Actually, there were a few things that annoyed me on Telia. One was that I didn’t manage to change the machine that was connected to the ADSL connection. I followed all instructions I could find and even called support. All I had to do was switch off the modem for 20 minutes and turn it back on with a new box plugged in. Never worked. Three hours. Still no new IP. Of course, it may have been just me, but that has never stopped anyone from being annoyed before.

The other thing was that I upgraded to 24Mbit/s, paid more, but they didn’t send me a new modem. I also had a feeling that new customers got better deals than me.

So, I switched. The switch was surprisingly painless. The target date was April 30th, and I expected all connections to go down and I’d have to install the new shiny modem I received from Tele2. Nothing of the kind! All of a sudden my dhcp address changed and that was it!

Then my wife started complaining about her mail not reaching her friends. My first suspicion was user error, but then I realized I had set up my qmail mail server to route via Telia’s smtp-server. Doh. I can’t blame Telia for not routing mail from Tele2 customers.

The neat thing about my linux servers is that they never crave any attention. That’s also a bad thing. While documentation is fun of the highest degree, my own network is slightly less than 6 sigma standard in that regard. Luckily I remembered that all I had to do was change the server name in the /var/qmail/control/smtproutes file.

Unfortunately Tele2 have blocked all outbound traffic on port 25. Instead they require mail clients to use port 587 and also to authenticate.

I had received a paper with a user name and password. I also set up a mail account with a new password. Furthermore I spent significant time researching how to shove that into the smtproutes file.

All to no avail. Support closes at 8 pm, but then I’ll try to explain my problem. The support site mentions very little about how to configure an smtp-server, though it does mention a lot about configuring mail clients. They also have a robot help desk service named Sara, where you can presumably ask questions in natural language. She claims to answer questions about internet, broad band and so on. I asked “How can I relay from my smtp server?” and got the reply “Server… Not my thing really. I don’t know much about hardware”.

Tomorrow I’ll bother tech support. That’ll be fun…

–Jesper

I think I am well suited for the job (given that … eh… I am an excellent programmer, quite a nice guy and appreciate Australian movies like Crocodile Dundee). However, ten thousand other people also think they are the perfect fit.

Here’s how you can help me. Visit my application and vote. The star to aim for is the right-most. Be sure not to click any of the four left-most stars as high ranking will be of the essence. You want them all to be yellow when you click that button!

Feel free to pass this instruction on to trusted friends or anyone who’s willing to watch the one minute video and vote.

Obviously, beer’s on me when you come visit, mate!

Now, off to vote while I start packing.

Best regards,

–Jesper Hogstrom

It’s going to be great fun. We start around one am which isn’t my favorite time – I prefer starting earlier, as it is impossible for me to nap during the evening.

Last year we started about that time too, and we had all intentions of napping. We parked the car in central Motala near a lawn. Had dinner, looked at the commotion at the city square and all the cool bicycle gear up for sale. Went back to the car, unpacked our sleeping bags and lay down on the lawn, set the alarm and hoped to get some sleep.

After 5 minutes the first drops came down. I tried to pretend it didn’t rain. Another 10 minutes of increasing precipitation  and I said to Jonas that we’ll stay the course – it will end soon. Yeah, right… We spent the next two hours in the car while the rain poured down…

Luckily it cleared up and the weather during the ride was excellent.

Anyway, time to get mentally ready for those 100km training trips – and of course gather some nice stuff to listen to. Last year I found a 10 hour series about the Greek-Persion wars which was very interesting. Given the fact that I have forgotten most of it I might as well listen to it again

See you in Motala!

–Jesper Hogstrom

As I intend to write more about ECO, I might as well give you the full story.

Way back when, in 1997, thanks to a series of improbable events I teamed up with Jan Norden, chief architect of Boldsoft and Henrik Jondell, CEO of Boldsoft to write a product called Bold for Delphi. During the next years we expanded the team to include amongst others Jonas Hogstrom (my brother) and we had great fun writing code and doing consultancy work for clients like the Swedish Government, the National Television Broardcast Corporation (SvT), the Swedish Armed Forces and others.

In 2002 we were hired as a team by Borland. We converted Bold for Delphi, a win32 product, to what would eventually become Enterprise Core Objects, a .Net product.

Late 2006 Borland decided to simplify their organization (or something – I was not privy to the discussions in the fancy corner of the C-level corridor) and terminated the Swedish development center, i.e. the ECO team was set free.

The team decided to continue work on the ECO code base and formed Capable Objects AB. Obviously this was done in friendly negotiations with Borland – simply stealing the code base was not an option

As time passed I decided to set my mind to something different and let the others continue the development of what is arguably the best model driven development platform on the planet.

However, despite having a day-time job in a slightly different area of the computer industry I still very much enjoy the concepts and programming model of ECO. Thus, I write the odd application or cobble together some proof of concept code in ECO. It’s those efforts that I have and will blog about.

My current relation to CapableObjects is such that I have no involvement in the daily operations or code cutting, but I do help out with (and host some of) their computer infrastructure and love to give feedback on the product and meet the guys for a beer or two. I still enjoy the benefit of having an email address on the capableobjects.com domain.

With that I consider the full disclosure as presented.

–Jesper Högström

Klicka på bilderna för en högupplöst bild.

Hela konstruktionen, med kvarn, mjölnare, djur och träd.

Tomtarna vid sin snölykta.

Djuren som hittat en öppen säck med spannmål.

Bild på enbart kvarnen.

Ingången till kvarnen. Lägg märke till de fina fönstren.

Sidan av den vintriga kvarnen. Se hur fint spröjsade fönstren är.

Vi var ett stort team som höll på i nästan tolv timmar. Tack till alla inblandade; Ewa, Ulrika, Lotta och naturligtvis Jens och Joanna (som gjorde fönstren!).

–Jesper Hogstrom