Author: Anders Rune Jensen

Categories
n800 nokia tablet

Summary of maemo summit

Some details for the next Nokia device was announced. It looks like it will have a 3x faster processor, be opengl es enabled (and will use clutter for it’s interface), will include tracker and have 3G. So it looks like Nokia wants to compete more directly with the Iphone.

In the talks it was also revealed that 2/3 of the tablet owners are developers. That is a higher number than I had expected, so either the tablets are not selling as well as one could have hoped or there is just a large number of developers owning them 🙂

Nokia was nice enough to provide all non-nokia people attending the desktop search hackfest with a n810. So I had some time to test it out in Berlin. Like going from n770 to n800, the upgrade is mostly only improvements and not very many “regressions”. Integration of GPS and keyboard combined with a smaller form factor are all very nice improvements. The keyboard makes the device much more functional as a IM device and is generally nice for inputting stuff instead of the virtual keyboard. Sadly I just bought a 8gb + 4gb memory stick for my n800 which won’t go into the n810, so I will have to hold onto the n800 for a while.

The hackfest went nice. A lot of decisions was made, it will be interesting how everything will pan out once everyone gets home and starts coming up with corner cases where the agreed upon solutions falls short 🙂 But overall it should be a good step in the right direction for xesam 1.0. It seems there was some tension between people which just want a functional xesam 1.0 (more or less just a cleaned up version of all the current api’s) and the semantic desktop people, but I think we came up with a nice compromise that made everyone happy. So that was pretty nice especially since it seems that the tracker guys have been punting the implementation of xesam support until the spec for 1.0 was finalized.

Categories
Blog

On the Death Magnetic production

Earlier this month Metallica released their new album, Death Magnatic, to great reviews and so far it has sold more than 500.000 in the United States alone. So what is wrong with this rose red story? Sadly the new album has become the one of the latest victims of the loudness war. At first, people just thought it was the quality of bad 128kbit rips that made it sound so bad, but as the cd started arriving in the hands of people, the sharp reality that this was indeed the final mix hit people smack in the face. And is not pretty a pretty sight (death magnetic at the bottom if you were in doubt :)):

So far Metallica has been completely silent about the whole deal. Luckily people soon figured out that the mix was much better on the Guitar Hero 3 version and in short order someone figured out how to rip the sound of the game. All was not perfect though, some people claimed the Guitar Hero 3 was too flat and missing some of the “oomph” of the original mix. But it didn’t take long before someone fixed that, and a guitar hero version 2.0 was born.

So is this what the world has come to? That you have to be a filthy pirate in order to enjoy the latest album of a band you have been listening to for the last 15 years? A petition has started online to get Metallica to release a fixed version of the album. But until that day comes, I’ll be happy to call myself a pirate.

Categories
Blog

Adding some metal to ubiquity

The other day I was reading about this new project from mozilla labs called ubiquity. A command driven interface for the browser. The ability to mark something and just type: map this, define this, or imdb this is really powerful and saves a lot of mouse wanking. What is really interesting from a technical point of view is the fact that new commands are written in javascript. They have a guide for writing these and a rocking realtime editor (requires ubiquity).

I often find new artists or albums and want to check them out. Now since it’s mostly metal I listen to, there is this great site metal-archives.com with a bunch of reviews. The reviews really helps finding out if the music is worth listening to or not. Sadly I couldn’t find a command for this, so I wrote one. It’s one of the most pleasent programming experiences in a long time. With this command you just type: metal metallica and it will bring you to the metallica page on metal-archives.net (in a new tab of course).

The source for Ubiquity 0.1.X.

The source for Ubiquity 0.5.X.

Categories
nemo

Attending the Maemo Summit 08 in Berlin 19-21 Sept.

I’ve just booked tickets and will be attending the Maemo Summit. I’ll be there for mostly for the Desktop Search Hackfest representing Nemo.

Categories
nemo

Release time! Nemo 0.2.3 released

Had some nice crasher fixes in svn for a while so I thought I would do a release of Nemo. The release is very minor, but the changes should be rather welcome for everyone 🙂

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On the web

Interesting statistic

I was looking at my del.icio.us account the other day and noticed that I have more tags than I have bookmarks there. Not a whole lot more, but still. 197 against 185. Not really what I was expecting. Many of the tags are only used on a single bookmark, so one can’t really easily navigate using the tags, but instead it makes the search that much more functional when it matches a tag. Anyone else got some numbers to compare?

Categories
On the web

opensteetmap usage

flickr uses openstreetmap, how very cool!

Categories
yayart

Ever wondering how YayArt looks in real life?

We just got a lot of pictures from a currently running exhibition of YayArt at Rambøll here in Aalborg.

Categories
jvm Programming

Clojure

This is perhaps one of the most interesting talks I have heard in a long time. The talk is about a modern implementation of lisp for the jvm which is designed for concurrency.

Categories
firefox On the web

Spank my monkey

Found out that apparently flickr doesn’t allow you to save their pictures. They replace the path of pictures with this odd spaceball.gif picture. Luckily greasemonkey ones again comes to the rescue, and this time in a very nice way. Apparently some images on flickr can only be view in large for pro users or something like that, but this script adds back the all sizes and makes it easy to snatch high quality images from flickr 🙂

From this new found interest in greasemonkey, I decided to look for what other nice scripts there exists. If you use gmail you’ll like the change all mailto:// links to open in gmail and replace http with https (works for gmail, google calendar and a bunch of other sites).