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My first computer was an Atari 2600jr, okay - so it was a game console. But don’t hold it against my parents, they didn’t know better.

But it was what sealed my fate as a “nerd” after having getting hooked on computers after having played games on an Intel/IBM box of some sort at the neighbours house.

I shortly upgraded to an Atari XE 64, a computer I sometimes think that I’m the only one who ever owned. And searching google it might seem so.

But I quickly became an Amigian, and joined the Clan. I had the 500, the 1200 and the 4000. I also spent all my money on the Phase5 PPC cards, but in 1999/2000 as I was finishing up my IT degree at college, I wanted Java.

Java was, and is not available to the Amiga platform, so I had to leave. Going Wintel was not a choice, so I bought an Apple iMac. It was as modern as I could get back then, without breaking my Amiga heart too much.

Now to what this post is really about.

My recent purchase. The Apple Mac Mini.

In my living room I had a HTPC (XP based) and a PS3 hooked up. Currently the PS3 isn’t complete and versatile enough yet to completely handle all my needs.

The XP based HTPC has always given me grief in one way or an other. And lately it’s become so unstable (hardware) that it’s been crashing and rebooting a lot, and worst of all. The sound has been corrupted.

So I looked for a replacement, that would work great, and be very silent. Very very silent.

I considered the Psile PC briefly. And even though I used to hate Windows and all it’s incarnations, I’ve grown to accept it’s existance over the years, and even like some of it’s ease of use and features… But don’t tell my friends at Amiga.org

But the Psile option could not simply compete with the Mac Mini on price. And also, it was hard to determine if it was quieter. In fact, some reports reported the opposite. So at more than double the price, I determined it was a no-brainer, and got myself the Mac Mini.

Tuesday this week it arrived, and I was very curious to see if the myth “It just works” was true.

Here are my experiences:

1. Wifi: I have a D-Link DI-724GU router at home providing me with a WPA2-PSK net. It did just work. But performance was horrible, and I had to change channel and lock in some dynamic features on the router to get max performance, and be able to watch my HD content on my D-Link DNS323 NAS
2. BYKM: Keyboard and Mouse. Check.
3. Screen: My Sony KDL-40W2000 and the Mac Mini aren’t completely at friendly terms. Most of the time when either of them is off, and they get back on the Mac Mini has “lost” the screen resolution. Silly, but here is a guy with the same problem.
4. Sound: Getting the Mac Mini to pass through sound through the optical link to my Pioneer receiver was harder thatn I’d thought it would be. Here is the recepie I followed to get it working.
5. Codecs: With Flip4Mac and Perian I’m pretty much covered.
6. DVDs: ISOs and TS_Video folders, VLC is your uncle. Also DVDs are slow over network. But here also VLC comes to the rescue.
7. MKVs: Perian works, but is really slow, especially over network. So VLS is the only way to go.

I was reading the Playstation Blog, especially this posting.

I’ve played the game, “Everybody Shooter” and I enjoyed it. It’s a fun little retro experience, it’s easy to get to grips with. And it’s hard to be excellent at it. Just the way it should be I think.

But reading about Johathan Mark was almost just as fun as playing his little gem of a game. Here follows some quotes from the post.

In the day of 42″ and 50″ plasma rave, I quite loved this byte: “I look forward to playing Heavenly Sword on my 12″ TV.”

And these were suspicious. They are surely not the variety that one finds in Amsterdam Coffee houses? The quote: “Yesterday I bought 5lbs of hash browns.”

And the best one, the one which convinced me that this is a genuine character: “The Everyday Shooter code has no 4s or 5s execpt in the combination of 54, or in very rare instances 0.5, because 5 and 4 are very unlucky numbers.”

Now, so that it’s perfectly clear. The term “character”, is a term of endearment.

Another guy, who’s got plenty of character is Jeff Minter. If you want insight to the way he thinks, and what he’s up to check out his blog where he excersises his freedom of speech.

I recently left M33 customfirmware for Sonys offical Playstation Portable PSP firmware (version 3.93).

No loss, actually. Sony is really getting to grips with the whole media home experience. And I hate be left behind when Sony is racing along with new features all the time for this killer combo.

But there is still a lot of “missing features” and tuning that has to be done for the features that’s there.

I posted a little comment on the playstation blog here, about what I feel has to be done to the RemotePlay feature.

I love my PSP and PS3, especially with Remote Play!

But I would like a little more tuning to when I’m able to connect.

Currently my PS3 has to be switched off, or listening for connection for my PSP to connect (I have the last but one FW for my PS3 “pre 2.20?, and 3.93 on my PSP).

I’d like it to be so that if I connect my PSP with RemotePlay to a running PS3, it’ll connect if no “counter meassure” is taken on the PS3 locally.

This ofcourse assumes that the PS3 is running in a RemotePlay compatible mode (RemotePlay enabled game, XMB, Folding@Home, etc).

When running something, and PSP attempts to connect, the PS3 should notify the local user to press the PS button or something within 5 seconds or so to reject the connection. If not rejected the PSP is allowed control.

The PSP should get appropriate error messages, like “Connection rejected by local user” or “PS3 running RemotePlay incapable game/activity”.

After a long time away from Appuse I recently had to download it again to make a POC.

It’s really coming along real nicely, I love the ready to go DAO layer, and I was quickly able to produce the POC. My only snag was the bug with full source. It doesn’t work currently. I’ve posted it to the userlist, but hasn’t been able to follow up with more debugging details.

Will have to do that soon.

When I first bought my Thinkpad it came installed with XP. I soon got Vista for a small fee from Lenovo, and Installed Ubuntu and Vista along with my existing XP partition.

Since I ended up using XP the most, no fault of either Ubuntu or Vista, I just felt most at home with XP since it was what I had used the most. I uninstalled both Ubuntu and Vista today.

Both operations were really easy.

1) Uninstall Ubuntu: Vista Boot CD: Bootrec /fixboot /fixmbr. This removes GRUB so that you can delete that partition…

2) Uninstall Vista: Vista Boot CD: (Boot XP) - “e:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force”. This will install a normal XP MBR.

So now I delete the Vista and Ubuntu partitions, and expand the XP partition again..

Vel, etter mye om og men…

Nå virker filteret, og AM’ene snakker riktig sammen! Phew!!

Vel, jeg får ikke demonstrasjonen til Sun til å virke, men programmet MITT virker!

Det hele kokte ned til at det ikke stemmer i dokumentasjonen at det skal hete AMClient.properties, men AMConfig.properties, også for amclientsdk… Den dokumentasjonen gir jeg ikke mye for…

Never write a blog post when you’re angry.

Never write a blog post when you’re angry…

Well, anyway - scr*w that. Here it goes:

Sun Access Manager is poorly documented. Really really horrably documented.

Try this: Install the SAML2 plugin for FM on windows or set up the client SDK…

It’s simply not possible. All documentation is out of date.

It’s not much better with the opensso FAM project either. It just points you to the sun documentation…

Well, Sun have excellent people and they’ve helped me A LOT (THANKS! You know who you are! :))

But I’d just format the docs.sun.com server and start all over again…

An intresting blog post on why the good Tapestry framework doesn’t have a greater following:

Tapestry 101 Blog

This is a post I made at PayPalSucks.com

Fist, let me say that the amount PayPal scammed me. $2.63 or NOK 63.74 is really small amounts for me (about the price of a beer). But it’s when you start thinking scale that these amounts, and the number of transactions PayPal have, that it starts to scare me and make me judge them as a company with immoral business practices.

For thouse out there familiar with dollar-2-kroner convertion rates, you’ll know that $2.63 isn’t NOK 63.74, is’t more like NOK 15 But that’s what’s so brilliant about the “PayPal way”.

This small post I’ve copy-pasted in here retells my story, and illustrates how their “apparantly” random practice is really fixed/skewed so that “the house always win”.

Short story:
March 22nd: Bought two DVDs from KIASMOMMY21 at eBay, amount charged: $146.12
April 17th: No delivery, contacted seller through eBay.
April 18th: Vague response from seller, replied. No response
April 20th: Contacted seller through ebay again, no reponse
April 27th: Opened dispute with PayPal
May 3rd: Escalated to claim the
May 25th: Dispute closed in my favour by PayPal 25th of May, received e-mail stating “You’ll be receiving a partial refund”
May 27th: Contacted PayPal via help form online. No response, not even automated. My account online says “refunding” as status
May 31st: Called PayPal, they assured me I’d receive a full refund to my card
June 1st: My balance was 0, they refunded me $146.12 and my account total shows $143.49
June 5th: The refund is completed. They refunded my PayPal account, not my card.

So, I called them today June 5th. Seems that after much back and forward. They are still working on the refund and will transfer it back to my card.

I tried to have her explain how adding $146.12 to my $0 balance added up to $143.49 but all she could say was “currency convertion rates fluxates”.

This is the currency conversion history of my case, remember. Both my account and my card are in NOK (Norwegian Kroner).

March 22nd: Purchase of $146.12. PayPal debits NOK 923.09. This is a rate of $1 = NOK 6.3173. The official rate that day was 6.1126
June 1st: PayPal refunds $146.12. PayPal credits NOK 859.35. This is a rate of $1 = NOK 5.88118. The official rate that day was 6.0352

See how clever you can be? You can even make money when refunding users! Using the iternational magic 8 ball exchange rate agency they are guaranteed to make money no matter what they do…

I seriously considering closing my account when this is all over, and rather by stocks in PayPal.

Update/Edit: By the way. An important point I missed out on initially is, what if this had been a bigger purchase? Say $2000 of computer eq or something? $1500 on that collectable Jabba The Hut peabag chair?

I got away lucky. But I’m sure these conversion stories have worse side effects, just imagine how it can be for defrauded merchants who use PayPal…

Se her

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