For as long as I remember, I have been watching angry mobs burn Stars & Stripes on TV and I have always wondered what is must feel like to be american and see people in foreign countries express their hatred of your country in this way. I was given a rare opportunity to get just a little taste of what it feels like today when palestinians on the West Bank burnt the Danish flag, Dannebrog.

I can testify that it feels very weird indeed.

The weirdest part is that the burning of the Danish flag is the latest development in a series of events, which basically has to do with the domestic situation in Denmark. I will try to brieftly recap these events:

During the summer of 2005 a news story about the Danish writer, Kaare Bluitgen, and his childrens book, "The koran and the life of the prophet Muhammed", is aired. The story is about how difficult it was for Bluitgen to find someone who would make illustrations for the book and that the artist, who ended up doing them, requested to remain anonymous out of fear from muslim reactions.

In the fall of 2005 Jylland-Posten (JP), a nationwide Danish newspaper, took it upon itself to investigate if matters pertaining to islam really is considered tabu in a country such as Denmark where freedom of press and speech is indisputable. JP asked 40 illustrators to make a drawing of the prophet Muhammed and 12 illustrators did so. JP published the drawings on September 30., 2005.
I include the drawings below and I discourage you from reading any further, if you are offended by such.

The publication of the drawings stirred quite a debate in Denmark. A lot of people, especially muslims of course, but also many non-muslims disapproved of the drawings on the grounds that it is unnecessary to offend people of a specific religious belief. A great many other people - including myself - thought that the paper were right in posting the drawings. I considered the drawings as part of an on-going debate concerning the fundamental values of Danish society.

On October 12., 2005, the ambassadors from 11 muslim countries request a meeting with the Danish prime minister, at which the ambassadors would like to discuss the publication of the drawings. The Danish prime minister declines the request in a written response in which the prime minister states that because of the freedom of press and speech in Denmark, the Danish government's opinion of the matter is of no consequence.

Since then, delegations from mulim communities in Denmark have been touring muslim countries trying to raise support for criticism of the (lack of) actions of the Danish government. Apparently the events concerning publication of the drawings have been exaggerated and confused somewhere along the line. It is being reported that some people has been given the impression that the drawings were published by a Danish government newspaper (there are no government newspapers in Denmark) and that publishing them is part of a hetz against muslims in Denmark.

In late January, 2006, the legwork of the muslim delegations has resulted in boycotts of Danish products and services in several muslim countries. Saudi Arabia has recalled its ambassador from Denmark and Libya has closed its Danish embassy. And now flag burning too…

Now, as I mentioned earlier in this post, the events which led to the publication of the drawings are basically Danish domestic events. They are in no way intended as a hetz or provocation of muslims worldwide and the subsequent events and responses therefore appear very bizarre. There are very strong forces at work in Danish society, forces which work very hard at making matters concerning islam and muslims "untouchable". On the gounds that muslims take their religion very "seriously", these matters should not be spoken of, or discussed, in the ways all other matters are usually treated in Denmark. To me, the work of these forces appears to be effectively subverting many values, which I consider fundamental to our way of living. It appears that a great many people want to revert from the traditional liberal and democratic ways of our society and establish an order of society, which resembles those of countries ruled by religion or totalitarianism.

That the controversy concerning the Muhammed drawings is at heart a cultural conflict is evident from the lack of understanding between the muslim communities in Denmark (or abroad¹) and the "old" Danish society: On the one hand, the offensiveness of these drawings to muslims does not make sense to many Danes - it has been almost 40 years since ¹) and the "old" Danish society: On the one hand, the offensiveness of these drawings to muslims does not make sense to many Danes - it has been almost 40 years since similar conflicts concerning christianity last took place. On the other hand, by insisting that the Danish government must apologise for the drawings, the muslim communities reveal a fundamental lack of understanding of our way of life. The Danish government cannot apologise for something for which it is not responsible and such an apology would undermine the right of the newspaper to decide what to print. The way to go about things in Denmark would be to either:

1. Respond to JP's publication of the drawings in other media - that is, engage in a democratic discourse.
2. If JP's publication of the drawings is believed to be an act of discrimination, the newspaper should be turned in to the police.

The disconnectedness between muslim communities and other parts of society would probably be less of a problem in many other and less homogenous countries. But there are only 5 mio. people living in Denmark and we are very homogenous. So is our society and it is not something which will change overnight. This is actually what is most bizarre to me: why would any person choose to live in a society dominated by values so at odds with the person's own? There are plenty of places on this earth in which religious bigotry and autocracy is the order of the day - why do these people come here and spoil the fun for those of us, who have just done away with it and got things sorted?

This post turned out lengthy, but it is just my 10 cents worth…

Drawings coming up - please do not look, if you are likely to be offended.

Do you find some or all of the images below ridiculous, rude or just plain stupid?

I know I do (the one about the virgins made me laugh), but it really is besides the point:

"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it." - Voltaire

1. Peer down into this cultural abyss by reading the comments on these two Aljazeera.com articles: "Media war on Islam" and "Has defaming Prophets become "Freedom of speech"?" [back]

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I am currently trying out Telmore's 3G service with a Sony Ericsson Z1010. One of the things about the Z1010, which immediately annoyed me is the (absent) capabilities of the phone's built-in browser. I mean, what is the point of pretty fast transfer rates, if there is not that much to transfer?

The browser on the Z1010 is WAP 1.2.1/WAP 2.0 XHTML compliant and yet I am unable to get it to load Google's Gmail Mobile (http://m.gmail.com). I think there might be a limitation to the size of pages the browser will/can load? I could access Gmail using the phone's email client, but Gmail Mobile include some of the handy features of "plain" Gmail: Search through messages, rendering of attached images, Word documents and .pdf's.

I therefore decided to take the Opera Mini browser for a little spin…

Opera Mini is a Java J2ME/MIDP version of the Opera browser - made specifically for mobile phones. Opera Mini uses the same Small Screen Rendering technology which I have come to enjoy when using the Opera Mobile browser on my P910i. When a page is requested from the Opera Mini browser, it is preprocessed on a remote Opera server before it is sent to the phone. The preprocessing scales down images, compresses the page and - if necessary - transforms HTML/XHTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Opera Mini can either be downloaded from the Opera Mini website and transferred to your phone by BT, IR, cable or such, or you can download it directly to the phone. Opera maintain a WAP site at mini.opera.com, which provides OTA (Over The Air) download of Opera Mini to the phone. The site will attempt to identify the make and model of the phone and provide the most suitable version (Opera Mini comes in both a 100 kB "hi-memory" and a 63 kB "low-memory" version). I attempted to download Opera Mini from mini.opera.com but all though the Z1010 was correctly identified and the application downloaded ok, it failed to install. I am not sure why - it may have something to do with an incompatibility between the Z1010 and the manifest file of the application .jar archive.

Instead, I turned to getjar.com, which offer a pretty decent download selection of Java applications for mobile phones and PDA's. Including Opera Mini. The Opera Mini version available at getjar.com (v1.1.2292) is slightly older than the one available at mini.opera.com (v1.1.2421). It is possible to download OTA from getjar.com, but I downloaded Opera Mini to my laptop and transferred it to the Z1010 via BlueTooth. It installed without any problems.

To use Opera Mini, your phone must be able to get a network connection via an Internet or WAP access point. When Opera Mini is launched for the first time, it will test if your phone is properly configured and Opera also provides a connectivity test app, MNT- MIDP Network Tester. MNT is a small Java program, which runs a simple test to see if your phone can get a working network connection. If you have trouble using network connections with Opera Mini (or another program), I suggest to use MNT when you play around with settings on your phone.

Opera Mini does a nice job of rendering pages for the small screen of the Z1010 and it generally runs pretty smoothly. I do experience fluctuations in the time it takes to fetch requested pages, but I am not sure if the cause is:

• Different complexity of requested pages
• The load on the remote preprocessing server
• Constraints in the Z1010 (I installed Opera Mini on my P910i to take the screenshots for this post and it appears to run faster on the P910i)

Maybe a combination of all of the above?

In sum, Opera Mini is a most welcome offering to all those non high-end, but Java-capable handsets. This article estimates that 60 % of handsets sold in 2005 support Java and that around 500 million Java-capable handsets exist in the world today. The majority of these are most likely to be low-end handsets, which do have connectivity and Java support, but only rudimentary builtin browsing capability (i.e. WAP), if any. In my experience, this ubiquitous Java capability is currently mostly used for small games and such, but by offering a nicely working and useable browser, Opera Mini now provides an option to "revive" these handsets.¹

  

1. The screenshots were taken using Anthony Pranata's ScreenShot for Symbian OS. [back]

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As is evident from looking at the sidebar to the right of this text, I am using the 'Top 10 posts and Views per post' WP plugin by Mark Ghosh. I am very happy with the "viewer popularity" rating this plugin provides, but I have been a little annoyed with my own page views being included in the view counts. Due to Adsense concerns, I have disabled the post preview in the WP post editor. This means that I tend go back and forth between viewing and editing a post - something which would capsize the view count.

I therefore decided to take a look at the plugin code, to see if it could somehow be modified to exclude requests made from the IP-addresses, I use.

The solution I came up with is shown in the code fragment below - I have added an IP check in lines 56 - 60 in

.

Now, I have no experience with PHP so I am not sure if this hack is 'come il faut' PHP, but it works :)

In the code shown above, I only exclude two IP adresses: The one at home and the one at work. It is entirely possible to exclude more, but I mostly access the blog from either one of those addresses, so excluding them removes the worst "error weigh in" in the view count.

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By messing around with upload of images to flickr from my mobile, I came across ShoZu.com, which offer yet another approach to flickr uploads.

The service offered by ShoZu enables you to upload, describe and tag images. ShoZu can currently be used with flickr, textamerica or Webshots and uses the open (semi-open in the case of Webshots) API's (flickr API, Textamerica API and Webshots API) offered by those services to interact with your account.

The setup is as follows:

1. You open an account at the ShoZu website and type in your phone number (countries all over the world is supported).
2. You then chose the image sharing service to use with ShoZu (see above) and authorize ShoZu to interact with you account.
3. ShoZu will then send you a link by sms to where you can download ShoZu's phone application. The application is either a J2ME (MIDP) application or a native phone OS application - the latter was the case for my Sony Ericsson P910i - and a reasonable range of handsets is currently supported.
4. Once you have downloaded and installed the application, you activate it by entering the user name and password chosen in step #1

To use the service, you must have set up your phone for GPRS or 3G data access.

The ShoZu phone app works somewhat like a FTP client. Using the app, you can browse the folders and files of your phone, add image descriptions and tags and select images for upload. The app integrates with your camera app, so when you capture an image, a pop up will ask you, if you want to upload the captured image (you can disable the pop up in the settings of the ShoZy app).

To give you an idea of how it works, I grapped some screenshots while using the ShoZu app - see below. The screenshots were taken using Anthony Pranata's ScreenShot for Symbian OS. BTW, take a look at Anthony's list of must-have Series60 applications - many of which are also available for UIQ phones.

[I have modified the following paragraph after receiving comments from ShoZu - see comments section]

ShoZu posit that their service is superior to email upload in terms of reliability (uploads can be resumed) and overhead. As an added bonus, it is possible to send uploaded images by email without having to transmit the images from the phone. Until you delete the images (the ones you have uploaded) from you phone, ShoZu will store copies on their servers. If you then send email using ShoZu, the service will fetch the images from their cache and attach them, before passing the email on to the recipients. This last feature could be the #1 reason to sign up with ShoZu, since it will dramatically lower the cost of emailing images.

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Give the kid a break! He is barely two months old.

I wonder if his mommy agrees?

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I have recently been trying out the Telmore UMTS (3G) network using a borrowed Sony Ericsson Z1010. I blogged about setting up the Z1010 with 3G in an earlier post (in danish) and I have since then been experimenting with putting the 3G network to use.

I was hoping that flickr uploads could be sped up using the higher transfer rates on the UMTS network (in comparison to GPRS). If I do take pictures, I use my phone camera and I have come to really enjoy the point-click-send (QuickShare) feature of my Sony Ericsson P910i. Using QuickShare, I can ship off an image to the flickr upload email address directly from the camera application, immediately after capture. To me, this is the whole point of phone cameras, the phone screen being simply too small to share images with friends and family (even the 208×320 pixel screen of the P910i).

So, after setting up the Z1010 "loaner" for the Telmore UMTS network, I tried to replicate the P910i point-click-send manoeuver on the Z1010. Alas, all though the Z1010 carries the "QuickShare" label, the Z1010 camera application only allows sending images by MMS, no email :(
To send images by email, one has to exit the camera application, open the file manager and select the image. Here, one can choose ⟨More⟩ -> ⟨Send⟩ -> ⟨email⟩.

Having figured that out, I immediately ran into another problem: The email client on the Z1010 is unable to send messages using the standard Telmore SMTP server (

). The Telmore support pages tell you to use this server and it is the one I use on my P910i (which uses the Telmore GSM network). On the Z1010, the email client will look for the server endlessly and finally abort complaining about incorrect mailbox or password - even though the settings are identical to those of the P910i. Go figure…

I should probably also note that when filling out text fields on the Z1010, some characters appear to move around between different buttons. For instance, in some text fields, the

character can be typed in using the

-key, while in others

is found on the

-key.

Having finally got everything set up right, I was able to get to the point of all this: a comparison of the time it takes to upload an image to flickr using GPRS and 3G. I first uploaded a 93 kB image to flickr using GPRS on my P910i and then uploaded the same image using 3G on the Z1010. The times clocked were:

93 kB image via email using P910i and GPRS: ~125 s.
93 kB image via email using Z1010 and 3G: ~25 s.

So, much to my satisfaction, the faster 3G transfer rate does come through and speed up tasks such as flickr image upload.

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In "The Closers" by Michael Connelly, Hieronymus Bosch returns from retirement to team up with former partner Kiz Rider at the Open-Unsolved Unit. In style, the first case assigned to Bosch and Rider comes laden with political implications ("high jingo"), which all trace to the dark underbelly of the LAPD. An excerpt is available at the author's website and the publisher provides an audio clip.

Professor emeritus David Favrholdt describes in his book, "Spaltningen", the relationship between nuclear physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and attempts to cast some light on their meeting in Copenhagen, september 1941. Did Heisenberg try to warn Bohr about the german atom bomb project, did he want to show off his success to his mentor and teacher, did he want to convince Bohr that no physicist should partake in making the atom bomb or did he attempt to recruit Bohr for the german project? Prof. Favrholdt will be holding a lecture series on the book's subject and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation - DR - have a radio program.

E. H. Gombrich: "A Little History of the World". The history of the world in 40 brief chapters. Review by the Observer. BBC radio interview with Gombrich's granddaughter about the book. On a curios note, I discovered that Gombrich reviewed a book about J. J. Gibson's theory to visual perception for the New York Times in 1989. As an integral part of his theory of perception, Gibson invented the concept of affordance.

   

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