Johan is in the same situation as me; had Flickr Pro for a while and didn’t really feel the need to continue it. My pro account expired in April and I should have backed up all my photos because now I have to pay $24,95 to be able to do so. With a free account only the latest 200 photos are available. Not only public but in the organization tool in Flickr as well as the API.

This is a very good example of the type of problems that exists with storing data in the cloud. We as users must demand access to our own data, whether we continue to pay for the service or not.

I am making a photo gallery myself and it is currently in beta. I plan to include an import function that will utilize the Flickr API; download the most recent photos and delete them when their saved on my own server. This way I should be able to get out all of MY photos.

hi espen

how r u? here every things is close. thats why i cant come on line in face book.even messenger… just very slowly smtimes yahoo…. sms is close. and most of day even phones r close…

what can i say about their violence? u cant even emagine that… plz tell me what things u want to know?

just i can say here is hill. everybody that u ask elected musavi… but see… its very hard when u know they r cheating u and u cant even shout or say give my right. all over the city is full of souldures and polices and…. some of them r from libenan, its funny that he pay money to arabic people to kill and beat iranian coz they want their right.

every day we go to protest… every night people r out…some with car and some walking…. they bleep to show their opositions.

i dont know what will happen to us…! but this not humanity.

today was the cermoney of people who died, they killed… and there r too much more the ones who r arrested and in prison they persecute them… i saw manythings by my eyes, they beated me too just coz i was walking in street…

any way, im really not good. i feel very sad now and dont know what can we do?!!!

they dont want even to count again , even if they do now its not reallity. they changed everythings… and our leader khamenei send congradulation to ahmadi nejad!

in saturday, counting finished in 2 oclock but they called on 8 oclock, before it get finish. 24 million… really funny. in all newspaper that reacived in our hand at 11,(3hours before counting finish) they said ahmadi nejad was win…

so they think people r stupid. but this time nobody accepted. but unfortunally just in tehran. coz people in other cities dont have risk and they affraid, if they beat one of them they even dont come out. and in tehran also, how do u think? how many days more people can come out and protest and…?!!!!!! they r dictator. finally they will get tired and force to accept, same as always…

before election i talked with many people in all cities… %80 said musavi… how can it be possible?!!! and if they r right, why they dont care about people who r shouting give back my vote? its not election, its selection……? why all phones r close? why they kill? they dont let people show….

and these people who r out r %20 of opositions. for example arround me, everybody elected musavi, but now they dont come out,they affraid… so, see this %20… everybody who can think, understand its rigging.

actually people r tired of this regim. musavi was a excues that they come out against of them.we didnt have too much choise.and all of our choises force to work for this government and regim,they have to.so we had to choose between them. but for sure every one of them would be better than ahmadinejad.

any way, u say about there and ur news about iran there and other places. what and how do u feel about it and what will happen from ur side?

take care
[name removed]

Me and two Italian friends had dinner at Naghsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan. The second largest square after Tiananmen square in China. The three girls on the next table were pretty and not at all shy. They showed us around town and bought us lunch (no argument there).

And this is what it looked like today, filled with brave Iranians fighting for their rights and for their vote to count.

My friends in Isfahan went to the university and lived at the dormotories. Earlier today there were reports of attacks on the dormotory there and this video confirms it. I hope they are ok.

Most people see Iran as an axis of evil. A dangerous place. With fanatical and religious people. I have written before about the truth about Iran and its people. But even so I am surprised about the turnout of these demonstrations and how brave the people are for standing up to their government. When I was there I tried talking to people about the problems that exists because of their leader and the way the state is structutured. Most people were very dissatisfied with the government but they seemed to be very apathatic about making any changes. They tried to live their lives and kept their joys in private. Maybe this time the government pushed too far with their fraud. Or maybe they saw that when (even) America can CHANGE so can Iran. Another thing to remember is that Iran tried this 30 years ago. These events are in some ways very much alike to what happened when Khomehni took power. The people were dissatisfied with the Shah (king) and wanted a true democracy. Khomehni promised it but as we all now did not live up to his words. The result is that Iranians have until now been very reluctant to make such a major change again.

These events also make me think how lucky my timing was last year. I was in Tehran in early 2008 and suddenly there was an election which was all new to me. But it was a local election. I went out on the streets to check it out but it was a ghost town except for a small crowd of 50 people outside the university where the voting booth was. One old man shouted “Bush – monkey. Bush – monkey” and I smiled and said “balle” – “yes”. Earlier that month another important event occurred in Tehran – the day of the revolution. About a million conservative Iranians parades in the streets along with me and two Norwegian girls. But it was a peaceful day out for families and people were smiling.

While I am worried for my friends in Iran and worried that the demonstration will be cracked down upon without any result, or maybe even for the worse, I am still glad to see these events occuring. A change for a slightly more liberal president is not enough. A revolution is needed.

Engelab Iran – Azadi.

Revolution Iran – Freedom.

I suggest that CNET drops this category.

Enter Gitorious!

Johan Sørensen from Shortcut, a ruby on rails company here in Oslo, made this amazing free open-source “GitHub-clone” (update: Gitorious was launched the same week as GitHub.). It has been available as a open-source project for awhile but recently Shortcut made a free public site available for those who do not want to install Gitorious themselves.

Gitorious boost most of the features that GitHub has:

• Host git-repositories.
• Visual source browser.
• Teams.
• History of the commit log.
• Clone/fork projects, download zipped file.
• Comments.
• Notficitation system.

On a day to day basis the source tree browser is what I most often use with GitHub. It is ajax-based and loads commit messages after the rest of the page is loaded. This is often a slow process in GitHub and something that works much better in Gitorious where no ajax is used.

There is not much I miss from GitHub, but I cannot see a way to constantly watch others repositories as is possible in GitHub. I follow various rails-projects in GitHub but I use it mainly as a form of bookmark so it is not a very important feature for me.

QT announced today that they will use Gitorious as their public repository for their cross-platform UI framework. Hopefully more will follow so Gitorious can gain the attention it deserves compared to GitHub.

Bluebird twitter client

I am using the Light theme

Zoli predicted it and Krishnan agreed with him when the financial crisis dugg deeper: SaaS and cloud computing benefits in a recession.

So far we have seen the amazing 33% growth in number of customers in 50 days by Xero and many SaaS vendors have reported record Q4 sales such as:

• NetSuite Q4 revenues in Q4 were up 30,5% from Q4 previous year.
• 24SevenOffice revenues in Q4 were up 135% from Q4 previous year. (Disclaimer: I co-founded 24SevenOffice)
• SalesForce.com revenues in 2008 were up 35% from previous year.
• Joyent 56% increase in revenues in six months.
• Mimecast up 318% compared to previous year

FreshBooks are reporting their best sales ever this January and Zimbra celebrated crossing the 40 million mark for paid mailboxes. For some this is just too much growth to believe but it is the result of the beneifts that SaaS offers boosted by cost-cutting companies. Previously companies choose SaaS for a number of benefits and the financial downturn made them all nearly irrelevant except one: cost. SaaS is cheaper to implement, host, support and upgrade.

So if you are a SaaS-vendor; here’s to a financial crisis!

To everyone involved with major Norwegian websites: Why don’t we start a campaign to get rid of IE6? One week with visible upgrade suggestions on the frontpage.

Journalist, blogger and tweeter Anders Brenna followed up the campaign with an article in TU requesting readers to help out by upgrading their browser. But it was Finn.no (the eBay of Norway) that took the first major step and displayed a “please upgrade” message to all visitors with IE6:

Soon the largest online newspaper VG followed, as did others: Sesam (search engine), start.no and more.

So if you are responsible or can influence the decisions made on a website, why not join the campaign: Kill IE6 now!

We have all received perceivably automated replies by drone-like customer service employees from banks, telco’s etc. But I would assume Yahoo would respond better to customers, and particurarly over an issue as important as content quality on a user-generated content website.

Another user on Yahoo Travel website sent me a message regarding my review of ‘The Green Hut Lodge’. I noticed six new suspicious reviews (most likely written by the user who wrote the message to me) and I alerted Yahoo Travel about the potential fraudulent behavior:

All the six newest reviews are fake. The first three reviews all gave this hostel a 1 star rating while the fake reviews gave it 5 stars. I wrote one of the initial reviews. The new reviews are all created within two days. Please remove them.

Answer #1 from uninterested employee:

Hello,
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Travel. I appreciate your report of potential violations within Yahoo! Travel. I have completed my evaluation and have taken appropriate action, as per the Yahoo! Terms of Service and the Yahoo! Travel Guidelines.

Regards,
Richie Valley

My response:

This is ridiculous. There was no action taken. Don’t you want the Yahoo Travel website to be a trustworthy source of information? This particular hotel has had four reviews over a period of six months, then suddenly six very positive reviews appear within two days. I am sure they all come from the same IP-address. Also note that the language is not very advanced in any of the six reviews which indicates it is the same person who have written them all.

Regards,
Espen Antonsen

Answer #2 from uninterested employee:

Dear Espen,
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Travel.

It appears we have received previous reports from you regarding this particular review. Please be assured we have investigated the review in question and have taken appropriate action per our Terms of Service. If you would like to review our Terms of Service, please visit: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Regards,
Richie Valley
Yahoo! Customer Care

Don’t to the same mistake as Richie’s boss. Find people who take an interest in their profession. No matter at what level.