Since I am working in front of the computer most of the day, the keyboard is really one of my most important tools. After my wireless Logitech keyboard at the office suddenly stopped working I was left with an old replacement keyboard. This old keyboard was almost as thick as the one in the image above and it was a pain to use. At least it felt that way.

I have had various Logitech mices and keyboards I am pretty satisfied with most of them. Probably the best keyboard I have had is my old wireless Logitech natural keyboard from 1999. I am still using it, currently for writing this entry. The wireless mentioned above one was probably the first one which stopped working. Having a weakness for Logitech equipment it was not a surprise that I ended up with a new Logitech package. After reading a couple of reviews I ended up with the Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave. It was relatively cheap, cordless with a tiny USB receiver and it got good feedback from users around the Internet.

I have been using the keyboard and mouse for about a month now and I am satisfied with it and I would recommend it for people looking for an “office keyboard”. The keyboard has a nice soft pad where you can rest your braces, and the keys are really smooth and nice to type with. If you are looking for either a gaming or a HTPC keyboard/mouse package I would perhaps look at other options. The package is wireless and the range of the mouse is not that good. I ended up having the reciever close to my screen, just 20-30 cm from where I have the mouse. Just putting the reciever in the PC about a 1-1.5m away did not work very well with several hickups. This would mean that it if you have to put an USB cable trough your living room it is no point of having a wireless keyboard in the first place. Second, hickups in an onlie frag fest is not very fun.

After some frantic searching I landed on the Nokia N82. I have had the phone now for acouple of months or so and these are my thoughts so far … The phone looks nice, it is Nokia (which I like) and it should theoretically have all the features I wanted. To be fair, it works ok as a phone and cover all my real needs. However, there are several things I am not that satisfied with.

First of all, when compared to my girlfriend’s phone it looks like a clumpsy elephant next to an agile tiger. In comparison, It is huge! The share size is really not a problem but I envy the looks of the slimmer Nokia 5310. Second, the keys on the phone are just too small and not very comfortable. Third, the camera takes decent pictures but only in broad daylight. The phone was not intended to be a camera replacement but I hoped the image quality would have been slightly better. These are all minor issues which I can live with.

What is worse is the battery time. I knew that “smartphones” would have only limited battery time but it is worse than expected. It is annoying to be afraid of using the phone in case the battery runs out. I am perhaps exaggerating a bit but the phone is not very useful as a music player if the battery runs out. With farily limited use (a few short calls and messages) I have to charge it every second day. For some strange reason, this seems to have improved slightly after using it for a while but it is still not satisfying to worry about running out of battery unless I charge it all the time.

Next, it seems impossible to syncronize the phone with Thunderbird and Lightning (both contacts and calendar). I found one tool which should syncronize the contacts and it is apparently possible to syncronize the phone with Google Calendar. However, being a bit paranoid with large corporations I prefer having my calendar somewhere private. Customer service at Nokia mentioned Outlook, but that is out of the question.

There are however some positive issues as well. Skype is quite easily accessed through fringe. fringe enables the use of several chat/communication protocols like msn, Skype, and several on your mobile. Installation is easy and it seems to work quite alright. I have not tested it much though but it works. Moreover, I would say the headset/handsfree included in the package is decent and relatively comfortable. To sum it all up:

Positive:

• Decent handsfree
• Works fine as a phone
• A lot of features
• Works with Skype

Negative:

• Bad battery capacity
• It is huge
• No synchronization with Thunderbird and Lightning
• Camera needs quite a lot of light
• Uncomfortable keys on the keyboard
• Somewhat pricey (you get a lot of features but they do not live up to the price tag)
• And finally, did I mention poor battery capacity?

Conclusion:

Ok phone. Get something else unless you really need the features it provides. If you only need a phone have a look at something cheaper, smaller and less “smart”. If you need a fancy phone rather check out some of the newer models.

If you have problems using Subclipse inside of Eclipse and get an error message containing “cannot create tunnel” you might want to change the SVN interface you are using. For some reason JavaHL (JNI) does not always work. I have not figured out why but the problem disappears when using SVNKit. If you want to fix this open Eclipse, and open the menu illustrated above (Window->Preferences->Team->SVN) and change the setting. This has at lest solved my problems with SVN over SSH. The only problem is that it is at least two years since I last had to fix this and I had totally forgot …

I am using Ubuntu at work and I am equally impressed every time when I upgrade it. Upgrading the operating system actually works! I still remember trying to upgrade older Windows operating systems and I am not trying that again (must be said that this is some years ago). The Ubuntu Linux distribution is released as a major release about every 6 months. Inside these months plenty of the included packages and applications are updated. To upgrade from 8.04 (2008 April release) which is a Long Term Support (LTS) release to 8.10 (2008 October release) you must follow the steps here.

I have have one slight problem with some flickering when using alt+tab to change between running applications but I expect this to be handeled pretty fast. The frequent updates of the distribution (not a service release every leap year) is a very good thing.

I think Linux has become so simple that I am going to install it for my parents when I get them a new computer. Hopefully, they should manage. They already use Firefox and Thunderbird and I guess they should be able to use OpenOffice as well, even though … well you know how old folks are

I must admit that my ‘find‘ and ‘grep‘ (two Unix commands used to find files and to search in text) skills are not as good as they should be. Luckily, someone has made an application with a graphical user interface (GUI) which makes finding files based on their content quite easy. Regexxer is also included in the Ubuntu repositories and it can be easily installed through the Synopsis package manager. It made my day a lot easier when I was looking for a function in one out of a bunch of PHP files.

For several reasons I have been trying to find other ways like for instance this and this to put it into sleep mode (without using the start menu) without success. Now, putting Vista into sleep mode is simply done by assigning a short key to sleep.exe and there we are.

Even though the Norwegian government has established a competency center for open source software, the government has only started using a few open source software applications. One of which is not open source is the application for getting travel refunds. This is clearly an important application but it is unfortunately only a Windows application.

Normally I have used this program on Windows but a few days ago I did not have any PC with Windows so I decided to try Wine. I must say I was impressed. I opened the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu, searched for Wine and installed it. Piece of cake. Then I just downloaded and opened the msi-file for the travel refund application. Wine automatically fired up and installed the application perfectly. Within seconds I was completing my travel form (which is really a pain).

I have not used Wine much besides this travel refund application. However, it worked flawlessly with the Olypus DSS Player, which we use for listening to recordings of interviews, as well. Bottom line, I was impressed by Wine’s simple installation and that it worked flawlessly out-of-the-box. Based on my somewhat limited experience I would warmly recommend it.

Personally I really do not understand why EA and others are using SecuRom and similar products to “protect” their games. I assume the intention is to either (1) stop piracy or (2) stop people from selling used games. For me, the only thing they achieve is stopping me from buying their games.

Piracy is clearly a problem on the PC platform. It is a shame that people does not pay for the games they play and it is understandable that the industry tries to stop this. However, there does not exist any effective copy protection (yet) and I do not think DRM is the right way to stop piracy. DRM is only making it harder for the customers.

I have a stronger beliefe in digital distribution of quality games which are updated after their initial release to a reasonable price. Much like what the guys at Stardock intends to do with their “Gamers Bill of Rights”. This is of course a PR trick but I agree with them in most of what they say.

Back to DRM, copy protections like SecuRom are just creating problems for the people who pay for the products, not stopping piracy. Pirated versions of Spore and NoCD-cracks sirculated, probably even before Spore was released. I want to play the games I buy anywhere, at any time and I want to be able to install them as many times as I like. I payed for the bloody game didn’t I? I wouldn’t buy a bike which I could only use four times, within the city limits on Sundays!

Spore is unfortunately not the first game which incorporates such DRM solutions. Both Bioshock and Mass Effect have received massive amounts of flack for their DRM solutions which created a lot of problems for a large number of users.

So why? Dear gaming, record and movie industry. Why do you use DRM when it creates problems for the paying users, does not effectively stop piracy, increases the price of your products and give you a lot of negative media coverage? Some of the vendors have got it and they are pulling the plug on DRM as we speak. But Walmart, what about the customers who were unfortunate enough to by DRM (infested) music who are not able to play their music any longer?

There are plenty of other games which look very interesting but I decided to make a top five. In doing this I had to leave out at least ten games I would like to buy. I also left out games with no confirmed release date. All dates are taken from Gamespot. You might want of have a look at all the games I am tracking. Nevertheless, here are the top five ordered by their release date.

Mount and Blade is set for a September 23rd release. Mount and Blade might not look like the most cutting edge game but I have already tested beta versions of the game and I know it is great fun. Talesworld are now about to release the 1.0 version of the unique game. The fact that it comes from a small provider makes the game even more impressing. Mount and Blade has a large community and there are already developed several mods for the game and you can expect many, many hours of barbaric fun from this game.

Far Cry 2 is going to be released October 21st. Far Cry is the sequel to perhaps one of the best halves of an FPS I have every played. The first half of Far Cry was a truly great game and I am hoping the new developers are able to pull off a complete great game with Far Cry 2. It sure looks beautify, let us just hope it is fun to play as well.

Fallout 3 with its October 28th release is another game I am excited about. I am a bit more uncertain about Fallout 3 than Mount and Blade and Farcry 2. As mentioned, I have already played Mount and Blade and I have a pretty fair idea of how Farcry 2 will play. I have never played any of the legendary Fallout games, Iam uncertain about how the gameplay will turn out and I am a bit uncertain about how Oblivion developers Bethesda Softworks will finish this game.

Gears of War 2 is starting a very hectic November with its November 7th release. Plenty of other great games are being released during November as it is probably the most hectic month of the year (in terms of potentially great games being released). Gears of War was the first truly great Xbox360 game when it was released two years ago, a short time after its superb trailer.

Left 4 Dead on November 20th is going to be a multiplayer blast. What is better than killing hoards of zombies with your friends? Just the fact that it is a Valve game increases my expectations an extra notch or two.

To include images in a LaTeX document is it very nice to have resizable figures which look good. To be able to resize an image it is recommendable to use vector graphics. Vector graphics consist of geometrical objects which can easily be resized while maitaining crisp images. Bitmap images on the other hand will often become unclear when resized. To make vector graphics figures I use Inkscape. It is simple and really easy to use.

To create graphs and plots I would use OpenOffice (Calc) and export the figures as pdf with lossless compression of images. The resulting pdf file can be imported directly when using LaTeX. I don’t really make that many graphs so I have not exported that many figures like this and there may be other, easier was to do it. However, this works quite nicely for me. It is of course possible to edit the pdf file in for instance Inkscape or some other image editor like gimp. Gimp is an open source equivalent of Photoshop. Some say it is better while others prefer Photoshop. I have not used either of them that much to have a clear meaning. Nevertheless, gimp should cover most of your needs.

When making plots and graphs gnuplot is a much used option. I must admit that I have not personally used it a lot but I know that other researchers swear to it. Like Inkscape, gnuplot is able to save scalable vector graphics. This is as mentioned a big advantage when resizing images. Everyone who has tried to export a graph or a plot as an image from Excel and resized this shold know what I am talking about.