ScratchMyTail.com

I have now started on my second year as a master student at the Univeristy of Tromsø. The program is built up like this: first year = 6×10 point courses, second, and last year, one large 60 points master thesis. I am currently working on this “enormous and scary” thesis. The thesis is a small puzzle in a larger project at the university. The main focus for this project is information availability, and how we can receive information based on our current context.

My task in this project is to build a system that makes information available, and handles context awareness. I am also building a prototype application which utilizes this system. The prototype is a bus application that runs on the iPhone. The main objective of this application is to receive route information based on the users current location.

The deadline for my master is 15th May 2010. There is of course a last exam where I must defend my thesis during a public presentation and a following closed oral examination. I will put my master out in to my portfolio when its history.

Scratchmytail.com has been down for a couple of months now (if you haven’t noticed). I’ve had enough, so I chose to move my files to a new provider, Pro ISP. My old provider, Web10.nu, claimed that some of my files were generating spam. So I decided to remove all the content and re-install WordPress. After a couple of days they shut it down again, and so it went on for almost two months. I got tired of arguing with their support team when they claimed that my empty hotel generated spam. How can an empty web hotel generate spam? Crazy invicible scripts perhaps?

Anyways, ProISP is cheap and very good. Take a look at their homepage ProISP.no for more details.

A couple of weeks ago I received a mail stating that my site generated spam. I have now removed all random scripts and is currently hosting WordPress alone. Hopefully the problem is fixed so they (web10.nu) don’t have to deactivate the site again.

Lately I’ve been looking for a new lens for my digital SLR (Canon EOS 400D). I’m tired of not being able to zoom. The default lens, 18-55mm, has it’s limitations. So what are my options? If you own a DSLR camera you probably know that there’s a lot of lenses out there. I have found two lenses, I can buy an allround lens with 18-270mm focal length, or I can buy a telephoto lens with 55-250mm focal length. If I buy the 18-270mm I can throw away the 18-55mm, which actually is an advantage since I only need one lens covering the same range and even more. The 18-270mm is an excellent all-in-one lens with an amazing focal length. You can zoom in on items and take wide angle shots with the same lens! If I buy the 55-250mm lens I’m not able to take wide angle shots which is a drawback. This means that I may have to change lens if I suddenly want to take a wide angle shot.

Dpreview (Digital Photography Review), which is the best review site for photo equipment in my opinion, have benchmarked the 18-270mm lens, the test can be found here. I will make a decision soon. A personal review will of course be posted on my amazing blog. Stay tuned!

Its been a long time since I wrote something constructive on this blog now (again). I have been very very very busy reading up for the final exams. Today I had an oral exam in the course “Advanced Distributed Systems”, it went okay I guess. Talked about MapReduce, Google File System, Dryad, Oivos, and some other systems and concepts.

I’m going home to Mo i Rana 10th june after the “Advanced Database Systems” exam. I start working the 15th june at the National Library (Nasjonalbiblioteket) in my home town Mo i Rana. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but at least it’s some IT related stuff.

I have decided to “publish” the papers I have written this semester. You can find them in the list below with a short description. Enjoy. They are not that long.

• “Face Recognition” – The paper was written as the second mandatory assignment in the “Advanced Database Systems” course. The paper is a survey type of paper. It sums up the different techniques used for detecting and recognizing faces in images. It is a very interesting topic.
• “Supporting Mobility in Content-Based Publish/Subscribe Middleware” – This paper was written as the third mandatory assignment in the “Middleware” course. This paper is also a survey kind of paper. It sums up different techniques on how it is possible to support mobility in publish/subscribe system. Interesting read.
• “Optimizing Hadoop for the Cluster” – This paper was written as the second mandatory assignment in the “Advanced Distributed Systems” course. In this paper I describe how we can optimize Hadoop for its cluster. The experiments conducted shows that tweaking the default configuration gives two times smaller job-latency. Very interesting paper this as well.

So thats an update for now. Have a nice summer. I will try my best to write more posts during the “vacation”. So stay tuned.

As you already know the new version of Ubuntu 9.04 is due to release later today. Several new features are included in the new version like: kernel 2.6.28-11.37, Gnome 2.26, and the a-lot-talked-about Ext4 file system. The main focus has been user experience. They have also worked hard on making the system boot faster.

I have gathered some links to other blogs/news-sites if you’re interested in more reading.

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Oh my god is this a post? Yeah, I know, haven’t been able to post that much on my awesome blog lately. To keep it short, school is a bitch. I am currently working on three mandatory assignments, first deadline is 15th April and the last is 22nd April. This is hopefully my last mandatory assignments ever. So what are these assignments about? Well, I am going to write three papers. The first paper is about Face Recognition, quite interesting actually (finished). The second paper is about Publish/Subscribe systems, this one is also quite interesting (almost done). The third and last one is about optimizing and testing different Hadoop configurations, quite interesting but alot of work I think (haven’t started). Maybe I’ll post them on my blog so that you nerdy readers can check them out.

I still don’t have a chosen problem for my master thesis. Hopefully I’ll have it ready before the summer. I’ll see you later innovator!

Today i finally received my first iPhone development book. The book is titled “Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK“. The book is written by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche. Both have alot experience with Cocoa and Objective-C, so I think this is a good book. I gave the university library a visit too where I found a Objective-C book,  so no I’m well prepared for creating the next killer app!

I have had some requests recently about creating a complete tutorial on how to install OS X on the Compal IFL90. This tutorial contains two parts. The first part describes which packages you should choose during the installation. The second part will describe how to get sound and ethernet working. This is not a step by step installation guide. Look at it this way, its only a tutorial on how to get some of your hardware working. Actually most of it.

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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?