard.
I tried finding a way to manually turn off the display (app, AppleScript, shell script, anything), but in vain. However, I stumbled upon a very simple workaround: Whenever I wish to prevent my display from going to sleep, I simply turn on the Visualizer in iTunes.
Note: This will not work if hide iTunes or disable the iTunes window, as both of these will stop the Visualizer.
February 27th, 2006
I don’t like this time of year, season-wise. It’s the time where the snow starts to melt and the trees haven’t come to life yet. It’s the time where we go from this:
… To this:
Soon the snow will be gone and the city will reveal its dirty truth. Fortunately, it won’t last long.
February 26th, 2006
The other day, I opened a terminal and executed “whois google.com”. I don’t know why, because the result should be obvious. Far from it.
Excerpt:
GOOGLE.COM.VN
GOOGLE.COM.UA
GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM
GOOGLE.COM.MX
GOOGLE.COM.IS.NOT.HOSTED.BY.ACTIVEDOMAINDNS.NET
GOOGLE.COM.IS.APPROVED.BY.NUMEA.COM
GOOGLE.COM.HAS.LESS.FREE.PORN.IN.ITS.SEARCH.ENGINE.THAN.SECZY.COM
GOOGLE.COM.BR
GOOGLE.COM.AU
GOOGLE.COM
(Complete output)
If you know the explanation for this, please leave a comment. I’m totally blank.
February 23rd, 2006
The country in which I have spent most of my life as well as the one in which I currently reside have recently seen their national emblems being burned on the streets of remote nations.
Both countries’ embassies in Syria have been burnt to the ground; “Danish consulate in Beirut ablaze” is the current headline on CNN’s web site.
Al Qaeda connected group encourages “chopping Danes to pieces”.
All of this because of some cartoons.
I simply cannot put into words the feeling of frustration in my head over the pitchfork-and-torch-like behavior that is being shown at the moment. And worse, the situation is escalating and shows no signs of stopping. This is a potentially lethal crisis with unimaginable consequences.
Wikipedia covers the events as they unfold.
February 5th, 2006
The other day I installed iLife ‘06. When it was done, the Dock quit but did not relaunch. To get it back, I would normally log out and back in. I didn’t want to do that in the middle of a DVD burn, and I didn’t want to wait either (duh! I’m an impatient, solution oriented geek).
Using the system without the Dock would normally have been pretty much impossible. However, I was running QuickSilver, so I just used that to lanch Opera. I googled, but wasn’t able to immediately find anything useful. Then it struck me that I’d seen the Dock in Activity Monitor running as an application, not a service or anything fancy.
So I fired up Terminal (again thanks to QS) and typed find / -name "Dock.app". And bingo, there it was: /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/.
With that little piece of information, launching the dock was trivial:
open /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/
There you have it. You know, just in case.
February 3rd, 2006
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