BRBcoffee

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Do you have any idea how disheartening it is to write long ass blogposts only to have them disappear, no drafts saved? That happened, many times. I’m done with offline blogging clients, before I even got properly started. Anyway, good to be back!

So today is the 17th of may, the Norwegian equivalent of 4th of July, happy constitution day! I thought I should make a blog post celebrating this, but there really isn’t much to say except I’m glad those people way back made Norway a free country, and laid the foundation for the great country I live in today, woohoo! And since that’s a bit of a short blogpost, even though short posts are ok too, I will throw in my current partition map as well. Hopefully some of you will find it interesting/impressive.

 
It belongs to the story that this is a 500GB hard disk, and that data partition coveres almost 300 of it. I’ve been spending the last two days working on getting Windows XP to install from a USB pen, and I can’t get it to work. If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to put them in the comments. I’ve tried WinToFlash, didn’t work, and I’ve tried extracting the files to the usb and marking the partition as active from DISKPART, then using BOOTSECT to install the bootmgr that didn’t work either. I tried giving VirtualBox Access to the hard diks, and that installed, but then bluescreened at boot, which I kind of expected. Any tips at all?

Song of the blog: Ja vi elsker

Yours again
Bjørn

So the Ice Cream Sandwich source code was released a while ago now, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting a port for my Desire Z, or Vision, or G2, or whatchamacall it around the world. By eagerly I of course mean I’ve been constantly refreshing the relevant threads on xda-developers, looking at gibberish git commits, and hex editing keyboardfiles in order to try and help out in any way I can, but still the fickle wench eludes me! I shall now proceed to pull all my hair out of my scalp.

So, why do I so desperately crave this sammich thing? Well, today I’m starting a new tradition: lists: by Bjørn Snoen. Props to any and all who gets the reference.

Why my phone needs a sandwich: a list by Bjørn Snoen

1. I’m a flash addict. It’s a real medical condition, usually contracted by visiting the xda forums, and once you start flashing, you just can’t stop. The thrill of flashing a new rom, hoping it won’t fail, and that it won’t seriously harm your device, is amazing. Possibly even more exhilarating than crack, but experts disagree. Sadly, or fortunately, few experts exist, as few flash junkies are crack heads, so it’s more like crack experts disagreeing with flash experts.
2. Remember when Honeycomb came out, and android tablets started getting awesome? It’s like that, but for phones. The UI changes are fantastic, from the subtle tweak of scroll bars, to the less subtle tweak done to the graphics of on/off switches, to the radical, and much anticipated, implementation of hardware acceleration in the launcher. Yeah, it’s friggin epic. At least it looks like it on the devices that, you know, have it.
3. Tron. That’s right, motherfucking Tron. This entire release looks like something from Tron: Legacy! I know the previous point was kind of about the UI, but this element deserves a point of it’s own. It’s all shades of blue, teal, and black, it has glowy neon edges where it seems appropriate, and it’s matte where it needs to be. This is one geeked out ice cream sandwich, and I love me some geekery. It’s a powerful kind of love. A little inappropriate, actually.
4. Okay, don’t get mad now, I lied. There isn’t anything else in specific that I’m looking forward to, however from reading about it I’m sure there are a bunch of kick-ass elements I won’t be expecting.

So today a supposedly “working” port of ICS was posted on the forums, so naturally I downloaded it immediately. Sadly, I’d just ordered pizza, and I had to put off flashing it until it arrived so that the delivery boy could reach me… and he was delayed! Agony! But the hour finally arrived when I could flash this magic ROM, and taste this sandwich for myself! And nothing works.

Well, some things worked, but I couldn’t use the ROM, nope, not at all. The software keyboard wasn’t reachable, because the ROM suffered from the same bug as all other ICS efforts for the old Z, it thinks the hardware keyboard is always out, so the software keyboard never pops up. You’d think that was no problem, the Z has a hardware keyboard, so just use that! Except for the fact that it isn’t working! Only a precious few of the symbol keys work at all, even if they do input the wrong symbol. Sadly this is nowhere near sufficient for inputting my passwords anywhere. And trust me, I tried vnc, I even tried a hacky jnlp script, none of it worked, input is fucked up beyond repair in this ROM. If this is a working ROM, I’d hate to see the broken one.

So I restored my backup after butting my head against this ROM for about an hour. Always remember to backup your data kids! At least I’m getting one good thing out of all of this: I’m getting very motivated to learn about kernel and Android hacking, so in a while you might see some ROMs with BRBcoffee branding popping up on a device near you! Or maybe not, but you never know!

And now for something completely different

With the birth of a new tradition, I’ve decided to change an old one. The song of the blog must die… Yes, I know you’ve loved it very much, but from the ashes shall arise a new and better tradition! Introducing the album of the blog! I know, it’s totally rad. I don’t even know why I didn’t go with album of the blog to begin with, I always paid more attention to albums as entities than songs anyway, and it’s not like I write an entire blogpost while only listening to a single song, I may be productive, but I’m not a robot. Actually… no, Robo-admin will be another post, I don’t need this post turning into a flying circus! Now, without further ado, or bad html, I give you the album!

The album of the blog: A Momentary Lapse of Reason, by Pink Floyd

Insincerely yours
Admin

Hello, you beautiful bastard!

Thought you were rid of me, didntcha? Well, ha! Wrong! Also I am a wizard. All the data I had backed up was stored on my netbook, whose charger went to hades a while ago, so the outlook was, shall we say, grim. However, you know us techies, we don’t let a little thing like dead hardware stop us, so I cracked that thing open (thank you, Samsung, you certainly made it a challenge), got the harddisk out and wired it up to my macbook. Now, there’s some kind of connectivity issue to the screen on my macbook, so I haven’t been using it at all for months now, but apparently not doing shit will do wonders for that kind of thing, so now it works some of the time, if I don’t touch it at all, which makes it a bit difficult to use it.

Anyway, I got that working, patched up the sql data, wrestled with a restrictive hosting service, finally got  my files extracted, did some more database patching to get all the options right, damn script provided by the host only updated half the records, so I was a bit puzzled when it was apparently unable to write anything to disk. It was trying to write to the old host, not the one we moved to last time and then disappeared without warning, no, that would make sense. It was trying to write to the host we used before that one, go figure. Oh, and it looks like all of y’alls magnificent comments have gone missing.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with tonight’s activities. It feels so good to be back! I think it’s time to give an old tradition another go, don’t you? I’m a bit nervous, to be honest, this one had better be good. So… I think I’m gonna do two of em this time, both by the same band.

Song of the blog: It’s Not Over, Secondhand Serenade
Other song of the blog: Half Alive, SecondhandSerenade

How you like them apples?
Admin

Sup dudes and ladydudes! Long time no chat! Guess what I’m doing? I’m hanging out at the NuMusic office! What’s NuMusic you ask? Why it’s this totally awesome festival we’re arranging in Stavanger this fall! Wait, allow me to put on my other hat… There we go! Hi there, I’m Bjørn, the office hermit, pleased to meet you 🙂

So, yeah, NuMusic! Why should you come to this festival, you ask? Because it’s totally awesome, of course! Why is it awesome? Because I work here, duh.

You want something more concrete, don’t you? Well, how about I tell you some of the bands that have been released? Yeah, that’d be cool. Are you ready for this? Alright, now please don’t squeal too loudly, you’ll wake the neighbors.

Ze list:

• Datarock (remember what I said about squealing now)
• Grandmaster Flash
• Anti Pop Consortium
• Mount Kimbie

Alright! But hold your horses, the ticket system isn’t up just yet. But we’re hard at work getting it ready for the masses! Just remember, you charge when I shout charge!

Hasta NuMusic siempre!

In other news, the server guys are giving me shit about cpu overusage, but I’m working with some guys to get it worked out. We’ll be up and flying again in no time! And there’s one little secret still in the works, which I don’t really want to spoil beforetime, seeing as it can still fall into pieces in my hands, but rest assured, it’s gonna be wicked.

What do I want you to walk away with having read this post?
Never count the Burnie out, and get your gorgeous ass over to NuMusic.no!

Song of the blog: Don’t Stop Me Now

Yours forever
The lovely admin

The endless paradox, how can so called revolutionaries hoist their colors while at the same time playing the political field, a game clearly tilted in favor of the old system? Indeed, isn’t parliamentarism itself one of the things that need to be torn up by the root when the red revolution comes?

We should all be able to agree that the social democratic project hasn’t exactly played out the way we had hoped it would, and yet the socialist parties of today are so mortified of being compared to the dictatorships of the previous millennium that they end up being softer than the old social democrats were! We, yes we, marginalize ourselves by yielding to the pathetic arguments of the opposition, and this while playing their game! We’re like a team of hunters challenging Manchester United to a game of football, severely outnumbered, more dangerous by far, but ignoring the obvious solution of just shooting the fuckers! Ah, figuratively of course. I love football. Actually, that’s a lie, but I tolerate it. I promise I dont’t plan on killing sir Alex. First. Kidding.

I was planning on a blog explaining the question in the title, but I appear to have made up my mind before I even got halfway through. We vehemently protest when we’re confronted with our past, we even claim to be unrelated to it! And then we wonder why people don’t know who we are, and much less what we believe in. We are revolutionaries, damnit! Of course we have something in common with Lenin, sans the senseless slaughter and dictatoring (I’m making it a word!) of course! But that argument just won’t fly in a debate, and we’re lucky if we’re ever offered a single seat in parliament.

So what should we do instead? The revolution won’t come if we keep doing what we’re doing now, and it won’t help any if no one ever sees a revolutionary again either. How do you make your politics visible to the people without participating in the one game we can’t win?
I don’t know.

Busride ends here.
Sayoonara!
Bjørn