Category Archives: Personal

General, Personal

Renault Zoe: The Electric Car Lie

1st of January 2015 I started working in Oslo, Norway. About 124 kilometres from where I live; Sandefjord.

I started off with taking the bus. Did that for a couple of months and found it to be sub-optimal with trying to work on the bus on the way in and back, seing that it was constantly crammed going back. I swapped to train to try if that would be more optimal. Sure, the comfort was way better – but had the downside of me walking to take the bus to take me to the train. Ended up being an end-to-end travel of about 3 hours each way. Compared to 2.5 hours with the bus (including walking to the bus and to the office from the bus), which was still a lot. We only had one car at the time and my wife needed it during the days.

In with the electric

We have a pretty good insentivised deal in Norway for electric cars. There is no sales tax on them, making them a better deal than their carbonfuel based counterparts. In addition we have other good deals with free parking on public parking spaces and also no toll for toll based roads. I therefor started thinking about buying an electric. Did the math and figured a car loan would in fact be cheaper than taking the bus or the train. In fact a whole 1000 Norwegian Kroners (about 130 USD or 110 Euros). And the best part, I could save a lot of time. Another benefit is that electrics can drive in the bus-lane – meaning you don’t have to get stuck in traffic. There are some local changes to this, but its a question about timing – when you drive, but still in place. With all this upside, what could possibly go wrong. <>Having absolutely no experience with electric cars, but have owner a bunch of regular gas and diesel based cars over the years – I jumped into it with the wrong goggles. I didn’t look too much around as most cars really didn’t have the range I needed, except for Tesla – but even in Norway these are very expensive. I know people argue they aren’t, with all the benefits – but a car half that price is still half that price with the benefits on top. So I set out to find something not Tesla with enough range to get me one way. I was counting on being able to charge when I was at work – giving me a full 8 hour charge. Seeing that the infrastructure was in place in Oslo, I was willing to take this gamble.

After reading a bit about a few cars, I found the Renault Zoe to be the most interesting from a range perspective. Unlike the competitors, it had gotten reviews claiming the range to be accurate to what they were promising; 240 kilometers on one charge. I even stumbled upon this article, claiming it had almost unnoticable drops in performance in -25 degrees celcius. Everything was pointing towards it. They even had a deal were you could get it with a home super charger included in the price.

I had my testdrive of the car on the 28th of April 2015. Found the car a nice drive, but found it weird that I had to stop for a 45 minute charge halfway to Oslo. The battery had dropped to 20%. I charged and drove it in, parked it for charging for the day. Called the dealer and explained my situation and the salesguy told me to drive it in ECO, which would prevent the car from going faster than 96 km/h. This is were I go; OK and then WTF.. But willing to do what he said when I drove back, I managed to get back – but the display said there only was 15 kilometers left on the battery. Sure, it was a bit confused since its averaging. At this point I knew little about the car and was willing to except that it might be displaying wrong information due to me not driving ECO in and then ECO back. Messed up the statistics, kinda. Did point this out, and the salesguy was surprised.

I was skeptic, to say the least. But had the car for a couple of days for test driving, this time only driving ECO and proved a couple of times it would make it all the way in. So I decided to buy one.

Got the car…

13th of May 2015; super excited. Picked up the car. The installer of the super charger thingy came the day before – all set. Since I was going to charge in different locations, I did order the car to come with a transformer that was able to transform from regular 240 volts to the 400 volts the car needed and also convert whatever it needed to convert. This was not ready from the manufacturer and I was promised to get this in August. Which was perfectly fine for me, as I could charge on the way home if I couldn’t find a charger that was compatible in Oslo and still save time on my travel in comparison to the bus and train options. The compatibility question is related to the volts but also the fact that it needs 3 phase charging and the plug being a Type 2 plug.

A week later

I don’t travel the distance to the office every day. Some weeks 2 days, others 3 and occassional 1 day a week. So I didn’t get into trouble straight away, due to this fact. 19th of May I drove the car in and found a public charging pole and plugged my car in. Shortly after it said “Battery charging impossible” in the display.

Pretty non informative message to get, and it didn’t help to drive to a charger I knew worked. Same message. Anyways, I ended up having to get the car and me picked up by a dealer in Oslo. They plugged in the car to their charger and the message went away. Apparently this happens from time to time. The car then needs to reset its software (turn off the car and wait for a minute or so).

First death

Yes, you read that right; first… The car died on the 29th of May. Not full two weeks after I got it. They had it for almost a full month, claiming to have swapped out the engine and had visitors from France and what not. That may very well be true, but a full month. Really. For a brand new product. Impressive. They hadn’t really found the problem, just swapped out everything. I use the car till I go on my holiday on 11th of June.

Second death

Yup, there was a second one. Got back from holiday and went on a work related trip to the US. I drove the car to the airport, which is farther than Oslo – so I had to charge on the way to get there. Parked it at the airport. Got back from the trip on the 3rd of August. Drove the car to the nearest super charger. It didn’t work for some reason. Drove to a second, got the famous message. Drove to a third, still – same message. Tried “resetting” the car. Googled for help – nothing. I had enough charge to drive to the Oslo dealer, did so. No magic charge could wake the charging unit to life.<>This time it took 5 weeks in the garage. But now they had found the reason for the car dying, some condensator internally not withstanding the type of power we have in Norway is what I’m being told.

Now what

At this point I’m beginning to really become desperate and annoyed. While waiting for the car during its second death. I contact the dealer on the 17th of August to hear about the transformer thing that was supposed to show up during August. Figured I had to have some dialogue with them and try to get my own mood better. The message back is; it will be delayed for another 2-3 months.

A year has passed…

… and then some, since I bought the car. It has not died on me since its second death. But it does occassionally say “Battery charging impossible”. And its just completely random. <>I still have not gotten my transformer. But I have a massive brick with me that does the job, almost.

It weighs in at 27kilograms. So not a lightweighter.

And it does only support 10 ampére charging. Which makes it take some 16 hours to charge when I drove it winter time and had just a few percent of charge left in the battery.

The range lie

Lets bring the story back to the title. Ok. I’ve been messed with quite a bit by Renault and the local car dealer; BilService here in Sandefjord. I’ve been served lies upon lies related to both the performance of the car, range, delivery dates and all. But the biggest of them all is related to the range. And that was actually what got me started on this. I got an email yesterday with an advertisement for Zoe from the local car dealer. Again promoting the awesome 240 kilometers of range of the car. This time with a * next to the 240 kilometers. Me hoping that meant they were going to be more honest, but no.. They actually pointed out that it was 249 kilometers according to the NEDC (New European Driving Cycle). The ad is in Norwegian, but it shouldn’t be hard to get the gist of it.

Having an experience were I see the range be more in the line of 150kilometers on a sunny day with high temperatures and next to no wind resistance and on a winters day with sub zero (celsius) its more in line of 110-130 kilometers, depending on air moistness and all. Added on top that I get the summer range if I drive in ECO with maximum speed of 96 km/h and for the winter range I have to stay at maximum of 90 km/h – there is something really fishy with how these cars are at least being marketed. When I buy a car, no matter what car, I’m not expecting it to be driven in a magical way to get from A to B. I also don’t expect it to have imaginary performance numbers in the lines of “if you drove the car off a cliff and fell for 240 kilometers, you would be able to make the range”. If I were to ever make that range, I think I would have to drive the car at a speed of 50 km/h. I think this is a big fat lie. Renault has yet to come with any excuse to me as a consumer of their products.

The best part, I think… I asked the dealer about the transformer; again… Almost 3 weeks ago, with a more annoyed tone from me. The answer I got was that he could see that I was on the list for the following week. Now, 2 weeks later – I’m just writing down on the “keeping score card” – another lie.

Fantastic.

And its a shame, the car is a nice drive. But if I could turn it back in I would – in fact I was in dialogue with the authorities; Norwegian Consumer Advice – they basically said it was hard to do anything with the situation, just based on the fact that the manufacturer has responded and done “… what they can…” to help me out. I’m now stuck with a product I kinda hate. And the awesome part; the battery quality will deteriorate – lithium based batteries has a tendency to go to 70% capacity after 1000 charging cycles. So that is brilliant when I was hoping to almost make close to one full cycle per day traveling rather than 2. All my math based on a lie, and I’m the one having to pay for it. Thank you Renault. Guess I won’t be your customer for long – nor the local dealer; BilService. Its the worst consumer experience I’ve ever had – I hope you don’t run into this.

Edit: I don’t do these kinds of posts – and trust me, I would’ve preferred not to this time either. But I don’t really know any other way. I’m frustrated, I’ve got a product that is not delivering on a promise, a manufacturer who is not in dialogue mode at all, a car dealer who is just trying to push the problem away, authorities basically saying I’m stuck. I know this is not the ideal way to deal with these things. I could “lawyer up”, but that can easily become expensive. So I don’t know.

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6 months into it

Time flies when you have fun, they say. Its been 6 months into my life @ Microsoft. Figured I’d summarize a bit.

The first indication I’ve been busy is the fact its actually also been more than 6 months since I posted anything here. That is just crazy. I know I kinda have slowed down the last couple of years, but never to this level of NADA, ZIP, ZERO.. And trust me, its been very busy.

Onboarding @ Microsoft has been a lot of fun – so much to learn, and I love learning! My role; Technical Evangelist – really does not explain what I do – at all. Basically I’m more of an advisor. My job is to help ISVs in Norway get the best experience in Azure. The thing is; there are an estimated 600+ ISVs in Norway. Some of these aren’t ones we would talk to, based on “natural selection” (basically, those not doing anything or have any plans of doing anything in any cloud). But even after this, there are enough left to talk to at least one ISV every day. I work in a team with 3 others representing more of the business aspect of working with the ISVs, with different focus areas ranging from startups to more established ISVs. Needless to say, these guys run in a lot of meetings, talking and trying to figure out what ISVs are interested and need to dig deeper. This is were I enter; try to understand their business and what technical needs they have – but also what needs they might have based on where they see their business go. On occassion I dive deep and get involved in creating proof of concepts that requires me to deliver code – not something that will be put in production though.

One of the true joys of the prototype part is that I can do things in the open @ GitHub when I identify common things that would benefit more than one partner. Having done open-source development for a few years, I’m careful though. Anything put out there needs more attention if its a reusable component.

Then there is this fact that my role is called Technical Evangelist; there is a part of the job that actually involves doing presentations and write blogposts. And I love both.

Different

I’ve worked a few places in my career. But hands down, Microsoft is different in all aspects – in a good IMO. Fair enough, I don’t have the type of role I’m used to having – but that aside, there is something to be said for the working environment, focus, structure and pace.

EMail

So.. What are these team chats you talk about. After getting used to everything being available on Flowdock or Slack for a couple of years, email feels like a true step down. This is a massive difference. The amount of emails I receive is ridiculous – but its needed. And I am coming to the realization that none of the tools I’ve been using could fix this in any way. So even with its shortcomings, email is king and I’m learning to live with it again. Its probably been 10 years since I’ve had to use folders to organize my emails – now after only 6 months I must have a 100 or more folders.

How about that coolaid?

Well.. Before I started @ Microsoft I had a few things I was starting to dislike about what they were doing. I felt that there was a need for revitalizing some of the tech and to be honest – recognize that there are other platforms and really start targetting them. I’m a Mac guy – and have been so since 2008. At this point in time I made a decision to step outside the Microsoft bubble I was in. It lead to a lot of cool new experiences and my favorite part; learning. Most of this learning I brought back to the projects I was on, which was C#/.NET projects. But the change of platform meant I had to actually learn new things which again lead to me wanting to explore even more. I grew back my apetite for learning. My wish has come through; Microsoft over the last couple of years have done the exact same thing and exactly what I criticized them for not doing when I was on the outside. The amount of stuff that has been open sourced for instance. Most of the things being done has a cross-platform thinking going into it. I’m really loving this. And yes, I’m half way down the cool aid. Azure has been on my radar and in my toolbox ever since it was launched in 2008 @ PDC. With all the new stuff thats going on top of this, I am truly smiling. I can now do all the things I’ve grown fond of over the years and the best part; I can use the best tool for the job – mix and match – on almost any platform.

My Biggest Challenge

Having a role like I have requires me to pay attention to a lot of things. Being in a small country, we don’t have the luxury of having a lot of people focusing on the different aspects of Azure – I basically have to know most of it, or at least know of it and go deep when called for. This is kinda fine, its knowing technology – and over the years one kinda absorbs new technology without too much hassle. The biggest challenge to me is to not stay in touch with real projects and gain real true experience with actually deploying the technology. This is truly the most important aspect in my opinion. Its when you use things you learn what works and what doesn’t. We’ve put in motion actions to actually gain the needed experience across our department. But in addition, I’m now starting a pet project that I’ve been planning for a couple of years and as luck would have it; the project will touch on most aspects of Azure. Now that I’ve gotten past the initial hurdles and starting to get a bit more comfortable with my role, I think I’ll be able to have the extra energy at night to do this.

Conclusion

In conclusion there is no conclusion. This is all so new and different that I just have to go day by day and see what is behind every corner. I’m excited, willing to learn and highly motivated. These things help.. 🙂

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Life vNext

Tomorrow, 5th of January 2015, I’m starting a new job – not for a client, but an actual new job. The place is called dRofus. I’m very excited about starting. It marks the end of my now soon 7 year career as a consultant and means I’m moving back to product development, which has been what I’ve done for the most of my career from 1994 till 2008. This gets me truly excited. I’m so much more a product developer than a consultant. I quite enjoy maintaining things over a long period. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing new things, but the idea of improving something over time is something I love. 

 

Back in 1997 I started a company called Dolittle – basically as a freelance thing, something I did on my sparetime, developing products for different companies. Meanwhile working for different companies at day time, I kept this company dormant and activated it when I got opportunities I felt I had the time to do. In 2010 I took the final step; I swapped out my daytime job with the sparetime and really took the plunge and got long term contracts with clients leading me all the way to today. During this, Dolittle became 3 guys. The three of us hit it off on a project and decided to see what we could do together.

 

2014 has been a very hectic year, its the year I didn’t really have time to blog – even though it marked the 10th anniversary since I started my blog. The first half of 2014 was pretty much dedicated to getting a product for a client out the door and on its way to the users. Seeing that the contract for the 3 of us was coming to an end, we started looking around for new things to do. Our goal was a long term project that the 3 of us could be on together. While looking, I got a 6 month extension to the contract and we got a request for one of the others for a long term contract. On top of this we had a project we were all doing bits and pieces on for a client every so often. We had enough work, but still wanted to get the three of us onto the same project. At NDC in June we all went to try to create a bit of a buzz, got a few leads from it; but nothing concrete. The summer went and we started broadening our search, creating more material to show what we had done and what we represented. Still, projects we came over were for one person. In fact, the third of us picked up one of these ensuring. During our expansion, we started looking outside our geographical area; Vestfold – Norway. We knew that it was a tough market in that area, but we wanted to try it out first before expanding. The minute we expanded after the summer, it started picking up. After a few meetings we got great feedback from a few clients impressed with what we had achieved. During this, we were headhunted individually by different companies looking for resources. This completely threw us off. We knew we weren’t really the perfect fit for being consultants, as our focus has always been on the product in a longer perspective than consultants normally get to do. All of a sudden we found ourselves doing interviews and at a couple of places we were doing interviews all together, as they wanted the entire crew. Long story short, we got opportunities we could not say no to. Two of us (myself and Michael Smith) ended up accepting an offer from dRofus. Our third chap; Pavneet Singh Saund accepted an offer at a more local client, which makes totally sense for his situation. 

 

What about Dolittle?  Well, it will have to back into a dorment state. I’m not a person to give up, and I don’t see this move as giving up. It was just not meant to be right now. But who knows, that could change in the future. However, I hope if it changes that it changes to be a product and not back to being consultants. 

2015

In many ways, I think for my own sake that moving into a regular job right now is a really good move. I get to focus more on my kids than I have had for the last couple of years. I also get to focus more on other things I love, such as blogging, local dev-community work, writing books and more. I will also try to be more visible on stage and talk about topics I feel passionate about.

Bifrost and other projects

So, what happens with the open-source projects I’m involved in. Well, having clients that push the development forward has been a luxury for the projects we maintain. It really has had an excellent velocity due to this. That being said, I’ve already mentioned for my new employer that I’m part of a couple of projects and that I would be surprised if they wouldn’t fit in their products as well. My employer has said we will need to look into it in more depth. But it is most likely the most perfect timing to introduce Bifrost as they are looking at rewriting a lot of the product.

 

However, I am expecting to have a lot more time on my hand to maintain these projects now. They are projects that has been with me for quite some years now and I’m not about to give up on them. We’ve been very clear that we were never going to develop on the projects without a real business need and these would come from real projects. We do however know a lot more now than when we started and I’m expecting to go back and refactor things, make a few things more focused and also modernize a few things as well. In addition, there are needs we know about that we found on real projects that we have yet to implement – so these will be put in as well. But the overall vision will be maintained; don’t make things in the projects without a really well founded argument. 

 

 

Wish me luck..

 

 

 

 

 

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.net, 3D, Balder, C#, Cloud, Community, JavaScript, Personal

GeekRider – the goal, technical perspective

As I briefly mentioned earlier I am endeavoring on a project which is going to demand a lot from me physically, but also from a technical perspective. I have a lot of things on my plate, during daytime I’m 100% engaged with work at clients, nighttime is the time I have to squeeze in a lot of activities into. For one, I have two kids that needs my attention – and I have a golden rule of engaging with them from the time I get back from work till they’re in bed. This leaves some 2-4 hours left per day to do all the things I do. I therefor have to be smart with my time and make the most of it. Adding things into the schedule is hard and if I add something, it in general must have a synergy with something already in my schedule. In my schedule I have a couple of open-source projects that I focus a lot of my energy on; Balder, Bifrost and Forseti, so pretty much anything I put in must relate to these in some fashion. Geekrider arose concretely from this need of synergy. I need to focus more on physical exercise and brought in Geekrider with the synergy of pushing forward development on the open-source projects I’m involved in forward. Balder will hopefully serve the purpose of 3D visualization and bringing forward the a few features that I want to have in that project. As a general web platform, I could have gone for anything already out there, but I wanted to push forward features in Bifrost, I therefor decided to build the site from scratch on top of it and also push into the cloud by hosting it on AppHarbor. Since the site will become very JavaScript intensive, and I pretty much get allergic reactions when I don’t write tests or BDD style specifications for my code, the last project also will get some love; Forseti. The reasoning behind the project is that most test runners out there has so many moving parts in the form of dependencies to get up and running and they’re also very focused on running things in a browser. Forseti is aiming towards something very different, a headless runner for JavaScript tests based on Env.js not using by default any browsers to execute the tests/specs.

One of the goals for Bifrost is to make it easier for developers to create rich web based applications, promoting good software development practices. Today, the RIA space is rapidly changing and for the most part moving away from plugin technologies such as Flash or Silverlight and focusing more on the open standards found in HTML, CSS and JavaScript/EcmaScript.

From a fronted development perspective, Bifrost is taking on this latter part. Traditionally one would compose the resulting web page that is handed over to the client on the server. Multiple solutions exist out there for doing so, and specifically in the .net space, ASP.net and its derivatives are the most popular ones. Rendering, as this is often referred to, adds an extra load onto the server – not only is the server responsible for dealing with the request from the user, wether it is getting data or performing an action, but it also has to transform the result into something the client can show. On top of all this, it has to deal with security. This pattern is a very proven pattern, but in my opinion not the pattern we want to be doing moving forward, and therefor Bifrost will focus on a different pattern. Sure, Bifrost will not only be compatible, but also support out of the box the traditional route – but for now in an opinionated fashion by only supporting ASP.net MVC. The technique that Bifrost will be focusing in on is the Single Page Applications, were you basically hand over the “rendering” to the client and let the client compose the page by swapping in and out elements at runtime. This is in fact nothing new, ever since AJAX became the big thing, we’ve pretty much been doing this – but only for parts at a time and even letting parts of our page be swapped out for new versions being rendered by the server dynamically.

Bifrost will have a composition technique that is based on, as most things in the framework, conventions. The focus will be on Features and one can point to a feature simply by adding a <div/> tag and give it the attribute data-feature=”[name of feature]”. Based on the configurable convention, Bifrost will find the necessary files representing the feature. Looking at the page from Geekrider as it is at the time of writing this post, we’ll have the following.

NewImage

So, back on track. Now that we have this, what is the next logical step?  Up till now, Bifrost has been very server side rendering focused, sporting an extension for ASP.net MVC and taking advantage of that stack. That is about to change, or should I say, the fact that it has been the only way to use Bifrost is about to change. A set of REST endpoints will be exposed from Bifrost, enabling any client to interact with the framework. From a Web developer perspective, this is not good enough, we’re therefor working on bringing in a JavaScript library that will just nicely integrate with all this.

In addition to the goals summarized thus far, I’ve also got another goal for me personally; I want to become more productive with tools other than what I’m used to. I recently bought a MacBook Air, an impressive piece of hardware – but it doesn’t sport the same specs as my MacBook Pro or my iMac, I’ve therefor decided not to put any virtualization software on it to run Windows. This means I have to start using other tools than Microsofts Visual Studio for my development. For .net development, I’m for now using MonoDevelop and for general HTML, JavaScript and CSS development, I’m using TextMate. My long term goal is to be using TextMate for everything.

Summarizing, Geekrider will be the proof of concept for features added to Balder and Bifrost – driving forward with new thoughts and ideas. I will try to blog about the progress as much as my schedule can permit. This means I should keep myself from playing around or doing unnecessary stuff.

 

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State of the union; 2012

So, here we are then – actually its been almost two weeks now; 2012. As most bloggers tend to do, I’m going to do the same; do a state of the union thing to tell the world “wasssssup”. Consider it a delayed Christmas letter from a relative. 🙂

2011 was probably one of the most stressful years I’ve had ever, it is the first year I am totally on my own as a freelancer and not having an employer, but have clients instead. That is needless to say quite different, not in the terms of what kind of work I do, but in more in a psychological perspective. In addition to that I had quite a few speaking engagements. Late 2010 I signed a deal with Programutvikling to do courses in 2011, I did a couple for them as well, but decided to drop doing courses as I was spreading myself way too thin doing way too much stuff. During 2011 I’ve also been heavily involved in the open source community, for the most part on the following projects; Balder and Bifrost, with most focus on the latter. I also started another project called Forseti, a JavaScript test/spec headless runner written in C# and has the goal of being a self contained executable that is easy to use and get up and running. October last year I got renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the 4th time, very honored and grateful to be receiving this award.

Come 2012, still alive and kicking, new opportunities and challenges are coming. For the last two and a half years I’ve been hired by Komplett to be their solutions architect and help build there vNext platform for e-commerce for both mobile and desktop web-browsers. The project has been an awesome experience and helped shape Bifrost. But, a new opportunity arose, and from 1st of March this year, I will be involved in a software project at Statoil, Norwegian oil-company. Really looking forward to be involved in that particular project. I will however continue to press forward on building features and fixing bugs in all of the open source projects I’m involved in. Will also try to involve myself more in the developer communities, such as NNUG and other communities. Allthough software is what I do, I’m also slowly realizing that I need to focus more of my energy on my own health. Personal exercise has never been a very big focus on my part, sure I’ve done my share of bi-cycling – but never reached a point were its natural or I end up doing it on a regular basis. Therefor, this year I’m setting out on a big hairy goal; be part of something called Birkebeinerrittet, apparently the worlds largest cross country bicycle race. In order to accomplish this I need all the motivation in the world and something driving me towards that goal. I decided in December 2011 to start a website to help me drive myself towards that goal; GeekRider. Not entirely sure what the site will end up being, but my plan is to let the site drive forward a few ideas I have with regards to how I see web development moving forward and at the same time help me maintain all of the mentioned open source projects – a synergy.

I guess thats just about it, wish me luck.. 🙂

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Focus focus focus

The last year I've been close to having a split personality when it comes to the projects I've been working on. On my last count, I have 4 active CodePlex projects that I've created myself, and 4 more that I'm a member of:

Balder
Bifrost
Odin
OpenCompiler

I decided a couple of months ago that I will pick one project and focus on it only for now, instead of spreading my attention thin with working one hour here and there on different projects. The choice was kind of obvious on my part, Balder got my attention for now. My reasons for choosing that particular project as my main focus, are many. First of all, it is the most mature of the 4 mentioned above, secondly, it is truly something I love doing – graphics programming has always been close to my heart. We're now running the last leg on Balder to get to a version 1.0 release. When this release is out I will continue on one of the other projects. I haven't decided on which one yet, but my money is on OpenCompiler – creating compiler extensibility for C#.

So, for anyone holding their breath for any features or bug fixes put into anything else than Balder for the next couple of months, start breathing again. 🙂 

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Another chapter

Today was the last day for me over at Objectware. It was a day I have dreaded somehow for a while. I really loved it at Objectware. Due to the fact that it is about 2 hours by bus or train away from where I live, it got to be too much of a strain on my family. I got an opportunity some months back to join a company called Bouvet and join them on establishing in my town; Sandefjord. So the choice was kind of obvious and at the same time gave me a bit of sadness. On average I've been holding jobs for some 3-4 years before changing, and everytime its been because I wanted to, for personal growth. But family has to come first, even though it was short run (some 8 months). Still, it feels kind of odd, leaving a place I got fond of with great colleagues and very fun projects.

I must take this time to thank Objectware for giving me the opportunity – I've had great personal growth and has had really fun challenges and projects. And the colleagues impresses me with their great knowledge and commitment to the job. Kudos!

15th of June, I'll be starting at Bouvet – looking forward for new challenges.

Until then, I'll be sunbathing in Spain, enjoying some time off with my kids and wife.

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Why DoLittle?

As you might have noticed, my blog lives on the domain “dolittle.com”. A domain that is hosted by myself on an old laptop sitting in my basement. :)  Anywho, the last couple of weeks I’ve been asked a few times about what’s up with the name DoLittle and does it have a meaning of some sort. I didn’t have a straight answer for anyone who asked, to be honest; I couldn’t really remember. Until it all came back to me a couple of days ago.

The year was 1997, I started to look for some freelance work for moonlighting besides my daytime job. In order to freelance work I needed to register myself as a single-person company with the government. I needed a cool name, or at least a cool URL. My objective was not to do a lot of business; one could say I wanted to do little. But that was not the real reason behind the name. At that point I was really focused on creating reusable code (I’m still focused on that. 🙂 ), I was always building code with the idea of trying to create libraries and frameworks that would enable me to do as little as possible code for the next projects. Finding the common denominators became my life work. In addition to this I was also convinced (still am), that computer software should really be focusing on helping the user achieve desired result in as little time and with as little effort for the user as possible. I even remember coming with a slogan for the company "DoLittle ..  so that you don’t have to do much.. " or something to that effect.

That is the story behind the name.. :)   

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Non-smoker : Life Laundry Project 1, step 1 completed.

About a year ago I decided to quit smoking with the motivational factor being my 2 year old daughter. I figured my health was in such a bad shape that I wasn’t able to keep up with her. As a gift to her 2 year birthday I quit smoking with the help of a drug called Champix (Chantix in the U.S.). I was lucky enough to not get any sideeffects, other than actually being able to quit smoking. The coming week I’ll celebrating 1 year of being a non-smoker, as well as the third birthday of my daughter.

Now it’s on to maintaining my position in the world as a non-smoker. I’m very motivated to do it, so let’s keep our fingers crossed. My next project is to loose enough weight to get down to my 1997 level. This means I have to loose some 20 kilos (appr. 40 U.S. pounds or so) from my starting point which was early january. So far I’ve managed 3 kilos, which is actually not that bad considering I haven’t started doing anything physical yet. Only thing I’ve done is get rid of bread and introduced WASA Whole Grain Crispbread. This works out great for my diabetes too.

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There is a house…

… in Sandefjord, Norway that’s looking for a new owner. 🙂

After living in the same house for 6 years, we’re now selling it and moving to the other side of town. Besides working heavily on my computer over the last years, the house has also gone from a early 1980s combined with early 1950s standard to 200x standard. I’ve done most of the work myself. Finally we finished it and then we’re moving, sounds familiar ?? 

Anywho..  If you know anyone who wants a nice house here in Norway, our house might be the thing they’re looking for.  🙂

Have a look :

http://webhotell.tinde.no/dnbnor/index.asp?pId=274824&offset=0

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