Was an article in a Norwegian newspaper today about what I believe is the last Norwegian king to attempt a foreign invasion, namely the invasion of Harald Hardrada of England in 1066. (Hardrada means ‘hard ruler’) as his rule was supposed to have been very harsh.

The story of Haralad Hardrada has always facinated my as he played a part on my important events in Norwegian history, like participating in the battle of Stiklestad in 1030. This battle is famous in Norwegian history as it was the battle which basically turned Norway into a Christian country, even though the army fighting to keep the faith in the Norse gods won the battle and managed to kill the king later known as Olav the Holy.

In 1034 Harald Hardrada had travelled to Constantinopel and took service for the Byzantin emperor, which was where he gained his battle experience and wealth. In 1045 he returned to Norway and became co-ruler for a year, before gaining sole kingship. Harald Hardrade is also known as the founder of Oslo, which is today the capital of Norway, which is why a
statue of him decorate the city hall.

Anyway the story in today’s paper was about the Battle of Fulford which I had to admit I didn’t know about. The battle of Fulford preceded the more famous (and for Harald Hardrade final battle of Stamford bridge. The battle of Stamford bridge preceding of course the even more famous battle at Hastings in which Harald Godwinson (the then king of England) was beaten by William the Conqueror.

It seems the battleside of the battle of Fulford is actually preserved today in a condition almost identical to the one of 1066, with an english society working to have it preserved as there is a recent effort to build a road and housing over the site.

So if you are in that area lend your support to the Battle of Fullford group :)

Decided recently that I need to be more active during my weekends as I was feeling that I was letting them slip away to easily. So I set myself a goal of at least doing two things every day of the weekend. Started doing this weekend by goin to Montserrat which is a old church/convent in the mountains north of Barcelona. It was a very nice area and I walked around in the mountains for many hours enjoying the feeling of being outdoors and the beautiful scenery. Definetly going to go back there to explore further. In the evening I went to a stand up-comedy show in Gracia. They had pulled in some stand-up comedians from London and it great fun. Mike joined me there and I learned that Mike has an uncanny likeness to David Hasselhoff from our friends on the stage.

Sunday I went to see V for Vendetta at the local cinema. Loved the movie and combined with my recent viewing of Closer it increased my appreciation of Natalie Portman as an actress a lot. In the evening I went over to Matthieu’s place where he hosted a barbeque on his roof terrasse as a delayed house warming party. Mattheiu’s appartment is pretty nice even being very rustic. Nice view of the town from the terrace and short walk to the beach.

Elisa update

So Phillipe and Loic are working hard on getting a first version of Elisa ready to be announced/presented at GUADEC. One of the things they are currently working on is making sure it integrates with ViiV systems. Managed to take this screenshot today showing Elisa browsing the directories of the ViiV server. Lots of polish needed though :). Lionel has already made an agreement with David Vignoni for doing graphics for Elisa (the current temporary graphics used are taken from various existing icon sets, mostly Crystal afaik). David has done work for us before, doing a set of icons for Flumotion (which we haven’t fully included yet due to letting it block on a more generic ‘cleaning up the Flumotion GUI’ task’)

Been dealing a little lately with the issue of standards. On one hand I recognize some standards as important and their existence has problably been a critical success factor for free and open source software. POSIX, PNG, Window Manager specification, UTF8, SVG, XML and various hardware standards come to mind as some examples.

The problem with standards is that the standarisation process often brings with it stagnation or that the standard advocates horrible solutions (the horrible solution was the compromise between two good solutions for instance). I think Solaris is an example of how letting yourself get locked down into a gigantic pile of standards and ABI promises in the end becomes more of a problem than a help. Sure if you ask people if ABI stability is important to them they will say yes, but in the end developers tend to value feature additions and improvements in the library they are depending on even more than ABI stability. And the same is true for standards, while everyone would say that being standards compliant is good, they would still choose to use something else if it provides a better experience.

Of course the worst kind of standards is when you create technical workarounds for the lack of standards and then ask people to standarize on those. Been a couple of examples of such I seen recently.

I don’t know how to do good and needed standards while not creating a standards bog, all I know is that I think standards isn’t the solution to all of the worlds problems.

Was sad to read today that Robert Jordan the author of the popular fantasy saga Wheel of Time have been diagnosed with a disease called amyloidosis, which according to Jordan has a median of 1 year until fatality from diagnosis if untreated. If treated the median jumped to 4 years which isn’t that much more. It made me think about my uncle who died two years ago after having been diagnosed with cancer about one year before that again, which again made me realize I tend to accept the occurence death quite quickly. I guess it comes as a byproduct of having a lot of doctors, nurses, vetrinerians and biologists in the family, all who comes in close contact with the cycle of life through their jobs almost on a daily basis, which in turn I guess have made them very ‘comfortable’ with such events, something which has rubbed of on me I guess. Combined with a complete lack of religiosity in the familty which has removed words such as ‘unfair or unjust’ in relation to death and instead quiet acceptance that death is direct result of being alive. So while there are of course the sadness and sorrow which comes when someone close dies, no energy or anger is spent looking to the heavens asking ‘why’.