the ramblings of onar vikingstad

What happens when you are bought by Microsoft...

2009-02-16T19:29:00.000-08:00

Farecast.net, a site that used to be the best web place for finding airplane tickets, is completely broken today:

I guess that's what happens when your company gets bought by Microsoft. I am sure the founders made a a lot of money from the sale though. Good thing kayak.com is still around and independent!

2009-01-21T21:14:00.000-08:00

So hackers were able to tap in Heartland's Payment Systems that processes 100 million credit card transactions a month!

Now, I was interested in finding out if transactions I have done online lately have gone through Heartland, so I went to their website. What did I see?

That's right. "The highest standards | The Most Trusted Transactions". Oh really? Well, guess it's time to change that slogan. And while you are at it, why not provide a list of your clients so I can check if I might be at risk? Or is that too high of a standard for you?

The Obama wishlist

2008-12-04T19:43:00.000-08:00

I create a wishlist for the new Obama administration on uservoice that you can find here:
http://wishlist.uservoice.com/

Update: uservoice.com has some serious caching issues, so many of the items are out of date. Hopefully it'll work again soon!

Change CAN happen!

2008-11-05T12:42:00.000-08:00

Who is Batman?

2008-10-20T23:27:00.001-07:00

Wow, this is just fantastic!

Steady hand?

2008-09-24T22:40:00.000-07:00

Literally a few days ago McCain said the fundamentals of our economy are strong. Today he said the economy is so bad he has to suspend his campaign and get a bill passed?

Is this the kind of "steady hand" people are looking for?

And something epic:
Palin has trouble finding an example of McCain pushing for regulation

"I'll try to find some and bring them to ya!" Thanks, but no thanks!

And the best comment on that story:
That's not fair! Asking her about the economy when everybody knows she has been taking her foreign policy lessons this week.

A new low?

2008-09-22T18:20:00.000-07:00

Are people really believing this stuff?

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/nra_targets_obama.html

Sad...

McCain health care plan

2008-09-19T23:00:00.000-07:00

Yeah, this will work (from his own plan that was published today):

"Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."

But wait, I just heard McCain pushing for MORE banking regulation in todays news. Can this guy make up his mind!?

McCain side effects...

2008-09-19T22:40:00.001-07:00

Cry or laugh?

2008-09-12T12:01:00.001-07:00

This is so ridiculous I don't know if I should cry or laugh. Is it even a remote possibility that this person might get the codes to the nuclear arsenal!? Someone please wake me up from this bad dream...

Who Started Cold War II?

2008-08-29T08:02:00.000-07:00

Could not agree more!
http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-who-started-cold-war-ii/

The best part:

A resurgent Russia is no threat to any vital interests of the United States. It is a threat to an American Empire that presumes some God-given right to plant U.S. military power in the backyard or on the front porch of Mother Russia.

Who rules Abkhazia and South Ossetia is none of our business. And after this madcap adventure of Saakashvili, why not let the people of these provinces decide their own future in plebiscites conducted by the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe?

Georgian-Russian war

2008-08-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

Having watched western media reports of the Georgian-Russian conflict for the last couple of days, it's ridiculous how incredibly ignorant the coverage has been.

First of all: The Georgian president started the war, killing hundreds if not thousands of Ossetians. Being Russia's backyard, are the Russians supposed to just stand there watching their peacekeepers being killed?

And what is this whole deal about the Georgian president spending hours a day to give interviews on live TV to western media, pretty much every media outlet out there, spreading ridiculous unsubstantiated charges that are never fact checked? And on top of it all, he also had time to write an article in the Wall Street Journal, in the middle of a very nascent war! Hello!? This smells way too much puppet regime!

This pretty much sums it up for me:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4525885.ece

As usual, Bush, Cheney and McCain are on the clueless side. Not that Bush cares anyway, he was pinching American beach volleyball players in Beijing instead of mediating the conflict! Ridiculous...

Update: Also have to add this article:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/la-oe-brooks14-2008aug14,0,4988958.column

Update: Fox News inadvertently put this on the air:

A bad sign?

2008-06-21T22:45:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of good things that can be said about Barack Obama, but this really got my eyebrows raised:
Passing out the signs at the Obama rally

Apparently the Obama rally organizers have been handing out what looks like home made signs to supporters that show up. I don't know about you, but this doesn't really connect well with the message he is trying to send about "changing how things are done in Washington". If this is just a sample of things to come, I'm rather concerned.

What's next, removing people from the background that don't fit the message? Oh wait, that was already done with two muslim women that happened to have headscarfs!

I'm hoping that Barack himself did not decide himself that this was the way to run a campaign. Especially not one that was supposed to be about change. Change to the worse in other words? However, when running a campaign of this magnitude I'm sure it's impossible that everything will smooth all the way. Especially this time around when there's always someone with a camera and the infrastructure (hint: internet) to distribute it!

Newsclipper.org is launched

2008-02-25T19:53:00.001-08:00

My side project, newsclipper.org, has finally been released to the wild. I got some pretty good coverage of it at both TechCrunch and the Huffington Post.

My intention with NewsClipper is to create a site that consolidates all news clips from the major TV news networks in one location. No more having to run around to different carefully managed and controlled individual websites. Basically it lets you view the latest news clips from the major TV networks in one location, without having to go to their slow and carefully controlled sites.

Please take a look and let me know what you think! I already have a few features in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

NewsClipper.org

Air Force One

2007-12-15T00:15:00.001-08:00

Blogging from iPhone

2007-07-30T22:39:00.001-07:00

Blogger has a pretty nice feature where you can email your blog posts
to a certain email address and have it instantly published.

So here you go, my first post from my iPhone. I am adding a great
picture here that my wife took this weekend when we took a trip to
Capitola beach.

And yes, it was taken with my new shiny device :)

Wikipedia on the iPhone

2007-07-30T20:53:00.000-07:00

As a followup to my previous post, I forgot to mention that I also have a very neat bookmark for accessing Wikipedia on the iPhone. It is basically a little piece of Javascript that you use instead of the regular URL. The benefit is that it will popup a little dialog and ask you which term/word to lookup even before anything is loading. This saves a lot of time when you happen to be on a slow EDGE connection.

To check it out, you have to add the bookmark in Safari on your Mac (or Windows) and sync it to your iPhone:

javascript:void(q=prompt('Wikipedia:',getSelection()));if(q)%20void(location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search='%20+%20escape(q))

Some iPhone tips...

2007-07-27T22:16:00.001-07:00

After having played with the iPhone for a few days now, I have found several handy tips that I'd like to share:

Cheap International Calls

When on the go, I have been using a 'virtual calling-card' service called PennyTalk for my international calls. Calls to countries like Germany and Norway are usually just a 2-3 cents a minute, which is a fraction of what AT&T would charge you, even with an international calling plan.

On of the caveats is of course that you have to first dial the PennyTalk number and when prompted the number you actually want to reach. However, with the iPhone, I found that by using commas after the PennyTalk number it makes enough of a pause to wait for the prompt and then dial the final number automatically. When showing the contact card the phone number looks something like "1 877 736 6925 ,, 011 47 907 21 745". Notice the double comma here which adds twice the "pause".

With this setup I can pretty much call anyone in the world for just pennies a minute. And there are no obnoxious menus to deal with! I wonder if AT&T knows about this? ssshhh....

So how did I get those commas in there? Well, I actually had to enter them in the Mac OS X Address Book application since the regular telephone keypad on the iPhone did not have a way to enter commas. But after a short sync all those cheap numbers are ready to go!

Number port from a different city

I wanted to keep my current Verizon number that I got back in Chicago when studying there. However, since I entered my new address in California during the iTunes registration process my activation got hung up and I actually wasted 12 hours because of it. When AT&T finally deleted my initial registration I registered again through iTunes, this time with my old address, and my phone was activated in 3 minutes!

So when porting your number, make sure to register with your old address that originally registered the phone number at.

Control your Mac

Wouldn't it be cool if you could control just about anything on your Mac from your iPhone? We'll apparently a couple of guys had the same idea and did something about it! They started an open source project named telekinesis, or more marketing friendly: the iPhone Remote.

It's just a small application that will enable anything from VNC, media playback, file browser, terminal access, iSight views and a bunch of other stuff. Even through your firewall if you set up port forwarding correct (hint: port 5010 and 5012)

So there you have it, three simple tips. Now let me hear yours. Add them to the comments or email me so I can post them here! What? You don't have an iPhone yet? What are you waiting for?

The world's greatest library

2007-07-16T21:44:00.000-07:00

Found an interesting new project, called the Open Library. Brings in many of the ideas from Wikipedia as well as builds on the knowledge from the Internet Archive.

Can it work? Jugde for yourself at:
http://demo.openlibrary.org/about

Only losers surf on a Saturday night...

2007-06-09T22:51:00.000-07:00

Something remarkable happened to me tonight. As I was about to go to all my banking sites and other online services to change my mailing address to my new home here in Campbell California, I was met with several "sorry, but we are doing some maintenance" type messages. It was actually so fascinating that I started taking screenshots of them.

I am including four here:

I'll post more if I stumble upon them during the night.

Obviously, this is the time when these sites receive the least amount traffic. But that so many were down at the same time was really unexpected, almost a little spooky.

This reminds me of the situation when a radio station turns to commercials and you start seeking to find one with some good music instead. However, you soon realize that you can't find one, cause they all make sure to play commercial segments at the same time! That way you won't be tempted to change channels in the first place and just listen through those absolutely revolting jingles.

Ahh.. conspiracies, conspiracies...

Your Favourite Piece

2007-05-31T05:40:00.000-07:00

Oda of Norway is relaunching their brand with a new look and of course a brand new website that I put together. There will be an event in Stavanger, Norway today launching the new collection and the products will only be for sale at select resellers at this point.

Please check out the new site!

Only 600 days left!

2007-05-30T23:42:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's right. Bush has only 600 days left in office and there might be some kind of light at the end in the of the tunnel. This guy has been an absolute joke and I can't wait to see someone who's at least able to pronounce nuclear as replacement.

As a matter of fact, I added a countdown to the right sidebar to remind myself that the days of joys will come!

Palm Fool-Me-Now

2007-05-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

What in the world are they thinking!?!?

Palm introduced a new product today, called Palm Foleo. Palm founder Jeff Hawkins himself talked about it at todays D Conference in San Diego. However, it is remarkable how this product has made it this far through the product development cycle and eventually to market!

Basically, it is a dumb-down notebook for $500 that will connect to your mobile handset, be it a Windows Mobile, Palm etc. The idea is that is a "mobile companion", so you will need to carry two devices instead of one. Or even worse, since it's not close to the horsepower of a real notebook you will actually have to drag one of those along as well to get some real work done. Revolutionary, isn't?

It's actually sad to see Palm just dwindling into oblivion while competitors are rushing by. It is almost like seeing Altavista in the old days or even Amiga. Palm was once a great company with some very cool PDAs, now they have completely lost track. Stock is surprisingly up a little today, but there is no way in hell this thing is going to sell.

However, if this was 2003, maybe, just maybe they'd have a chance...

Really, really bad...

2007-05-14T23:25:00.001-07:00

The Perfect Storm

2007-03-23T18:13:00.000-07:00

Seems like everything has been set in motion for the perfect storm leading up to this weeks availability of the Apple TV. The blogosphere is going crazy over it. We have already seen the traditional unboxing photos, the internal shots, and now the modding has seriously started.

The Apple TV is impressive by itself, even without any modification. However, 40GB storage is a little short for some, so someone already upgraded it with a 120GB drive, simply by using Carbon Copy Cloner like you would do in Mac OS X. Even more interestingly, some have already installed Quicktime codecs such as Perian to be fully compatible with xvid.

What makes this device really exciting is that it runs a modified and somewhat simplified version of Mac OS X, so in theory it should be able to run almost any Mac OS X application out there. I am sure we will see the USB port soon support things like keyboards, external harddrives and photo printers. Later we might even be able to see support for more advanced devices such as EyeTV. It's also just a matter of time before someone makes the Joost Mac client run on this thing.