a settlement regarding the swedish surveillance law

Information i have received indicates that there have been a settlement regarding the Swedish surveillance law. Which so far seems to be fairly good news.

As i have heard the new law will still force operators to hand over all their traffic over Swedish borders, but with the following changes:

• Only the parliament and military will be able to order searches for traffic. Not other government agencies, police or the secret police as was the case before.

• All searches must be approved by a special court before implemented.

Well this is much better than before, but there still is some issues with the writing in the law that was really bad before. Lets hope they change that to in the final version that is expected to be presented to the parliament in December.

So it seems like the hurricane amongst bloggers in Sweden did pay off, even if i think some people wont rest before the law is ditched alltogether. But the jury is still out, i won’t call them back until i have read the actual law…

Aftonbladet writes about the law here

And expressen here

(In Swedish, use google translate as usual.)

Update:

Some other thoughts and articles about this:

Swedish newspaper DN

Svenska Dagbladet

Supercomputer inflation

Today i read on slashdot and other places that Microsoft and Cray are releasing a $25000 HPC 2008 server ready “supercomputer”. Why someone would like to run windows on a supercomputer i can’t tell. But since Cray tends to do sexy machines i decided to look the CX1 up. Well maybe you could call it a little bit sexy, but when you look at the specification of that machine you realize that its not a supercomputer at all! It’s a 8 slot blade server with each board supporting dual Xeon processors. So the $25000 i would guess is for the system and one blade with one CPU…

Well some teenagers having a LAN party will bring together more CPU power than that nowdays…

Btw. i couldn’t buy one even if i wanted to. Their website didn’t allow me to configure a model since “This section of the Website is compatible with only Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x and higher.”…

Some more articles about this “supercomputer:”

ZDNet

Windows server division

Water cheaper than beer!

I’m in a state of chock!

The Prague rule that beer is always the cheapest drink on the menu dosn’t apply any longer!

I have found that the sky bar at hilton prague called cloude 9 is selling water for less than their beer. Their price for a 33cl. bottle of mattoni mineral water is 60 CZK and the equal amount of beer would cost you 90 CZK. And their soft drinks cost about the same as the beer.

So watch out, ordering the cheapest on the drink list could result in you getting served water

Btw. 90 CZK is really expensive for a beer in this country but i guess it’s the normal price at an international hotel.

Vinyl gramophone records to usb and SD or MMC

Living in Prague i didn’t really expect to find a technical gadget that i never seen or heard about before in my local grocery store!

Today it happned! I found a gramophone that is able to copy the a record in MP3 or WMA format directly to USB, SD or MMC flash. It also have a built in AM/FM radio and amplifier and loudspeakers. Strange little thing, that seems perfect for those who want to convert their old pieces of plastic to something more modern.

What suprised me even more is that Aftonbladet (A major Swedish newspaper) wrote about a similar product today here. Much more expensive (with less features) than the Czech product i found. The Ion “LP 2 flash” apparently costs 1600 SEK and the Czech product SMARTON costs 1999 CZK (118 USD, 66 GBP or 790 SEK.) wich is approx. half the price quite a bargain in my opinion.

Ill try to dig up a link for the product so check back in a little bit for updates.

(And if anyone wants one drop me an email and i’ll see what it would cost to ship it to you.)

And naturally, if you have any experience of any of these products please give us some feedback in the comments section below.

Howto run chrome on FreeBSD 7.0

So as i promised you in my last post (actually posted from chrome!) here is how i managed to get chrome running on FreeBSD. Actually this time around it was simple… The secret key lies in the new 1.1.4 version of wine released today.

Step by step follows…

First install wine 1.1.4:

% wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.1.4.tar.bz2

% tar xfz http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.1.4.tar.bz2

% cd wine-1.1.1

(I had some problems with wineinstall so i did a manual installation)

% ./configure

% gmake depend

% gmake

% gmake install

Now wine is updated, lets do the magic for wine.

(And remember to take a backup of .wine before trying this, or as i do below hide your .wine and install fresh in a new .wine)

% cd ~
% rm winetricks
% wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
% mv .wine .wine.old
% sh winetricks msxml3 corefonts firefox flash winxp

So now you can let firefow install chrome for you, just go to chrome.google.com and install it directly from their webpage!

When done quit firefox and run chrome with this command:

wine ".wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/$USER/Local Settings/Application
      Data/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe" --no-sandbox --new-http
Thats all to it now when the wine crew has fixed wine!

Total success in running Chrome on FreeBSD!

No i have secceded in runing chrome on FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE it’s not fast bot it works. I’m even writing this blog entry using chrome!

But i’m not pushing my luck so i will keep this entry short and write the howto in another entry using firefox…

The short story is use wine 1.1.4, but hang on i’ll give you a complete howto in my next entry.

I’m running google chrome on FreeBSD, part 3

Well there have been a lot of work going on in the wine community and version 1.1.4 of wine released today includes some fixes for running chrome under wine emulation.

Right now i’m in the middle of compiling  wine from source and i’ll be back shortly with information about if it was a success or not…

In the mean time i hope the FreeBSD port maintainer is doing the same since i guess there will be a lot of FreeBSD users who would like to give chrome a good test run.

Btw. i guess i should mention that linux users have already have managed to run chrome under linux. But the performance isn’t the best.

I’m running google chrome on FreeBSD, part 2

After some more testing and googling i found some hints in the Wine AppDB. Apparently i needed some DLL’s from microsoft and some extra arguments for wine to get further. To get the DLL’s use winetricks and winetricks need cabextract so install that first.

So this is what got me further down the road to a working chrome on FreeBSD:

% su

#cd /usr/ports/archivers/cabextract

# make install

# exit

% rehash

% wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

% sh ./winetricks riched20 riched30

% wine "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/$USER/Local Settings/Application
        Data/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe" --new-http --in-process-plugins"

Now i managed to go to www.slashdot.org and got past the first redirect (That sends you to slahdot.org) and slashdot started to render before chrome crashed.

chrome running on FreeBSD, crash after starting to render slashdot.org

From the output of wine it seems like there is some issues with locking that isn’t implemented in wine yet, but i’ll start digging into that and see where where i will end up. The next thing to try is to test different FreeBSD threading libraries and see what that can do for us.

I’ll keep you posted when more info is available, so keep an eye on my RSS-feed.

I’m running google chrome on FreeBSD

Well kind of…

Since google chrome just recently launched and it unfortunatly only supports windows i felt a little bit dissapointed. But hey that doesn’t stop me so easy. So i decided to check out what wine (a windows api emulator for linux and FreeBSD) could do for me.

So i downloaded chrome and tried to run ChromeSetup.exe with wine. No success, wine whined about a windows sytem call regarding http not implemented. So i googled around a bit and noticed that that call was implemented in the latest wine… Did i run the latest wine? no…

After a quick portupgrade wine is upgraded to 1.1.3, but still no success. Since ChromeSetup.exe was so small i realized that there must be a bigger file out there with the real executable. strings didn’t get me far so i googled a bit more and found chrome_installer.exe approx 8 Mbyte large, this could be it.

Shure it was now i was able to install chrome and have a look at the nice tabs and look around in settings and preferences.

And things went fairly ok. Chrome looked nice but when i tried to go to google and some other pages it turned out that things wasn’t going so nice. The URL field is totally black. But since the nice suggestions beneath it where nice and clear is was mainly annoying at this point. But i’m sorry to say the only page i managed to get was a “sad page”. A graphic representation of a sad computer and the following text: “Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this web page. To continue, press Reload or go to another page.”

Well i guess that’s what you could expect from a product compiled for a totally different platform…

But i will keep on a bit more and keep you updated with my efforts on getting chrome running on FreeBSD.

But the chrome hysteria is huge. Already several Swedish newspapers are running articles about googles chrome. Some of them are here:

Aftonbladet

Dagens Nyheter

PS: If you find any hints or examples of people trying to run chrome under wine or FreeBSD, please let me know and comment on this article.