I’ve had a few computers before, but my 80286 was the first one with a network card. This was a computer that actually needed a name when I was connected to LAN networks, which usually was during “hack-weekends” with my friends, and usually these weekends occurred some time before the so called “demo parties” I used to attend.

Holly was her name and she was fucking expensive. 20 years later it’s obvious that it was the right decision of my parents to buy me that computer as it gave me a great career, but at the time it must’ve been the most expensive thing they ever bought except for the house and the car. Anyway, the reason to why I called her Holly must’ve been a tribute to the computer in the TV show Red Dwarf because I didn’t have my crush on Holly Marie Combs (Picket Fences) until five years later or so.

Since then I’ve named all my computers as something that ends with “-lly”. I’ve had Holly, Nelly, Kelly, Sally, Ally, Wally, Silly, Lilly, Milly, Molly, Jolly, and probably a couple of more I forgot. The names are even loosely based on what kind of computer it is. As for example Ally was a gateway/firewall server, Wally is my pocket Iphone, Silly is my Playstation 3, Lilly was my little iMac, Molly was an Ipod, Polly was a PowerMac …

Name themes like mine seems to be a common nerdy thing to do. I’ve worked at offices where the servers have had names from Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the rings and even communist leaders or names of large disasters through history.

Do you name your computer? Do you have a theme? In that case, I’d love to hear what is is in the comments!

Posted via web from helloandy’s posterous

• Demotivational Pics mit Spielebezug – Update: Neue Bilder: Jade Raymond, Multiclassing und mehr – 2009/12/reality_091211135507.jpg

  Game related demotivational posters. Some of them are hilarious, like the Jade Raymond one for example.

• TVdags

  New TV guide from web company Doberman that looks pretty nice, gonna try it out for a few days in place of the ones I currently use.

• Free-to-Play Best Free-to-Play Multiplayer Game 2009 – Battlefield Heroes

  Our cartoon shooter got rewarded with IGN Awards 2009 "Best Free to play" game, where other nominees were games like "Quake Live" and "Free Realms".

• Star Trek Online Video Game, Exclusive Explore, Discover, Engage Trailer HD | Game Trailers & Videos | GameTrailers.com

  I've always loved Star Trek and it's unfair that the game is looking so good and fun, when it's also very close to the beta of the new Star Wars game. I can't play more than one MMO at the same time!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Holly was her name and she was fucking expensive. 20 years later it’s obvious that it was the right decision of my parents to give me that computer as it gave me a great career, but at the time it must’ve been the most expensive thing they ever bought except for the house and the car. The reason to why I called her Holly must’ve been a tribute to the computer in the TV show Red Dwarf because I didn’t have my crush on Holly Marie Combs (Picket Fences) until five years later or so.

Since then I’ve named all my computers as something that ends with “-lly”. I’ve had Holly, Nelly, Kelly, Sally, Ally, Wally, Silly, Lilly, Milly, Molly, Jolly, and probably a couple of more I forgot. The names are even loosely based on what kind of computer it is. As for example Ally was a gateway/firewall server, Wally is my pocket Iphone, Silly is my Playstation 3, Lilly was my little iMac, Molly was an Ipod, Polly was a PowerMac …

Name themes like mine seems to be a common nerdy thing to do. I’ve worked at offices where the servers have had names from Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the rings and even communist leaders or large disasters through history.

Do you name your computer? Do you have a theme? In that case, I’d love to hear what is is in the comments!

Picture of a swan in Hagaparken

Closer look of the same swan

Went for a walk in Hagaparken and met some swans. When I came home I decided to develop them in Adobe Lightroom instead of Apple Aperture, but found the software quite confusing. Lightroom really doesn’t fit the workflow I’m used to, but some of the features seem great.

Posted via email from helloandy’s posterous

(This one contains the same objects as the briefcase in Pulp fiction)

Posted via email from helloandy’s posterous

This is definitely a service I have use for, but it also got me thinking. Is this really such a good idea? Why are we so obsessed by a progress bar that perhaps even is counter-intuitive?

In Windows, this is how a typical progress bar looks like:

Now, we all know that Windows is terribly bad at guessing how long time a certain action will take. The above progress bar might go to 90% in 5 seconds, and then spend 2 minutes more doing the last 10%.

Mac OS X got a similar one (with a fancy little candy stripe animation that gives the illusion of the progress moving faster than it is):

It’s not as inaccurate as Windows, but pretty close.

It doesn’t matter. What they both are doing is filling an important role as to tell you that the computer is working, it has not hung, and it’s has a goal of completing the action. The standard ajax loader on the other hand, is just a gif animation. It does not continuously get fed information about the progress. It will spin and rotate forever and ever until someone decides to hide it, and it might happen, it might not.

In the beginning of this post I said that the ajax loaders might even be counter-intuitive. What I mean by that is that you are tricked into believing that this animation has any idea of what’s going on backend wise, when it has not. You could actually improve the process by exchanging the loader to a dancing banana instead. It would be exactly the same function, but hey, it’s a dancing banana! You wouldn’t wait five extra minutes because the banana is still dancing before you realize that the task will never complete.

Here’s a typical ajax loader gif animation:

Are you waiting for something?

Over one year ago I signed up for a site called Shelfari which is a book reading community. It lets you add books you’re reading and rate and discuss and collect books you’ve already read. This information would be a nice addition to the “life stream” on my site. Imagine my surprise when I found out they doesn’t have RSS feeds! At the same time I joined, we added a request in their forums, and it even got replied to a couple of times by developers. Still, a year later, Shelfari doesn’t offer any kind of RSS feeds.

This is the love/hate thing about Internet and developers. I love that a person on his spare time creates a site like Server Progression, which basically is a World of Warcraft site that tracks down which guilds have killed which bosses on a particular server, and I love that he can be more friendly, more service minded and keep a better product than Shelfari. At the same time I hate that Shelfari, which is an Amazon acquired commercial site, fails to deliver simple features like feeds, which is one of the core functionalities of the web today.

So I’ve used Readernaut (still in beta) for tracking what books I read. It’s not as pretty, but it works as it should.