Thomas Nybergh’s pages

When I recently rented a VPS running a fresh install of Debian, I thought it was about time to stick with the now default Unicode locale, UTF-8. Doing this switch in a sensible fashion would include converting often used text files, such as chat logs from the older, more compatible but limited ISO 8859-15 charset. [...]

Good grief, what are these MEP asshats thinking? I’m against ownership concentration as much as the next guy, but I wonder what pluralism in media policy has to do with blogs putting “journalists and other media professionals under pressure”. I don’t see how regulation of before unseen ways in which potentially independent, anonymous citizens can [...]

Hewlett-Packard has released the source code of AdvFS under the GNU General Public License. AdvFS is an advanced file system (with features such as snapshots and storage pools) used by the company’s high end Tru64 UNIX operating system. This probably means that HP does a lot of business with Linux, and that there really is [...]

Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party discusses a wiretapping bill called “better adapted military intelligence gathering” that soon may hit hard on the privacy of anyone relying on any electronic communication routed through Sweden. A few quotes from the post: “At about 20 points in the national information infrastructure network, all traffic [...]

Google has a fugly new favicon.ico. I liked the old one because of its relative colorfulness, and I find it somewhat puzzling that they chose to use a gray gradient in the new version. (Image borrowed from Google Blogoscoped)

Due to recent very unclear, confusing and freedom hating legislation prepared by corrupt and incompetent people and an appeal court decision from a couple of days back, it’s now criminal to break the not very functional CSS copy protection used on most commercial DVD-Video discs. Watching DVDs using GNU/Linux systems is thus not something well [...]

Something exciting may be going on. Jeff Bonwick, storage expert and leader of the ZFS team at Sun has posted pictures from a seemingly informal meeting with Linus Torvalds on his blog. Sr Program Manager at Sun, Jim Grisanzio also links to the pictures in a blog post of his own titled “ZFS Pics“. Does [...]

After installing Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy Heron), I didn’t get any sound when I tried to play sound files in Amarok (the distribution’s own package of version 1.4.9.1), a music oriented audio player/music library for *nix. I fixed this by changing opening Settings – Configure Amarok – Engine and changing the Xine engine’s (no other [...]

I generally find music videos with bands miming songs to be depressing nonsense. An exception to this rule is made by The Get Out Clause, an unsigned Manchester band with their video for a song titled “Paper” (link to higher quality Youtube video). By cleverly taking advantage of The United Kingdom’s groundbreaking pioneer work in [...]

Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger instant messaging network (formerly MSN Messenger) is currently blocking messages with urls that contain *.youtube.com. Tietokone, a Finnish IT publication reports that this applies to messages with links to *.mediafire.com, too. WTF, how did the people running Windows Live even come up with such a lousy idea? I’m guessing the explanation, [...]