thoughts of the driverSteinn Eldjarn Sigurdarson on tech, tel, digital freedom and possibly his life..

First off I’ll start with saying how glad I am Richard Hammond is back on his feet, and looking like a million bucks — or as close as his skinny little self ever will

I think it’s fair to say that his boyish enthusiasm and antics on television have won the hearts of millions of viewers, and offsets Clarkson’s “grumpy old man” outlook perfectly. George or James, or whatever the name May, did however score some points by throwing Jeremy’s loudhailer under the roller in this episode. More antics like this, and he’ll get the fans to remember is name properly.

However, on the note of Top Gear, and specifically Richard Hammond, I once blew an opportunity to have a chat with him (or at least try to have a chat in the sense of an insane fan knocking on his side window). It was back in may 2005, when the top gear presenters were in Iceland doing some bit on cheap roadsters (audi tt, nissan 350z, and chrysler crossfire). And so it just happens, that I’m walking down the only real “high street” in Iceland, and I see this bloke sitting in an orange metallic nissan 350z with right hand drive. I thought to myself how unusual, this guy must’ve imported it from UK or Japan. And kept on walking. The next day at work however I found out that Richard, Jeremy and James were in Iceland filming, and it suddenly dawned on me that getting glasses might not be such a bad idea. There I was literally walking right next to Richard Hammond, at the time one of relatively few people in Iceland who had any idea who he was, had nothing to do — I could have at least come off as an insane fan I think.

Anyway, back to the show, which I felt was pretty amusing. The boys are up to their usual antics, this time with one of their ridiculous challenges, where they attempt to repave a stretch of road in 24 hours, while the job’s supposed to take a week. According to Jeremy, it’s easy, just skip all the healthy and safety nonsense, and work instead. Factor into the equation that our dear Top Gear presenters seem completely devoid of all engineering ability, this makes for excellent TV.

From a real motoring perspective however, they drive a long-anticipated car. The new Jaguar XKR. Now, in recent years I think any Jaguar which has an X in it’s name is a promising piece of kit, but the new XKR takes the cake.

Just look at that, so beautiful!

Yes, I know the engine is the same bloody V8 there’s been around for years, and yes the interior wasn’t according to Jeremy’s ridiculous standards (who else would want a fireplace in his car?). But WHO CARES?! It looks absolutely ridiculously hot, sounds amazing, goes like stink, handles better than a dog wearing sneakers, and when traffic jerks you back to life’s mundane reality, it’s a quiet and comfortable car. It’s just simply a stupidly desirable car. Personally I must add that I think it’s also less of a prat’s car than the Aston V8 (which it will of course be compared to), because well, I guess it’s just too in to have an Aston these days.

Another important part of this Top Gear episode was of course the showing of Richard Hammond’s crash. I have to say, it took a lot of guts for him to get in that jet engined steel framed accident, and to put it in his own words; “And when that happens I haven’t got 5,000 horse power, I’ve got, 10,000 horse power, and possibly the biggest accident, you’ve ever seen in your life.” — Referring to the afterburner. The crash was not taken completely lightly, as you’d expect with any such traumatic event. Looking at the recording, it’s amazing he survived, and I can imagine a bigger person (if they’d fit in the car) would not have been so lucky.

Well, I’m glad “the Hamster” is back on his feet and looking fit as a fiddle, as his presence on the show obviously prevents it from being “grumpy old men 5: the motoring version”.

I guess it’s a bit late for writing now.. just passed 3am, and I’m still up, doing pushups, and eating this wonderful yoghurt cheese I discovered.

Right now I’m in Vienna of course, still living in Stefan’s living room, but going to look at some places to live tomorrow — even if Stefan has been an excellent host, and doesn’t seem to mind me using his apartment, I’d feel a lot better to get a place where I can settle in.

Another thing I’m getting back on track with, is my diet and training. I have to face the facts, the last few weeks of hardly any physical activity, and less than perfect diet choices have left me weaker and softer than I would like.

Nutritionally I haven’t completely fallen of the bandwagon, just not been as strict as before. When it comes to training however, I need to get some focus. I think my inherent laziness may not be the sole factor in all this, the fact that when I got back from my business trip in december, my gym membership was expired, and with just 3 weeks until moving here, I didn’t deem it worth a renewal, this may be a smal mitigating factor. But now I’ve been here for two weeks, and starting to feel like I can think about my health again.

Found a gym where I can book a badminton court or a tennis court as well (for a modest extra fee) which would allow me to vary my exercise a bit. So the current plan is to do Chad Waterbury’s Total Body Training, followed by 12-20 minutes of HIIT, 3 days per week, one day per week badminton, and one day per week tennis. Nutritionally I’ll be restricting carbs except post workout, eating a lot of omega-3 (fish oil mainly), adding some CLA and Sesamine into my routine. I have a bunch of NOW Green Tea extract which I think I’ll take, and once my stuff from Biotest arrives, some of the BCAAs, HOT ROX Extreme, and a modest amount of Rez-v.

My theory is that by eating 200-250g of protein per day, and restricting carbs except post-workout, along with the green tea, hot rox, fish oil, cla, and sesamine — I should be able to shed around 5kg of bodyfat in a month using this dual pronged approach of protein fueled glucagon production, as well as thermogenic and lipolytic supplements. I estimate being at somewhere around 15% bodyfat (even more?) now, so these 5kg would at least bring me closer to my goal of 10% or so.

If not, once I finish my “fatburning supps” (ie. green tea, hot rox, cla, sesamine), I’ll just keep on with the diet, and see if spike can help me supercharge my workouts a bit, try to just keep going strong, and finally see my bloody abs. Summer is coming up, and I would like for once not to just feel ok about myself, but to be actually proud

Oh, and I still hate you firefox!

Now don’t get me wrong, I know the title sounds a bit harsh, I am mostly a web developer, and without firefox, my life would probably be worse. However without version 2.0 (which I naively and eagerly updated to) my life would be much better.

Most of my problems with this infernal machine of feature creeping lagfuckery, stem from my usage of it on my 12″ 1.33ghz G4 powerbook w/ 768MB ram. Just now writing the last and this sentence, I’ve had about 5 complete (colorfoul beach ball and all) program hangs. Over the last couple of months, I have a freeze right now.. oh great.. oh there we are, where was I? Ah yes, over the last couple of months, I have come to know and despise the multicolored beach ball of OSX sooooo. Three more hangs, make it four, writing this. I’ll stop mentioning the hangs now, I think they average around 2 per sentence. Maybe it’s the spell checker?

The slowdowns range from switching between tabs, even when switching to a recently opened, completely empty tab? Also I get these hangs when closing tabs, creating new tabs, clicking links on websites, scrolling the page, the hangs sometimes even manage to break something, so when I’m holding down the pagedown button, it hangs, and once the hang is over, the event is not being fired anymore!

Now I’m not sure everyone has noticed, but web browsing is probably very large share of what most people use their computer for, in my case, it’s probably close to 70% of the time I spend at the computer, proportionally even more now that firefox 2.0 is out, and keeps me literally hanging. Just writing this blog I have probably experienced around 30-40 hangs, each lasting for at least 2-3 seconds. Now quick math tells me that’s already an extra minute or two. An extra minute or two, while engaged in an activity which is quite more simple than most browsing (ie. I’m just staying here at my wordpress admin page writing .. not firing off links into new and new tabs, and multitasking).

My main e-mail is a GMail based one, which unfortunately, after the 2.0 upgrade has become quite more difficult to use. And beyond wasting time reading various news sites, myspace pages, forums, I also happen to develop web apps, often rather rich javascript laden crap I’m afraid. So yeah, the browser is my mainstay…

I’ve so far established that I spend a lot of time browsing, even more than I would like, and I have become close and personal friends with the colourful beachball of Mac OS X, all thanks to this wonderful assfart of a browser called Firefox 2.0.

Now I wish that this was just a problem due to my relatively underpowered mac (1.33ghz might be considered underpowered in todays sick world of performance?). But not quite, my brand new ThinkPad T60, with it’s 2.0ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, and 2GB of ram, suffers severe slowdowns as well — not as severe as the mac, but quite slow, to the point me having started to try and tweak the browser settings to make it faster. Albeit on the ThinkPad it’s called Iceweasel, due to me running debian. Last time I knew two 2.0ghz latest generation Intel CPUs with 2GB of ram at their disposal should be more than sufficient to run current generation WEB BROWSERS!?

I had some grand witty sentence I was going to lead up to, but all the hangs made me forget, so I’m reduced to witless namecalling Firefox 2.0.. I hate you, you ugly bastard child of good parents, who had you for all the wrong reasons!

P.S.
I really wish I knew more about recording videos of a windowing session, then I could actually make a video showing this.. showing this total of 4 hangs for this one sentence, incl. three beach balls, each staying for around 5-6 seconds!?

Yesterday I got an interesting trackback.. from a planet site which sucked up my last entry. I decided to check out the site, which is absolutely covered in googleads. I think a screenshot to demonstrate, is in order..

I have cleverly marked where my content starts, with some orange arrows and letters.

The entire rest of the page is just random crap sucked off of other blogs on the internet, oh and of course more google ads. I am actually AMAZED that this crap site would have the decency to link to me as the original author. But perhaps since they try to increase their pagerank by getting a link in my comments trackback section, they’d be too afraid not to at least link, so this would bear the resemblance of an actual planet site.

If you go to their “about” section, you’ll find the standard “this is a wordpress installation…” text, and some php include errors.

Making money off of internet ads is fine by me — hey I even have google ads on this site, although at the moment I’d be reluctant to call my income even “beer money”, but none the less, I think making a website which publishes interesting things, prompting some people to read it, gives you the right to at least try and make a buck off it — I mean, the readers are there, maybe the ads will have some effect?

However, I am constantly more annoyed by websites which do absolutely nothing to provide any type of value for the reader, except to blindly leech material from other sites, and generating an excessive amount of pages all linking each other, with tiny ad-infested spurts of content here and there. These websites have always been annoying when trying to find something actually useful, however when I notice them stealing even my insignificant content — now I don’t know whether to be flattered or sickened.

Btw, the site URL is http://planetalinux.blog.br/ .. and my websucked post can be found at, http://planetalinux.blog.br/debian/2007/01/22/random-nitpicking/

I do realise that debian’s move to call firefox “iceweasel” has got to be some sort of burn on the name “firefox” (which I thought was awful initially), but how ridilulously annoying is it for people like me to see at the top of their browser the proud letters; “Iceweasel” ? Not to mention the “Icedove”, or the “Iceape”, I’m just waiting for them to name the next release Icepenguin.. no that would probably make too much sense..

Also, I know myspace is uncool, but I don’t care, what I care about is how infinitely it sucks; anyone familiar with this;

Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.
This error has been forwarded to MySpace's technical group.

Back to bashing debian (my favorite linux distribution), what is the deal with since I installed galeon, it’s been the default browser for gaim to launch links in. Even after I removed it. Now my wonderful gaim-2.0 beta doesn’t open any links, nor does it do anything else particularly well.

Well, I guess linux just sucks, but unfortunately it just sucks less than the main alternative for PC’s — windows. An example of how much they both suck, is my brand new ThinkPad T60 — 2.0 Core 2 Duo, 2GB ram, as many gizmos, bells and whistles as a corporate-oriented ThinkPad would carry. In short, an amazing machine. Now there is a slight problem with the wireless network card in Linux, but after a bit of hassling around I got it working, by downloading some packages from intel’s site, compiling them against my kernel with what I imagine to be half as many warnings as the first compiles of windows 95 (read: a lot), I got wifi on linux!

But wait, it was all lagging and even though the connection strength seemed fine I had terrible packet loss. Time to boot up the ol’ windows, where things are at least supported — nope, same problem there! This may be the crappy wlan I was on, but strangely enough at the same time I had my 12″ powerbook online with no packetloss, and my asus pc notebook as well — my only guess is the ThinkPad being too advanced for these last-generation wlans and machines, and uh.. stuff..

Well, not to be defeated, I figured, “hey, even if I can’t go online on my fancy thinkpad, I do still have windows on it, so why not play a game?”, I sat down and installed Thief 2: The Metal Age — some game I got a few years ago along with some crappy graphics card. I was in the first level of Thief, having configured my keys, and just found the first key to open the first door to where I could find some bastard guards to hit over the head with my trusty blackjack, when OH NO, all went still, and silent, and no pressing of the windows button, or ctrl+alt+del would help. Fresh windows that came with the computer, about a week old, and already I had a crash — for the third time I tried to use the windows.

It slowly dawned on me, that as much as debian was annoying me, I had actually gotten the ati fglrx drivers working on it, and quake3 with a passable 286fps timedemo, and without crashing!?

So yeah, Linux can suck, but apparently, even in all the years I’ve avoided windows, it’s not gotten any better, or maybe I’ve gotten worse?

Lately I’ve been using the wonderful little firebug debugging add-on for firefox.

However there is one slightly irritating thing, that is the fact that if anyone else wishes to use the page, while I’m working on it, they also require firebug to be installed, or the page fails due to console.log errors.

Of course, installing firebug lite would be an option, however I preferred to avoid having to instruct people to do that, so a small hack was devised;

1. create a file called for example firebug-fix.js, and in it put the following;

if (!window.console)
{
console = {log: function() {
var str = '';
for (var i = 0; i < arguments.length; i++) {
str += arguments[i] + "n";
}
alert(str);
}};
}

2. In each file depending on your console.log firebugging.. just add a reference to this file, for ex.

<script type="text/javascript" xsrc="firebug-fix.js" mce_src="firebug-fix.js" ></script>

… albeit, this fix causes the annoying alert windows to appear, but that can easily be avoided, by just stripping the contents of the log: function.. in the console definition — however I decided to have it alert the data, to make this still function as a debugging function.

So, I decided to reopen my blog, which has been offline for almost a year.

I moved to Vienna on the 11th of January, and started working for the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, as a programmer for the iCamp project. Here I’ll try and document some of the happenings in my life, both professionally and personally.

I’m currently trying to find an apartment/room here, and hoping that the sale of my house back in Iceland can go through in the next few weeks (there is some sort of paper-dam going on). Today, I am working on implementing a nice mapping feature for the iCamp Objectspot search portlet, which will allow people to see on a Google Map where the learning object repositories they query are located.

Since the geological coordinates we store for each repository are in the old, degrees° minutes’ seconds” alphabet, format, and as far as I could see from the Google Maps API, I need to supply them in a single decimal number with fractions, I wrote a little method which calculates between the two, perhaps it will be useful to some other people?

function convertitude(l)
{
var rextract = /(d+|w)/g;
var digit = /^d+$/;
var dataarr = l.match(rextract);

var divide = new Array(1, 60, 3600);

var reall = 0;

for (var i = 0; i < dataarr.length; i++)
{
if (digit.test(dataarr[i]))
{
reall += dataarr[i]/divide[i];
}
else
{
if (dataarr[i] == 'S' || dataarr[i] == 'W')
reall = -reall;
}
}
return reall;
}