The Leirdal Blog

As I have mentioned earlier, my little brother is a designer. The most recent news is that they have achieved a Red-Dot award (opens in a new window) for their Orio Wire and Tube Collector.

Opera has released their new "revolutionary" Opera Unite. It is an interesting way of handling the sharing of services and information and probably also a quite natural extension of the browser as an platform. Now we just have to sit back and wait for some more exciting services in addition to those available in the beta release.

Here are some of the services I would like to see (Some of them might be available or not possible, I have not read the documentation fully yet):

• WebDav - I would like to be able to upload and download files easily within my normal desktop tools.


• HTTPS connections - I would like to be able to do this securely


• A versioning system - A simple subversion implementation maybe?


• Easy Backup - A way to create a backup of some of your files on a friends computer.


• Easy Wiki/Blog/Portal - A simplified tool for creating a site in Opera Unite. Hopefully with RSS support (both out and in)


• RSS Reader

What do you think, are there other tools you would like to see? Please leave your wishes in the comments.

Do you want to know more about how it works?

Check out these articles:
digi.no - Slik fungerer Opera Unite (in Norwegian)
digi.no - Opera flytter webserveren til nettleseren(in Norwegian)
Opera.com - An introduction to Opera Unite

Some are not that excited:
DagensIT - Operas viktigste nyskapning(in Norwegian)

Last night I attended a project dinner in Oslo after a long day at work. On my way home I noticed a lot of people looking up. I did as they and was a bit shocked by this woman balancing on top of a very flexible pole about 40 meters above ground. (This number is a guesstimate on my part based on the height of the nearby buildings). She was standing on top of the pole, balancing, hanging by a leg and doing several other stunts. I admit that she was wearing a safety rope, but hey it looked pretty scary anyway. While she was up there it even started to rain a few drops as well.

In the picture below you can see her looking down at me. I have also included a video in the full blog entry (click on the title above to see the video). Please have a look at that to see how the pole and the acrobat was swinging beneath the clouds.
Continue reading "Fearless"

During my last London visit these cranes were greeting my arrival. At least that is what I felt when I spotted them on the horizon the evening we arrived.

My girlfriend celebrated her xx birthday on Friday, and we marked the event by visiting UK. We arrived in London Wednesday evening and jumped on a bus to Bath, Stonehenge and Salisbury the following day. These are a few of the pictures from Stonehenge. Other pictures will follow later.

• Alternative Stonehenge image 1


• Alternative Stonehenge image 2


• Alternative Stonehenge image 3

It’s kind of interesting to see the turn among most companies out there concerning the use of different software tools for different tasks. For years we have had a mentality that either you create your own monster of a solution or you customize one product from some big vendor. But since the appearance of internet and the web our world has gotten a lot more fragmented.

(All links in this post opens in new windows)

Lately the consumer market has created a feel for sites and products on the net that is not only OK to use, but “necessary” to use. I am of course talking about web based applications and social software. In other words, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, instant messaging products and other similar tools. Several companies have their own Wikis, blogs, forums and instant messaging products. Micro-blogging tools like Twitter and Yammer is also being used more and more these days.

For years we have had Open Source Software (OSS), and except for Linux and Apache not all of them have been accepted by big business. And the only reason that Linux and Apache got accepted was due to their track record and the support from some pretty large vendors, among else IBM.

Lately I have got the feeling that a lot of corporations have accepted the risk of using products with a smaller support organisation than what these corporations are used to. The acceptance of small vendors and OSS products into the suite of software used by corporations have given me as a professional both benefits and challenges.

The biggest challenge is the same as it has been for years now, integration. We need information and functionality integrated on several layers and in infinite ways. So what the big vendors do and have done for years is to create tools for us to help integrate our fragmenting world.

The increasingly complex world of tools and services always make me think of the second law of thermodynamics. Luckily we do not have a closed system; we have the opportunity to impose change and to establish ways to solve our complexity.

So, the next time you use a wiki for documenting your experiences, the next time you rate some other users post on the web, the next time you chat with a colleague or the next time you write a blog post, consider this - how do you use such information from other products and sites within your company. Are you able to use the information? Should you be able to use it? Do you want to be able to use it? And finally, if the answer is yes on any of those questions, how do you integrate your tools?

I have deliberately not mentioned search, archiving and all the other corporate necessities like reviewability, reusability, accountability and so on. Neither do I want to mention the words service oriented architecture (SOA), web services or integration platform. What I want is a world where this information is seamlessly available to me, stored indefinitely and persistently at no cost. As a professional I do not trust this, so I need to gather knowledge I have produced in such a way that it is still available to me even though the service I originally used to create this information no longer exists.

How do you do that?

It has been quite mixed weather in Oslo today. It rained in the morning, then we had a few hours with beautiful sunshine. Then some thunder and lightning with heavy rain. And now the sun shines again. Kind of weird.
On my way to work I took a few pictures of my umbrella using my Canon G9 camera. I converted them to grayscale and then to duotone with a dark blue colour. There is another picture here.

Yesterday evening my girlfriend and I went to check out a stunt they tried out on top of the new Oslo Opera building. The Opera Carmen was sold out after just a few days, so they rigged up a big screen outside on the Opera roof and had a free Live show of the same concert as it was performed indoors. It turned out to be an enormous event with over 7000 people coming for a look. This was April in Norway... cold is a key word. Not everybody stuck it out for the full opera, but it was a better experience than I expected.

The first part had the most viewers. After a while the sun came and we had a magnificent view of the sunset as it set behind one of the big buildings next to the Opera, Havnelageret. (The big pink building in one of the pictures below). Some of the people nearest the traffic had some noise during the concert, but except for that the sound was pretty good.

Read more (opens in a new window): Carmen på Operataket ble en knallsuksess