Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

by Dylan Thomas.

Former UI developer for Internet Explorer, Scott Berkun, has switched to Firefox and tells us about it. What strikes me as interesting and profoundly annoying is this:

The Favorites UI model in IE is the same one we built in 1997, when we knew most of our users had 20-40 favorites. It was made to be super simple and consumer friendly as most of the population was still new to the net.

Twenty to forty bookmarks? Twenty? Forty? We break for commercial while you ponder those numbers. No wonder I complained from the first minute I used this piece of junk. I vividly remember agonizing chestpains as I tried my best to organize my imported Netscape bookmarks of which there were hundreds. Fair enough. I’m not the average user. Never has been. Never will be but it’s really not that difficult to create a UI which also caters for the perhaps more technical savvy amongst us. Is it any wonder why this particular group of people are fleeing in all directions (OS X, Linux, BSD) from Windows? We don’t like the UI mess, amongst other things, that’s why.

Goddammit, Scott. You fucked up good and don’t even think about joining the Mozilla/Firefox team or you’ll be seeing me down your street with a pitchfork.

Here’s Tom with the weather.

Photographer Paul Fusco has photographed a number of American soldier funerals and assembled them with a haunting narrative of the events and his thoughts in a Flash presentation called Bitter Fruit.

Some great pictures and video at New York Times website.

Time to break out the dingy.

A List Apart got redesigned and railsified. Very nice.

The 4.0 article is an interesting read about the evolution of the site.

I finally got around to giving Skrigekassen a new design. I also added Google AdSense to it (any profit from the site will go to organizations we see fit).

We just got back yesterday from a fine car trip to western Norway. Specifically we drove around the Stavanger and Bergen area, through beautiful nature combined of spectacular fjords, forests and waterfalls.

So Battlefield 2 is almost here. Released in Europe on Friday. I’ll be first in line. I’ve been playing the demo a bit cough and it’s a great game apart from the server browser which is just as bad as the first one. Someone should teach the coders to sort alphabetically and give them a course in string matching.

There’s a much more team feel to playing it now because of the new commander and squad features. You can join/create a squad as you please and every squad has a leader. This leader can direct his men and receive or request orders from the commander. He can ask for artillery, UAV, supplies and so on. This greatly improves the feeling of participating in a real battle. With two good 32 player teams on each side it’s multiplayer conflict at its best. The graphics, effects and audio is top quality. I’ve been hit by artillery about five hundred times now and it’s still a spectacular experience.

My new gaming rig has no problems playing it but a 256MB graphics card would be nice in order to get high quality textures. I’ll have plenty of time to upgrade though as I plan to stay with this game for quite a while.

Good deal, thanks!

Me and a few friends have launched Skrigekassen. A Danish site where we rant about… stuff. I am sure there is not a topic we will not touch if we feel like it.

The site is done in TextPattern which besides being written in PHP is a very nice blogging system. The documentation could be better but that is my only pet peeve about it.

Alex Holst got married. Never thought I’d see the day. Congratulations to both bunnies. May they have a long and happy life together. I think this calls for a beer or two and I happen to have a couple in the fridge.

I like the comments for the wedding pictures which (it seems like) there was actually put a bit of thought into. That makes it about a thousand times more interesting to browse than subjecting yourself to some mindnumbing narcissistic array of pictures which you see much too often. Somebody clever said Content is King but content without purpose is a killer.