So, finally I am leaving my home to spend one year on Elida V. I’ve been packing all day and said goodbye to my friends, and my train leaves at 14.30
I will do my best to keep this blog updated, but as you might understand that is not always easy while at the sea. See you in midsummer!
I got my first “cool” rating on istheshit today. Check out http://fire_fox.istheshit.net/
On the 17th of September the Swedish General Election will be held to elect members to the Riksdag (Swedish Parliament). Since I recently turned 18, I am allowed to vote for the first time in my life. The first sign of the coming election was that I recieved my voting card yesterday.
There seems to be a few “improvements” since the last election, which was held in 2002. One can now more easily vote in advance of the election day (something I will do because I’m leaving for Elida), and this year everybody who votes are obliged to identify themselves.
I and my family went to see the launch of Elida V this weekend. For the last few years, people from the Elida team have been working at the Swede Ship Composite shipyard in Hunnebostrand, two hours north of Gothenburg.
On 16.05 on Saturday, in front of 2 000 spectators, Elida V was slowly lifted off her cradle into the sea. It was a beautiful sight, and she floated perfectly in the water.
Saturday 19th, Elida V will finally be launched. (And now I do really mean it!)
I will be there and watch the joyful event. Will you?
Elida V, a few weeks ago. Photo courtesy of elida.se
I switched from Crossover Office to VMWare for my Microsoft Office business on my computer yesterday.
I use Ubuntu Linux on my personal laptop, and for my work I must have Microsoft Office installed. I first tried using Crossover Office, and it seemed to work great for the first time. Crossover Office is a Win32 sublayer, just like Wine and Cedega, that lets you run Windows applications seamlessy inside Linux. After a while, I got to notice a few bugs that meant the end of my Crossover journey. It was impossible to open a few spreadsheets because of a few missing API:s, and sometimes the ALT key would hang because of my window manager. I cannot afford having a bug-ridden version of Office, so therefore I had to acquire VMWare Workstation 5.5, in which I have installed Windows XP and Office 2002. I am impressed by the performance; despite the fact that I only have 512 MB of RAM, it works like a charm.
Last week I were at the Frizon Festival and listened to great music and met many old friends of mine. Frizon takes place every year at Torp, 25 km south of the city of Örebro and attracts about 4000 people every year.
I lived in a tent, ate food from a Primus LP gas stove and showered in icy water. But it is a festival, right? The programme was filled with different activities, such as morning meeting with worship and studies, seminars and lectures (including Magnus Tunehag from Linköping) and, of course, music in the evening! Every night started with a huge concerto with a featured band in the main building (the barn) and a roaring crowd of several thousand people standing before the stage. The concerto would end around midnight, the same time as the music started to play from various stages around the festival area. The musical genres varied from heavy rock music to soft and sentimental acoustic and vocal styles, to funk and jazz.
One of the best artists on stage was Andreaz Hedén Trio, a jazz pianist backed up by a double bass and drums. Featuring a style similar to Esbjörn Svensson Trio, Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett, they made my day by playing incredible and intense indie music. I am fascinated by the pure skill of this type of jazz pianists, and Andreaz Hedén is in the top league.
Other great musicians were The Tiny, Loney Dear, Blindside, Silence the Foe, Anderson and Jonas Ottoson Band.
I also tried to race with a pocket motorbike (minimoto) but I think I was just too tall for them. There was no way I could put my feet in the correct position, so I had to stretch them forward on the bike. I also fell quite badly the first lap and hit my knee.
Frizon was a very good experience, and I am looking forward to the next year already.
Frizon, Sweden’s largest christian musical festival, located south of Örebro, starts on Wednesday. With several thousand people meet to sing and listen to great bands, it is definitely something I look forward to.
I bought my ticket today, and I luckily got hold of a “food ticket”, which grants me two meals a day during the festival. This is good, since I didn’t really like the idea of having to bring canned food for a whole week. I sleep in a tent, and I will be alone in my four-people tent, which gives plenty of living space.
Several of my friends will be there as well, I know people all around the country who will be there.
Hot laptop
The Laptop I wrote about yesterday is still working fine, and I have been tweaking it even more today. I borrowed a docking station at work, and I use Microsoft Word 2002/XP almost flawlessy with Crossover Office on Ubuntu Dapper. Crossover Office is a commercial, improved version of the Wine sublayer in Linux, which allows Linux users to use windows programs natively. Before anyone starts complaining about this and stating that I should use OpenOffice.org I need to say that Microsoft Word is a prerequisite in my office, with all the VBA macros and tricks we use.
One thing that struck me hard today was the fact that the laptop is running very hot. I quickly installed cpuburn and pushed the processor to its maximum when it comes to heat emission, and find that the die temperature goes as high as 95 degrees Celsius. On a desktop computer, the CPU would had been toast long before this, but this laptop seemed to carry on without having to slow down even here. I went out on the Internet and did some homework, and found out that the Pentium4-M processor has an operating temperature that goes as high as 100 degrees (!). Laptops and cooling has always been an issue, but it seems like Intel has done a great job in making a reliable CPU.
Speedstep was quite easy to get working. I am using the “userspace” kernel governor, and let the powersaved daemon do the speed-stepping job. Now the processor is at 1,2 GHz all the time while running on battery, but the speed increases to 1,8 GHz when the computer is plugged in and uses more than 80% of the CPU. I am really impressed of seeing all these innovative technologies cooperating well, since I almost never have owned a laptop before.
The only thing that is bothering me about the computer is that the battery has partially failed. Linux reports about 50 minutes of battery time at best, and running 3d games while on battery is a big no-no. The battery is three years old indeed, but buying a new one is just too expensive, so the laptop will almost only be semi-portable.
Pictures of my Ubuntu Cd:s I’ve got from ShipIt
I bought an IBM T30 a week ago from a person in Stockholm. It is a 1.8 GHz Pentium4-M computer with 512 MB of memory and wireless networking.
The Thinkpad is a very solid computer, and the week I have been using it I’m becoming more and more impressed of its qualities. The only thing I am concerned of is the graphics card. The computer contains an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, which is only moderately supported. I do get okay results when playing games, but I believe that the radeon driver gives me problems with textures. In Gnome I do sometimes get buttons that have a black pattern on them, a pattern that disappears when hovering the buttons.
Apart from the graphics, the computer is working great and I look forward to many hours of joyful usage on board Elida.