I renamed the SSID on my MiFi to “Free WiFi” and turned off the encryption. Launched Firesheep and waited. After less than fifteen minutes I had a Facebook account that I could log on to. On the status page from the MiFi I could see that I had three computers connected.

After a while I had another Facebook account I could log on to. But I just wanted my point proven. So I decided to stop and change the SSID again. This time I called my network “I will hack you with firesheep”. For some strange kind of reason nobody logged on to that one…

Update:
My headline is not correct. The best WLAN name ever is the last one in this list: Hilarious wifi network names

And even if you don’t want to order anything you should try their service simply to learn something about usability and customer communication. Fantastic company.

The cards are high quality prints of some of my Flickr-images.

The Volapük Edition of Wikipedia has more than 100 000 articles.

Now that’s some productive 20-30 persons!

Oyvind answers my quick link to Fortune Magazine with a very good post on how the net will change your media habits. I decided to comment on it with a separate article here:

Moving the internet into the living room has been done before. But the big problem with the WEB-TV products of the late ninties was the fact that the companies making those products didn’t understand the living room situation at all and thought that web pages as we know them today would be a good idea on the big screen. They soon realized that it was a horrible idea. Traditional web pages are not designed for the big screen and a remote.

So, over the last couple of years products like the media center softwares you find here and connected hardware boxes like the proposed Apple iTV box, the Xbox 360 and other devices starts to bring content from the internet into your living room with a front end that is tailored for the big screen and remote control navigation.

The quality on YouTube and Google video is not at all tailored for the big screen, but that quality will be better. And I think we’ll see that the audience develop a tolerance for low quality on certain types of content combined with a need for high definition and very high quality on other types of content.

This is the long tail entering a space where the big broadcasters have been ruling for the last decades. I repeat, we’re up for some groundbreaking change…

Or in plain english:
Rolling on the floor lauging! The inexperienced user got a serious error on his home theatre personal computer.

People keeps asking. And a while ago I realised that my mother is reading this blog. She wasn’t the one requesting this little roundup of strange computer geek language but I have a feeling that she will be one of the persons learning a couple of new abbreviations from this article.

There is no point for me to give something of a complete guide to internet language. I’ll explain a couple of the abbreviations I have used here on eirikso.com and lead you to some excellent recources in the end of this article. Here we go:

HTPC – Home Theatre PC. A computer that is tailored for media playback. Very often built to stay in the living room besides amplifiers, DVD players, VHS players and other audio and video equipment. And, regarding the DVD players and VHS players the HTPC is very often replacing them, not sitting there besides them.

IMHO – In My Humble Opinion

LOL - Laughing Out Loud

ROFL – Rolling on the floor laughing (laughing even more than when you laugh out loud)

BSOD – Blue Screen Of Death. The blue screen that a Windows computer will give you when something goes seriously wrong. Usually the most horrible error message of them all. Very often connected to complete hardware failures.

NSFW – Not Safe For Work. “This link is NSFW“. Used to indicate that the content might be offensive. So far the closest thing you get to something that is NSFW on eirikso.com would be this. (…ouch. Did I mention that my mother reads this blog?)

WTF? – What the fuck? Hmm. Maybe one of the words there is NSFW?

w00t! – Something like WOW!, Fantastic!, Yippeeee! Difficult to translate directly, and a part of the very advanced l33t-language. Read the complete explanation of w00t here. Yes, you write w00t using the number zero instead of the letter “o” and l33t using the number three instead of “e”.

OMG – Oh My God

n00b – Newbie. An inexperienced user. “I am a n00b, please be gentle. ”

RTFM – Read The Fucking Manual. If you ask a very stupid question in a forum you sometimes could get a simple RTFM as the answer.

The list goes on. You find one of the most complete lists of internet slang on Wikipedia. Together with the Urban Dictionary you should be covered.

And yes, the fact that my retired mother actually reads this makes me proud of her. …problem is that before I know it she’ll start commenting on my bad english.

I’m using Bloglines as my RSS reader. I like the fact that it is independent of the computer I use and that it lets me keep a list of clips and a blog of links that I can follow up later.

Today when I tried to access it the site was down for maintenance. Bloglines seem to have systems that let them maintain and keep the service running without having to take it down often, but today they apparently had to take it down for a short while.

What kind of message they give to their users while the system is down is an important part of their communication with their users. And I admit it. I am used to such horrible messages of “Error-whatever-please-come-back-later” that I actually get charmed by messages like this one:

Hi,

I’m the Bloglines Plumber. Bloglines is down for a little fixer upper. We will be back shortly. Bloglines will be all better when I’m done with it.

Thanks,
The Bloglines Plumber

The result of such a communication? Well, the downtime doesn’t bother me at all. Simple as that.

Edit: For the people not reading comments, the brilliant Peter Rojas of Engadget just assured that this is a 100% coincidence. And I believe him. Case closed.

Edit2:
And now the writer of the guide over at Engadget, Barb Dybwad has contacted me as well. No doubt about the fact that we worked on these articles in parallel.

Keep up the good work over at Engadget. A coincidence does not make you copycats. But those pictures where a bit blurry, wheren’t they?

I posted this how-to on my blog on August 14th. I was quite satisfied with the guide so I sent a message to Engadget notifying them about my post in case they wanted to link to it.

No answer from Engadget, but two days later this article shows up. Dangerously close to mine, but with bad pictures… Maybe a pure coincidence. I shure hope so, taking suggestions from users and just copy them without even mentioning where the original could be found seems too unprofessional for one of my favourite web sites.

I have followed parts of the discussions around the fact that Yahoo claimed to have increased its index to include about 20 billion web pages.

A claim that several people questions. I am not in the position to have qualified theories about that, but I am running a web site that reflects that something clearly has happened to the engine over at Yahoo.

In Trendmapper nearly all the charts searching for phrases with a significant amount of hits had a big jump in its Yahoo curve earlier this month.

Actually, a search that looked useless at first have become quite useful for me. Every night Trendmapper searches for several thousand phrases and records the amount of hits. The word “the” has been added in the system, and is in itself not interesting. However, the word is so common that the charts actually reflects something about the performance of the engines themselves.

As you can see in the thumbnail here in my post, something happened to the red Yahoo curve in the beginning of August. If you click the thumbnail you are taken to the page for the chart.

To be precise, at the second of August Yahoo reported 1 978 791 943 hits on “the”. On the third of August this jumped to 9 583 745 268.

Hera are some example charts showing the Yahoo-jump:
Trendmap: “kottke”
Trendmap: “Xbox 360″
Trendmap: “DVD-Jon”

It never stops fascinating me where I can reach using the internet. I have done lots of presentations and it is always a thrill to comunicate to many people. The biggest presentation I have done so far was in front of about 1200 people.

That is nothing compared to the amount of people I reach with my blog. And, even doing international presentations while working for the consulting company Accenture, I never reached out to the same divere audience that I do through eirikso.com

My little comic strip about Bob the Millionaire is one of my most popular posts. I have fun using Babelfish and friends mastering other languages to try to understand what people have to say about my ramblings. My comic has even been translated into French. My wife speaks French and could confirm that the translation was well done.

And, I can even use my own blog to get help when more than 10 000 users reach my blog from a Duch web site and I don’t know what they are saying…

Now, I have some problems with this one and this one. Still, it is interesting to see that people from all over the world reach my page!

I added the search phrase “Lehtovaara” to Trendmapper the day this case was featured on BoingBoing. The charts for Google, MSN Search and Yahoo all goes up. And what do you think? On Google the search for Lehtovaara got around 19 000 hits on June 27. Now it gets around 27 000 hits. Do you think the extra 8 000 hits are about the good service and nice food at Lehtovaara? The case is all over the internet and the bullying owner is doing interviews revealing that he don’t know anything about blogging. It’s back on BoingBoing and people are discussing and blogging on the story all over.

The question is how big the story has to get before this actually is good PR for the restaurant. If the story gets big enough people will actually go eating at Lehtovaara because it has become a novelty.

Related post:
Legal threats and the internet