Actually, I’m a bit surprised, given that my first impression of Iceland was “barren.” The landscape along my ride from the airport to Reykjavik was about forty-five minutes, a long winding road with a stunningly beautiful ocean on one side, and broken, volcanic, treeless landscape on the other. After about twenty or thirty minutes, my impression had been modified from simply “barren” to “barren, stark, and dramatically beautiful.” The day is windy, enough so that the waves are being whipped up into whitecaps in stark contrast with the deep blue ocean and sky. It’s a clean, crisp and cold day, invigoratingly so. There is no pollution—I feel like I can see forever, right up to the glacial mountains in the distance.

Near to Reykjavik, the landscape changes. The hillsides become fissured, covered with moss and grasses still brown from winter. Curious stone monoliths dot the landscape, and I wonder if these have something to do with the legends of elves I’ve been cautioned not to bring up too much. A few lonely outposts along the oceanside soon turn into a city, modern but still quaint in many regards. The buildings are charming, colorful. The roads are clear and wide with lighting every hundred feet or so. I can’t help notice that most of the taxis seem to be Mercedes.

So what am I doing on a volcanic island midway between Greenland and Europe? Well, it’s about my kids, and finding a better lifestyle. I’m visiting CCP, an Icelandic company best described as a builder of the hands-down largest virtual world in existence today—although, if you’ve heard of them, odds are you identify CCP with EVE Online. CCP has bigger plans than EVE, and those plans are intriguing.

Moving to Iceland is an exciting prospect, but, alas, over the past year or so I haven’t been able to bring it to fruition. It’s far away, and the economic differences between the U.S. (and the complexity of owning real estate in the U.S.) make it a tough nut to crack.

As a U.S. citizen, I’ve always felt terribly dismayed at how insular the United States is. Very few of us travel internationally, and only marginally more seem to have any knowledge of the world at large. Most of our students can’t draw a map of the world or even a reasonably accurate map of Europe. In fact, I recently saw a video clip in which confused interviewees claimed they would support Bush’s plans to start a war with Australia, which had been incorrectly labeled as “Serbia” on a world map. On the whole, as a people the United States is not a part of the world. There is nothing beyond our borders worth talking about, unless perhaps it has some financial impact on our future.

There’s also the matter of the horrible state of education in this country. Granted, we still have good colleges, presuming you can pay for them. But pre-collegiate education is suffering—continuing a steady decline that began in the 1970’s. Bush’s “no child left behind” is, in fact, making sure that we leave nobody behind—at the cost of our nation’s future.

This is not the environment I would like my children to grow up in. And according to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Iceland—for that matter, just about all of Europe, New Zealand and Australia—would be an immense improvement. The prospect of my children gaining a European eduction is irresistible… and yet, at least for the time being, out of reach.

The PISA study, published by the OECD in 20007, summarizes it’s content as:

More than 400 000 students from 57 countries making up close to 90% of the world economy took part in PISA 2006. The focus was on science but the assessment also included reading and mathematics and collected data on student, family and institutional factors that could help to explain differences in performance. This report summarises the main findings.

The study’s key findings include an extensive variety of statistics, focusing heavily on science but covering a variety of other areas as well. These key findings begin as such:

Finland, with an average of 563 score points, was the highest-performing country on the PISA 2006 science scale.

Six other high-scoring countries had mean scores of 530 to 542 points: Canada, Japan and New Zealand and the partner countries/economies Hong Kong-China, Chinese Taipei and Estonia. Australia, the Netherlands, Korea, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Ireland, and the partner countries/economies Liechtenstein, Slovenia and Macao-China also scored above the OECD average of 500 score points.

This goes on for quite a while before the United States is mentioned, and when it is, it’s to point out that the U.S. “performed below the OECD average.” Digging further into the study I find the results even more dismaying: For example, in mathematics, the U.S. places poorly, well below the OECD average (with a score similar to Azerbaijan and Croatia).

While the U.S. reading comprehension ratings in PIRLS (a related study) show more promise the statistics are still not outstanding. Worse, we also have high school students graduating with 4th grade reading levels (and illiteracy is startlingly high).

Despite the barren and stark (but dramatically beautiful) landscape, Iceland is looking more and more attractive. Consistently placing higher than the U.S. in most educational categories is only part of it. Icelanders are, by and large, more well-read and more well-educated that most U.S. citizens. Iceland’s largely socialized educational programs contribute to this countries position as having the highest literacy rate of any country. This is a society where you can sit down with just about anyone and have a cogent discussion on world politics, international policy, economics or market trends. I’d like my kids to have the opportunity to grow up in a society that’s not so insular it’s citizens have a hard time distinguishing Australia from Serbia.

So, back to Reykjavik. The city seems to be striking a balance between the modern and the rustic. It has a charm about it, something in the way houses are unique and built with old-world style and robust construction. There aren’t any McMansion development complexes with identical houses as far as the eye can see.

Over the past couple of week’s I spent at least two, probably three hours trying to figure out why my girlfriend’s iPhone apps all crash. They would start up, display a splash page for a second or so, and then drop back to the main iPhone screen. This happened to every app we tried to install.

After hours of reading other people’s accounts of the problem — apparently it’s pretty common, unfortunately — and trying out numerous solutions I finally stumbled on a fix. At least, a fix for this particular issue — based on the different threads, this problem manifests itself in different ways.

Some iPhone users have found a relatively simple solution: Delete all the iPhone apps from the phone and from iTunes, then download the apps again from the iTunes store and re-sync their phone. Alas, this is not a cure-all, and only works for some people.

Others reported success in re-authorizing their computer with the iTunes store. I tried both of these approaches, with mixed results. Even though my computer was already authorized, and iTunes told me so when I re-authorized it, some apps started to work. Unfortunately, though, not all — which was completely baffling and very frustrating. (Imagine me dancing around thinking I’d found the solution, only to find that after several hours of work I had merely reduced the problem from “completely reproducible” to “finicky and unpredictable.”)

In the end, I had a strange mix of some applications that worked on my girlfriend’s iPhone, and some that didn’t. My final last-straw solution was to delete the misbehaving apps from her iPhone, and download them directly to the iPhone (not through iTunes). This, finally, seemed to work — but now I’m afraid to touch the phone… or, more precisely, afraid to sync again. I’ve turned off application syncing, so hopefully it won’t break again. In the meantime though, Apple, I hope you are listening to tdavis312 in his Apple discussion post:

This problem continually occurs on my iPhone (along with the dropped call problem). All of the solutions presented here are for fiddlers. A phone is an appliance. Apple sold it to zillions because it is carefree. Download a sexy app and use it. Not go to a GENIUS BAR (puke) or reload, or reset, or fiddle, or or or. Some people have lives, responsibilities, and interests. This is not 1980. We have moved on beyond the Apple II. Apple needs to email us all an official workaround and apology. THEN FIX THE **** THING.

I couldn’t agree more — unfortunately, I’m afraid Apple may just not be listening. They marked the post as “archived,” and any further responses are… not allowed. (”Maybe if we ignore the problem it’ll just go away.”)

For the past few months, political analysts and demographers have been poring over the results of the 2008 election and comparing them with presidential results from the past two decades. From whatever angle of their approach — age, race, economic status, geography — they have come to a remarkably similar conclusion. Almost all indicators are pressing the Republicans into minority status.

The author goes on to say that the study “offered conclusions that would alarm any Republican hopeful of a quick turnaround in the party’s fortunes.” It’s being borne out in personal and anecdotal experience, as demonstrated by the Star’s forum on the topic, as one poster writes:

I was having a long-distance phone conversation with my oldest brother just yesterday. He and (especially) his wife are very conservative and ALWAYS voted Republican. They voted for Obama. I couldn’t believe some of the stuff he was saying about Republicans and how disgusted he is with them. “The more they talk the more stupid and foolish they look” is the line that most sticks in my mind.

All I can say is… it’s about time. But is it too late to make a difference? Our educational system has been gutted, the country is feared not respected, and our economy is in a mess. Last time I looked, China was buying up our real estate. Without a doubt, the U.S. we all grew up with is gone for good. How realistic is it that we can turn the country around, when we’ve discovered that yes, you can fool some of the people all of the time. Recent poll results by Gallup still show 27% of our country believe Bush did a good job. Yes, yes, it’s close to a new all-time low for the Presidency (beat out only by Nixon and Truman), but really, about 1 in 4 people actually think Bush was a positive influence on this country? (I’m going to be watching my coworkers very closely).

One [Mujahideen] fighter climbed into the lion enclosure but was immediately killed by Marjan, the zoo’s most famous inhabitant. The man’s brother returned the next day and lobbed a hand grenade at the lion leaving him toothless and blind.

Open source to the rescue, at least so it seems. This article offers a look at how Hudson and Selenium can provide a powerful and fully automated regression testing platform. In fact, working together these two systems provide more automation than QTP alone can hope to achieve.

There is a cost though: As is often the nature of open source projects, setup and configuration is more involved than QTP installation. While the latter is a Windows program that you can have up-and-running within minutes, a Hudson/Selenium platform will involve programming resources and a stronger technical know-how. Personally, I favor using both: QTP provides an excellent, traditional “point-and-click” regression testing platform, while Hudson/Selenium can augment that process dramatically with integrated, build-level regression testing.

Toshiba on Thursday announced another big step in the industry-wide adoption of solid state drives—the first 2.5-inch 512GB SSD. The drive will make its public debut at CES in January.
The company will also be debuting a number of different capacity SSD drives—64-, 128, and 256GB drives, available in either 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch form factors. The drives feature MLC controllers, read speeds of 240 Mbytes/s, and write speeds of 200 Mbytes/s.

I’m sure the price is going to be staggering—for a while. But in five to ten years, we’ll probably be looking back at mechanical drives and wondering how the heck we survived with spinning pieces of metal in our computers.

And while we’re at it, I’ll mention Truphone too. I haven’t given this a try yet—and to be sure, reviews on the net range from wildly positive to abysmal—but it’s surely a sign of things to come.

The “old problem” that Parallels printing fails to properly identify printers is still present. That is, in attempting to set up a printer port for my laserjet, Parallels will only print to the correct printer intermittently. It is possible to make Parallels print to the correct printer, but only if you delete every other printer profile from the Mac. This becomes tedious, as I use four different printers — so, when I absolutely must print from Windows, I have to delete all of my Mac printer profiles except for the one I want to print to, print from Windows, and then put my printers back. Hideous. This has been a problem from Parallels 2.0 and I had hoped they’d fix it in 4.0 but, no luck.

Now, the bad news is that in 3.0 you could work around this problem using Bonjour. Unfortunately, Bonjour no longer seems to work in Parallels 4.0 with Windows XP SP3. I have heard some reports that Bonjour is broken in XP SP3, although this is unconfirmed — there is an Apple forum thread on it. Either way, I can’t get Bonjour to work — and, I have downloaded the latest Bonjour, installed it and set up printers. It appears to print, but nothing arrives at the printer… is Parallels somehow blocking the printer communication? Is Bonjour broken? I don’t know, but for now… no printing in Parallels 4.0.