itDagen

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itDagen at NTNU was for me a great success. Let me explain what itDagen is.

As most of my friends should know I’m going to Japan for a couple of weeks. That of course costs money, so what the 3rd year of computer science (that’s where I’m at) and communication technology is that we invite maybe 50-60 companies to our school so that they may do some recruitment, in exchange for a sum of money. They love it of course, since they’re able to recruit some very talented people, and we love it because we get in total around 1.2-1.3 million NOK to spend on our class trip to Japan (for computer science) and… somewhere else (I think Singapore and Malaysia for communication technology).

Anyway, in addition to talking to a whole lot of very interesting companies, many of them had quizes which we could answer to win… stuff. Usually expensive stuff (PS3, smartphones, XBoxes, …). I did one of those C++ quizes. And I won the geeky dream phone of all time:

Nokia N900. Full keyboard, high performance mini-computer. People call it a phone. I’m not sure I agree; it’s more of a computer with a built-in phone. Anyway, to my delight I found out it ran Linux (you can see a linux terminal on that picture, where I transfer Duke Nukem 3D over SSH to run on DosBOX from my desktop computer (though I haven’t gotten it to run yet – but I will 🙂 )). It running linux is a great thing, since there are quite a lot of good open source software out there which can easily be compiled for the ARM archtecture used on this phone. And people have found that out, so already there are lots of good stuff for geeks like me.

That being said, the battery time isn’t all that good (not really unexpected :P), but I can live with it. Also, the phone being so new (released in November or December of 2009) the choice of software for the phone is still lacking a bit (but that I expect to turn around very quickly). In any case, I’m particulary excited since I didn’t pay anything for it – I actually won it. I’ve never won anything this expensive! (around 5000 NOK, about $850). I must admit I’d never pay that much for a phone, no matter how great it is. I think that goes for many people. 🙂

That’s all for now. 🙂

I hate headings

Personal

As I promised in the last post, I got out the next morning and ran. It was incredibly hard, since I really was in a bad shape. But I did it, and the next morning, and I’ve tried to keep it up (although not every single day). And I’m noticing improvements already (I think it’s easy to notice when you go from incredibly shape to actually excersising :P). I really hope I can keep it up, and not suddenly stop and get demotivated. I’ll just have to try. I think this can be quite useful when I resume my tenshi tsume training this week.

Now I need to get in the shower and get my arse up to school. Untill next time… *wave* 🙂

PS: If you’re trying to save money, have a look at http://tonebrustuen.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/hvordan-ha-en-viss-standar-som-en-fattig-student (in norwegian). It has some awsome tips. 😛

– HAL 9001

I, Breadbaker

Personal, ,

Today I tried something I’ve never tried before: Baking bread! It actually worked, and the breads works as intended (that is, they taste good, and they’re bug free (as far as I can tell)). Anyway, if you have free time on your hands, there’s a tip on how to keep you busy for a while. I used this recipe: http://snakk.klikk.no/Mat/Default.aspx?id=10175269 (In Norwegian), in case anyone wondered.

Something else I’ve decided to do is to get in better shape. So I make this promise in public: Tomorrow morning I’m gonna get out and run. If I don’t, please do hit me with a noodle pack.

And at last, here’s today’s “Lookalike”:

.

… he still is awsome, though.

Vacation time!

IT, Personal, , ,

It’s finally here! Today I had my last exam (Programming Languages), and I even think it went quite well. And what does that mean? Vacation time, baby! I can’t wait to get home for a few weeks. My train leaves about 8:30 tomorrow – and about 5 hours after that I’ll be home with my mom and sister. Later, somewhere in between christmas eve and new years eve I’m heading to good ol’ Dokka, with a few days with my father and old friends. I look forward to seeing you all soon! 🙂 Although I bet it’s freezing there… *brrr*.

On another subject: I went to see see Avatar (in 3D of course) today. Man, it was such an epic movie! I loved every tiny bit of it! I watched it tonight, and it was so worth it! 🙂

The last week or so I’ve worked on a new little project. It’s a program to list all the new episodes of various series released on eztv.it. It’s written in Python, I’ll make it available on my programming page after I’m done writing this blog entry. Anyone interested are free to use it, of course. 🙂 Below is a screenshot for those who are interested.

Show Announcer
Show Announcer

Last I’d like to say Merry Christmas and a happy new year to everyone! I hope you’ll all have a good one! 😀

Gingerbread house and exams

IT, Personal

It’s soon christmas. That entails that it’s soon gingerbread time. Actually, yesterday we made a gingerbread house here. We’re fortunate enough to have a construction engineer living here, so the result was quite awsome:

Gingerbread house
Gingerbread house

To change the subject completely, I finished my first exam yesterday (5th) in Operating Systems. I think it went quite well. Next one is 8th, 10th and finally 18th. Then I’m going home on vacation, and it’s going to be great. And just to be completely random: I love Chrome. With the recent support for extensions, and a usable Linux version, I use it as my default browser for the time being.

One thing I missed this weekend was Dokka-LAN. I really wish I could be there, but hey, that’s life I guess. 😛 I hope everyone had fun!

Also, if you want to follow this blog in any way, feel free to use the RSS feed (http://hallgeir.org/feed/). 🙂

Tenshi Tsume and Chrome OS

IT, Martial arts, Personal

It’s about time I updated this blog. I don’t have a lot of news, but there’s at least some.

Some may have picked up that I’ve joined Tenshi Tsume, a martial arts group at NTNUI that is a mix of various martial arts (mainly Jiu Jitsu though). On Saturday I got my yellow belt. The grading was tough as hell, I’ve never seen anything like it. I won’t go into details here on this site in case future members reads it (it’s a little secret so people don’t know what to expect), but believe me when I say I’ve never been as exhausted as when I was done. But I got through it, and passed with good margin. 😀

In other news, I just tried out Google Chrome OS on VirtualBox. It doesn’t run very smoothly, but I don’t expect anything else when running it on a virtual machine.

chrome-os-test

I’m really looking forward to when it’s done – maybe even I will buy a netbook then. 😛 Though I see that some of the features they were very proud of (like the application tabs) will come in Firefox 4.0.

Exams period…

Personal, ,

Oh yes, it’s the dreaded time of the semester. Exams are coming up in a couple of weeks, and I have so much to do before that. The course Operating Systems is the first one on the agenda. It’s an easy course, but a lot to read nonetheless.

Thankfully this also mean it’s soon christmas which brings 3 weeks of vacation, visits to old friends and family and awsome food. “Always look on the bright side of life!”

On a side note, I just ordered Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It’s gonna be awsome!

Programming section nearly done

Site news, ,

I’ve used some time now to make a programming page for this site. It’s pretty much done (I’m missing a few projects there which I will add later), and it was all but easy to get the formatting as I want it. I’m not sure if I’m happy with it yet, but it’s acceptable.

I had a few problems with WordPress when working on this. First of all, it for some reason was a little trigger happy on the paragraph tags. It added </p>s where there were no opening tags, <p>s where there shouldn’t be a tag in the first place, and so on. It might be my fault though, being new to WordPress and all. In any case, I found an addon to disable automatic formatting. Also for some reason, sometimes when posting the whole content of the page disappeared. It seemed to have something to do with the combination of the visual editor and shortcodes. It seems I’m not the only one with this problem. I disabled the visual editor, and it all worked nicely.

I’m very content with WordPress in general though – it’s amazingly easy to customize to my needs (among other things, it’s very easy to write plugins). It just takes a little bit getting used to. And hopefully some of the bugs are fixed in later versions. In the meantime, I got workarounds.