www.gisvold.co.uk

Off to Las Vegas

tor — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:57:57 +0000

And this morning I'm travelling to Las Vegas for the weekend - should be a experience.

Sushi King in Santa Monica

tor — Mon, 07 May 2012 02:32:09 +0000

Just went out for dinner and managed to get in to a very small sushi restaurant just down the street from my hotel - "Sushi King" (the name of the restaurant - not the hotel (-; )

I presume the excellent gentleman that made all my sushi was the man himself - the food was excellent, even though it took me some time to figure out how to eat some of the sushi pieces with my dignity intact/

Decision made by person with highest salary

tor — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:53:47 +0000

A common phenomena in many companies I have worked for is known as "Decision made by person with highest salary" - a really bad way of making critical technology decision in any company, as in general this is not a good way of ensuring sensible decisions. This person is almost all of the time the person with least relevant knowledge and background for making such decision - something that can be confirmed faulty easily in most cases.

Interesting quote from Marc Andreessen

tor — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:38:52 +0000

In the later edition of Wired there is a interesting quote from Marc Andreessen on companies he wants to invest in :

"We are only going to invest in companies based on computer science." i.e.. "Primary technology companies".

- I must admit I find this fascinating, and probably correct.

Lunchtime

tor — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:53:09 +0000

there was a line of 6-7 food trucks in a street close to the office.

New firmware for Fritzbox

tor — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:38:08 +0000

Just found this :

I think that I'll personally wait with this upgrade until I'm home - the perils of upgrading from abroad do not seem to be justified by the new features..

Ruby and IOS

tor — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:07:02 +0000

Hm! Interesting work on ton of Mruby link here.

On my way to work today

tor — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:46:06 +0000

Having coffee outside…as I am here way too early due to jet lag.

(Click for larger)

On my way to work today

tor — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:43:25 +0000

Management styles in IT

tor — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:09:07 +0000

I have had a bit of time lately to think about IT management styles, and the opportunity to discuss this with a large number of companies and both senior and junior staff.

And my current conclusion is that there are 2 radically different style of management :

1. Enterprise - where all staff are seen as "role descriptions", and anyone with job description type "B" should be able to be replaced with anyone else with the capabilities described as "B". This by necessity requires in-depth documentation on everything and anything, and a very risk-averse management style.

From my hotel room window

tor — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:07:35 +0000

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:20th St,Santa Monica,United States

A new job

tor — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:10:07 +0000

I've just started a new job - and spending the first month doing on boarding in Santa Monica getting to know the company and all my new colleagues.

Enjoying it!

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The Fritzbox seems to have settled down

tor — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:08:15 +0000

The Fritzbox has now had 5 days with no restarts, so I am now much happier that this may have been part of the "training" of the ADSL line. Still a little bit worried about the empty logs after the restarts.

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The Virgin lounge at Heathrow

tor — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:33:25 +0000

A very impressive lounge indeed

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OsX 10.6 problems with ruby gems and mysql

tor — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 06:59:43 +0000

After running a update of all gems on OsX 10.6 my old ruby programs using MySql stopped working, complaining of a old (or non-existent) "mysql" gem.

Trying to install it gave the following errors :

sh-3.2# gem install mysql

Building native extensions. This could take a while...

ERROR: Error installing mysql:

ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb

checking for mysql_ssl_set()... no

checking for rb_str_set_len()... no

checking for rb_thread_start_timer()... no

checking for mysql.h... no

checking for mysql/mysql.h... no

*** extconf.rb failed ***

Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of

Door and window switches as part of heating systems

tor — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 07:28:01 +0000

I have now installed a number of door and window switches attached to the heating systems controls in the house - and the effect can be seen form the graph below

There is a clear dip in the actuator opening around 09:00 - where the door to the conservatory was left open, and as a result the heating system decided to reduce the amount of water going through the radiators in the room, as the heat was just blown out the door.

It seems to work..

iTap mobile - the fix to non-working windows remote desktop problems

tor — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 08:13:38 +0000

Microsoft have recently made a few changes to their remote desktop software at both ends (server and client) - and unfortunately this has meant that we were unable to use our Mac's to access work computers due to the new TS Gateway functionality. Microsoft has so far not updated their Mac/OsX client software to handle this.

But fortunately we found that a 3rd party - iTap has sorted this :

Fritzbox OS 05.21 - not as stable as previous version?

tor — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 07:51:03 +0000

I seem to have a (small) problem with the newest update of the Fritzbox OS - 05.21 on my Fritzbox 7390.

Previous to this update the box was rock solid - and had not rebooted since install. With the new firmware I see 1-2 reboots every day. This is not particularly bad if just the ADSL connection had disappeared for a short time, but it actually looks like the box reboots itself.

As there are not any logs (all logs are deleted and restarted during the reboot), it is hard to pinpoint the exact cause of the problem.

But the really annoying part of this is that the Ethernet switch is reset as well, and looses it's connections for a period of up to 4 minutes - this is not really acceptable for me, so I will have to move the connections to a new Ethernet switch…...

Fritbox firmware upgrade

tor — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 11:40:49 +0000

AVM seems to have released the international versions of their firmware today :

The part I was interested in was the ability to manually set a different DNS to the one that is automatically supplied by the ADSL provider.

It works - but the disappointment was that if you use the Fritzbox to provide DHCP for your network then it only supplies itself as the DNS during the DHCP setup.

Hm!

Otherwise it seems to work and also improves on a already good router/box.

Interesting message from the Fritzbox

tor — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 07:14:40 +0000

The Fritzbox wireless lag has been rock stable since we installed it - usually some of our devices lost connection at least once per day.

And maybe some of the answer is in this message from the Fritzbox

(Click for larger)

It actually actively checks for interference on the WLAN and adjusts to it.