Janine Jansen in München, 2007. Max Bruch, Violinkonzert No 1, Finale – Allegro energico.

At the Queens Jubilee – Meditation from Thaïs, composed by Jules Massenet.

Am I the only person in the world who thinks that McDonalds is cozy?

Text till sången “Konungen” av Miracle Music, från CD:n “This Gospel of the Kingdom”:

Som solen i sitt fulla sken
så var hans ansikte
Hans ögon strålade som eld
Och såsom bränningarnas dån
så hörde jag hans röst
Jesus, min frälsare, Guds son

Jag fick se min Konung
i hans härlighet
och jag blev mättad av hans ljuvlighet
Och allting runt omkring mig
bleknade bort
och inför honom föll jag ner

/Refr/
Jesus, du var och är och du kommer igen
Alla folk skall då tillbe Konungen
Jesus, du är den Förste och Siste, den Levande
Du var död men du lever i evighet
Du har nycklarna till döden och dödsriket
Du som dömer och strider i rättfärdighet
Du är värdig allt lov, bara du
Du har frälst oss med ditt blod!

Jag kan lyssna på den hur många gånger som helst.

Few things are so difficult, as to wait expectingly for an email to come, written by someone who doesn’t know.

What if everyone was good? What if no misunderstandings took place? If everyone’s intention was to do good instead of evil?

There would be…
…no passwords
…no passports
…no borders between nations
…no customs or security checks
…no hackers
…no spam
…no security cards
…no license plates on cars
…no log-in screens
…no war
…no military
…no police
…no weapons
…no crime
…no dictators
…no hunger
…no torture
…no fear

*sigh*

One thing you must do some day, is to try and verify a root certificate.

We’re installing a program in our systems that connect to the Swedish payment transfer service BankGirot. As a part in the installation/setup process, the program wants to add a custom root certificate to my Windows machine. This makes me feel somewhat queasy, as does putting my signature on a document I haven’t read. I therefore began the process of trying to validate it.

My first attempt was rather fruitless. I contacted a representative of BGC via email, sending him the certificate details and thumbprint, asking him to validate it. My inbox has been disturbingly quiet since then.

The next attempt was marginally better. I phoned their customer service number, and talked to a very nice lady, who unfortunately had no idea what I was talking about. After briefly discussing my electronic ID card and concluding that this card had nothing to do with my question, she transfered me to another lady, who was very professional, courteous, but equally clueless. (I have no complaint against any of these persons: I realize the slightly technical nature of my question.)

Next, I received an email from another representative who sent me a screen dump of the Windows front page of the VeriSign certificate used in their normal environment. I remain boundlessly thankful for this; but, as the root certificate I question is not signed by VeriSign (in fact, it is not signed at all), it didn’t help me very much. I am now eagerly awaiting the follow-up to my reply to this letter.

I also contacted the support division of the company who wrote the program trying to install this root certificate by support mail, and am now eagerly awaiting a reply from them as well.

What frightens me in all this, is that nowhere in my attempts to verify this root certificate, have I been met with the slightest level of understanding; and it leads me to believe that I may very well be the first person to attempt this. Which means that there may be possibly hundreds of companies, doing monetary transactions over the Internet, running with a completely unverified root certificate as the security foundation.

One question that strikes me from time to time, when watching science fiction movies, is how similar the worlds depicted seem to ours. Yes, there are walking and talking robots, hyperspace travel, laser guns and all kinds of scientific development. But the fundamental societal structure seems very indifferent. It seems plausible to me, that given millions of years of development, many alien civilizations ought to look very different.

The scientific development could (and I am assuming wildly) be described as exponential, like the chart on the right. It depicts where we are today; as more and more scientific discoveries are made, further scientific possibilities emerge at an exponential rate. The advancements during the last centuries seem to confirm this.

If this development were to undergo unchecked, we would very rapidly become transformed into an extremely advanced society of such magnitude that very few science fiction movies would be made about this. Indeed, scientific endeavors in the Star Trek time would be orders of magnitude faster and greater than depicted.

There is a possibility, however, that the hypothetical scientific development is represented better by an S-curve, than an exponential curve. If so, then there might be a particular timeframe (at least one) in which the entire scientific community take great strides in development. Once an arbitrary point has been reached – say, for instance, warp drive – the scientific growth slackens again, and it becomes more and more costly and complicated to discover further scientific advancements. There is, so to say, a leap which every planet has to go through; once this upper plateau has been reached, the development stagnates again.

It is not unlikely that there may be similar levels of exponential growth beyond this stagnation again, leading to yet undiscovered levels of technology – the Star Trek “Q” may be one civilization that has passed through several of these stages. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, as Arthur C. Clarke reportedly said.

This may be an explanation of why all movies look about the same. Once we have phasers and space ships, and a few oddball robots, much of the excitement may be gone, and we’ll all sit back and remember the good old days of the gold rush.

It’s sometimes been said, by many people, that turning the computer off at night and starting it up again is bad, because it puts an undue wear on the processor and components inside when you switch on or off the electric current.

This is almost entirely, completely false.

However, I think, some day, it should be measured the cost of turning Microsoft Outlook on or off. Whenever I come back to work, turn on the computer again, and start Outlook, I just let it sit there for a few minutes until Outlook has stabilized itself. It sort of steps out of the cave like a burly caveman who haven’t had his coffee yet, and who realizes that there’s been a time gap since he last was lucid, panics for a brief moment, and then proceeds to spend the next few minutes rummaging about in a frenzy and doing everything at once, until he finally comes to his senses again and idles back.

It’s pretty much come to the point where I usually start by opening Mozilla Thunderbird instead, go through the mail briefly, and then press the little Outlook button to wake up the caveman. In the meantime, I can go get coffee, say hello to my colleagues, chat a little, and when I come back, the caveman has just about come to his senses again, and I can continue working.

I wish I knew why.