bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There
are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you
-want to get started and lack a friend without any bitcoins to spare,
+want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
you can even get
<a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
bitcoin at the time of writing). Use
</description>
</item>
+ <item>
+ <title>Pornoskannerne på flyplassene bedrer visst ikke sikkerheten</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pornoskannerne_p___flyplassene_bedrer_visst_ikke_sikkerheten.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pornoskannerne_p___flyplassene_bedrer_visst_ikke_sikkerheten.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 11 Dec 2010 10:45:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description>
+<p>Via <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/10/links-for-2010-12-10/">en
+blogpost fra Simon Phipps i går</a>, fant jeg en referanse til
+<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/9/exposed-tsas-x-rated-scanner-fraud/">en
+artikkel i Washington Times</a> som igjen refererer til en artikkel i
+det fagfellevurderte tidsskriftet Journal of Transportation Security
+med tittelen
+"<a href="http://springerlink.com/content/g6620thk08679160/fulltext.html">An
+evaluation of airport x-ray backscatter units based on image
+characteristics</a>" som enkelt konstaterer at
+<a href="http://www.dailysquib.co.uk/?a=2389&c=124">pornoscannerne</a>
+som kler av reisende på flyplasser ikke er i stand til å avsløre det
+produsenten og amerikanske myndigheter sier de skal avsløre. Kort
+sagt, de bedrer ikke sikkerheten. Reisende må altså la ansatte på
+flyplasser <a href="http://www.thousandsstandingaround.org/">se dem
+nakne eller la seg beføle i skrittet</a> uten grunn. Jeg vil
+fortsette å nekte å bruke disse pornoskannerne, unngå flyplasser der
+de er tatt i bruk, og reise med andre transportmidler enn fly hvis jeg
+kan.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Some thoughts on BitCoins</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 11 Dec 2010 15:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description>
+<p>As I continue to explore
+<a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
+what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
+and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.</p>
+
+<p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
+verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
+is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been
+published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
+possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
+that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for
+all transactions. There I can see that my address
+<a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
+have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
+<a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
+address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
+<a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
+of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and
+every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
+fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
+address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
+generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I'm told
+there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
+organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
+themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
+
+<p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
+regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
+without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting
+laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
+If the Skolelinux foundation
+(<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
+Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
+normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
+Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or
+not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate
+should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay
+income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
+BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
+
+<p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
+accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to
+the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
+easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
+access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really
+a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
+so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I
+would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
+and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
+if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
+to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I'm sure they
+will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
+probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
+believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
+currencies.</p>
+
+<p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
+CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
+competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
+to see which one get the next lump of cash). The "winner" get 50
+BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
+join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
+by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
+and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
+BitCoins. Check out
+<a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
+if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a
+machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
+own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
+yet.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
+href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
+criticism</a> of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
+it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be
+equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>How to test if a laptop is working with Linux</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_if_a_laptop_is_working_with_Linux.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:55:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description>
+<p>The last few days I have spent at work here at the <a
+href="http://www.uio.no/">University of oslo</a> testing if the new
+batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
+years the university have organized shared bid of a few thousand
+computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
+five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
+group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
+and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
+university.</p>
+
+<p>My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
+perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
+install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
+a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
+something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
+on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
+vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
+have the time to do this for all the problems I find.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
+I perform on a new model.</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+<li>Is PXE installation working? I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
+and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
+RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.</li>
+
+<li>Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
+installation, X.org is working.</li>
+
+<li>Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
+package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
+reported by the program.</li>
+
+<li>Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
+logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
+are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
+the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
+normally test this by playing
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20101012-chef/ ">a HTML5
+video</a> in Firefox/Iceweasel.</li>
+
+<li>Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
+memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
+
+<li>Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
+I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.</li>
+
+<li>Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
+picture from the v4l device show up.</li>
+
+<li>Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
+any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
+few.</li>
+
+<li>For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
+memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
+notice this.</li>
+
+<li>For laptops, is suspecd/hibernate working? I'm testing if the
+special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
+resume.</li>
+
+<li>For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
+adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
+switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
+laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
+not.</li>
+
+<li>Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
+acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
+to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
+existence.</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
+for the HP machines I am testing. I'm not done yet, so I will report
+the test results later. For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
+fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
+and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p. As you
+can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
+observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the framerate than
+RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>165 norske overvåkningskamera registert så langt i OpenStreetmap.org</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/165_norske_overv__kningskamera_registert_s___langt_i_OpenStreetmap_org.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/165_norske_overv__kningskamera_registert_s___langt_i_OpenStreetmap_org.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 24 Dec 2010 11:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description>
+<p>Jeg flikket litt på OpenStreetmap.org i går, og oppdaget ved en
+tilfeldighet at det er en rekke noder som representerer
+overvåkningskamera som ikke blir med på kartet med overvåkningskamera
+i Norge som
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Kart_over_overv__kningskamera_i_Norge.html">jeg
+laget</a> for snart to år siden. Fra før tok jeg med noder merket med
+man_made=surveillance, mens det er en rekke noder som kun er merket
+med highway=speed_camera. Endret på koden som henter ut kameralisten
+fra OSM, og vips er antall kamera økt til 165.</p>
+
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.no/pere/surveillance-norway/">Kartet</a>
+er fortsatt ikke komplett, så hvis du ser noen kamera som mangler,
+legg inn ved å følge instruksene fra
+<a href="http://personvern.no/wiki/index.php/Kameraovervåkning">prosjektsiden</a>.
+Hvis du vet om noen flere måter å merke overvåkningskamera i OSM, ta
+kontakt slik at jeg kan få med også disse.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
</channel>
</rss>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff