Anything related to information technology
This site is kept open for archival purposes. There are lots of blog posts on everything from tech stuff to Scientology on this site. It will remain open for years to come.
But, my new home is at isene.org. That is where I continue blogging and sharing materials for your free use. You can subscribe at the bottom page over at isene.org to keep yourself updated on new posts.
Articles, books, my artwork and music is shared at one of the pages on my new website, and easily reached via isene.com.
After 15 years in the making, finally Amar Tools is ‘feature complete’ and deserving the 1.0 release mark.
The swiss army knife tool set for the Amar Role-Playing game is freely available on Github. Although created for the Amar RPG, these tools are useful for any fantasy RPG.
The online version is available here: http://www.isene.org/amar.html
A shortened version of the feature list:
Check out the online version to see all the other features.
Thanks to all contributors – players, game masters and others that have helped push the Amar Tools with more than 30K lines of code over this milstone mark.
If you never ever clean your room, wash the dishes or your clothes, water the plants or make dinner, the gap between your skills and your mother’s skills in these areas will keep widening. Your skills will be handicapped by your mother’s empathy and care.
If you establish processes in an organization that is supposed to take care of issues and problems for the employees, it wil handicap their abilities to handle this themselves.
In the ITIL framework, you are supposed to establish some 27 processes to cater for every part of IT service delivery in an organization. One such process is Problem Management. The purpose of this process is to handle the underlying cause of one or more issues so that it doesn’t happen again. When this is turned into a process where a subset of employees gets to be experts at detecting problems, conduct root causes analysis and solve the problems, the gap between the skills of these guys and the rest keeps widening. The process will handicap the employees problem solving skills.
Problem solving should be a skill exercized by every employee. It should be part of the company’s culture, their DNA. Everyone should jump at the opportunity to solve problems they encounter. It will hone their skills and keep them valuable as efficient problem solvers. Those who encounter a specific problem has more initial data about it and can usually solve it quicker… if they have excellent problem solving skills.
Don’t relegate important skills sets to only certain processes. Help everyone exercize and fine-tune their skills in fire-fighting, problem solving, change management, customer handling, documentation and strategic thinking.
Here’s life from Geir’s point of view:
Not even close to complete or even correct, but it’s a start.
I have blogged about the Innovation Garage before.
And now it’s in the news. FutureNautics has written about the Garage titled, “Space Age”. Go check it out: http://www.futurenautics.com/2017/02/space-age/
Update (2017-03-13): Here’s another article in Dockyard Magazine. Also, I’ll be speaking on the Shipping2030 conference and be on the panel discussing the human side of innovation.
Here’s a really neat overview of mathematics. Enjoy.
We need to handle our environmental problems, limit the centralization of power, ensure transparency of government and privacy of citizens. The rest will take care of itself.
Brendan pointed me to Overleaf – an excellent tool to create high quality documents using LaTeX. It boasts automatic rendering of the output, collaborative editing and lots and lots of templates to start from. I’m crazy happy I found this. And I decided to remake my CV/résumé with one of the templates I found there. And here it is: Geir Isene’s CV.
Check out Overleaf. It’s a real treat.
And, if you have any suggestions for improving my CV, please leave a comment.
Here’s a HyperList of my current computer setup – for reference in case someone is looking for inspiration:
PC = Samsung NP900X4C
OS = Ubuntu Linux (16.04) (http://www.ubuntu.com/)
Shell = zsh (http://www.zsh.org/)
Terminal = urxvt (http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html)
Text editor = VIM (http://www.vim.org/)
Document production = LaTeX (https://www.latex-project.org/)
Programming Languages
Mail User Agent = mutt (http://www.mutt.org/)
SMTP client = msmtp (http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/)
Instant communication = Weechat (https://weechat.org/)
HP-41 link = pc41 (https://github.com/isene/pc41)
Newsreader (RSS) = Newsbeuter (http://newsbeuter.org/)
Window Manager = i3 (http://www.i3wm.org/)
Information display = Conky (https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky)
Browser = Qutebrowser (https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser)
Office suite = LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/)
Presentation viewer = Impressive (http://impressive.sourceforge.net/)
Been doing lots of tech stuff lately. Here’s a sharing of some highlights.
Through the years I’ve been programming in more than a dozen different languages. Since many years I have more or less settled on Ruby besides my HP-41 projects programmed in FOCAL and MCODE. Now and then I get this urge to learn a new programming language, and after an extensive search for something neat, I finally landed on Julia. I’m trying her out while reading the book, “Getting started with Julia Programming Language“.
The book is good. The programming language seems excellent. It boasts a complete GitHub-based package system to extend the language with various modules. Although it’s a general purpose language, its strength lies in maths and natural sciences. It’s very fast and with a pretty clean and natural syntax. You can even do straight forward math like this:
f(x) = 2sin(3x)^2
And by then executing the function “f” with x as 0.8, you get the answer straight:
f(0.8)
0.9125010165605526
There is a chance I could be falling in love here 🙂
I’ve also been doing lots of work on my Conky setup resulting in this as my “bare” desktop:
If you have any questions about scripts or conky setups, just ask by leaving a comment here.
Then there is VIM – perhaps my the tool I use the most. I’ve been using VIM for writing everything from HyperLists and notes to e-mails, short stories and books since around 2001. It’s a fantstic text editor. But it lacks a good package manager for add-ons 
But then I found Vizardry. Using Pathogen as a base to install extensions, Vizardry will let you search for add-ons, install it with a breeze and remove it just as easily. If you’re a VIM user, this is a must. Go get it! You will thank me 🙂
Geir Isene - uncut 