Temporibus autem quibusdam
A shorter piece of filler, kept short so the list has something of each length in it.
Melhus · 63° north · light until 19:55
A place where I gather ideas, projects and reflections. Programming has somehow sharpened everything else I have learned. Hold a culture up against a system and its habits have to explain themselves. That is usually where a good routine turns into a better one.
This is where I keep my thoughts, projects, experiments and whatever else I happen to build. It all runs on hardware I own, in a place I control, where nobody can suddenly rebuild the floor beneath my feet without telling me.
This is not meant to be the prettiest presentation on the internet. Usability, interface design and presenting work to customers, colleagues and decision-makers are things I know well and have worked with for years. But that is not the assignment here.
This site is my workbench. Here I can push a technology further than the task strictly requires, learn something new by using it to build something real, and find out what actually happens when theory meets reality. Things get assembled, tested, broken, rebuilt and quite often end up with a few more components than they really needed.
That is part of the point.
Much of what you find here is deliberately overengineered. A links page could have been a list. A text player could have been a text box. But the simplest solution does not necessarily teach me anything new. I have been learning technology in roughly the same way since I was a kid: understand the parts, build something with them, try it, figure out why it does not work, and try again.
Over time, this has become more of an archive than a portfolio, and more of a personal site than a showcase. Things end up here because they are useful, because they are still being developed, because I learned something from building them, or simply because I think they are worth keeping.
The Norse theme is not accidental either. History and mythology have been interests of mine for a long time, and I like the idea of stories, knowledge and traces of the people who came before us being preserved and carried forward. Here, that idea has taken on a form of its own: servers named after halls, Norse details where they belong, modern technology under the hood, and no particular desire to hide how everything is put together.
Some of what you find here started with a problem for which I could not find a good solution. Some started with a question about how something might work if it were done differently. And some of it exists simply because I wanted to find out if I could build it.
Written down
A shorter piece of filler, kept short so the list has something of each length in it.
Filler with a picture in the middle of it, to see how the measure holds around one.
The longest of the five, so the reading time and the archive have something to measure.
The oldest of the five, so the archive has more than one year in it.
What you just saw
That was this site's own history, played on the machines it ran on. The internet in the strict sense is older than any of it: ARPANET carried its first packets in 1969, Norway was on it from 1973 through NORSAR at Kjeller, the first node outside the United States, and the protocols that still run the whole thing were switched on in 1983. But for almost everybody it did not begin there. It began with a modem, a telephone line, and a computer in somebody's bedroom that answered when you called.
A bulletin board system was a PC left on with a modem, waiting for the phone to ring. One caller at a time; everyone else got the engaged tone. The Eagle BBS ran on PCBoard at 2400 bits per second, which is a screen of text in a few seconds and a picture over an evening. You dialled 22106221, gave your name, read the conferences, left mail for people who would call in tomorrow, and hung up so the next one could get through. It was the family's telephone line, and the family noticed.
Five years later the board ran Worldgroup, the multi-line successor to MajorBBS, on a number of its own, 22108057, over ISDN through a LASAT Unique 1280mi. Digital lines connected in a click at 64 kilobits each, two of them, so two people could be on at once and talk to each other live in the teleconference. At four every morning the board rang other boards and swapped mail through FidoNet, a network of thousands of such machines that passed messages around the world without the internet at all. The old number went back to being the family phone.
The web had existed since 1991 and had a browser people wanted since Netscape in 1994, but 1998 is roughly when it became ordinary in Norway: a 56k modem, a grey page set in Times, a marquee, a hit counter, a picture that arrived in four passes and a status bar counting the items. The callers who used to dial the board typed an address instead, and the boards went quiet one by one. This site was first a page like that.
Fibre delivers the picture of the day before you can see it arrive, and the page is built by hand on a machine of my own, named after a hall for dead heroes. The badge marked Intro by the counter at the foot of the page plays the journey again, with the modems audible.
240 kB, the picture over the title, at each stop's speed, with nothing else on the line and no overhead, which nobody ever had.