I don’t buy much electronic stuff, but I have been on the look-out for a new phone since my old one died, letting my company Sony-Ericsson P800 double as my own phone in the meantime. Working for Opera makes buying a new phone harder as I can see products not yet on the market, tempting me to wait for the next generation, which in the phone world means 6-12 months in the future. The venerable P800 has already become a great grandfather of its line, it may be filled with wisdom, but not with verve.

So laden with cash I went out to buy me a phone. Of course nowadays buying means comparing what is in the market, their characteristics with my requirements, with some recommendations to seal the deal, then checking what price I could get (no operator binding please). The actual buying meant going into a store, pointing at a plastic dummy and saying “I want that one, please” and was done within minutes.

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Note

To change from Czech Crowns (CZK, koruna, Kč) into Norwegian Crowns (NOK, kroner, kr), use the Currency Converter.

Airlines

Norwegian, ČSA, SAS, and sometimes Sterling have direct flights to Prague from Oslo (Norwegian also has it from Bergen and Trondheim). I like ČSA, but they rarely come with good offers, so Norwegian is the airline I most commonly use and can recommend.

Preparation

Bring a passport, a mobile phone with charger, some plastic for the ATM, non-smelly clothes, and toiletries. If you have time and inclination read about Prague and the Czech Republic beforehand. Go for the stuff you won’t discover on your own the first five minutes you get there (e.g. look for history, culture, architecture, current affairs). The Czech Republic uses all the normal standards for electicity, phone networks, etc. You can expect things just to work. Don’t bring stuff, you don’t need it. Unless you go to Prague in the winter where warm clothing is recommended. That way you don’t have to check in any luggage either and don’t have to wait for your luggage to come through. Check with Trafikanten for travel options to Gardermoen.

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I left the hotel in for the last time today. Except for my flat in Oslo this was the place I had spent most nights the last few years. I have never lived long-term in a hotel before, but I could get used to it. The reason I left was that I had finally gotten the keys to my own apartment, signed the lease, paid the rent. I miss having a reception so that I didn’t have to carry my keys around, the two keys to my door are fine but the key to the entrance door is a huge brass thing that seems more appropriate for ceremonially giving someone the key to the city rather than actually unlocking a door.

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Early mistakes are the hardest ones to fix. From the start HTML supported semantic markup, which is one of its selling points and in the same tradition as SGML. The early HTML had markup typical for its use of the day (code, dir, samp, kbd…). Today elements more like byline or nav might have been picked instead. But formatting elements like i, b, or u were of lesser value, because they gave information of what the phrases looked like, not what they were.

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Co-founder of Opera Software, Geir Ivarsøy, died of cancer last Thursday.

The first time I met Geir Ivarsøy was in 1998 installing Opera 3.5, when Opera got CSS support. What I didn’t know then was that this very first good CSS implementation had been Geir’s work in few months, but it made CSS geeks worldwide pay attention to the Opera browser. A couple years later many of us ended up as Opera employees.

When I started in Opera I was charmed by that people worked regular hours, the atmosphere was as far removed from the life of a microserf as could be. Geir, our lead developer, went to the office in the morning and home to his family in the afternoon. But what happened in between was pure gold. Dozens of newly employed Opera programmers lined up at his door whenever they had a problem they couldn’t fix. Geir would pinpoint the problem and the solution within minutes.

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Attended the W3C Technical Plenary, in Cannes, France. W3C has played the United Nations of Web standards for a decade now. In that period they have created 85 recommendations (finished specifications). In the works are 2 proposed recommendations, 28 candidate recommendations, and 111 working drafts, 25 of which are in last call (actually a few more, but I dropped some of the more process-oriented documents from the list).

The World Wide Web comprised three standards initially, URL, HTTP, and HTML. The URL, the location of a resource, was the crucial one. It created one standardised way of describing an address. The HTTP transport protocol allowed any machine to pick up or send to that resource, and HTML like this included the URLs as hypertext links. WWW built upon existing Internet standards as well as predecessors like Gopher, FTP, and Enriched Text.

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Going from the usefully useless spacer to the false start of HTML 3.0. HTML 3.0 never made it to a final specification, but it contained many interesting if half-baked ideas. One of these was the fig element. Like spacer the element had many attributes now obsoleted by CSS.

Also like spacer or the logo and photo types in vCard, but unlike img, object, or canvas elements fig tells what kind of image is shown, here a figure. In addition the figure had associated content, the caption and credit elements, as well as content fallback like for object in HTML4. caption reappears in XHTML2, while credit has yet to reappear.

Two other properties were unique for this version of HTML, the overlay, an image positioned on top of the figure, handy for sprite animations, but here ostensibly to save bandwidth. The images could have a checksum so that when leeching an image the owner of the site would not be able to swap the image with an inappropriate one without the browser detecting that the image had been tampered with.

Berlin may be my most bypassed city. In the old days I would either take bus or train the Oslo-Göteborg-Malmö-Sassnitz-Berlin-Dresden-Prague route. Apart from train change I rarely spent much time in Berlin, and the bus wisely took a huge circle around it. So it is now when I’m mostly flying over the city that I seek it out, and this time I did it the old-fashioned way, taking the Budapest-Hamburg train from Prague. The web site had warned me the train was running 18 minutes late so I could leave later than I otherwise would have to. The 350km train ride might have costed more than the 900km airfare from Oslo but that is fair since the ride lasted more than twice as long, passing through the pretty but depressed landscape of the Czech-German hinterlands.

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From our QA department we’ve been told that Opera Mini is the first browser not merely to pass the Acid2 test, but to surpass it. If you haven’t downloaded Opera Mini yet, you should do so now, or try the Opera Mini™ simulator.

Still in Prague. Had I blogged using Opera Mobile or Mini I would have been at the airport in time (maybe a posting on battery life on mobile devices at a later time), but as the trip was almost a stopover in Oslo before going to Berlin a couple days later, and Berlin is just north of here, missing it was no disaster.

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