Could I have been doing some drunken internet shopping? It has only happened once before, and it’s a long time ago. I watched an excellent movie, Deep Rising, after coming home from a long night out and decided I just had to buy it on DVD. It was impossible to come by in Norway, but luckily I managed to dig it up in an obscure American online store. A few weeks later the DVD arrived in the mail. With P&P, import tax and an unfortunate exchange rate, the price of the thing easily exceeded three times the normal price of a DVD. And after seeing the movie again I learned a hard lesson in life: Drunken internet shopping is a really bad idea. The movie was crap.

If I had been riding the plastic VISA dragon again, this registered packet from Amsterdam could potentially contain anything. Maybe it was a tiny prostitute or some dope?¹⁾ Should I worry about plain clothes cops hiding in the snowdrift outside the post office?

As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. Of course. What I received was my RIPE Atlas probe. RIPE NCC is an independent, not-for-profit membership organisation that supports the infrastructure of the Internet through technical coordination and it’s located in – you guessed it – Amsterdam.

With the Atlas, RIPE is building the next generation active Internet measurement system. It is currently in the prototype stage and will eventually scale up to thousands of measurement nodes distributed around the globe. A probe is a tiny hardware device that runs measurements in the RIPE Atlas system and reports these measurements to the data collection components. I’ve now connected one of the nodes to my network to feeds the Atlas with relevant measurement data. Or all my passwords and credit card numbers.

I’m not doing this only to do RIPE a favor. I’m suspecting the my ISP has overbooked their bandwidth capacity considerably in my area: Last week I was at home sick for a day and around noon I started a download that sped through at maximum speed. As one should expect, since I do, you know, pay for that speed. In the evening, however, downloads tend to just crawl along. The most likely culprit is someone with way too much warez to share. I suspect the downstairs neighbors; I’m pretty sure I can hear the PSU fans of a server when I walk past their front door.

With the Atlas probe I’m hoping to extract some measurements that show ping values skyrocket and bandwidth measurements plummet in the evening. It’s nice to have some sort of data when sending that angry (but polite) old-cranky-man e-mail to the ISP. And if I don’t get the data I want from the probe, I’m still contributing to the RIPE Atlas. If you also want to connect a probe to your network, you can use this form.

1) Just to clarify; I’ve never order neither (tiny) prostitutes nor dope (on the internet).

Whoever wins gets to go on a conference of their choice. My choice, should the grand price mysteriously fall into my lap? Black Hat USA. Some of the greatest minds in IT security come together to share some of the most impressive hacks you’ll see that year. Who would not want to go to a conference where they recommend that you to leave all your gadgets at home and just bring a notebook and a pen? If you bring any gadgets you can be pretty sure they are hacked beyond all recognition when you leave the conference. Sounds like fun to me!

But to win an app contest where the competitors are the “best consultants in the universe”¹⁾ can be challenging and a killer app is required. Unfortunately, I have no idea what to develop. I did have a pretty good concept outlined, but it turned out the data required isn’t public and collecting the data myself is impossible, or at least not very practical. Also, all the killer applications are already developed. But the thing is that most these killer applications are based on an idea so simple and trivial any idiot could come up with them. Another option is to take a great concept and do it better. But how many flashlight applications are there room for? At least 1000.

During the last couple of days I’ve worked really hard to come up with a good concept. I’ve even brought out that pen and paper all the creative people recommend. I’m this close to starting to write on Anniken’s napkins and I have still not had a great idea that hasn’t already been done. I’ve given myself a deadline until next week to come up with something. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll just have to leech off of someone else’s great idea.

The Simpsons did it.

1) Totally unbiased management quote.

• “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” — Vladimir Lenin
• “Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.” — Vladimir Lenin
• “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
• “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” — Voltaire
• “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.” — Voltaire
• “I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.” — W. C. Fields
• “I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do to it.” — W. C. Fields
• “It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.” — W. C. Fields
• “Take me down to the bar! We’ll drink breakfast together!” — W. C. Fields
• “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” — Warren Buffett
• “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” — Will Rogers
• “Thought is free.” — William Shakespeare
• “A conservative is a man who sits and thinks. Mostly sits.” — Woodrow Wilson
• “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.” — Woodrow Wilson
• “To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.” — Woody Allen
• “Cut my pie into four pieces, I don’t think I could eat eight.” — Yogi Berra
• “There are no traffic jams on the extra mile.” — Zig Ziglar
• I would rather tell you one truth you don’t like than to tell you a hundred lies you do like.

Thankfully, there are sites like ThemeForest. ThemeForest works as an aggregator for all those people trapped in basements around the world and enables them to sell their creations on a secure market place. Not unlike how all other market places work. Many theme artists make good money on ThemeForest as well, having sold for a million USD or more. I’m guessing that the creators of ThemeForest also laugh a little when they go to bed at night.

Unfortunately, there isn’t exactly an abundance of responsive premium themes either. Since there is limited money flowing in the blogging sphere – very few bloggers actually make money from their site – premium themes tend to be tailored for businesses and creative professions who need portfolios. I’m neither a business nor creative enough to need a portfolio, and this makes the selection of usable themes even more limited.

So far I’ve seriously considered Rewrite, PixelPower and Angular. Rewrite and PixelPower are blog themes, while Angular primarily is a portfolio theme with a nice blog section. All three themes look great and work well in terms of responsiveness. Previews are also available for all three themes (links above) and this gives the potential buyer an impression how the theme will look with his or her content.

Now, the problem with the previews is that the theme authors use just the right kind of content when the previews are created. I’ve got ten years¹⁾ worth of content with various length, images in all shapes and sizes and everything in a format that can’t exactly be described as “consistent”: The design has changed a lot over those ten years and the content format has changed with it. To be sure that things look good, or at least OK, with a new theme requires that I’m able to test drive everything with my own content. This can be challenging with a premium theme and shelling out $30+ for something untested that might not work well isn’t really an option.

So the hunt continues.

1) Woah! It’s been ten years! Countless hours poured into something that has helped me keep my head above water every now and then.

• WordPress is huge.
• It’s no longer a pain in the ass to run on Windows.
• Responsive web design is the way to go.
• Plugin development is something I’d like to dive deeper into.
• I discovered the distraction free writing feature.

In the short term, responsive web design was the presentation that triggered me the most. I’m familiar with response web design and use a lot of responsive sites. Even this site is somewhat responsive, it’ll remove some white space on a device with a smaller screen, for instance a tablet device. Now I want to make the site’s design even more responsive and better looking on mobile devices. WPtouch is a great plugin, but when it’s possible to get the site to look familiar even on small screen, there’s really no need to use it.

One option would be to make the current theme more responsive, but that will probably be a lot of work for someone like me. Also, from past attempts to do my own redesign from scratch, I know my limitations. So my best bet is what I always do: Find a nice looking, free theme and hack away!

I’ve been looking around a little, and at this point Renova seems like a good option. But I’d prefer to have two columns, not just one. That can probably be arranged, though. It might take a while, but I’m positive the next design will be responsive. For more responsive goodness, have a look at the Media Queries showcase.

At least I managed to write wrestle through this entry and schedule it yesterday!

09:53 CET: After a good morning walk I’m at Thon Hotell Opera. I’ve got my name tag and t-shirt (another one of them convention t-shirts you never use) and the main room is starting to fill up, but it’s not crowded enough for a picture yet. I’ve seen one familiar face, one of the presenters – who looked somewhat hung over. There’s public Wi-Fi, by the way. I’m not connecting.

I’ve been trying to use the Android WordPress app to update, but holy crap, the thing is unstable when handling images: Crashes, XML parsing errors, disappearing updates. The WordPress app has them all. So I fell back to using Opera Mobile, which works, but it’s not ideal since the WordPress admin GUIDE isn’t exactly exactly made for mobile.

11:25 CET: After Hanni Ross’ opening remarks I know now even more ways how to contribute to WordPress. Not sure where she got the percentages on the Norwegian translations of WordPress, though, because they don’t match the ones on translate.wordpress.org. And now: “Writing a plugin” by Morten Hauan. Title in English, presentation in Norwegian. Trailer fraud?

12:08 CET: Hauan gave a great introduction to plugin writing in WordPress. I’ve only touched the surface of plugin development in WordPress myself, and got some ideas on how to change wp-days-ago with what I learned. Next up: “Responsive Web Design” by Wilhem Joys Andresen. Voted best dressed this evening.

12:38 CET: Woah, that was fast! Wilhem, former Opera Software employee, now independent consultant, briefly took us through media queries. Nothing new and groundbreaking, but the more you talk about it, the greater the chance designers around the world will see the light. It’s the future, man (and it started way back in 2001). Unlike 99% of other presenters, Joys Andresen finished twenty minutes before schedule. Soon it’s time for lunch and a room packed with nerds awkwardly socializing.

13:57 CET: We’re back from lunch and I’m happy to report that there will be no pictures of food. But the lunch was nice. Next Marko Heijnen will tell us how to create native apps with WordPress. Rumors have it that the hipster phone will be involved. Maybe Marko knows something about the bugs in the Android client as well.

14:31 CET: And Marko is done. Must have been a nightmare for the interpreters to handle that one. Not as much native focus as I’d hoped, but gave a good introduction to how you can use WordPress while thinking way out of the box.

14:52 CET: I don’t know about you, but I just had a powernap. Feeling fresh an ready for Josh Holmes, who will tell us how to run WordPress on Windows. My experience: Noooooo!

16:01 CET: Josh is done and I’m not scared of running WordPress on Windows anymore. The rest of the pack is preparing for lighting sessions, while I’m heading out to do some errands. Back at 17:00 sharp for Zé Fontainhas’ keynote.

17:01 CET: Let the keynote commence!

17:38 CET: Aaand we’re done. Zé took us through the history of WordPress and took a quick look into the future. Certainly interesting stuff, followed by a good Q& A session.

I’m coming back next year. Given that there will be a next year, of course.

Pictures after the break.

When it comes to games, I’m not much of a puzzle guy. But since I got LIMBO a few months ago and enjoyed it quite a lot, I decided to give Machinarium a try when it was on sale on Steam a while back.

Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure game with heavy use of puzzles and brain teasers. It’s created by Amanita Design, a small, independent game developing studio based in the Czech Republic. The game was released in 2009, but that something is “old” doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad. “Old” in this case means that us patient gamers can get it on sale. “Old” in this case also means that the game is written in Flash, but we’ll come back to that later. Machinarium tells the story about Josef, a little robot who finds himself dumped on a scrapheap. After re-assembling himself he sets off towards the city to look for a friend. The story, which is told without the use of text or dialogue, unfolds as you play, and even though it’s not the most intriguing and creative story I’ve seen – you’ll probably feel it’s very familiar – it’s very well told.

The story’s backdrop is beautiful, hand-drawn scenes accompanied to a lovely soundtrack by Floex, Amanita Design’s own in-house “sound maker”, as he is entitled on their website. The soundtrack is available here if you want to listen to it. If I’d have to label it, I’d call it “industrial chill”, which is perfect for Machinarium – except for some plants and a bit of water, everything in the game is mechanized and industrial, including the local wild life. The game design is extraordinary well thought-through and the attention to detail is impressive.

The puzzles you stumble across in Machinarium are mostly about pattern recognition. How to interact with the environment is also often part of the puzzles, which are very well balanced and just challenging enough for Average Joe. I got stuck once, but even if that happens, there is hope. Josef will have a small clue for you most of the time and if you find yourself feeling like a moron for not being able to solve a puzzle even with his help, you can play a little mini-game that will reveal the solution, or at least give you some very good clues on how to solve it.

But Machinarium, like all games, has its flaws. The game is written in Flash, and clicking the right mouse button brings up the Flash menu with its “About Flash” and whatnot. Since clicking the right mouse button is usually some kind of action in other point-and-click adventure games – for instance that you automatically put whatever you are holding back in to your inventory – the Flash menu got a bit annoying after a while. It’s mostly my own fault though, for not being able to memorize that I could not use the right mouse button to return whatever the little robot was holding in his hand back to the inventory. Instead the inventory had to be opened before the item could be returned. Point-and-click adventure games often involves a lot of pointing and clicking – hence the genre’s name – with items from the inventory, a process that got rather tedious.

The game lagged considerably on my computer when played in fullscreen. It have to be said that my hardware isn’t what you would call state of the art, but it should be able to handle a game from 2009. Hardware acceleration was turned on in the Flash settings, but that didn’t help at all. I ended up playing the game in windowed mode, which worked a lot better and was fine since fullscreen didn’t really add anything to the game: The resolution used in both fullscreen and window mode is the same. The immense detail of the background images also proved to be a challenge: In one of the scenes, it was virtually impossible to see that the main character could interact with an object on the screen, and it was only by accident I clicked on it.

But in spite of these minor issues, Machinarium is a great game. If you like puzzle games and brain teasers, you should go right ahead and buy it. It won’t entertain you that long, it took me only 6 hours to complete the game and I really suck at puzzles, but at the asking price of USD 10 it’s certainly worth it. You can buy the game straight from the creators.

I tested the Machinarium on Windows, but it’s also available on Mac OS X, Linux (probably through Wine), PlayStation 3 (PSN), iPad 2, BlackBerry PlayBook, and soon, Android. So pick your poison.

Encryption is the key to safe wireless internet usage and while all wireless routers available today support a range of different encryption standards, many are configured with no encryption or very poor encryption by default. As an example, let’s have a look at the wireless access points that are visible from my apartment.

No less than 16 wireless access points are in range of my computer. I found them by using a tool called inSSIder, which anyone can download and use to scan for available wireless access points. It basically does the same as your operating system when it searches for wireless networks to connect, but the information collected from the networks found is displayed in a very convenient way. The main point of interest here is the Privacy column, which tells us what kind of encryption each network uses. There is one network with no encryption at all, 6 with WEP encryption, 3 with WPA encryption and 6 with WPA2-AES encryption (displayed as “RSNA-CCMP” in the table). As you can see, the WPA encryption comes in two flavors; WPA-AES (WPA-CCMP) and WPA-TKIP.

Initially, the network without encryption seems like an interesting one: It will give you free internet access by simply connecting to it. Personally, I get a little nervous when I see an open wireless network like this. It might be tempting to use it, but in some cases it’s a trap!. Someone might have set up this honeypot to lure you to connect to it just to record everything you do while connected. And by everything I mean everything: usernames, passwords and credit cards numbers – every single piece of data that is transmitted between your computer and the internet. Remember that free wireless internet you use at the coffee shop and the pizza place? It might be that you are connecting to a honeypot, not the free wireless network. And even if you are connecting to the coffee shop’s network, anyone can eavesdrop on the connection as long as the connection is unencrypted. This is the reason why I never connect to an unencrypted network and neither should you.

6 of the networks above are encrypted with WEP. In terms of communication security, WEP encryption is almost as unsafe as a network with no encryption at all. A quick search on Google shows you just how easy it is to crack the WEP passphrase and eavesdrop on the traffic on a WEP encrypted network: This means that if your network is encrypted with WEP and there’s someone within range of your network who wants to know what you are doing on the internet, he or she is probably listening in right now. Is your ex hiding in the bushes with his laptop? Even if that’s not the case, you should immediately change the encryption on your wireless network to something else than WEP.

WPA might seem tempting. But no. WPA can also be cracked fairly easy, even if it’s considerably more complicated than cracking WEP encrypted networks. Even though some Japanese scientists did it in one minute (PDF), most people wanting to crack an encrypted network will target WEP encrypted networks because it’s so damn easy. To stay as safe as you can today, switch to WPA2-AES (might be WPA2-CCMP on some routers) and create one hell of a passphrase. It is possible to crack WPA2-AES, but it requires a lot of computer power and password guessing. By using a non-dictionary password you can be fairly safe that no one will be able to eavesdrop when you surf on your wireless internet connection.

Personally, I’m using WPA2-AES with a 64 character long password. It makes me feel safe, but annoys the hell out of everyone who visits and want to connect to the internet.

Worth it.

• “I don’t need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.” — Stephen Fry
• “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs
• “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” — Steve Jobs
• “Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.” — Steven Wright
• “All warfare is based on deception.” — Sun Tzu
• “Opportunities multiply as they are seized.” — Sun Tzu
• “Knowing what’s right doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.” — Theodore Roosevelt
• “The reason fat men are good natured is they can neither fight nor run.” — Theodore Roosevelt
• “When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a know and hold on.” — Theodore Roosevelt
• “Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.” — Thomas Alva Edison
• “I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.” — Thomas Alva Edison