My first visit to NYC & Niagara

New York was fantastic, enven though we lost our baggage.

An so was beautiful Niagara.

Mattias buys his own apartment

My dear friend Mattias buys his own apartment on Södermalm in Stockholm. Me and Mattias performs the epic event of dragging and pulling up a huge fridge into his new apartment. We swore never to do that again.

A few weeks later we help my father carry a freakin huge jacuzzi over rooftops in central Stockholm. So much for swearing not to redo things.

Briefly engaged in Tango/D development

I’m briefly engaged in Tango/D programming language development, responsible for the Mac OS X package. My progressively increased lack of interest in Tango/D made me leave the team in November.

Best picture of the year lost in Germany

This was one of my best pictures from 2008 and the lab in Germany screwed up; lost my originals. All I have left is the above scanned crappy proxy copy.

Smisk 1.0

The first version of Smisk – a high performance web service framework – is released.

from smisk import Application
class MyApp(Application):
  def service(self):
    self.response("Hello World!")

MyApp().run()

Mom gets married

My dear mother and her Magnus get married. A little surprise marriage during another celebration in Paris.

Adobe fails to change language

I buy a Adobe Creative Suite and become the victim of Horrible Software™ when the actual software is in the wrong language. The process of getting a correct copy takes more than a month, involving hours of phone time and letters like the one pictured above.

This incident makes me laugh even louder at this increasingly downwards-spiralling software company.

Ejoyed my last Belgo Dubbel

Best beer ever, last bottle in the picture. Brewed in limited volumes by Slottskällan.

Finally got to fly a helicopter

This was a big thing for me, as I’ve flown lots of different airplanes but never a helicopter. Got this opportunity as a 25th birthday gift from my parents and friends.

We flew over the Stockholm archipelago and enjoyed both thrill and beauty.

The most noticeable difference from flying an airplane (except fromt the obvious lack of bearing wings and the addition of a huge rotor) was the extremely high sensitivity of control – I used my thumb and the index finger alone to handle the cyclic stick.

The aircraft in question is a Robinson R44 – single-engined with a semi-rigid two-bladed main rotor.

I even managed to put her down nice and easy at Gärdet.

Dads 50th birthday

As a surprise, we spent two days on Styrsö with his closest friends.

Music intro quiz == midsummer

Mattias establishes Music intro quiz as a festive midsummer tradition (summer solstice celebrated in Sweden).

iPhone arrives to Sweden

As the technology fan I am, this was of course very exciting, even though the most conservative service provider; Telia, signed the valuable we’re-the-only-ones-who-can-earn-money-from-your-thing-in-Sweden-contract with Apple Inc. (Telia press release.)

I’d earlier bought a generation 1 iPhone in the U.S. – now I needed to change ISP and upgrade to generation 2, something that took me about two months.

Vacation in Hong Kong

Second visit payed to amazing Hong Kong. This time I used sunscreen.

Noko Jeans officially accounted for

Noko Jeans consisting of Tor Rauden Källstigen, Jacob Åström and Jakob Ohlsson are producing Jeans in North Korea. Noko Jeans writes about it being official, showing off with a video.

Spotify goes public

With the push of a big ENTER-button, Spotify goes live and, at least for me, marks a big happening in the history of music industry.

I wrote a short notice about it at the time: Spotify Official Release.

Smisk 1.1 released and used by Spotify

Smisk 1.1 is released and at the same time being used in the high-load backend system of Spotify.

This is the third time one of my hobby open source-projects is used for profit in production. Earlier projects are Content Daemon used as the Spray content aggregation backend and AbstractBase, a PHP runtime library used to service spray.se and parts of spotify.com (as well as this blog and numerous other small projects).

Other events during 2008

Flickr/Yahoo! cooperates with several archives/libraries, releasing historical photography under Creative Commons or lesser licenses. George Eastman House, State Library of New South Wales, Nationaal Archief, and The Library of Congress all joined the idea during 2008. This is something great, giving the people access to all of these photographies (and videos) documenting our civilization.

Leica announces they are using a different strategy than other high-end camera manufacturers when they say Today’s and tomorrow’s users will always be able to incorporate the latest refinements and developments in handling ease and technology.. Basically, the M8 will be partially upgraded rather than replaced. At least in a semi-long term perspective. Horray for less consumerism.

2008 was also the first full year Spotify spent at Humlegårdsgatan 20, our second Stockholm office.

Adium, a popular instant messenger for the Mac OS, was released including a patch enabling Spotify URI support. Adium 1.3 with Spotify-support