Archive for November, 2005

Spent my birthday weekend in the SF Bay Area.

Berkeley

UC Botanical Garden

I’m 22 years old today and it’s story time: When I was 17 years old I bought my first portable MP3 player. I reverse engineered the Windows driver that came with it and wrote a Linux driver. After some time I was contacted by the Singaporean company that manufactured the player. They were quite happy with my work because they had “lost contact” with the Chinese company they had outsourced driver development to. Not only did they give me their support, they wanted to hire me to write a Linux driver for their next product. I was willing to start the work immediately, but they needed my CV first due to formalities. After I sent them my CV I never heard back from them. I doubt it was due to my lack of work experience, as I had already demonstrated that I had the necessary skills. So if you were wondering ‘Old enough for what?’ after reading the title of this post, the answer is ‘Old enough to write software for a company in Singapore.’

The Sony DRM rootkit saga just keeps getting better. Sony is infringing the copyright of several open source projects. Matti Nikki who has been doing research into this mailed me to let me know that some of the code Sony has ripped off is the FairPlay code that I wrote for VLC.

Went hiking in Mount Tamalpais this weekend.

Some of you have been pinging me about iTunes 6. I’ve yet to start reverse engineering iTunes 6 as I don’t have much free time in my personal life these days. Spending hours on end in front of a debugger with pen and paper is not an attractive proposition in the great San Diego weather. Perhaps I’ll find the time in December.

1. The weather.
2. Boring software engineering jobs.
3. 25% sales tax.
4. Tax barriers (up to 500%) on imported meat.
5. State monopoly and high taxes on alcohol (beer is $11 at bars).
6. The farmers, their crappy products, and their propaganda about the dangers of imported food.
7. $7/gallon gasoline (I don’t drive, but the FedEx guy who brings me stuff does) and ~50% tax on cars (a Toyota Prius starts at $46000).
8. The monarchy. “The royal family is so nice” is not an argument for monarchy, especially when you’ve never even met them, you weak-minded sheep.
9. Politicians who pat themselves on the back when the U.N. ranks Norway as the best country to live in.
10. The prosecutor who tried to portray me as a member of an international crime gang.

Update: The title of this post is “10 things I don’t miss about Norway”, not “Norway sucks” or “The U.S. rocks”. It was written somewhat in jest for my American friends who have been complaining recently about the state of things in the U.S. I had already planned to follow up with a “10 things I miss about Norway” post, though that will have to wait as I can’t think of anything!