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Everday, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

Streetsmart, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

First snow, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

First snow, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

First snow this winter came December 20th, the shortest day of the year.

Laila, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

Late October mood…

Me!, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

Visiting Farsund in August 2009, waiting to go on-stage with Escapetor,.. found this poster in a window.

Joel’s 15th birthday, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

Joel was 15 years old Saturday August 15th. Coffe & choclate at Charles & De in Sandnes is the appropriate way to celebrate an urban young man.

Happy Birthday, Joel!

I got a new camera!, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

An Olympus PEN. Selfportrait taken in the reflection of my iMac monitor, using the 6×6 mode and Grainy Film effect.

brothers, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

I have started reorganizing my collection of digital photos. This picture was suddenly there. From a vacation in Denmark, in 2002 I think it was.

Boyhood. Brothers. Family.

Joel & Emrik dykker, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

Joel & Emrik went scubadiving in the big tank at Florida Aquarium. 27 ft deep, 1600 fish from 60 species, including 6 feet long murena eels. Laila and I watched from behind the glass.

Happy Fourth!, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

4th of July @ Clearwater Beach, Florida

Skatepark of Tampa, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

Emrik got a new skateboard

Joel chiller, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

The trans-atlantic flight was OK. We had good seats and made ourselves comfortable. Joel relaxes with his Nintendo Wii

Ole E., originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

Ole, recording guitar at Valhalla Studio, for the Escapetor release “Misanthropia”

Task planning, originally uploaded by Henníng Janzén.

Embarging on a new SCRUM adventure, this time with Schlumberger. Iá all about the stickt notes!

The DRM - Digital Rights Management - regime is destined to fail. The now closed MSN Music is a good indicator of just that. And, Microsoft deliberatly rips their customers bought-and-payed-for property out of their hands. That is effectivly what is happening now; the MSN Music tracs which you paid for, will continue to work unitl you need to re-install your OS or by a new computer. And, we do re-install, or upgrade quite frequently, don’t we?

The MSN Music service is dead, and the server hosting Microsofts DRM keys is shut down. No way you can get a new DRM key for your new computer or your re-installed OS… unless you crack the DRM key and thereby criminalize yourself.

If you have an opinion or feel strange about someone else ripping your property of your hands, please go see the Defective by Design web-site. You might as well even join the campaign. . . !

With the recent release of Mono Develop 1.0, moving a bunch of my personal C# projects from my laptop with Windows XP to my living-room Apple iMac (Mac OS X) suddenly seemed like a very good idea. Mono is as you all know an open implementation of the Microsoft .Net framework.

With a new job soon coming up, its time to brush of some of the C# sample code I´we written, and have easy access to a sandbox where I can explore more aspects of C# and .Net. Its been all about Ruby for more than six months now. The previous .Net project I participated in had its peak around a year ago. And in June this year, I have a new job, with a different company. I am really looking forward to digging into what appears to be a very interesting application domain, a large-scale .Net API and applications in the Oil & Gas industry. Anyhow, this post is about MonoDevelop, and not my new job…

The Mono installer took care of the whole installation, no hick-ups with X, Gtk+ or anything else (Mono is a very Gnome centric project?!?) Mono installs nicely under /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework and the MonoDevelop and MoMA (migration assistant) applications are OS X Application icons, dropped in the applications folder. Then simply create a default C# console application to test the installation, and we are done!

Next step will be to run the MoMA application, the Mono Migration Assistant, on my projects. To be continued…

GUT’s - Good Unit Tests. Yes, I think I like it!

The background of the debate is whether or not unit-test is considered GOOD if is written prior or post to the implementation of functionality it tests. Alistair Cookburn has some valuable input in the debate, go read his entry in the link I provided to catch up on the subject.

Regarding my own unit-test’s; I sometimes find that writing tests prior to implementing the class/function to test, leaves me with a different architecture/design then what I would have if I created the test after the class/function. Design and software architecture is more or less imposed on us from the circumstances that we develop under. Hence, unit-test can or can not impose a certain design on the classes and functions we create. Sometimes the design imposed from unit-test’s is a good thing, and sometimes its not. Sometimes a test-application approach is a good way of evolving a good design, not a unit -test. This issue requires Pragmatism! What is the potential value of Good Unit Tests?:

1. Is it the road towards the unit-test (TDD or any other formal design paradigm)?
2. Is it the the final unit-test itself that has potential value?

My vote goes to the second, but not without acknowledging the first.

GUT’s is a term missing in the vocabulary, that says something about unit-tests and their quality without emphasizing too much on the design paradigm used to get to the final result.

Netscape is dead. It was know to the public late 2007 that Netscape as we know it as about to shut down, and the date for the official shutdown was set to February 1.st 2008.

If you have been around for a while, you might remember the time when Netscape was synonymous with the graphical web, the HTTP/HTML part of the web. Actually, if you have been around since 1993 (thats when I got to know the Internet), there was the Gopher web, and the FTP sites that dominated the Web, in addition to HTTP/HTML based web. Anyhow, Netscape WAS the internet at that time. And Netscape was the primary driver towards the graphical, contents rich HTTP/HTML web. But not anymore.

My personal analysis of what has happened to Netscape is:

• Lack of innovation
• Not being able to attract the best people

Significant innovation on the web browser arena has taken place in the open source Firefox, and in companies like Opera and Microsoft with the major Internet Explorer. These companies & organizations managed to sustain innovation, attract skilled people and dominate the market in their slightly different ways.

No matter how much of a tech-giant someone can be; without significant innovation and truly innovative and smart people, giants fall over and eventually dies. In this case, a rather silent and unnoticed death. But still. Netscape is dead.

I have spent considerable time implementing a data-abstraction layer based on ActiveRecord for a web application I am creating. And now I have finally decided to abandon ActiveRecord. The library itself is a mess to work with. The over-simplified approach to a “web application” that Ruby On Rails seem to have is reflected in ActiveRecord. The same goes for the ActiveResource library. The magic stuff behind the curtains makes it incredibly difficult to create a fit-for-purpose architecture for my particular web-app. Which by the way is not the standard blog/wiki/cms/shopping-cart illusion of a web-app that Rails apparently is based on.

A web application framework should be about supporting the needs of that web application. Not try to push it into a model that is a compromise based on the average of common web application, and maybe not what YOUR particular web application really needs. The “create {insert your application of choice} in 15 minutes” is not a valid argument.

Anyway, I spent some time trying to implement the Og object-relational mapper from the Nitro project. Its by far better with regards to design, flexibility and source-code layout. Despite its severe lack of documentation, I still prefer it to ActiveRecord. Actually, comparing the two might no be fair; they take a different approach to the object-relational phenomena, where Og is more about Object -> Relational mapping than ActiveRecord, which is more about Columns & Attributes. ‘Nuff said, you have to make up your own opinion related to the kind of web-app you are writing.

Apart from spending time on implementing, and managing a mess of gems and libraries, it’s sad to say that the average libraries in the sphere around Ruby are at their best inconsistent. The gems them selves are somewhat a pain in the ass; matching Ruby gems with the Debian package management has resulted in a number of conflicts on my Ubuntu machine. This little notice from the Debian community comes to mind.

Don’t get me wrong on the Ruby side of this rant; Ruby is a beautiful language. The eco-system around it is quite ok to interact with. It’s the quality of libraries and packages coming from that eco system that has a long way to go to reach maturity. In the mean time, I’ll keep hammering the Og package and see where I go from here.

A picture I took last year has been included in the Schmap World Wide Travel Guide. The picture was taken in the Veritas Park @ Høvik in Oslo. I put it up on Flickr, where Schmap apparently found it. It was also published on my weekley photo blog, urbanmonster.org.

Schmap politely asked me about using it a while ago, an now it is no finally published. I took the picture in September 2007, with a cellphone camera while waiting for a taxi-cab after a business meeting. It was a beautiful day, one of the last summer days that year.