Demokrati i Thailand

Vad vi bevittnar i Thailand just nu är en bitter klasskamp.

Eliten i Bangkok kan helt enkelt inte acceptera att den fattiga befolkningen på landsbygden (framför allt nordöstra delarna av landet) ska tillåtas rösta i allmänna val, eftersom de alltid röstar "fel", nu senast genom att rösta fram PPP och tidigare Thaksins gamla parti TRT.

PAD kallar de sig (People's Alliance for Democracy), dessa makthungriga Bangkok-bor, de flesta av dem med thai-kinesiska rötter. Det dom sysslar med har väldigt lite med demokrati att göra.

Jag befinner mig i Bangkok just nu och hoppas på att det blir ett inbördeskrig. Varför det? För att de krafter som verkar för demokrati i det här landet helt enkelt måste få vinna och i ett inbördeskrig, som på samma gång blir en klasskamp, kommer eliten i Bangkok inte ha en chans.

Pirates

Give me all the equipment I ask for, give me some funding and most important, give me total immunity from future prosecution, and I can GUARANTEE that the piracy problem outside the coast of Somalia will vanish in a few weeks.

But there will be collateral damages.

Singapore

Almost amusing, the way S'poreans boast about their little City State. So clean, so technically advanced. And shopping. And food.

I think they need to see a shrink.

Staying in Singapore right now, and massively disappointed. Paying a fortune for a hotel that's nothing more than a rathole, impossible to get an internet connection, food completely tasteless (for God's sake, there is something called "salt").

Took my Macbook Pro outside around Orchard St, and managed to find a WiFi, but WTF!, the connection sucks BIG TIME! The speed is something I remember from the time I moved to Bangkok in 1998.

And all these signs ... No spitting ... speed camera ahead ... Reduce speed ... Low speed ... Reduce speed now ...

Tried to find an ATM around Sim Lim Square, the computer mecca. Found one, but the queue was 30 m long, no joking!!! Continued walking, found one bank with 6 ATM booths outside and a queue about 30 m long. Ok, had to accept this harsh reality ... I mean, come on! to wait in queue to get some fucking monopoly money???

Thank God I'm going back to Bangkok tomorrow! With a 4Mb wireless connection, with delicious food, with gorgeous babes all over, with civilized prices ...

Obama for President

New President

We wish Barack Hussein Obama all the best. May he be the best president USA have ever had.

Tournante

The word tournante is a French adjective meaning "turning". It is used as a slang term to mean gang rape.

The typical scenario that takes place is that the targeted young woman is drawn or lured into a secluded area where she is brutalized and repeatedly raped by groups of men who take turns raping her. The victim is usually insulted for behaving in a westernized manner.

Typically the girls are often released afterwards, but rapes are often unreported for fear of reprisals against their families. In nearly every case on record the young victim who does report the crimes committed on them says that days later they would again be caught by the gang and gang-raped again.

Interview with Hamid, a brave muslim boy in Sweden

"It is not as wrong raping a Swedish girl as raping an Arab girl," says Hamid.

"The Swedish girl gets a lot of help afterwards, and she had probably fucked before, anyway. But the Arab girl will get problems with her family. For her, being raped is a source of shame. It is important that she retains her virginity until she marries."

"It is far too easy to get a Swedish whore ... girl, I mean;" says Hamid, and laughs over his own choice of words. "Many immigrant boys have Swedish girlfriends when they are teenagers. But when they get married, they get a proper woman from their own culture who has never been with a boy. That's what I am going to do. I don't have too much respect for Swedish girls. I guess you can say they get fucked to pieces."

Hussein for President!

Allt pekar på att Barack Hussein Obama blir vald till president i USA på tisdag.

Hussein är snubben till vänster på bilden i fall någon undrar.

Man kan bli mörkrädd för mindre.

Baghdad-Södertälje

13 årig flicka stenad till döds i Somalia

... av islamister.

Hur länge ska vi tillåta islam?
50 modiga, skäggprydda Osama-kopior kastar stenar på en liten flicka, 13 år gammal. Hennes brott? Inget, däremot hade hon haft fräckheten att låta sig gruppvåldtas av 3 skäggprydda Osama-kopior.

Mitt Islam-hat är så starkt att det nästan gör ont.



Brutalt våldtagen av 4 modiga Somalier. I Sverige. Hade det hänt i ett Islam-land, så hade hon som straff riskerat att bli stenad till döds.

Mitt Islam-hat är så starkt att det nästan gör ont.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu

Just installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my MBP using VMWare Fusion. Works like a charm. Even the fonts looking good now! That has always been a headache in the past when I've tested some Linux distro.

Tid att deppa

Höstdepressionen har mig i sitt grepp. Här sitter jag och kan inget annat.

Wireless broadband with a Mac

Recently i decided to try one of the new broadband offerings here in Sweden - a prepaid, unlimited wireless broadband connection with the mobile carrier 3 (www.tre.se).

At SEK 299 for one month of unlimited usage, it's a pretty good offer, and did I mention it's prepaid - no need for any subscriptions!

The USB modem that's included is a Huawei USB E220 with the latest firmware supporting download speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps.

The driver and application program for Windows is included in the modem, just insert the modem and the installation program will launch automatically.

However, for Mac users life isn't that easy. You need to download the latest driver, and for Mac OS X 10.5 it's just the driver, no application client is available. If your SIM-card asks for a PIN-code, there's no way to disable this with the Mac driver. The only solution is to first install the modem in Windows and then use the Windows client to disable the prompting for a PIN-code. Alternatively, insert the SIM-card into a 3G phone, and disable the PIN-code in the network settings of the phone.

Following the instructions it's pretty easy to configure the modem under network settings - basically you only need to enter "*99#" as the phone number and the correct APN address of your mobile network's access point, in my case "net.tre.se".

So, I was happy to be online and the first thing I did was to test my speed here in Södertälje, Sweden. Bredbandskollen reported 3.5 Mbps as download speed and 0.35 Mbps as my upload speed. More or less what I could hope for ... so far, so good!

Next, I decided to start a movie torrent using Transmission. I was happy to see that the download started and soon also with a decent speed. And this is where all hell broke loose ...

First, I noticed that the processor activity on my Macbook Pro went through the roof. In Activity Monitor I could see that a process "kernel_task" took about 50% of the CPU power, and another process "syslogd" took another 20%. This was at the same time as the torrent was downloading with speeds of about 300 Kbytes/s. Hmm, not good, this modem seems to be processor hungry, way too much if you intend to download large files only using your battery power.

Before I've had time to analyze the situation, the connection abruptly went dead. Completely dead! However, the light on the modem was still glowing, but no connection to the internet anymore. It didn't help to disconnect the modem, I had to physically remove the modem from the USB and re-insert it again, in order to get my connection back.

Needless to say, I tried to continue downloading the same torrent several times and the same thing happened each time, the processor activity shot up, and after a while the connection went dead!

Next, I did the usual thing, I typed google.com into my browser and went hunting for a solution.
(Here I should mention that during normal web browsing, the Huawei E220 USB modem seems to perform pretty good, it's only under stress that the above-mentioned symptoms occur).

I soon found out that the Mac-drivers Huawei provide, basically are crap, it doesn't matter what Huawei model you are using. Still, I couldn't accept this easily, after all, I had paid SEK 895 for the modem and the SIM-card.

So, next I installed the latest Mac-drivers for Mac OS X 10.5 from Huawei's web site, but the same thing happened of course, under stress the modem goes banana!

This meant I had a wireless, mobile broadband solution that worked for casual web browsing, but not for more demanding tasks, like heavy downloads or streaming of music.

I decided to reserve the Huawei for use exclusively on my other notebook running Windows XP, and went shopping for another modem for my MBP. I've seen some good reviews about wireless modems from Option, that uses chips licensed from Qualcomm, and I found a nice one, the Option Globesurfer Icon 225.

Black and sleek, not much bigger than a regular USB stick, and with supposedly good Mac support, I thought I couldn't go wrong. Oh, boy, was I wrong!

The installation was smooth, with Mac-drivers included on the modem and a client program (Globetrotter Connect) as well. So I was able to connect right away, but at the same time my Airport connection disappeared!!!

Yes, the Option Globetrotter application hi-jacked my Airport, and I couldn't turn it on again. I tried to disconnect the modem and then connect to my Airport, it didn't work. I removed the modem from my computer and tried to connect to my Airport. It didn't work. Finally, I uninstalled the whole driver/application crap from my harddisk, and presto, Airport was back and connected to my home network right away!

At this point, I was pretty pissed off, to say the least. Now I had two expensive wireless USB modems, that didn't work with my Macbook Pro. On my Windows machine both modems worked flawlessly, but I really wanted a mobile solution for my Mac!

Before I uninstalled the crappy Option driver from my MBP, I tested it though, also with some big downloads that would stress the modem, and I was glad to see that the problems I had with the Huawei E220 modem didn't appear with the Option Globesurfer Icon 225. But I simply can't accept not to have access to my Airport Base Station and my Airport Extreme while I use the modem!

At least I knew that the modem could be useful as long as I could locate a decent driver that worked with the network settings of my Mac.

And yes, I finally found that driver, included in the software launch2net from Nova Media in Germany.

This piece of software/driver is awesome, the Option Icon 225 is now working beautifully, I have Airport access, I can download huge files for hours without a hiccup, no excessive processor usage, just a stable, fast internet access! Thanks guys behind this software!

I haven't tested it with the Huawei E220 yet, for now I'm just happy to have a working connection, and to tell the truth, the Icon 225 is so sleek and sexy, so I intend to keep it with my MBP and only use the Huawei with my Windows notebook.

flickr image

This image is fetched from my Flickr account using MaemoWordPy on a Nokia N810

Cool stuff!

Testing MacJournal 5

Installed on May 24, 2008

test iSight

We test iSight recording within MacJournal 5 :)