AndreasB.Net

I must admit that I have great enthusiasm for my new camera, and for this particular post, my collectibles.

I have a nice collection of LOTR collectibles, worth a small sum of money, but even for me personally, as a collector. I am also working on improving my dragon collection, and today I bring you the first pictures taken of them. These are highly compressed as opposed to the 7 MB gargantuans of yesterday, but the picture quality is still pretty good, for 300 kb images, at least

• Overview – collectibles
• LOTR Collectibles
• Dragonlamp

I have been playing around with my new camera, and would like to share a couple of the pictures I took. I am quite amazed at the quality from my new camera. (Warning, each picture is 7 MB at full quality )

• Icicles
• Icicles2
• Sun on the lake
• Sun on the lake – 2

With Wrath of a Mad God (Darkwar) Feist closes one of his many riftwar saga cycles, ending the plotlines for the Dasati. And there are a lot of Riftwar books now.

So how does Feist manage to write yet another well written, interesting and hard to put down? Character buildup. A new book invariably presents one or more new characters, and often kills a few of the ones introduced in earlier books, and this book is no exception. And it comes with a very healthy recommendation from me.

There are two main subplots in this book, one closing the Dasati saga, the other most likely setting the stage for Feists next cycle. As the Dasati God threathens Kelwan and the Tsuranni people, the heart of Midkemia itself might also be threathened from another side. One even the Valheru failed to vanquish.

Its been a while since my last post, been busy with work and reading, have a lot of reviews I should write and put up. But for day, i would like to talk about my new camera.

I don’t take many pictures, but there are times when having a camera is a nice thing, and I have been wanting a digital camera for quite some time now. And today, I bought one

The Canon PowerShot G9 is my new little camera, and I love it. There is a nice big LCD screen, 12 megapixels, picture stabilisation, 6x optic zoom and loads of other stuff. Its a bit beyond a mid-range amatour camera, but I am happy anyhow Who knows, perhaps there will be more pictures on this blog in the future?

Cryteks last game, FarCry was a huge success, and their newest game, Crysis, is perhaps an even greater success.

One of the most demanding games on the market today, it sets a new standard for visual quality in a FPS game, as well as having more realistic physics engine. I had great fun cutting down trees with my guns.

Set in a future not to far away, the player is a supersoldier, sent in to investigate a North Korean takeover of an island with a US research team on. The player then needs to investigate what the North Koreans are doing, as well as find out where the research team was taken. However, as you progress, there is clearly something else on the island as well. Something, not seen on Earth.

Graphics and storytelling taken together, this is simply a must-have game.

I moved into a new office at work after Christmas, and decided to buy some decorations to liven it up.

I tried something called sandart, which gives a new piece of art every day. Using just different sands and water, it creates some incredible landscapes and pictures. I will try to document the more beautifull ones in this thread.
Sandart 16-01-2008

So, I am a little more awake now than when I wrote the Galla Dinner post earlier today, not much, but a little. Bah, I was almost sleepwalking at that time, conferences are existing but oh so tiring as well.

You really should not follow as many lectures as I did, or you will get as tired as I did. But still, I enjoyed it immensely, and now only the long train journey home remains. Should be home around 23:00 today. *Yawns*

First today I went on a BOF workshop about large storage needs, it was interesting, I think, I really was not awake enough to get much of what was said.

Then the time had come for us to present what we do. I only listened today though, two of my colleagues, a professor and a coworker held the presentations. Strangely enough there were not as many people around today in total. I wonder if hangovers and sleepneed is the culprit

But all in all, it has been a very interesting conference, and tomorrow, tomorrow is a day for sleeping, much sleeping.

With my fifth day in Trondheim, I can feel the fatigue cominging on. The Galla Dinner yesterday did not make things easier, although it was a great experience

We met up at 19:00 at the Free Masons Lodge on Trondheim, (which was built in city money for the Free Masons, but also as a gathering house for the population of Trondheim.) The baroque style of the building was interesting and nice. We started off with some champagne down in the lobby of the building. Mixing, socializing and greeting people you had met throughout the week.

Then after half an hour so so, we walked up into the ballroom on the second floor and found ourselves some free seats. It was to be a three course dinner based only on ingredients found in the county of Trøndelag, although the wine was not Norwegian, as is normal.

We were served a nice white wine and farris water to the appetizer, which tasted very well. It was based on “Kamskjell” and carrots and something else fishbased, and tasted very nice.

Three toastmasters had been hired to humour us between the courses and also tell us things about Trondheim and Trøndelag. They were quite good, being native to Trondheim they have that special dialect of Norwegian which makes Trøndelag famous, and with songs, jokes and stories, they filled some of the gaps between courses.

Then it was on to the main course, being some kind of potatoes along with a beef and a bit of greens, along with a spiced Portugeese red wine.

For dessert, it was chocolate mousse based on the raw chocolate of Nidar, which is a Norwegian chocolate producer.

Over all I enjoyed the evening, the food was good, the entertainment entertainign and the talks interesting. I elected not to hit the town afterwards though, I felt the need to sleep, I still feel it, tbh, and at 14:05 I board the train for Trondheim after hearing a few more sessions today.

The second day is half way through. Not so many interesting tracks today, although it was interesting this morning.

It started with Jørgen Leknes from the Norwegian FAD-department talking about government, e-government and open standards, following by a very interesting network security lecture from the chief of network security at the Dutch ISP XS4all. He was quite good when it came to talking about what he did (and I would gladly have listened for 45 minutes more), and looking at the tools and issues when it comes to network security, the averages users faults, the need to download porn and/or play world of warcraft, and how his tools were designed to quickly catch infected spambotted or otherwise compromised computers belonging to his customers.

Next I followed a track about the needs or not for full 24/7 availability of computer services. The oldschool way of handling things is to fix them when they break, and otherwise let sleeping dogs lie. Some might buy redudant hardware, but still only act reactively.A more efficient way of getting full 24/7 availability is handling things proactively, fixing things before they break, monitoring systems for signs of imminent breakdown, and the like, and perhaps even coupled with redundancy to further try to ensure that systems survive breakdowns.

Availability is a cost/effect issue, and at least for higher education, extreme availability is not always needed. Who cares if the webserver is down while everyone is sleeping? One or two insomniacs perhaps? But is the price of 24/7 staff worth the effect? For an international buisness, probably yes? For a local college, most of the time, no.

I also took the time to walk a bit around in Trondheim during daylight, my first chance to do so. It appears to be a nice city, with more the cozyness of a town than the urbanness of Oslo, I liked it. Seeing Nidarosdomen, the only church in Norway perhaps worth being called a cathedral was also a nice sight.

Well, now I am going to rest a bit in preparation for tonights galladinner. Sleep might not be that common tonight, but I am looking forward to it all the same

Today was the official opening of the conference. There were two tracklines, one about Gigacampus, and one about Feide, which is an adminstrative system and program for the higher education sector in Norway. Personally I chose to follow the track about GigaCampus, as that was the track closest to what I do at work.

In the beginning, Uninett was like most ISPs, their job was to deliver network connectivity up and until the last time, but nothing inside the campus. However, over time, it became clear that there was need for some centralized experience not only on delivering the network connectivity to the various campuses, but also when it came to maintaining the core systems of each system. Gigacampus is the name of the current program, which aims to have 1 gbps internally and between every campus site connected to Uninett, along with network and program monitoring, both traffic and to support the services such as e-mail, each institution needs to run. This program is uniquely Norwegian in style, and gives amongst other things, a centralized experience pool for instititutions to draw on when they move campus sites. As each institution seldom do that more than once in a decade.

Outside the two auditoriums there were several stands. Mostly it was vendors, such as Dell, HP, Microsoft, Netcom and a couple of others, along with a main Uninett stand, promoting amongst other things, eduroam, which lets you connect to the wireless network of any university or college in Norway using your local username and password.

We had been asked to showcase some of our development on the Uninett stand, and we used two large plasma screens and a 15″ laptop to do so. We showed off our embedding of video over IP in webbrowser system. Audun Vaaler got it working a few weeks ago, and it works brilliantly. We also showed off AccessGrid again, although the person in Halden which should have been on, elected to turn the camera to his goldfish instead. The goldfish had little to say, but the lighting became absolutely correct, so it was a pretty picture, perhaps prettier than the one originally planned.

The plasma screens were the usual TVs with a computer interface thrown on as an afterthought, and did not work well, (and had a tendency to burn the images into the screen itself within 30 minutes til an hour. I fear one screen running on Windows will never get rid of that ugly start menu again.

After dinner there was an meet the experts session, although none were interested in multimedia or SIP, which was our table along with one person from Uninett. It was not unexpected though, as there is mainly network people here, and not so many working with a broader view, although we got some questions to try the Remmen Streaming System from people who had attended yesterdays workshop.

During this session, a gang of male students arrived with their manschoir to sing four ironic, stupid and fun songs, which was probably the highlight, at least for us.

When I say I followed the Gigacampus track, it is correct, what I did not say, was that I never entered an auditorium to do so. NTNU is using a system which shows both the speaker, and his computer presentation in a webpage with two videofeeds, alowing one to follow something without being in the room. So I was at our stand during the whole day, and did not miss one session. However, if things got boring your could walk around or talk to the one next to you without disturbing anyone. It actually worked out quite well. The only problem is that the system is based on the closed and proprietary Windows Media Format, which means that used as is, the system is useless, as we only use systems based on open standards.

Over all I am quite pleased with this day, and I am looking forward to tomorrow.