Now you can check out what web pages I’ve found in my link blog. It’s a little app I’ve been developing for some time and since a few days it’s a link in the sidebar to the left on this blog. There are still plenty of things to fix but it’s working and fills its purpose.

The first bookmarking application I made a few years ago never made it to launch. I was put off when I discovered other similar services like del.icio.us and Google Bookmarks so I never finished it. But even though I’ve tried those and a few others I never really feel that they worked the way I wanted. That and the fact that I no longer care if what I do is unique or not made me have another go.

I was thinking to release the script for anyone to use but it’s too early at this point. Even though I believe in “release early, release often” it would require some tinkering before making it public and I have other projects I’d like to spend more time on now. Please tell me if you are interested in an Open Source link blog application runnning on PHP+MySQL because if there is an interest from other people to use it I will feel more motivated to add missing features and make install scripts etc.

Frog in gras, originally uploaded by Martin Svedén.

When visiting Sweden recently a family member spotted this little fellow in the grass. I went for my camera and took a series of pictures. This is one of the last ones and I think it came out best.

It’s a rather small frog, the body being ~5 cm. He looks like boss of the situation, cool dude.

My friend Dave’s got a new house mate, a kitten called James.

He is a funny little fur ball!

I took a series of pictures. It was a bit tricky to get good shots as he had a tendency to move around a lot but I think I got some good ones. You can find the rest of the pictures here.

Feel free to use any of the pictures on your site, just give credit by linking back to this page, thanks.

I did not have a Compact Flash card but needed one. I do however have other types of memory cards and if I could utilize any of those I would prefer that to buying yet another type.

There are as far as I know two types of adapters for this. Secure Digital to Compact Flash and Memory Stick II to Compact Flash. Since I have cards of both types already, it didn’t matter much which kind I got hold of, although I would prefer SD since I have more devices that accepts that kind.

After asking around in local shops it turns out that SD to CF is not a common product. No one had it. Maplin’s got it but I needed the card ASAP and going to the nearest of their stores would cost me a big portion of what a CF card costs + the time, so that wasn’t an option.

OK, I thought, I’ll go for MS to CF then. I wasn’t far from a Sony Centre and it’d be strange if they didn’t have it. They did have it, great!

- I’ll have one of those please.

- That’s £49.99.

- (silence)

- But you can have it for £39.99.

- No thanks.

That’s just madness. I am not an economical person but I can spot a ripoff. Who in their right mind would pay 50 quid for that? No memory included mind you. What are they thinking?

I have a theory. This is one of those products that they don’t really plan to sell individually but rather give away or give a heavy discount on when sold together with something much more expensive. So the customer should feel they’ve done a bargain. I’ve seen it before. When I bought a digital camera a few years ago(not Sony) I got the memory at half price. I had done my research so I knew I got the camera at a good price, but I also knew what the memory should cost and it wasn’t far from what I paid. They just had a type of memory with a price sticker on with a ridiculously high price so they could throw it in front of customers and say you’d get it for half price to close a deal. Pretty clever, but if you know your stuff it feels a bit silly when you’re supposed to appreciate it more than you do.

I’m not paying £39.99 for an adapter when I could get a Compact Flash card - the right type of memory - for half that. So I gave in and bought a CF card.

Sony would benefit from selling the adapters to a reasonable price or even giving them away for free. I don’t get it. Don’t they want people to buy and use Memory Sticks? If not, it worked with me, I will try to avoid it.

This weekend I was in Sweden at a wedding. Nice one, thanks! During the dinner I had the honor to talk with some very nice and interesting people. One of them was a doctor. Unfortunately I forgot to ask what kind of doctor he was but I guess there is some kind of general type, otherwise he would have said something a bit more specific, like brain surgeon.

During a speach, the speaker quoted a well known swedish football commentator that once said:

We’re going to warm up by running in rectangular circles.

Funny, because there is no such thing.

Afterwords, the doctor said something like “it’s okay, a circle is only a rectangle with an infinite number of corners”. Arghhh!!! Can a tech head let something like that slip? Of course not. Or actually yes, but I didn’t. I told him, politely.

No.

A rectangle with an infinite number of corners is not a rectangle. And even if a shape with a billion corners may look like a circle from a certain distance, it’s still not a circle!

I almost wished I hadn’t said anything. But I explained, politely, with a smile hoping to not come across as rude.

Luckily we didn’t get stuck on the topic. I think we both thought, “Arghh, engineers!”. Then we moved on to other topics.

One of my favorite things to say when someone points out a mistake I’ve made, that gives an explanation to why something doesn’t compile or behave they way I thought it would is - “Is it really THAT important” - to whatever it was. Typical programmer’s humor, only appreciated by… errh… programmers?

At a wedding, maybe a “rectangle” with an infinite amount of corners can be called a circle. It’s an occasion when it’s really not that important.

But still, it’s not a…