Jonas Öberg

That everyone, teachers and students alike, leave mugs and glasses everywhere around the IT University building has been a recurring problem for the last couple of years. Various solutions have been proposed and attempted, but nothing has really lasted. This year, two attempts were made to improve the situation. One using pigs. One using robots. I will focus on the pigs, since I was the one to introduce them (in the cover of night, I will add: I had to get there really early to avoid anyone seeing me put my plan in motion!).

It's thesis time again, which means that I'm facing a small pile of theses to review, and together with another course I've been teaching this semester, I thought to explore the topic of qualitative assessment a bit. Let's start with the opposite: quantitative assessment, which is the clearer of the two.

I'm not one that would usually complain about Microsoft: I think they have as much right to compete on a free market as anyone else, and is obviously doing a good job at it (certain lock in effects should be taken into consideration though). Yet, it always strikes me as very odd indeed when an organisation or company willingly migrate from a platform over which they have complete control to a proprietary solution which they have no control over.

Little did I realise, until today, the full extent of this, and it's just around the corner from me.

This RSA Animate youtube video, featuring a talk by Dan Pink, on the subject of motivation, has been circulating around my social network today. It's interesting. But it's not news. Huh? Allow me to explain. Dan talks about motivation, based on historical scientific data. That's interesting, but it's actually something which we've known for a very long time as society. Just look at Alfie Kuhns legendary article on motivation for the Boston Globe. Alfie wrote his article in 1987.

This is horribly exciting: I've been wanting to write more about this for a while now, but we wanted to time the release together with the Nordic Culture Fund. The short story, part of which I've leaked before, is that the Society for Free Culture and Software has been granted €49000 in funding for a project to bring Creative Commons to artists.

För skojs skull testade jag idag SvD:s valkompass och fick bekräftat ännu en gång att mina åsikter går isär. I alla fall vad det gäller de politiska partierna. Jag känner inte att mina åsikter är speciellt märkvärdiga: jag är positiv till invandring, negativ till Euro, men positiv till jobbskatteavdraget. Men det är klart, de två sista åsikterna ställer till det. Högerblocket verkar ju driva på för Euro, medans några på vänsterkanten är motståndare.

I hadn't actually seen any news about this for a while, but when I checked today I noticed that the feature film of the 1980s series A-Team is due to premiere on the 11th of June this year. Following a couple of years of uncertainty, I'm glad to see my childhood heroes get on the white screen. Of course, things have changed, as they always do, but what irks me most is the tag line. It used to read, and I know this by heart from so many episodes when I was a kid:

I just got the word: the FFKP has gotten the funding required to start off our second Creative Commons project. This is great news, since the project works very well together with our other initiative to increase the collaboration between the Nordic countries. The new project, which will run from the 1st of September 2010 to the 30th of June 2011, will aim to bring Creative Commons to artists, writers and musicians in Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and the Faroe Islands.

This is what mine and Henriks office looked like when we moved into it, just as we were getting started with work on the SELF project:

After some time, the house gods blessed us with some additional furniture:

This is what our office looks like during an FSCONS (this was taken in
2008):

This is the reason why during FSCONS 2010, we MUST GET RID OF ALL OLD T-SHIRTS! Please help us! When you register for FSCONS (registration system will be up in a couple of weeks), please place your order for an FSCONS 2007/2008 or 2009 years t-shirt, and help us clear our space :-)

Where did things go wrong? In programming, a lot of the time, things went sour roughly around the place where you made the last change. If a program you're developing suddenly, for no apparent reason, breaks down, you can always look towards the last place where you changed something and trace your problems from there.