Blåbär is not Blueberry

Yesterday I was reading about a tasty dessert including bilberry. I like berries and I have never heard of bilberry before so I started to google for it. At the top of the search there was a link to my favourite source of knowledge Wikipedia.

I was quite surprised to see that bilberry is the same as what we in Sweden call blueberry. But we call it the Swedish name blåbär, which directly translated and literally becomes blueberry. This has lead most of us to use the word blueberry when we talk about our blåbär in english. This seem to be very wrong of us.

I asked several of my colleges what they call blåbär in english and all of them said blueberry and none of them knew what bilberry is. This topic covered most of our lunch time. :)

The truth seem to be that we don't have any blueberries in Sweden or any wild blueberries anywhere in Europe. They only exist in North America. What a surprise!

There are some similarities and some differences between the berries.

Bilberry have a dark blue skin and dark red or purple meat with a very juicy sweet taste. They break easily and stains your fingers and the stains are very hard to wash of. The berries are grouped one by one on the plant. They are very hard to cultivate and therefore you only find them in the wild were they usually grow up to 10-40 cm low bushes.

Blueberry have a blue skin and white or light green meat. The meat is firmer and not as sweet as bilberry. The firm meat makes them not as easy to break and are easier to transport. The berries are a little bigger than bilberries and have a "crown at the end". The plants are higher than the low bilberry plants and the cultivated ones are up to 4 meters tall. The berries are grouped together in clusters of several berries.

Here you can see the bilberry at the top and the blueberry at the bottom. As you can see, they are quite different from each others.

Maybe we should use the name bilberry or maybe "European blueberry" if we want English speaking people to understand what we mean.

Play Ogg!

I'm writing today to ask you to support the Play Ogg campaign.

Are you tired of constantly being prompted to download proprietary software and plugins to play the videos and listen to the music you want? Are you fed up with seeing new gadgets that only use incompatible and restrictive audio and video formats? Did you know that it's not a lack of technological know-how that causes this, but software patents and other legal restrictions?

Increasingly proprietary software companies like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe are pushing video and audio formats that restrict access and restrict software developers, but there is an alternative that can be played on all computers without restriction—Ogg.

Ogg provides professional grade multimedia formats. Ogg is used extensively by free software projects, artists and a growing number of music and video distributors.

Soon over a million children and their families will be receiving the One Laptop per Child XO computer designed to play and create Ogg files. By advocating now for Ogg we can help ensure that those children will gain access to, and not be unnecessarily restricted from thousands of educational resources and materials on the web.

Join us in advocating for Ogg right now by taking 4 Easy Steps: Install VLC multimedia player, sign-up for the PlayOgg advocate mailing list, find and share Ogg friendly sites, and put PlayOgg Buttons on your web site or blog. After all that, if you are still looking for more to do, consider encouraging others to do the same.

Start here: http://playogg.org/

Jusandan 2009

Girlwing and I went to the Jusandan weiqi tournament in Aspudden in the southern parts of Stockholm. We haven't been practising anything since the Linköping Open tournament in September 2008, so neither of us were expecting any good results. I would be happy if I managed to win two out of five games. Instead I told myself that I can take the loss and see it is practise and a nasty kick off for some study before the next tournament in Västerås next month.

In the first round I met a new guy who seemed to be at his first tournament. This game went quite easy for me and I won by a lot. It always feels good to win your first game in a tournament and this time it felt even better because of my low self confidence.

The second game was against one of my most evil opponents. Well... he is actually very nice but I have never won against him. So in this game I didn't have much hope. But I had the luck on my side. I had marked out a huge corner that never got invaded and I was able to secure the territory later and that was enough for me to win the game. I was so happy! Finally I won over this guy! I even have two wins in a row and already got the two wins out of five that I was aiming at. So now I can lose the rest and still feel ok.

Time for the third game of the day and I was starting to get tired. I had even felt something that can be the beginning of a cold. My head was heavy so I took another cup of coffee and sat down with my next opponent. The game started quite good and I felt that I had a comfortable lead. So I started to relax at the same time I was fighting to keep my focus while I get more and more sleepy. Then it happens... My opponent plays a move that threaten to invade the corner or cut of some stones. I got shortcut and play totally wrong and my opponent can jump deeper in to my corner and I play wrong again and have only one eye. Then I start to play desperate moves trying to capture something or escape. I read wrong and play sequences that does not work and my corner dies and I play to a huge loss.

Now finally it is time to go home and we are very hungry and I feel very weak. Probably both from my coming cold and because of the need for food. So we go directly to the ICA supermarket to buy something. I buy a skagen (seafood) sandwich, a chocolate drink and some dextrose tablets. Before I get home it starts to itch on my legs but it is nothing I think about but closer to bed time is start to itch everywhere. That night I hardly slept anything and the most problems were the itching of my hands and I almost scratched of all my skin. Later when I looked myself in the mirror I saw that I had red spots all over my body. Scary... It really look like an allergic reaction and it must have been something that I ate.

So after almost no sleep, it is time to get up again for the second day of the tournament. In the fourth game I play against my friend Pel. I have played him three times before and he won two and I only one. Last time we met, he won. This time I wanted to win! The game started quite well with my chinese opening and he invaded maybe a little too early. I could attack his stones and chase them out while I was building territory. I think I had a lot of initiative and that is always comfortable. I made a couple of reading misstakes but I was lucky and the sequences we played did not end bad for me. In the end I won and now our score is even at 2-2. Next time I take the lead Pel! ;)

By now I have a tournament score of 3 wins and one loss and I am more than satisfied. So I can relax and just have fun in my last game. In the last game we had a very large ko in a corner. I first believed that I lived when my opponent played a smart tesuji to create a ko. The only problem for him was that I had a thousand local ko threats while he had to search all over the board. So in the end he gave up and let me capture four stones and connect to my outer stones. This for sure game the victory in that game.

So there I won four of five games! That is really really good! Especially without practice. But I feel like I was lucky in this tournament. If I play these games tomorrow I will probably have more problems. So I am not sure if I deserve to be ranked up to 3 kyu yet. First I said that I can rank myself to 3k but Girlwing said that I should probably play another tournament to see if I am stable at this rank, unless I play more games online and see there what level I really am at.

Official results
Some pictures by Larske

Jusandan by Girlwing
Jusandan by Smernaz
Jusandan by Pel

Do not get drunk on wine

"Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery.
Instead, be filled with spirits."
(Ephesians 5:18)

AR-System 7.5 - What's new?

To increase the excitement in the project I want us to install the latest version of ARS in the server, mid tier, clients and why not exchange the whole ITSM with version 7.5! Yeeaahh! Here we go! :D


ARS developers x-mas:

• BMC Remedy Developer Studio. I haven't seen this yet but I have heard a little about what it can be and I want to say: Finally some improvements for us developers! I have also heard that it now can be possible to use Linux instead of this hated Windows for a development platform. I hope it is true. There is also a possibility to search for object, which is great when you have hundreds thousands to manage.

• Workflow debugger! Yeah! Finally!

• Version control. You can lock objects for others when you modify them and you can get a log of every change of an object.

• Application-Set-Filter-Phasing is a new run process command for delaying inserts of entries into a form so that they can be inserted in bulk for greater efficiency.

• Dynamic join of multiple forms on runtime using API call ARGetListEntryWithMultiSchemaFields. With this you can create recursive queries, value-set queries or joins with vendor form data in an external database.

• Run process command line can handle 4096 characters instead of 256.

• ARGetCacheEvent API call can be used to monitor if changes have been done in the workflow or not. Can be useful... we'll see...

• It is now possible to join external data sources with internal AR System forms.

• Possible to log to forms instead of to files and then put workflow to filter out what you are really interested in. This can be useful...

• A new log file for measuring mid-tier performance.

• 64 bit AR servers for UNIX and Linux using a 64 bit database.

• Image server object. This is "a place" where to store images in the AR Server. Then references to these images are used when building applications instead of a lot of copies of the same image. It is common to have images on buttons to give them a nicer look and a common feel throughout the application suite. It is a bit strange that they didn't implement this earlier.

• Remedy Import tool is dead, long live Remedy data import tool! The old tool needed an upgrade so we will see later how much better this all brand new tool is.

• arimportcmd is dead, long live "a Java data import command-line utility". Hmm.. why?

User impressions, or details that makes the ARS developer cool:

• Auto completion in fields that have a menu attached.

• Tooltips which is small messages that are shown when holding the mouse over some field or data. There is a HOVER event that can trigger active links. This sounds quite powerful and can be very useful to create user friendly interfaces.

• File system browser character field. A new display type for the character field. With this you can search for a file in the network and save the file name in a field but not save the file. I can see its use but it is very limited.

• Cell-based tables. Display the whole data row with several columns in one cell instead of several. Yes we can make more beautiful designs with this.

• Possibility to remove the (clear) value from drop-down lists. Our customer will be so happy!

• Panels! These sounds great... replaces the page holders and in many cases the trim box. These will probably make my life as a user interface designer much easier!

• The panels in the panel holder can have tabs like the old page holder, collapsible/stacked (not really sure what that is), splitter which lets you see all panels and drag to resize them, accordion which sounds a lot like the old tabs but but a bit cooler.

• The panels can have solid or gradient colours, background images, rounded corners.

• Possible to expand or collapse panels with workflow.

• Possible to trigger workflow on when a panel expand or collapse.

• Text formatting templates in HTML to be used by workflow with tooltips or viewfields.

• Buttons and URLs inside a table field.

• Possibility to use PNG or GIF images and use the transparency effect.

• Yahoo User Interlace Library, a collection of libraries in JavaScript™. With this library we get the possibility of animated highlight effects of fields using workflow.

• Quick reports in the browser, saved per server, per form and per user.

• Flashboards are using Adobe flash technology.

• There will be a countdown clock in the browser telling an inactive user how much time there is until his license is expired. Do we really need this? Can I turn it off?

• If you close the web browser or navigate away from the mid-tier, the license will be released after a configurable delay timer has expired. I hope this time can be set really really short, because we see this will be a problem today in earlier versions.

You can read more details here about BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.5.0.

BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.5.0

Here it is! In the middle of our project to implement version 7.1.0 of BMC Remedy AR-System and here version 7.5.0 is released. I can not believe that we will jump on the 7.5-wagon this late in the implementation project. But I wish we would... I really do... That would be exciting... in many interesting ways... :P

I will soon dig into the documentation and see what is new about this release. :)

Counting lights

In China they have really cool street lights for walking people. When it turns green they start to count down the seconds until it turns red again. I wish we had that everywhere in Sweden. Then you would know if it is an idea to start running or if you see that there is no idea so you can just take it easy because you will never make it anyway.

Now they are trying this kind of green light in Stockholm. They also say that they will probably not use this because we use dynamic timing of the lights depending on the traffic. But I don't see the logical point by that comments. No matter if it is green for five minutes or 15 seconds, you can still have a counting light. Just let it be a green light and as soon there is less than say 30 seconds left it can start counting down. Let be that the counting sometimes starts at 20 seconds but that is ok. Just bring us these lights in Stockholm.