ScratchMyTail.com

This is the first time I have seen the Google Mail service offline. When I’m writing this post the system is currently down. When I visit the site it loads for a couple of seconds, then I get a 502 Server Error message. The time is now 12:37 PM, I believe the system went down at 11:30 AM, Norwegian time. I have not received any information about what is the cause from the Gmail app itself. I searched through the newest posts on digg.com and found out that the system has apparently been offline for almost an hour now. From comment posts at digg.com it appears that the IMAP servers are still working.

Currently everybody is following this case.

• Follow the live feed at twitter. Holy crapamoly 200 tweets in a per minute. Im starting to understand why twitter may be useful.

• BBC news have also joined up on this “breaking news”.

Remember Gmail has over 100 million users. Maybe Google is deploying their final release of Gmail?

Yesterday I finally got my OS X up and running again. I forgot to choose a kernel (embarrassing), I thought the Vanilla kernel was selected for installation by default, but obviously I was wrong. This post is the first one posted from my iPhone using the native WordPress application. Sweet or what?

Lately I’ve been trying to install OS X on my laptop. At first it all went well, until I decided to upgrade from 10.5.5 too 10.5.6. After the upgrade things stopped working, so I chose to install another release called iPC 10.5.6. That of course messed up my bootloader. Read more about how I fixed this.

Read the rest of this entry »

For the last couple of weeks I have been playing around with Mac OS X on my Compal IFL90 laptop. When Apple went from using the Power Mac architecture to using the Intel architecture a community called OSx86 was born. They have been working making OS X compatible for non-apple computers. The main problem is off course driver support.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Palm Pre was announced earlier this month at CES (Consumer Electronics Show). The Palm Pre is a smartphone with touchscreen and a qwerty-pulldown keyboard. I would say this is the first real iPhone competitor. The Palm Pre uses what is called the webOS. With this OS you can build custom applications for the device using only HTML, CSS, XML and JavaScript. This is very practical, you do not have to learn any new languages, that is, if you know the basics of web-programming. Compared to building apps for the iPhone this will be much easier. The iPhone SDK requires developers to program in objective-c which is Mac-only. The iPhone-SDK itself is only available for OS X.

Every time theres a new touch phone out on the market its automatically compared to Apples iPhone. So why shouldn’t I do it too?
Read the rest of this entry »

Today was the first day at school after the holidays. This is my second semester, first year, on my Master’s Degree in Computer Science at the University of Tromsø, Norway. This semester I’m attending three classes; Advanced Distributed Systems, Advanced Database Systems and Middleware. I think it’s going to be much harder this semester. People at the university tells me three Computer Science courses each at 10 PTS is quite alot. Wish me good luck, I think I’m gonna need it.

I’m going to post more information about the courses later on.

Check out this insane movie I stumbled over earlier today at digg.com.

Today I finally decided to install WordPress version 2.7. I have never used any blog engine before so this is my first try using one. So far (couple of hours) I am very impressed by the choice I made. Previous blogs I’ve had running were homemade. I never finished programming the functionality in those so they were kind of crappy. What I have learned is: Why program the whole system yourself from scratch when you can download WordPress for free? The number of plugins available for WordPress is also one of the main reasons why I chose it.

Read the rest of this entry »