Kjartan Mannes

I just realized last night that I know more about the political and legal system of the United States than I do of the Norwegian system. This came to me as I was trying to read up on Norwegian politics to find out where my country is headed, and I kept getting confused. The irony is that I read a dozen or so political blogs that focus on U.S. politics and never suffer the same level of confusion. After trying to find out the cause of this I remember that I learnt most of the basis of the system used in the States from the few years I spent in school, in a Norwegian school and not the several international schools I attended while my family lived aboard. We spent 3 weeks on the checks and balances of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches as well as the how the powers were divided between federal government and states. I've never had anything approaching the same information on the Norwegian system, and I haven't really got a clue on where to figure it out.

I actually know more about the Democratic presidential nominees than I do about the ministers of my own country. Or maybe its just one of those things Norwegians who have spent their whole life in Norway learn over the years. Seeing as I spent a little under 3 years in the Norwegian school system I might not be the best critic of the educational system in Norway. Which from my experience is rather backwards compared to some schools I have been through my during limited life experience so far.

The new version of Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 doesn't seem to be too popular in the blogging world. Sven wrote a rather negative review on his blog Quarter Life Crisis. (Found the link via Scott and Jeremy.)
There is another area I don't think Adobe is getting right either, and the marketing of their full version of Adobe Acrobat, which oddly enough didn't get a name change. In the USA Adobe Acrobat Standard costs $299 and the Professional edition is $449. I've just started a project at work where we are going to use PDF for our more formal documents we send out, so we need about 100 licenses for our user base (whom are mostly clue less). What we want is the PDF Writer part of Adobe Acrobat to convert MS Word or Excel files into PDF. The only problem is that 100 licenses of Acrobat Standard is $29900. That is a lot of cash for a virtual printer that can convert anything into PDF. You just print to it and specify where you want to store the PDF.
Granted, Adobe does have a product called Adobe Acrobat Elements, that is basically just the printer but "is available only through licensing with a minimum of 1,000 seats per order", which is a tad to much for our needs, or most companies in Norway for that matter.
So I was looking around for an alternative and someone suggested Win2PDF which is basically just the printer component and costs $35 for the basic version and $69 for the Pro version. I got a recommendation from a friend who works in a law firm that just installed Win2PDF for their 200+ users. Several of the larger ASPs in Norway are also offering it to their customers. The major reason for this is that for one its a lot cheaper, and really simple to use.
Most companies do not need the full power of Adobe Acrobat 6.0. Most of the features in Adobe Acrobat 5 use terms that no normal mortal comprehends (DocBox, Distiller, TouchUp, JavaScript, etc). I give that to any user that barely understands Word and I've increased the support load. Even if you show users the simple way to do things they inevitably click their way into some obscure part of the program causing them to scream for help and refusing to perform the operation again by making someone more technical do it for them.
So next week I am going to run a test of Win2PDF and see how it works, and will most likely choose it over Adobe Acrobat.

Arg. I just blocked some IP addresses on the firewall that were hammering my web servers. There are too many of the IIS bugs that people are trying to exploit, and they just do not seem to get it that it won’t work on Apache. Its annoying and a waste of server power and bandwidth. At one point, I was seeing 40 requests for bogus pages per second. It doesn't bother me to have a lot of visitors, but when most of them are asking for script/../../cmd.exe like URLs then I get frustrated.

Now I blocked the more persistent IPs and contacted the owners if the IP blocks to have them look over their security. This problem was worse when CodeRed and other trojans/viruses were first released, but it is still a constant problem. I fear it will get gradually worse over the next few years as more people get broadband and leave their computers hooked up to the internet all the time.

Music fans are being offered "the biggest ever official give-away of digital music" in a campaign to tempt them away from unofficial download sites.

A range of websites will offer free access to 110,000 songs by stars from Kylie Minogue to Elvis Presley for one week. [BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Digital sweetener for music fans]

Hey look, the music biz is starting to get a clue... but is it too little too late? The list of outlets listed on OD2s site don't seem to actually provide music for download. Maybe I just got unlucky with the ones I tried.

Update: found some ofcoz I can't use any since they don't like my restrictive cookies setup! Also I am using Mozilla so a 5 step program to reconfigure MSIE isn't going to help me.</rant>

This thing keeps annoying me. Mozilla insists on saving the .exes to disk then having me run the file from explorer. Yes it opens the folder for me, but now there are 200 executables in there and its getting harder to find the new files quickly. I read in the mail archive its to protect the users and la la la. Concider this, how is seamlessly downloading the file to c:temp then running it from there and me downloading it some place else and running it any different? My virus scanner will pick up on it either way.

Also its quiet pointless as you can run .msi files, which work more or less like an executable. So all someone has to do is make their .exe an .msi and it will run anyways. Windows has dozen of other extensions that can be run as well.

I don't care if its a secret option deep down in some configuration file or whatever. I just want to be able to have Mozilla download executables I just want to run once to c:temp then run them and delete them when the program ends. Is that too much to ask?! Require me to setup an anti virus program and automatically check it before it runs. Anything.

This isn't security, its just an annoyance.