This year I planned to present a complete virus to the students and demonstrate how it worked and replicated itself, but for various reasons it wasn't finished on time for the guest lecture.

The virus itself isn't actually a full functioning virus, it's for educational purposes only, and wont infect more than a single file with a specific name (I want tempt fate by making a virus that has a chance to escape out to the real world, however teoricly improbable and unlikely it it, the history is full of viruses escaping the creator to wreck havoc onto the world)

The virus is an very simple DOS/COM-infecter, it's a virus from the ancient past, and wont work on any modern operating system, but it will run just fine in dosbox and give you a nice rundown of how viruses work in theory. The virus will infect only one file with the name "hello.com", but it can be easily modified to search for more files.

To try it out, download both the hello world program and the virus itself, and compile them using NASM:

[stianh@batstick ~]$ nasm virus.asm -fbin -o virus.com
[stianh@batstick ~]$ nasm hello.asm -fbin -o hello.com

Then start up dosbox and run the HELLO.COM file to see that it actually prints a "Hello World!". Then run "VIRUS.COM" to infect the file, and re-run "HELLO.COM", to confirm the virus has actually been planted (it will give you a message on the screen)

Now all you need to do is to sit down with a debugger and step through the program several times to really understand what it does ;)

Off course it didn't go without glitches (a journalist was involved after all), and they managed to get my name wrong - not just the spelling - the name itself. They decided I looked more like a "Kai Mathisen" and used that name throughout the entire article. Very awkward, but I did get an embarrassed apology and a complete reprint of the article the following week, which suits me fine since they did manage to get the name of Gjøvik University College right and all publicity right before high school graduates decide which college to apply to, is a very Good Thing :)

One of my long time plans was always to build some sort of home studio. Of course a real home studio isn't cheap. One needs all kind of expensive equipment, like mixers, microphones, sound cards, and recording software. Being a "less is more"-freak ,of course, I wanted to find out whats the least amount of money and equipment you need to do decent recordings for song writing and demo use. I had almost given up, when I discovered this small gadget called the Zoom H4. This little baby is truly amazing. It has two built-in high quality condenser microphones, set in a X-Y setup giving you real stereo recordings. You can record with quality up to 96KHz 24bit (or strait to mp3 up to 320kbps) on to a standard SD-card, applying all kind of built-in effects real-time. It can also function as a 4-track studio, making it useful for quick demo recordings any where any time. The connectors is the really cool part. It has four inputs, two standard jack connections, and two "real" XLR plugs with phantom power allowing you to use any kind of external microphones. The unit also comes with an usb-connection to easily transfer your recording to the computer, and can even function as an external USB sound card which shows up automatically even in Linux. The recordings sound great, just listen to this short improvised jam of me just goofing around. Others I've spoken to tells me it's also great for recording concerts and band rehersals, and I can't wait to try it out.

I have really wanted to build a HTPC for a long time, but never gotten around to it. Both because spare time is something I have very little of, and that most HTPC parts cost more that I want to spend. Then I suddenly had a revelation during a visit to some friends of mine. They had an old Xbox hooked up to their TV as a media center, and I really liked the looked and feel, and superb usability of it, so I decided this was the route to pursue. I finally got my hands on an old Xbox (even with a DVD kit addon) for free though an old friend of mine that had just upgraded to the Xbox 360. I then bought a very cheap modchip for about kr. 200,- and one of my coworkers offered to chip it for me and install XBMC on it. I now watch and listen to all kinds of media over the network in my living room on my big screen TV and Home Surround System. I have even watched a few Everton UEFA Cup games via live Internet streams on it, and it works like a charm. So people: don't throw away your old hardware, someone will always find some good use for it.

This week I ended up purchasing a new CD player for my car. Initially I was only looking for a new CD player that could blend more in to the car's dashboard than my old one, meaning it needed to be dark grey or black with red LEDs. Then by chance I stumbled into the Pioneer web site and looking at their CD tuner section I found their DEH-P55BT model not only had color configurable LCD and LEDs, read MP3/WMA discs, and options to connect iPods with additional accessories, but also a built-in Bluetooth hands-free for almost any mobile phone. Nice! You get all your phones functions on to the diplay of and control it with the player. Look up numbers in the phone book, speech commands, the works. Only down side is that it didn't support streaming audio from your phone, apparently you need to add another €300 and buy the more expensive player to get that option. Well, anyways, now I only need to get the damn thing plugged in properly ;-)

Derby days, aren't they just great? Up yearly, nice breakfast, the whole body tingling with excitement and anticipation, off to the pub, good friends, singing, cheering, few pints, build up to kick off, Z-cars, a full Gooodison Park roaring, the Red Shites sent home packing after a real trashing in every position of the park! 3-0! The biggest Goodison derby win since 1909, the biggest derby win since 1964, what a game, what goals, what a twatting! Today I'm a very happy man (albeit a bit hung over). Come on you Blues, the School of Science is back!

You see all these planets that keep popping up rely on HTML in the RSS feed, so you can add links, or nice bullet lists:

• one link
• two
• three

or even a nice image:

But as you (should) know there is no room for HMTL is RSS, and certainly I just don't do HTML, I use reStructuredText ;-) One trick of course is to use the content namespace, and add "content:encoded" nodes to your feed, and keep the description nodes clean. So that's what I did, and I wrote this diary entry to test the result.

So here you have it, a shiny new nice RSS, with all the gore you eye candy junkies crave, and with plain 'ol text for the rest of us. Enjoy :-)

• Python is quick and easy to develop in and let you have something working very fast.
• It has a effective runtime system that does much of the things that Simula's runtime also must handle giving you much for free.
• Python is so dynamically that even language specific things in Simula can be expresses in a similar manner in Python
• Even though CPython is tragically welded to the C stack, Python 2.5 now has support for co-routines through the extended yield statement, and some preliminary testing indicates it can be used to simulate Simula co-routines.
• Python is very portable, runs on almost anything, and has a vast Standard Library that's part of the language itself. So writing a compiler in Pythin let's Simula easily access Python modules giving it more tools to do real tasks with.
• The PyPY project shows that a compiler written in Python is actually very doable, and gives you an extremely flexible compiler that can be very quickly adapted and extended with no or little effort..
• The performance issue isn't that important in most cases anyway, and if it is adding a new back-end should be simple enough. Like for instance a CLI option would be a mouth watering thought.

This is something I have been claiming for nearly ten years now, that publicly traded companies doesn't work properly. They spend more time trying to do want they think the stock marked want, rather than focusing on want the customer want. They trade quarterly results for the company's survival in the long run. This is because every stock marked investor is screaming at the top of their lungs at every quarterly result presentations that the next quarter must be better than the last. It's not enough that you make sound profits, the profits must increase every quarter, not in numbers, but in rates mind you, or all the day-traders and mutual fund managers will drop the stock like yesterdays newspaper. I worked at a company that had never in it's existence lost money, still we were stamped as "boring" by the stock marked because the stock never moved thus not giving stock investors any chance for quick profits. Since most CEO salaries and stock options are decided not on the company's heath, but on it's stock price, they will do anything to "please" the stock marked, usually by cutting cost (which in corporate terms always means layoffs).

Having worked for a public company myself, I've seen first hand how the quartile result race strangle all creativity, kills employee satisfaction, a ignore humane and ethical thinking, and eventually destroy the company itself. All by seemingly looking healtly and managing to holding it's stock price high by constantly laying off staff thus cashing in on the short term boost it gives to profit margins. No attempts to boost the turn-around was made, because that meant hard work and probably delivering losses a couple of quarters, so eventually shortly after I left the company it was slowly broken up in tiny pieces that where sold off or dropped.

After this I made a promise that I will think long and hard before I work for a publicly traded company again. Working for entrepreneurs and founders is fine, so is privately held companies, even government held companies might do, but if you're a recruiter from a company noted on some stock exchange, you better be carrying a very good offer to tempt me in to even consider it ;-).

Sitting in a sales meeting with APC talking about cooling the discussion suddenly took a surprising turn when the sales rep mention in a casual comment that APC was now pursuing fuel cell powered backup systems. This got me really exited because it suddenly dawned on me that is would revolutionize the way we do backup powering in computer rooms, and apart from laptops this must be one of the most perfect uses of fuel cell technology. No more diesel generators, no more large battery driven UPS', just one system powered by hydrogen providing long time stable AC backup power with no moving parts. Brilliant. APC has this only half way out the research labs yet, but can deliver you a system for €25,000 per 10Kw module. The system is powered by standard industrial quality hyrogen cylinders, each providing 79 minutes of run time with runtime extending linear by adding more cylinders. One cylinder cost about €25 and with three cylinders you achieve N+1 redundancy.

I'm telling you all now: this is the new way you will be doing backup power in the future. Of all my predictions; this is one I have great confidence in. Certainly, the next computer room I'm building will be with fuel cells ;-)

I finally got my hands of one of those Series60 Symbian phones, a Nokia N70. I'm really disappointed by how slow and bloated it is (I mean when a phone takes 30 seconds just to boot, something has gone horribly wrong) but on the brighter side I finally got to try out the Symbian port of Python. One cool features I discovered was that you can connect to the python shell on your phone remotely over bluetooth using a laptop computer.

First I told my box to accept incoming bluetooth connections on channel 1:

[root@batchop ~]# rfcomm listen /dev/rfcomm4
Waiting for connection on channel 1
Connection from 00:16:4E:D7:14:DA to /dev/rfcomm4
Press CTRL-C for hangup

Then I started the python bluetooth remote shell, and connected to the serial device using a simple terminal emulator like "minicom", or "cu":

[stianh@batchop ~]$ cu -l /dev/rfcomm

or alternatively:

[stianh@batchop ~]$ minicom -m

Then you get the familiar python interactive shell prompt:

>>>

>>> print sys.version
2.2.2 (#0, Sep 26 2005, 11:38:57)
[GCC 2.9-psion-98r2 (Symbian build 546)]

>>> sys.platform
'symbian_s60'

>>> dir()
['__builtins__', '__doc__', '__name__', 'appuifw', 'commands',
'exec_btconsole', 'exec_interactive', 'exit', 'init_options_menu',
'menu_action', 'my_console', 'os', 'pr', 'query_and_exec', 'quit',
'series60_console', 'sys', 'this_dir']

>>> os.listdir('c:')
['cache', 'DxDPOF.txt', 'Nokia', 'Private', 'System']

Of cource like all other python distributions batteries' included, and Nokia gives you some nice modules to play around with the phone's data. Like accessing it's calendar:

>>> import calendar
>>> db = calendar.open()
>>> print db.export_vcalendars((2,))
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:1.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:2
DESCRIPTION:Skattekort
DTSTART:20060127T000000
DTEND:20060128T000000
X-EPOCAGENDAENTRYTYPE:EVENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
DCREATED:20060327T000000
LAST-MODIFIED:20060327T105500
PRIORITY:0
STATUS:NEEDS ACTION
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

C:\>adfind -list -b ou=wpkg,dc=hig,dc=no -f "objectcategory=computer" cn  > wpkg.grp
C:\>beyondexec -g c:\wpkg.grp -s cscript \\higvm\wpkg\wpkg.js /install:firefox

And voilá, you push out Firefox to all computers in the wpkg OU.