Blog of Anders Rune Jensen

LLM as a compiler

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:40:16 +0000

Recently I have been using LLMs to explore different ideas related to syncing two nodes. I wanted to see how far I could take the setsum idea. The first tries last year was fraught with disappointing. The LLMs needed a lot of hand-holding to get things into shape. Eventually I settled on a stable foundation (tests) and code base and that made it easier to iterate on performance improvements. This resulted in a 10x speedup compared to the initial version.

Learning python

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 22:26:42 +0000

My son (12 years old) recently started getting interested in programming. They had been working with the Micro:bit in school and he was playing around with it at home with an emulator on his laptop. The machine is not very powerful and he soon ran into problems with the code size.

We started talking about Python and he was very interesting in learning more, so we spent an afternoon one weekend going over the basics. Then I thought it would be much nicer if things were more visual. There is always pygame, but I wanted something a bit more tangible. I remembered that raspberry pi has some small screens that can be bought relatively cheap, so I ordered a Raspberry Pi Pico with a Pico Display Pack 2.0.

Distributed findings

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 19:43:41 +0000

Recently I stumpled upon two interesting projects that I thought was worth sharing.

The first is Reticulum, an encrypted network that allows one two create adhoc private mesh networks over both internet and wireless links.

The second is the Eg-walker paper detailing an efficient crdt algorithm for text. What I found interesting is that some of the algorithms seems more general and this might be applicable in other situations with concurrency. The paper also details a lot of tricks used to spead an the implementation. The paper is based on diamond types, so more a write up of an existing system rather than a new algorithm that is not really used anywhere yet.

SQL links

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 23:42:11 +0000

SQL sometimes feel a bit like black magic. How the query engine figures out what plan to execute, why is this query slow etc. The best resource I have come across is the book Indexing beyond the basics. Its available as a PDF download or for reading online. It gives a bit of easy to remember theory and lots of great examples.

Some more random links I stumples upon recently:

A work diary

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 22:55:47 +0000

Acording to wikipedia, diaries are almost 2000 years old. And they still work just as well today! At work I have been keeping a simple diary in the form of a giant org document. It's a practice I have been doing for 9 years and would not be without. While org mode can do a million things, I almost use none of the functionality. Instead the main function I use is the ability to search anything instantly. I use it as for todos, for saving SQL queries, code snippets, for links and in general for things I need to find again. I have a key binding to enable F9 to insert the current date and then I use tags to split things into topics.

Raspberry pi music player

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 18:11:34 +0000

Ever since the raspberry pi zero 2 was released I knew it would be good as a always on machine at home. It uses around 0.4Wh idle power which amounts to around 5kWh per year at 0.6 Wh average. Or 1-2 euros and around 500g co2 per year.

I have been digitizing my music collection. I do still enjoy and mostly listen to full albums and having the ability to listen to any of hundreds of those with a click is amazing. I still keep my CDs around, they look like this:

P2P applications

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 10:28:01 +0000

User autonomy is at the heart of P2P applications. This means that the data should be written locally first and later exchanged with peers. For this data to be safely exchanged, the data should be signed by a key in the users control and ideally be encrypted as well. The aggregate data is what makes up a full application. There is no single source of truth as in a centralized application instead this concept is fluid and changes over time as the application grows.

Butts in the Browser Fosdem talk

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 22:08:51 +0000

Over the weekend I gave a talk on running secure scuttlebutt directly in the browser. The talk gives an overview of ssb in general, how it is different from federated services. It touches on some of the work we have been doing for a European NGI pointer grant including jitdb. The browser app uses local storage, indexed db and Chrome FS. WASM for crypto and web sockets for communication with other nodes. Slides are available here and video available here.

GITEA and cors

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 20:32:24 +0000

I was looking to use git as a storage backend for a project I was working on, as one can run git in the browser now using isomorphic git. The app needed to run from my machine directly for easier development, which meant that the remote git backend has to support CORS. Luckily the gitea project allows one to quite easily host your own git reposities with an interface very similar to github.

How to setup a PUB for SSB browser

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 18:06:47 +0000

SSB-browser as mentioned in my last blog post runs a SSB client in the browser. In order to communicate with other peer it needs a pub to relay messages through. Furthermore the pub acts as a super node allowing the browser peer to do partial replication without necessarily needing to store the full feeds of peers.

We don't really gain very much compared to the classical client-server setup if we rely too much on especially a single pub. The browser client can of course run fully off-line, but still when it needs to communicate messages with other peers it needs some intermediary.

Secure scuttlebutt in a browser

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 20:43:05 +0000

For roughly the last year I have been working on bringing secure scuttlebutt to the browser. The result of this is ssb-browser-core.

Secure scuttlebutt allows one to write an unforgeable append-only log of messages and to exchange these messages between nodes in a p2p network without a central authority. With this, one can build event sourcing systems.

The first secure scuttlebutt implementation (there are also Go and rust implementations now) is a normal node application and thus requires a lot of things that are not readily available in a browser such as a filesystem and crypto. Filesystem api is provides by random-access-web that for chrome uses the file system api which is quite fast. Crypto is provided by libsodium.js which uses wasm and is roughly 90% the speed of running it natively. The last part is network, he we rely on web sockets which gives us a long running connection to a server somewhere. With epidemic broadcast trees to exchange messages, one can get the latest messages for several hundred feeds (probably also thousands) in a reliable and low latency manor.

Bornhack talk

Sun, 11 Aug 2019 15:09:22 +0000

I recently gave a talk at Bornhack with the title anarchitecture. The talk is available here and was recorded so you can watch it here.

Book review: Better work together

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 21:01:25 +0000

A few weeks ago I finished a really good technical book called Better work together. The book is written by people from enspiral about working together in non-hierarchical structures and the lessons learned from doing this within enspiral. I was lucky to meet a few of the authors at the network convergence retreat I attended last year.

The book is written as a bunch of essays and reflections by a range of authors, instead of a single author, very much inline with the books theme. This includes great stories, such as the ones from Susan and Kate, but also deep thoughts about growing distributed leadership by Alanna and musings on consensus by Richard. Also thoughts on how to value the commons and the things you can't (and probably shouldn't measure).

Techfestival talk

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 10:10:14 +0000

I went to TechFestival in September and did a talk at the Algorithmic Sovereignty summit. The talk touches on how Scuttlebutt can be used to regain some sovereignty over how data is shared and bring transparancy to the algorithms that runs on the data. The whole summit was a wonderful experience with lots of interesting people and discussions. When talking about these issues most people talk about the negative aspects of current systems such as Facebook, but rarely about solutions so I was really happy to give a more solarpunk positive story. The problems are really hard as it intersects human nature and technology but are increasingly important in todays society.

Scuttlebutt development grant

Fri, 08 Jun 2018 11:09:39 +0000

Since January I have been working on a grant to add a benchmarking ci framework to scuttlebot to better understand the behaviour and make it easier to find regressions as the implementation matures and changes. Furthermore I have been spending time understanding and finding things that can be improved performance wise.

The grant is almost at an end so I’ll use this blog to summarize what has been achived.

Built a CI framework and visualization tool for the bench-ssb repo. I used the nci framework for this and have been quite happy with the result.
Found and fixed a memory leak that made level-post really slow over time.
Made several improvements to flume to improve performance. Some interesting links related to this: charwise and json performance related to buffers in node.

I have kept a dev diary for the duration of the grant. It has been a very interesting to really get to understand a relatively large and real world distributed system.

Scuttlebutt and dat

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 14:01:39 +0000

I wrote a small plugin for ssb that allows it to read through posts to discover dat links and seed them automatically. The cool thing is that you can tell it to only seed for people you follow. Besides the normal use case of a user only sharing friends links, this also makes it really easy to set up a pub that automatically seeds content shared by its member. This combined with something like beaker browser makes it easy to create content and share it in a totally distributed fashion.

Chromebook for development

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 12:06:20 +0000

I got myself an early Christmas present: an Acer Chromebook 14. I wanted a dedicated linux development machine and always wanted to try out Chrome OS to see what it was like. So far the overall experience has been good. The laptop is excellent for the price, the screen is good, keyboard is fine and best of all, the battery life is really good.

I installed debian stable (jessie) in a chroot on the machine using crouton. There i can run node, scuttlebot and tor and use emacs graphically using xiwiÂ for editing. The best part about crouton is that you can do a full chroot backup and store that somewhere safe. You can even have multiple chroots running at the same time for testing. Crouton seems a little rough, like I ran into this wierd node bug. But overall I like the seperation. I might end up installing debian directly at some point, but for now this suits me fine.

Tor support in scuttlebot

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 13:54:01 +0000

For the past year I have spent some time on a distributed system called scuttlebot. Scuttlebot using gossipping to distribute message and is a true decentralized system. What is interesting is that the applications built on this platform shares the same decentralized thinking. There is a twitter/facebook clone and a github clone. In git-ssb-web you can do the normal fork/pull request workflow or you can use the web of trust built into scuttlebot to allow multiple people to write to the same repo, so you get the best of both subversion and git. I have built an entity database inspired by CQRS on top of scuttlebot, that handles writes and reads separately and allows one to reason about concurrent writes to objects in a way that minimizes conflicts in 170 lines of javascript.

On altruism part 2

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 14:21:18 +0000

In the spirit of holidays and sharing is caring, an update to my other post with some more interesting organizations to support:

Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you havn’t watched this then do it now. Then you’ll know why they are important, more now than ever.
Mozilla. I can’t think of another program I have spend so much time using over the last many years. Their support is important in order to remain independent and make the web a better place.
Randers regnskov This is a Danish one, but a rather important one I think. They pay for school to an indian tribe in Ecuador, and in response the families will not sell their rain forest land to big international companies. What a great idea and really worth spreading.

On altruism

Thu, 15 Aug 2013 23:29:53 +0000

Some years ago I became an apostate by leaving the church and became a “real” atheist. In Denmark the church and the state are still quite heavily intertwined. Luckily the biggest portion of the money the church receives are from believers who pay about 1% of their annual salary through a special church tax. Many of these never go to church, except for Christmas, when they get married or when they get children and need to get them baptized. What would happen if they spend that money on charity instead?

Hashtables in javascript

Wed, 30 May 2012 16:35:52 +0000

I was looking into some performance problems with knockout yesterday and starting digging into the code. In particular I was wondering why it would take their mapping plugin several seconds to wrap an array of 500 objects. Profiling lead me to look deeper into the code, and the following code stroke me as very strange:

Basically this is a hash implementation of only put and get operations using two arrays. I don’t think I need to tell you how bad the performance of this will be once you start adding lots of items :)

Time in a database

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 19:13:41 +0000

For some applications, the ability to be able to trace the different states during the lifetime of data can be very important. Especially when it comes to debugging. This is mostly relevant for data stored in a database, but could potentially also be interesting for in memory data structures. Luckily many databases today support this as change data capture. I would add to the article that the capturing the user as part of the change can be very effective.

Donation links

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:13:49 +0000

I really love the kickstarter concept, flattr and in general other great free projects, such as wikipedia and wikileaks. Then there are smaller projects such as The Project Hate MCMXCIX trying to fund the recording of their latest album. Or the interesting, but maybe a bit top low budget TV series Pioneer One. Or the excellent free android mod cyanogen.

I donated to the recording of Obscura’s demo collection this month, what did you donate to?

mocomp released

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:27:43 +0000

I wanted/needed a web based frontend for mpmovie player so that I could play movies on my projector and build a quick little system in clojure to do it. Since there was quite a lot of code I could share from mucomp it was very easy to get running. I’ve been using it for about a month now and just thought I would share it.

A digital dictionary

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 13:07:58 +0000

One of the nice things about reading is that it enhances ones vocabulary, but only if one can learn the new words that one meets. I’ve always dreaded using a dictionary because one has to manually find the right page, and for them to contain all relevant words they need to be huge. When one is used to computers, this just seems terribly inefficient. Luckily now there are many online dictionaries. Sadly they don’t help very much when one is lying on the sofa or in bed and reading. This is where I think the kindle really shines. When reading a book on the kindle, one can instantly look up a new word without leaving the page. This alone is often compelling reason enough to buy it as an ebook than to buy it in paperback.

Learning from the web

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:53:03 +0000

While Paul Graham and many others have pointed out the virtues of web compared to normal desktop software. For Nemo Documents, working as a file manager for local files, it was quite clear that we needed a desktop application. Given this how could we then apply as much of the good things about the web into developing a Windows application?

We quickly decided on WPF as it allows one much greater freedom in designing the application. We wanted something visually appealing and in this I think we succeeded (whether that is the case, is of course not up to me to decide :-)). But at least it is not the ordinary ugly grey programs that are so common in the Windows world. As for WPF as a framework I’m quite torn. On one side, it allows one to do a lot of fancy stuff, but on the other side there is way too-much architecture astronauting in the framework and that really hurts when you’re just trying to get something done. jQuery is a good example of how to do this right.

A messy desktop

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:12:51 +0000

Earlier this week we released a new version of Nemo Documents, the biggest addition is that we integrated google into the desktop. How this improves things have been documented on the official nemo documents blog, so instead of writing more about that I want to focus on a more personal angle, namely the subject of a messy desktop versus an organized one.

My windows desktop is quite messy. You can see how it looks below. Then again, it’s mostly used to store temporary stuff. Projects we are working on always go into a neat folder structure inside our version control system.

Amazon Kindle review

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 23:13:10 +0000

I’ve recently bit the bullet and bought a kindle. I’ve been wanting to see the display of an ebook reader for a while but never had the chance, but the reviews of the display were all very good so I wasn’t too worried about that. With the recently announced 3rd generation kindles at a much more reasonable price I decided that it was time to see what all the fuss was about.

Nemo Documents released!

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:36:07 +0000

Today I’m pleased to announce something we at IOLA have been working on for quite a while. In essence it deals with how one can create a more humane interface for managing files an documents. By humane I mean an interface that is build with people in mind instead of computers. I’ve written a bit more elaborately on the official blog about how and why we have designed the system in the way we did. If this short teaser was enough of an appetizer, you can also just go ahead and try our beta version of Nemo Documents right now for free.

Language design

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:35:50 +0000

When talking to people about the benefits of clojure often people point out that most modern languages have evolved to “support” the functional paradigm with lambda functions. The argument is that one can stay in the familiar safe environment of imperative programming and use the functional constructs when they fit the problem better. That is a very valid and good strategy but I’ll show in the following that it brings a whole lot of accidental complexity with it. Some of this is specific to the way .NET is implemented and some are a clash of the functional paradigm with the imperiative.

Concurrency the other way around

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:00:06 +0000

Clojure is built around concurrency and it clearly shows in the abstractions the language makes available. I would say that concurrency is pervasive in the language. The good thing about that it that it’s a bit harder to shoot yourself in the foot when doing programming with multiple threads. But the bad side is that it adds quite a bit of mental overhead in situations where concurrency is undesirable.

As an example in mucomp, there is a certain part of the code that deals with the audio player. This is inherently a resource that should only be handled by one thread at a time. Clojure comes with a very good abstraction for exactly this problem, agents. An agent is simply some state, that is manipulated by only thread. Using an agent is done by through sending a function to the agent that will take the old state and return a new state. So with that one gets everything that is needed to write an audio player: serialized access and safely mutable state.

Do we really need record labels?

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:00:12 +0000

I was very sad to hear that one of the better bands in metal, The Project Hate MCMXCIX, parted way with their record label, Vic Records, after only one record because they didn’t have the money to record their latest album. I guess it’s not easy to have a band on your roster who doesn’t tour.

The new album is written and just needs the funding to get recording. One great thing about Lord K, the main man behind the band, is that he cares a lot about the sound quality. The music sounds so much better in flac than in mp3 and proper speakers / headphones of course helps a lot :-) hint Slayer and Metallica.

Microfunding

Wed, 26 May 2010 22:04:55 +0000

I’ve recently joined flattr (that’s the icon on the right you can see :-)), and just last week I read about some students from NYU who got almost 200.000$ in funding through kickstarter to write an open source facebook clone. Something is definitely buzzing in the micropayment world.

When you look at kickstarter and flattr, they are attacking the same problem, funding, at different angles. Kickstarter tries to get all the funding up front, while flattr is more of a tip jar model for something already produced. So in a way, they are complementary. I would argue that they both work best if the content is placed into the public one way or another. And that is where I think there is a huge potential.

Google search is not a programmers best friend

Sun, 23 May 2010 16:49:27 +0000

I was playing around with google this weekend. The original problem I wanted to solve was that last.fm returns strange strange release dates for albums, so I was writing a small script that would extract the correct release date from various sources. I was aiming at www.metal-archives.com and wikipedia. Both of these sites have different search pages, and in general I’ve come to rely more on google’s site:xxx functionaly, than on individual pages own search engines. So I thought, why not just use google programmatically to search the sites. Seems easy enough.

Channel downmixing in MPlayer

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:49:58 +0000

Recently I have been playing with downmixing in MPlayer.Â When I bought new speakers, I decided to go with stereo instead of surround since I mostly listen to music. As anyone using mplayer or any “derived” players such as vlc have discovered, there is a incredible annoying problem that the voices of the actors are very low, actually in general the sound is very low. It appears that when mixing to two speakers, the center channels is put very low in the mix. The same could be said about the subwoofer although it’s naturally not as easily recognized.

mucomp released into the wild

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:01:58 +0000

Today I’m happy to announce that the world is one audio player richer! This is a personal project of mine that I have been working on for a little while. It’s written in clojure and javascript (jQuery) and uses alsaplayer as the audio player. I probably won’t have much time to hack on it, so consider this a code dump that hopefully someone else will find useful and play/run/do-whatever with. As for maturity I use it almost daily and it’s pretty stable. There are some known bugs and kinks (mostly due to that its using alsaplayer and that the java inotify library is buggy).

How far have we come?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:47:32 +0000

Things like these makes me wonder, with all the advances in computer science how far have we really come?

40 years after the invention of relational databases we are still manually defining indexes
40 years after the invention of Unix, the scheduler in Android (= Linux) still does a terrible job at scheduling the tasks that really depend on it (games and audio)

AndNav2 is now Open Source

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 18:14:41 +0000

Wow this is quite a nice suprise. Nicolas gave in and released the source of AndNav2. So I can now spend my time hacking that instead of reverse-engineering it :) I rooted my HTC Hero so I actually don’t need to do that anymore, but that is really beside the point. With the source available there is no ends to what can be done :)

As I have said before, I really think this is a killer app for Android. Google released their navigation which is nice, but I’m not sure how well it works in offline mode.

Programming nirvana part 4: the repl

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:51:33 +0000

A repl is a very important tool in the arsenal of a programmer. It allows one to test bits and pieces of code and then assembling that into a running program. Examples of this includes the excellent firebug utility for firefox and various shells (like the python shell). There has even been tries to bring a repl to C#, but the languages is not at all designed for this purpose, so it’s a crude hack at best.

Programming nirvana part 3: avoid relational databases

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:37:27 +0000

This is actually a blog post I have been meaning to write for quite a while not, but I just never got around to it. Relational databases are ubiquitous in programming. Whether it’s mainframes, application programming or even phones now a days everyone stores persistent data in a database. Recently there has been some talk about non-schema databases and there’s a myriad different implementations of them, but why the sudden interest?

Programming nirvana part 2: be agile

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:28:29 +0000

In part 1 I made the very brief argument that compiling sucks. I really like that cartoon since there is a lot of truth to it. Compiling sucks mainly because it breaks flow. There has been several tries to fix it by lowering the time it takes to compile but in the end, it’s still the same loop: write, compile, “debug”.

There is another layer to it as well, one that dynamic languages doesn’t necessarily imply: Developing a program should be having a running program that can be used while it is being written. This is one of the pillars of agile programming. Step one in achieving this goal is to separate the UI from the backend. Web is a natural way to do this.

Programming nirvana part 1: avoid compilation

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:53:03 +0000

I have been meaning to write about a new project I have been working on in my spare time for a while now. It’s a project where I wanted to maximize the fun I had doing it, learn something new and to do something that I can use. Sadly I have been putting it off since enumerating all the reasons feels like quite a daunting task.Â So instead of writing everything in one big blog post I’ll just do shorter posts. One for each argument. First one is pretty simple.

Fighting spam in gmail

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:25:51 +0000

Everyone hates spam, and like everyone else I get tons of it. So I’ve of course written about it two times before. Earlier this week we migrated over to a better email solution, so that we could get SPF working properly. SPF should help google figure out what is spam and what is not. In the process I went through all my old spam (all 4200 hundred of them) and found the following patterns to beÂ effective in cleaning my spam folder:

Django Alliance

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:03:51 +0000

Being small and agile has many advances, but sometimes people confuse it with being fragile. Although one could argue that betting on a single-vendors proprietary solution would be a more fragile business proposition. Anyway, to make people feel safer buying web systems developed in Django and Python based on Open Source, we have had a finger in the creation of the Django Alliance. The web site complements Django People with a focus on companies rather than on single individuals.

Andnav2 working on Hero again

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:49:53 +0000

First a short background. HTC Hero released with android 1.5. Google releases android 1.6 with TTS (text-to-speech) support. Andnav2 working fine since it uses external tts library. Author of Andnav2 (Nicolas) releases version compatible with android 1.6, but leaves all users of 1.5 devices out in the cold. The update was uploaded to marked with NO warning. After many talks back and forth Nicolas finally agrees to release a version that at least starts up on 1.5, but still crashes when using turn navigation. HTC announces that they are working on a new firmware based on 2.0, but release has not yet been determined.

Go

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:19:34 +0000

Google released a new system programming language. I wonder if the names of Robert Pike and Ken Thomsen will make it more appealing to C people :)

It’s clearly meant to go head to head with C++. The two most interesting design decisions to me is their take on OO (feels like templates done right and no crappy inteheritance in the ordinary sense) and concurrency which looks a lot like Erlang because it’s CSP. Both of these things make it feel very functional.

Python scoping

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:30:08 +0000

Last friday, Lau discovered an interesting edge case of python. Something that at first appeared to be a bug, but later revealed a deeper truth about the scoping of Python. I guess coming from a C++ background spoils one in some regards. Scoping in C++ is simple and uniform, I have never in many years of programming C++ got bitten by the scope of the language, something that I also can’t say about C#.

Getting android emulator running on Ubuntu 9.10

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:59:08 +0000

I had a little trouble getting the android emulator running on my laptop. I wanted to start debugging why andnav2 is no longer working. Hopefully Nicolas can get it fixed, but it appears that he’s quite busy :(

The first problem I ran into was that the buttons in the tools/android application where not responding properly. Starting tools/android with the env variable GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 fixed that problem. Next problem was that the ssl mirror for getting the different SDK versions was not working. A quick google revealed that adding a sdkman.force.http=true to ~/.android/androidtool.cfg fixed that. Do not try to just remove the http. You’ll get the SDKs, but it will not work.

Font problems with QT programs in Ubuntu 9.10

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:00:15 +0000

I upgraded early to Ubuntu 9.10 release and have been overall very satisfied with the changes. 3d effects are back, thanks to fixed intel drivers, kernel has been upgraded and suspend + boot is faster, and Emacs has been upgraded to 23 :) I just had one problem when upgrading, namely that QT applications would use a non-hinted font which made Skype and Virtualbox would look like crap. It took a bit of googling to find out what the problem was. Using qtconfig-qt4 did not work for some unknown reason. I followed the guide on the link, and got fonts working again by simply copy/paste in his .fonts.conf file into my home directory.

8 free android apps and two web

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:25:58 +0000

One of the more interesting aspects of the HTC Hero for me was the android market. As paid applications are not yet available in Denmark, this list only includes free (as in beer) apps:

Locale: Brilliant and simple program to handle profiles automatically. Currently I just use it to have the phone silent when at work and with ringer on at home. But there are endlessÂ possibilitiesÂ with this application. No wonder it won the Android DeveloperÂ ChallengeÂ 1 competition. Highly recommended.
Facebook: pretty decent way to read and post status updates. Mostly needed because their website sucks in the browser.
Flickr.com: While not an app, the web site is simply a blast to use with the browser. Way to go flickr!
Wikipedia.com: Also not an app, but I've tried a few different apps, and the web site beats them all hands down. Don't bother installating any apps.
AndNav2: I wrote a seperate post about it here. I'll just add that I tried mapping with it yesterday and that also works perfectly. This application for me is the killer app for the android right now.
Google sky map: Mostly a wow-factor application but to be fair this application is pretty nice.
PMix: Application to control music player daemon (mpd) that I use at home for playing music. It's ok, but still quite rough around the edges (=crashes).
Skype lite: The software uses normal phone minutes for calling and thinks its a feature. Very disappointed.
Pro football live: Just to keep up with the latest games. Works pretty well. The best NFL app I have used.
Advanced task killer: The best I have found to keep the android running lean and clean :)

Getting album covers working on the HTC Hero

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:19:02 +0000

I’ve been strugling getting album art working properly with the music player included on the HTC Hero. Covers was only working for some albums. After a bit of googling and a few different tries, since there was a lot of misinformation on google about this problem, I finally figured out how it works. The player reads covers from a tag on the files. This is apparently the only way it supports covers. The player after reading a new cover, then thumnails them and stores the thumb in the albumart directory on the flash. The first application that I tried to add the album art to the files was Easytag, sadly it has a pretty nasty bugs that leads all the covers all fucked up. That combined with the caching of the player, left me strugling trying to correct the covers after I found a tagger that actually worked. So please don’t try that at home :) My second try was Kyamo, which I can’t recommend sadly. There are simply too many things that sucks in it. Things that combined makes fixing up ~10gb music a complete pain in the ass. I finally settled with Mp3tag, it’s for Windows, but at least it works quite well and its free (as in beer). Another annoying thing about the player is that, while it supports Ogg Vorbis, it doesn’t understand covers embedded in ogg. So no cover for those albums. Ah yeah, I should probably also mention that the thumbs generated are in 320x320, so in my experience around 500x500 pixels works best.

Profiling multithreading applications

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:16:51 +0000

I’ve written about profiling before in the general case. But when it comes to multithreading, there are a few more factors to consider such as lock contention and cache invalidation that affect performance. And this is where mutrace (mutex profiler) comes into the picture. The profiler has a very low overhead compared (no perceived delay for me) to other solutions and gives quite nice results. I tested it on My Media System (C++) and Nemo (C#) and got interesting results for both. I knew more or less what the results for mms would be, but the results for Nemo was a bit suprising. The lock contention was significantly higher than for mms, even though I didn’t really use a multithreaded design for Nemo. So I guess it comes from the mono platform itself. Sadly it seems that mono programs aren’t compiled with -rdynamic, so the results that one gets are quite hard to decipher.

Andnav2, open maps for the android

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:48:45 +0000

As I was researching the android platform before buying a HTC Hero, one of the things that really got me excited was the mappping/gps application andnav2. It’s a frontend for openstreetmap, that uses the open routing service to provide turn-by-turn, all for free. The only thing is that it requires is a internet connection for routing, but it’s not really a problem as a route is only a few kilobytes. Maps can be preloaded onto the device also, for situations where one doesn’t have an internet connection available (like when traveling). I used the nice TrekBuddy atlas creater application to fill the device with maps of all of Denmark, London, Berlin and Europe at a decent level.

Fixing the HTC Hero Sync installer for non-english versions of Windows

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:50:03 +0000

I recently aquired a HTC Hero phone. More on that later. First I just wanted to help out other poor souls out there, who are forced to use Windows to upgrade the software on the phone. There is a bug in the installer for the HTC Sync program which leads to the drivers not being installed, in turn resulting in the inability for the computer to find the android device. Very frustrating to the say the least. The installer writes the driver to the localized program files directory (on a Danish version of Windows this is C:\Programmer), but looks for it at the hard-coded path C:\Program Files, resulting in the drivers not being installed. Fixing the problem is pretty easy:

+1 Ubuntu

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:10:59 +0000

I was flaming Ubuntu in an earlier post for their lack of quality in their releases, so I thought it would be fair to give them credit when it is due. They have a project called One Hundred Paper Cuts where they try to fix low hanging fruit, easy bugs but annoying bugs. Bugs that when stacked together really can make you go from loving a piece of software to hating it. When I look through the blog post for their round 6,Â I really like what they are fixing.

Gmail please fix your spam filter

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:50:45 +0000

Lately Gmail has been become increasingly frustrating to use. When I check mail in the morning I have about 5 spam mails in my inbox. Even some from Viagra. Even worse, the number of false positives (ham classified as spam) has also been increasing so that I now at least once a day have to resort to looking for legitimate mail in my spam folder. For a spam filter this is the worst case scenario. Actually it seems like Gmail has trouble categorizing spam as seen below. I hope it's only a UI bug, but something deeper down is definately rotten.

The OpenBSD Releases Process

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 11:20:24 +0000

Theo de Raadt talks about the OpenBSD Releases Process.Â It’s short but sweet little interesting talk that touches a lot of different aspects about releasing software and doing development. I hightly recommended to anyone who cares about this field, that ought to mean any people doing software. They have a different way about thinking about a lot of things, of course their focus on security is special which also shows off in their release management. What I really liked was that they import stuff into their tree and then they take ownership of it. That way, I think, they avoid a lot of the problem that plague e.g. Ubuntu, like crappy intel drivers in latest Jaunty, the thrashing hell failure, unstable tracker in Jaunty. Of course all that comes at a certain cost, they are running ancient version of some pieces of the tree,Â but at least they know that it works.

Running Chrome in Ubuntu

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:07:54 +0000

Getting Chrome running in Ubuntu is now pretty easy, simple add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable main

Then you can install Chrome using the package manager and it will keep itself updated. Sadly the browser is quite alpha (no flash, random errors, no tabs saving on exit) but they update it every week and it runs insanely fast compared to firefox.

Making hibernate work after harddrive upgrade

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:30:03 +0000

I recently upgraded the harddrive in my trusty old IBM T60. I mirrored the hd using a little dd magic and everything worked fine, including the IBM rescue partition. The only thing that wasn’t working anymore was hibernation in Ubuntu. This was because it relied on wierd UUIDs instead of actual device names. Fixing it was pretty easy, once you know what the problem is. First step is to fix up /etc/fstab so that the swap partition has the right UUID. You can get the UUID of a device using something like:

Random Ubuntu notes

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:04:45 +0000

There’s an annoying problem in Ubuntu 9.04 that if you have set your machine to automatically login, but have a password on gnome keyring manager, then it will prompt you for the password before wireless is enabled. There is a bug about it here on launchpad. And as usual the Ubuntu guys doesn’t seem to want to take responsibility for the software they are providing. Reminds me of this thrashing bug reported over 3 years ago and it’s still open. It’s actiually the first result on google (out of 544.000) if you search for thrashing hell :)

How to Win Friends and Influence People book review

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:08:37 +0000

What a title for a book. The book was recommended by Joel Spolsky, he calls the book mandatory for what managers in his Fog Creek Software should read. That was what peaked my curiosity at first, then I read that the book is from 1936 and I was really intrigued. So I thought I’d order the book and see what all the fuss was about. And glad I did! The book is full of interesting anecdotes and advice that still rings as true today as the day they were written. It’s funny to read examples from the 1899, but that really doesn’t make them less true, on the contrary, it just shows that he was onto something fundamental in the human nature. The book touches many aspects of life, from business, to family to friends.Â On wikipedia all the advices are summed up, but I really recommned that you read it for yourself. It’s worth it.

Nemo 0.2.4 released

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:48:05 +0000

Nemo is not quite dead yet. It’s been a long time since the last release, as I’ve been super busy with external contracting work at IOLA so I havn’t really had time to work that much on Nemo. There are some interesting things coming up in the Nemo space in the future, so far I can’t say much about what they are since they are still quite a bit up in the air, but be sure that Nemo is not dead yet :)

The right medium

Wed, 27 May 2009 10:22:45 +0000

Just finished reading Jeff Jarvis book What Would Google Do. It’s an interesting study of applying google thinking to a wide range of other businesses. In the book he mentioned the Is google making us stupid article, which mulls over what happens if we can just search for everything, do we even need to remember anything anymore? And what happens if we shift our reading from books, to blog posts, to 160 letter twitter posts. Does that make us more stupid? Of course not! The only thing that twitter, blogs and facebook is making us better at, is choosing the right medium to convey our message. That is to say, in a more effecient way.Â Some ideas are best presented in a book, some in a blog post and some in twitter. Too often books could be cut in half (anyone else noticed that the sweet spot for books seems about 200 pages?) and sometimes a blog post might as well have been a twitter status update. It’s all of matter of choosing the right medium.

On designing libraries

Thu, 14 May 2009 11:01:15 +0000

I recently finished up a big project at IOLA which used two major components: Javascript and c# (.NET). It was interesting for me to see the big difference in the libraries for these platforms. For Javascript we used the excellent jQuery library. For .NET we used the very buggy Devexpress library. jQuery, like Javascript, is very simple. .NET on the other hand is overload with interfaces and concepts. What is interesting of course is that this philosophy shines through in libraries build on top of both platforms.

Generators and decorators in Python

Tue, 05 May 2009 15:53:26 +0000

Was reading through some old blog posts today and found an interesting talk about Coroutines and Concurrency. The talk is pretty long but presents some nice ideas about how to split a problem up and making it more modular using yielding. It seems like python has extended this a little so that you can actually use generators to consume messages also. What I found particular interesting though in the talk, was when he briefly showed a decorator. Decorators are really powerful and seems to bring about the best of lisps macro extensability to Python without loosing the excellent syntax :) I googled a bit and found the following list of patterns that you can do with decorators.

My Media System 1.1.1 released

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:02:05 +0000

A minor bugfix release for the 1.1.0 series was released today. Special thanks to the many contributors.

Streaming media between two linux boxes

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:30:39 +0000

I was wondering why it wasn’t possible to playback a movie over a ssh connection using remote X11 forwarding and mplayer. It seems that the latency is simply just too high. I’m not exactly sure if it’s a ssh or a X problem. This was on a wireless link, which might be part of the problem. While researching the problem I found this pretty cool patch for openssh that should give better transfer speeds. It’s in gentoo as the hpn use flag (even a patch for openssh 5.2). Sadly it did not seem to solve the problem. The movie was still very laggy. Then I tried adding a -C to add compression. This help a bit, but it was still painfully slow and uses quite a bit more cpu on the server side. Also the sounds will come out on the server end, so this might not work very well if you’re not in the same machine as the server :)

Ginger cookies

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:39:56 +0000

My lovely girlfriend Milda made ginger cookies again today :) The last batch of cookies went so fast that this time she made 3 plates full of goodies. The recipe needs the following ingredients:

100g butter 100g sugar, recommended brown 150g honey 1 egg 400g flour a bit of salt 1 tee spoon of baking soda 2 tee spoons of blended ginger 1 tee spoon of cinnamon 1 tee spoon of hot wine spices 2 table spoons of sour cream

My Media System 1.1.0 released

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:23:23 +0000

Finally the day has arrived when mms 1.1.0 has been released. After 9 release candidates the release is finally here. The last couple of months of only focusing on bugs has really payed off. Everyone was only fixing bugs which means that we where able to squaze in 67 bug fixes in 2 and a half month.

See photos of mms running in the flickr group.

Spank my monkey part 2

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:37:45 +0000

This is a list of scripts that I have been collecting over a long period of greasemonkey use. The extension to firefox just keeps getting better and better all the time.

Flickr

Allsizes+ - Now with nag screen galore, but still very nice to snatch bigger resolution pictures.
Cross recommendations - This really makes browsing random pictures on flickr much more interesting.

Last.fm

Chart changes - See which tracks goes up and down in the most played tracks of yours.
Aaverage plays on artist pages
Lyrics - My favorite for last.fm, adds lyrics to the track pages.
Normalised charts - Show charts by amount of play in time instead of number of plays. Good for artists like Opeth with long songs :)
Top tracks on artist pages

IMDB

imdb runtime fix - Show runtime in a sane way instead of in minutes only
Enlarge actor images - on hover. Not really that useful, but the pictures are small.

Google/Gmail

Block unwanted results - like the damn Experts Exchange described here
Replace http with https - for better security

DRM

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:05:44 +0000

Now if only they would sell their music in flac instead of mp3 :)

Bridging the gap between web applications and desktop applications

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:37:19 +0000

Google gears has been touted as the answer to offline web applications, but so far very few sites have adopted it. Maybe its because exactly what makes web applications great is the fact that you can communicate with people in real time, or maybe its because adopting a non-trivial web site to work with gears is a very significant task, or maybe its because gears was never bundled with a browser by default (until now).

Vdpau without tearing

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:02:04 +0000

Acmelabs made a great blog post about how to install the latest nvidia drivers (180.29) and set them up to avoid annoying tearing. I installed it on my system and it A/V sync has also been much better so far. Upgrading heavily recommended :)

Yay, lot of things happening at YayArt

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:29:59 +0000

Yay! Bunch of new 21st century art on YayArt. And we have a new competition, Art for better health, with some awesome submissions. Really think they’ll put a smile on the face of people at the hospital. And also make sure that you take our survey, if you want to help us better understand how you use the site and have a chance of winning a 90x90 canvas :)

It appears that the Yay Nay voting system has spread to shoes as well :)

Distributed development using bzr

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:54:44 +0000

It’s no secret that I have been a big fan of distributed development tools for a while. One of the maybe best things about them is that they have almost zero overhead settings up. This means that the biggest argument for not using (are there really any?) a version control system is gone. We have been using bzr in MMS for quite a while and recently the core team of developers with access to the source code has grown quite a bit.Â So we started having trouble with revision numbers, since they are in a distributed version control by definition not absolute. But fear not, there is a good solution to “work around” that problem. One that goes well with the good idea of having multiple branches. I’ll just use mms as an example. First thing to do is to create a local main branch, a mirror of the what is available on the web:

Small review of Cory Doctorow's Content

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:01:27 +0000

Content, is a new book by Cory Doctorow filled with small essays. Essays ranging from 2 to 10-15 pages in length, so they are quickly read but still takes some time to digest because of the depth. Cory knows his stuff and it really shows. The book includes the now infamous DRM talk at Microsoft. Not that they have learned much from it it seems :) And a lot of other good stuff, including stories on how he deals with copyright in an internet age using Creative Commons.

Experiences with nvidia vdpau support in mplayer

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:10:11 +0000

Updated: Fixed a bunch of issues by using latest patch for mplayer from here.

I installed a nvidia 9400 fanless graphics card today. I’ve been hearing good things about the rate of their driver development so I thought I’d try it out. My experiences after having tried the latest 180.18 drivers is:

A good deal of 1080p mkv's still crashed after a second or so of playback. Even with the hack posted here.
cpu usage is very low (max 20% and the cpu is at 1GHz)

I changed it to my default movie player in MMS to use vdpau by default with the following script to detect extension as vfm is not working yet. Linux kernel was 2.6.27-r2 in case anyone is interested.

Openstreetmap 2008

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:22:26 +0000

Very cool and inspirational video showing the progress of openstreetmap in 2008.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

Scoping rules in c#

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:32:12 +0000

What a dull subject. Exactly so because it’s supposed to be a done deal, I don’t hear many people arguing about scope rules anymore. That is why I was so suprised when the compiler complained about some perfectly valid code I had written.Â At first I thought it was only a peculiarity of the way closures are implemented in c#, but as I dug deeper, the scoping rules of c# seems to be… well just annoyingly stupid. Lets start with a simple case:

Writing readable regular expressions

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 04:33:55 +0000

I was talking to Ole today about regular expressions, and one of the problems with regular expressions is that it, like SQL, compounds the actual problem into on string, thus making it very hard to read again. Luckily we now have ORM’s to take care of most of the SQL mess, but regular expressions hasn’t received the same kind of limelight. I immediately thought that one could use a similar technique to deal with the regular expression problem, just by expression it as a language (DSL) and running something like LINQ on it. And of course, several people has already been doing this. Nifty stuff!

YayArt covering my home

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:49:06 +0000

Almost forgot to mention that Yayart did an interview with pictures from my home of the art I bought. You can read it here.

Little Brother

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 04:17:02 +0000

I finished reading the new book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow tonight. It’s a really exciting book, one that leaves you wanted to read just a few more chapters before you fall a sleep. The book is about a not-so-distant future in which San Francisco is attacked by terrorists. And how the whole system is turned upside down because of the event. Besides the main story which is really good, the book is sprinkled with reference to geeky stuff like Tor, Electronic Frontier Foundation and crypto. The book is also stuck full of good humor, like the following quote:

The pirate bay declared illegal in Denmark

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 16:55:16 +0000

This is a major blow to anyone who cares about the future of media and distribution. I’ll just say that there is precedence for this already with the VCR. The motion picture studies at the time argued that it will kill them off because of the ability of the VCR to pirate. Today it’s one of their biggest sources of income. Those who don’t remember the history is doomed to repeat it, badly.

Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:53:29 +0000

Just finished reading Lessig’s latest book. I’ve been widely fascinated by his earlier work, but this one falls short compared to his other work on the subject of copyright in modern society. The first two parts is more or less just rehashing of old ideas, while the last part, about the future, is where the book really shines. More specifically it mentions five ways in which we can actually change copyright to make it better suited for the world we live in now.

Google as a spell checker

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:09:18 +0000

If you also have been using googles “did you mean” function as a spell checker for words, you might find this funny:

Open google
Type in exadurate
Click I'm feeling lucky

Closures

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:34:19 +0000

I had a real “aha moment” today while coding some javascript. Let me first start this post with a quote:

The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said "Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?" Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, "Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man's closures."

Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire “Lambda: The Ultimate…” series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress.

On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying “Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man’s closures.” Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying “When will you learn? Closures are a poor man’s object.” At that moment, Anton became enlightened.

Bridging the gap between web apps and desktop apps or virtual homedirs

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:10:15 +0000

As anyone working on different machines know, keeping files in sync between different computers is really a pain. But it’s not only files, its as much the settings, bookmarks etc. that change when you shift to another machine. Not to mention backup. In large organizations this is solved using central servers where your stuff is stored remotely and synced to your local machine when you log in. This works fairly ok, except the whole centralized approach, but its a major pain to set up if you’re a small company or a dude with two machines at home. Especially considering your want access to your data anywhere you have an internet connection.

Business of Software 2008 talk by Jason Fried of 37signals

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:14:01 +0000

This talk got me pumped today.

Location aware web applications

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:36:06 +0000

Firefox 3.1 will have geolocation support, allowing some interesting new web applications to come to the web platform. I really like what this will do for devices like the n810. They also announced alpha1 of their mobile brower version, fennec. Sadly its incredibly slow, something that hopefully will be fixed as the browser matures for the first real release.

You know you developing on Windows when...

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:16:50 +0000

Your editors notion of running the program is to “start debugging” :)

On the Death Magnetic production part 2

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 01:07:37 +0000

Following my first blog post, two interesting things have happened.

Lars Ulrich responds, and its almost as painful to read, as the production of the record is. Just listen to this:

Of course, I've heard that there are a few people complaining. But I've been listening to it the last couple of days in my car, and it sounds fuckin' smokin'.

2) BBC has picked up on the problem, and is putting it into the spotlight. They talk to a mastering engineer and several people who have bought the album.

BBC part 1

Summary of maemo summit

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 03:06:49 +0000

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 :)

On the Death Magnetic production

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:01:16 +0000

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 :)):

Adding some metal to ubiquity

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:54:46 +0000

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).

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

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:57:15 +0000

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.

Release time! Nemo 0.2.3 released

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:18:48 +0000

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 :)

Interesting statistic

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:20:41 +0000

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?

opensteetmap usage

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:48:35 +0000

flickr uses openstreetmap, how very cool!

Ever wondering how YayArt looks in real life?

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:41:55 +0000

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

Clojure

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:18:03 +0000

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.

Spank my monkey

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:45:11 +0000

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 :)

Beautiful code = proportionality, integrity and clarity?

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:29:24 +0000

Writing beautiful code is such an elusive subject. I’ve never been able to put into words what makes code great, it’s sort of these things that just is. I even read a book on it once, and while it had some quite tricks and hacks along the way, I never really thought I got closer to a definition of what beautiful code is.

I saw this talk about beautiful code yesterday. The talk is from a ruby conference and starts a little slow, but around 18 minutes in, it gets really interested. His main thesis of the talk is that beautiful code can be defined using only three measuring sticks: proportional - 200 lines to read a simple file (Hello C)?, integrity - does it actually do what it’s supposed to do and in a reasonable fashion (speed, memory usage etc.) and finally clarity - can you grok the code again quickly 2 years after you wrote it in the first place (Hello Perl). Each one of these must be balanced.

I <3 del.icio.us

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:19:13 +0000

Sometimes a new technology comes along and completely changes the way you go about doing a set of things. del.icio.us has done that with information research for me. At first, I thought it was just stupid. I mean, it’s just a glorified online bookmark system. Who cares, really? But as I started using it I became addicted. Bookmarks in browsers just don’t work. It is not just that its a web app, it’s the folksonomy aspect of it that really puts it over the top.

How to remove Experts Exchange from your google results

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:02:42 +0000

If you, like me, is sick and tired of sites that lure innocent googlers into registering on their site just to view content that is should be freely available. The worst of those sites is probably experts exchange with their stupid blurring technique. Luckily I’m not the only one sick and tired of this. The following greasemonkey script silently removes all links to experts-exchange.com from google results.

TED: 50 million views in two years

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:45:48 +0000

Wow, amazing! That is about 70k a day. I’m not sure how many I have watched, but it is at least 10. All of them have been on various subjects and all of them have been mind blowing. And even though I thought I have seen it all, out of the top 10, I only watched 1.

openstreetmap.org

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:06:00 +0000

I was told about the openstreetmap project a little while ago and finally had some time to check it out today. It is indeed a very interesting project. I found out that there are no roads for NÃ¸rresundby, so today I decided that I would help make that happen. A little walk with my trusty old n800 and the external GPS bluetooth dongle and I now have uploaded the GPS points of my trip to the site. I used maemo mapper to gather the data points. It’s quite nice to be able to look at the route you walked later by just reimporting the data into maemo mapper. Fresh air, a chance to get to know your neighbourhood a little better and helping making important information free to the world is not a bad combo for a wednesday night :)

2 great links

Mon, 26 May 2008 15:38:42 +0000

I’ve been very happy enjoying these two pieces of distractions the last week. So happy I’ll write a small blog entry about it instead of just saving it to delicious :-)

Paul Graham on Disconnected Distraction
David Heinemeier Hansson on starting small

YayArt part 2

Fri, 09 May 2008 14:37:07 +0000

YayArt has been running for three weeks time now and the number of visitors and art pieces have just been increasing day by day. It’s wonderful to see! One of the things I find quite interesting to see is how people are rating the art, in that regard how one makes sure to best harnessing the power of collaborate filtering without ending up in Groupthink. And it’s quite clear that we havn’t ending up in any groupthinking yet. The YayArt crowd is really a tough crowd but lets see what happens in the future. The deadline for submitting art for the competetion is just a little more than one week away now, so if you havn’t done so yet, come on over and help us find the next Picasso :-)

Yayart.net launched

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:19:02 +0000

I’m very please to announce that we, at iola, have launched a new site for digital artists today. For the 31 days there’s a competition where you can win lots of nice stuff including an exhibition at the center of Copenhagen. The site is coded in Python (Django) and uses varnish for caching.

Wikipedia for data?

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:17:52 +0000

Found this extremely interesting blog post today dealing with the need for a wikipedia like approach to structured data. It hits the problem quite nicely and has a ton of comments with interesting links and discussion. I talked about the problem a little over a year ago. Time to take the power back?

Nemo 0.2.2 released

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:44 +0000

I made a new release of Nemo 0.2.2 today. It has some nice memory usage improvements and indexing fixes. Plus day view got pagination so that it can handle large number of files on a single day (like an svn update) gracefully. Upgrading is highly recommended.

Lolcats in your media center

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 23:00:26 +0000

I wrote that in about 3 hours thanks to the wonderful support in MMS for writing scripts in python.

The problem with static typing in programming languages

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:06:28 +0000

I remember reading in Paul Grahams excellent hackers and painters book, about how he liked the language he worked in to be dynamically typed as it provided him with more flexibility. The first time I read it I was still very much entrenched in the bondage and discipline language C++, and as so I found the statement wrong, but at the same time interesting. There had to be some deeper insight into this. A couple of years later, which would be the present day it just dawned on me that the biggest problem with statically typed languages are not the typing, you can get used to that. Its rather the fact that it becomes very hard to refactor the code afterwards. And worse, it shifts the burden of figuring out the right data structures and the right types to the beginning of the coding process instead of afterwards. Thus going directly against the good programming practice of writing for clarity first and only rewriting code if it has been deemed inefficient by a profiler.

How to stop wordpress spam

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:41:33 +0000

We had trouble on the Nemo blog because some stinky casino spam overlord had found our nice little blog. Luckily the spam started of slow so I had a change to try different solutions to fight the problem. I went trough updating wordpress, to update Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, to installing akismet, to try reCAPTCHA before I found the perfect solution WP hashcash. None of the other techniques got 100% of the spam. The wordpress plugin uses the clever hashcash technique (first proposed to fight email spam) implemented in javascript, to force a poster to pay a small amout of cpu time for each post. Supposedly though, the biggest effect just from requiring the client to have javascript installed in order to post ;-)

Improving latency while keeping your sanity

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:54:05 +0000

We had this problem in Nemo 0.2.0 that it would use quite a lot of cpu while it was indexing. I kind of knew this could happen but hoped that a transaction optimization to the database could improve the performance enough to make this problem irrelevant. Sadly it did not. The indexing code works by running an event loop in a single thread and then having two queues, one for tasks that needs to be completed fast and one for background tasks. Each of the queues are basically just a list of function pointers that is popped when a new task need to run.

Nemo 0.2.1 released

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:13:52 +0000

Did the release of nemo 0.2.1 today. The release is the result of a large amount of massaging of the nemo code to use less cpu and memory (a garbage collector suddently makes these interlinked in a new one is not usually familiar with when coming from a language like C++). Then some profiling and massaging of GTK# which is sadly still not 100% ready for prime time. And finally some poking at mono code ~~for which I’m not ready with a patch yet (tomorrow it will be)~~, but I’ve improved the performance of the inotify backend of the filesystemwatcher by quite a bit especially when watching a large number of directories.

mms 1.1.0 rc2 released

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 02:12:48 +0000

I’m pleased to announce a new release candidate of mms 1.1.0. Biggest improvements are a weather plugin, vsync in opengl, better lyrics support besides of course a large amount of bug fixes. The number of changes since rc1 has been quite high, on avarage 2.71 commit every day thanks to all the wonderful contributions.

Iimplement brain damage

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:17:22 +0000

Had this annoying bug today where something that seemed perfectly resonable just didn’t work. After much investigation it appears that once again brain damage from Java has managed to over into C#. The problem is illustrated with the following code (You can ignore the Tuple for now):

public struct Tuple < TFirst,TSecond >
{
public TFirst first;
public TSecond second;
public Tuple(TFirst first, TSecond second)
{
this.first = first;
this.second = second;
}
}
[...]
Tuple < int,string > t = new Tuple < int,string >(1, "1");
Tuple < int,string > t2 = new Tuple < int,string >(2, "2");
List < tuple < int,string > > lt = new List < tuple < int,string > >();
lt.Add(t);
lt.Add(t2);
List < tuple < int,string > > lt2 = new List < tuple < int,string > >();
lt2.Add(t);
lt2.Add(t2);
System.Console.WriteLine("eq {0}, == {1}", lt.Equals(lt2), lt == lt2);

Which gives the following result:

Nemo 0.2.0 released

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:53:09 +0000

Long time since I’ve blogged about Nemo. Since the initial release a little over a month ago we have had two major releases, the first one a bugfix release to fix some of the defects reported and the 0.2 release which adds support for beagle through Xesam and lots of other nice enhancements like pagination on the search results popup and better indexing performance. The software is still fresh but I consider this to be the first release that I would feel comfortable recommending to a stranger :-)

Has IMDbs rating system lost its touch with reality

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 22:36:31 +0000

I used to view the IMDb voting system as one of the greatest examples of why the wisdom of crowds is often much more in touch with reality than a panel of experts but lately some “b-movies” have been getting excellent initial scores. First it was Snakes on a Plane that started above 8.0 but now is at 6.5, and then we have AvP2 which apparently started at above 7.5 but now is below 6. The following comment on IMDb more or less summed up my feelings:

This made me laugh today

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:27:08 +0000

My Media System 1.1.0 rc1 released

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 20:30:39 +0000

It’s been a long time coming but finally 1.1.0 is almost here. The new stuff is: plugins, improved search, opengl output with fancy transition animations, python support, movie collection. ofdb.de support, last.fm support, improved lcd support and new theme. More here (pictures :-)).

I did a small video to show how one can use a nokia 770 (the n800 works even better) together with MMS that you can see here.

Acmelabs did a small video of the opengl plugin in action:

bzr 1.0 out now

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 14:53:09 +0000

The bzr guys just released 1.0 yesterday. Congrats guys! bzr is truly awesome, as in just works, and for the past 1 or 2 years have been been working really good for MMS.

Video about ducks

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 20:10:44 +0000

Just finished watching the probably best talk of FOWA again. Watch this brilliant talk, it’s both insightful and funny as hell.

Server almost Ajaxianized

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:36:55 +0000

Ole, friend and collegue from iola, released flot today. Flot is a Javascript plot library for jQuery released under the MIT license. The release got mentioned on Ajaxian and brought the server this blog is also hosted on to its knees. Several hours later, out server is now up and running again with lighthttp as a proxy shield in front of the dear apache server that could handle the load :-)

Check it out if you need some client side web plotting. The graphs are quite nice since they are antialised and with shadows :-)

Bought a n800

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:52:33 +0000

Seeing the new os2008 released for the nokia 800 as well I decided that it was time to upgrade my trusty old n770. The n800 has the same hardware as the n810 but is missing GPS and slide-keyboard. I have a GPS receiver from my n770 navigation kit so I thought I would save the 200 euro and still be one generation behind the latest and greatest internet tablet from nokia :-) So far I have been more than impressed with the device. The next OS is absolutely amazing. The layout of the new theme is great (much more finger-friendly), the speed is much improved and the keys are much better than my old n770, making it much easier to navigate around in MMS over VNC.

Announce Nemo 0.1

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:16:57 +0000

I’m very pleased that I can now finally lift the curtain and show what I’ve been spending most of my time working at iola on.

It’s been a long ride, but now the alpha release is finally ready for public consumption :-)

The problem with depending on a server

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 09:07:53 +0000

So here at iola we use subversion internally. It’s ridiculus that the following use case doesn’t work:

svn commit

svn commit

svn log (local copy out of date, only shows revision before the first commit)

svn update

svn: Working copy ‘.’ locked svn: run ‘svn cleanup’ to remove locks (type ‘svn help cleanup’ for details)

Owned :(

Finished reading Practical Common Lisp

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 03:10:20 +0000

Finally got through the mighty Practical Common Lisp tome. The style of the book is written in a nice mix of theory and practice (with relevant and good examples). My friend Lau asked me why on earth I would want to read a book on Lisp? A fair question since Lisp is really old, actually measured in computer time it might even be called ancient. But I had two main motivations for reading the book, to become a better programmer and secondly to better understand new language features introduced in languages like Boo and C#. Just look at the new LINQ features in C# 3.0 and specifically this video.

Seems there was a somewhat good reason why Google built their own VM

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:59:57 +0000

Best explaination I have found yet for the Dalvik VM for Android.

Ohh the irony

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:09:20 +0000

Two microsoft licenses approved as open source. It had to happen, open beats closed in the long run.

C# from a C++ developer perspective

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 03:11:12 +0000

Been wanting to get this out of my system for a while and since I can’t sleep I might as well do something productive.

During my time in iola I’ve begun writing code in C#. I’ve written quite a lot of C++ in the past and still does, so it was quite interesting for me to see what the next iteration of C would be like when I started out with this. This next section is written in a very practical sense, since at the end of the day, that is really what matters.

Cleaned up the blog a little

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:33:56 +0000

Had some time tonight to do some winter cleaning of my blog. I found a new theme that is a little lighter (Thanks Bob :)) And finally found a plugin called Google Code Prettify which allows one to easily display code inside blogs (Something that is utterly pain to do in vanilla Wordpress). I also added a related blog posts at the buttom of each blog entry so that it’s easier to find other blogs with similar content. Enjoy :)

The power of lisp part 2

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 02:38:07 +0000

As mentioned earlier, lisp is incredible at abstracting away small everyday stuff you write over and over. A good example is this way one has to define a local variable in order to make variables sucked into a delegates from the surroundings static in C#. As mentioned briefly in this blog post, one needs to change the loop to read like the following code for it to print 0 to 9 instead of 10 times 9:

The power of lisp part 1

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:17:02 +0000

Lately I’ve been reading the book Practical Common Lisp. My earlier experience with lisp was at the university where I briefly touched lisp in the form of the Scheme dialect. After having read Paul Grahams excellent Hackers and Painters twice, I thought it would probably be a good idea to see if lisp lived up to the hype. After seeing Practical Common Lisp being recommended by bamboo of boo fame and seeing this google tech talk I was convinced that the book was the best way to see all the wonderful stuff lisp has to offer.

Nokia n810

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 23:19:41 +0000

3 words baby, gimme one now

Future of Web Applications postmortem

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 11:57:44 +0000

FOWA is now over and it has been a great conference. On the way back in the plane I got to thinking that almost all the new web applications work a lot like open source projects. In the way thatÂ they are first and foremost open, encourage external contributions (using APIÂ´s), encourages the users to drive the development of new functionality, andÂ are actively encouragingÂ feedback from their users in an open way where users can helpÂ other users solve problems.

FOWA day 2

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:54:41 +0000

Day 2 is great, won a red?! 8 gig ipod. Great and funny talks about startups and ducks among other thing so far… :-)

FOWA day 1

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 09:08:30 +0000

Day one was really great. A lot of awesome talks. The most interesting guy was perhaps Umair Haque talking about edgeeconomy.Â I havn’tÂ heard the economicÂ perspectives of openÂ distributedÂ production, really interesting. Steve Souder showed a very nice tool called Yslow, that can really help you find speed bottlenecks in your web apps. Anyway next up is Paul Graham so I better stop here :-)

Future of Web Apps

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 16:47:23 +0000

I’ll be attending the Future of Web Applications next week. The conference seems to have quite a few interesting talks, I’m particularly looking forward to hear Paul Graham talk since I enjoy his writings immensely.

UI design

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 14:42:21 +0000

Saw this very interesting UI-video today called Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop by Aza Raskin (part of the google tech talks). It shows an interesting application enso, very similar to quicksilver. The interesting part is of course the abstract (what it is a solution to) and the conclusion (and why). Especially things like application silos and how enso marries the CLI with the UI gives some food for thought.

Finally skip-free audio playback in Linux

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 00:07:14 +0000

Stumpled upon this story the other day. Finally a tool where you can actually decide which things get prioritized instead of the kernel relying on heuristiscs. I did a test with alsaplayer playing back using through jackd (very sensitive to not getting enough time slices). To stress the system I did a emerge sync together with a fetchmail process sucking down the days mail. I don’t really care if it takes 5 seconds longer to fetch my mail or if it takes 2 minutes long to emerge sync as long as I can be sure that my music doesn’t skip. And guess what? With DeskOpt you can :-)

Boost part 2

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 00:17:08 +0000

In the quest for improving the quality of the MMS code in 1.1.0 I’ve done several things, one of which was to convert all the source to the boost foreach statement. Since I liked the result of the foreach cleanup so much, I decided to see what other libraries could be of use. I quickly found the function and bind library which allowed me to remove the internal function pointers framework we have currently been using. While converted I was surprised to see how cleaner the code became. The bind function is truly easy to use and read and made it possible to remove several helper classes which only purpose was to capture state to create a uniform interface.

The future of C++

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 03:34:34 +0000

Recently I’ve been looking a lot into boost and it’s really a great set of libraries. Although the syntax of some of the libraries could use a helping hand (assign library). Luckily I was watching a presentation by Bjarne Stroustrup on the next C++ standard and it appears that they will finally add a way to construct containers such as vectors with elements as construction time. I think it was called initializer lists and the syntax was the following:

Touch screen input in MMS 1.1.0

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:29:19 +0000

Really wanted to make navigating MMS on the nokia easier so I implemented mouse input which is luckily also what a touch screen is. Yay!

bzr bundles

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 12:16:09 +0000

Stumbled upon this guide today for how to create better patches when the project in question is using bzr (such as MMS :)).

It's all the little things

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 01:36:58 +0000

Having been coding in c# for some time now, what is really nice about the language compared to c++ is the foreach statement. The syntax is really natural and easy to read:

foreach (string s in strings)

Compare this to the standard c++ notation:

for (vector::const_iterator i = strings.begin(),
iend = strings.end(); i != iend; ++i)

So I decided there must be something easier and vague remembered that boost had something for this. And low and behold they had. So now instead of writing that horrible for line, one can just write:

CXFE 0.9.2 released

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 20:38:55 +0000

A long time ago, Rett D. Walters created a console frontend for Xine so that we could use that in MMS. I’ve since the last release created quite a few patches for it, and because Rett wasn’t actively maintaining it anymore I decided to roll all my patches into a new release:

http://people.iola.dk/anders/cxfe/

Welcome to the 21th century

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 23:07:35 +0000

I received a letter today from my insurance company about a service where one can access account information using their web site. What I noticed was, in the letter, they specifically mentioned that the site was only open from 7am to 10pm. Why would such a web site ever be closed? If they need to run some maintenance they can always just schedule it. Sometimes I wonder if some people didn’t realize that we are now in the 21th century?

Even your daemons can have usability problems

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 14:29:31 +0000

Today I decided to change nic in my server because the onboard NIC wasn’t working properly. And so again I hit the problem that udev can assigns a NIC a different ethX name than what the kernel is printing in dmesg. So one modprobes the module and gets the following output:

e100: Intel(R) PRO/100 Network Driver, 3.5.17-k2-NAPI e100: Copyright(c) 1999-2006 Intel Corporation ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:07.0[A] -> Link [LNKB] -> GSI 10 (level, low) -> IRQ 10 e100: eth1: e100_probe: addr 0xdcfff000, irq 10, MAC addr 00:A0:C9:E6:3E:75

My Media System 1.0.8.4 released

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 00:32:47 +0000

A new stable release of MMS is out. This is a bugfix release and so 15 bugs have been fixed and no new features implemented. Upgrading is recommended.

Very interesting documentary about Copyright

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:49:49 +0000

I bumped into this documentary (Good Copy Bad Copy) about copyright yesterday. The documentary is made by 3 danish guys and is really interesting in that it tells the story about copyright from the view of countries in four different continents (USA, Russia, Nigeria and Brazil). In case you havn’t read the wonderful inspiring books by Lawrence Lessig this video is an excellent introduction and will only steal away one single hour of your life :)

Keyboards on fire?

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 02:38:59 +0000

Found this crazy piece of software tonight. It’s a clone of guitar hero as far as I understand. Open source (written in python(g)) and seems to work on all major OS’s. The game is really entertaining but also extremely hard on my fragile coding hands after a few hours :)

MMS now environmentally friendly

Fri, 18 May 2007 00:35:46 +0000

Sometimes nice tools just come dumping down from the sky and PowerTOP is the latest of such programs. The Linux kernel 2.6.21 has become tickless which means that instead of waking up at specific intervals it will just sleep until it needs to do something next. This clearly has the potential to save quite a lot of power, but only if it really can sleep longer than it otherwise would have.

Intel has created a tool, PowerTOP, to test which programs causes the kernel to wake up. And thanks to the power of free software they have also been able to fix quite a lot of the programs people use a lot. So tonight I decided that I would run MMS and see how it performed. I installed the new kernel and the tool on my laptop and was ready to test. Initially the kernel was waking up between 60-80 times a second but after starting MMS it quickly rose to 1000! Something was definitely wrong. After a long debug session I finally found the cause of this massive spike in kernel wakeups: SDL. For some reason SDL was initialized using SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO|SDL_INIT_TIMER). This small SDL_INIT_TIMER flag caused SDL to start a thread which just slept for 10ms, woke up, just to sleep for 10ms again over and over again…

MMS running on nokia 770

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 20:09:38 +0000

I got MMS running on the nokia 770 today.

Ok so maybe I cheated a little and it was running on my server and I was just using VNC to connect to it. Anyway it’s working great for music playback :)

Edit: Added instruction on how to get this working

Edit2: Better input method

First one must start a VNC server: Xvnc :1 +render -dpms -s 0 -geometry 800x480 -depth 24 -rfbport 5900 -PasswordFile ~/.vnc/passwd

MMS featured in heise

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 18:59:39 +0000

My Media System has been featured in the German magazine heise this month. The article is categorized under Praxis and has a funny image on the first page of a penguin on a stage :)

Can’t wait to pick up my copy tomorrow.

Edit: Add the pengiun :)

Interesting video on the future of programming

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 22:49:11 +0000

I found this interesting video today. It’s basicly just Anders Hejlsberg, Herb Sutter, Erik Meijer and Brian Beckman sitting around a table discussing future and current trends of programming languages. It touches a lot of exciting subject such as concurrency and the .Net’s ability to mix several programming languages.

It was very relieving that a lot of what was taught in courses at the university where I studied is now reaching mainstream languages :)

This months cool hacks

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 15:53:24 +0000

Clever hacks of the month:

zeroconf bazaar
notifications about programs using xmltv

Creating nice and clean patches

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 19:01:05 +0000

I was creating some patches for tracker today from a rather large amount of local changes which was nicely filtered together. Some source files had several independent changes that I wanted to extract and submit as a single patches instead of one big megapatch. So I looked around and found out that the OO guys have created a script to do exactly that. It takes as input a regular expression (the script is created in perl so one gets the nice regular expressions from perl) and a diff and spits out a clean diff + the rest of the changes.

Bzr kicks gits ass

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 14:06:34 +0000

So I’ve been known to rant about bzr before. I got a new machine recently and it came to my attention that it quite a pain to keep two local bazaar branches in sync. So I thought I would have a look at the new breed of revision control systems: git and bzr.

My first preference was git, mainly because of what I said in my rant post. So I installed it and got my arch repository imported. I then tried to see how it handled merging of two branches. To be fair the branches have diverted quite a lot but the change was extremely simple: two identical po files where one of them has been updated. It completely fall flat on its face and I had to manually merge the changes. It also failed to find a merge point between the two revisions so I had to cherry pick changes by hand. After some more testing I tried to merge my local repo to the mms mirror using ftp. Sadly ftp is not supported so that was kind of the last drop that made me think twice about trying out bzr.

Back from FOSDEM

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 01:36:40 +0000

Last friday I was very afraid that I was not going to be able to attend FOSDEM due to a large amount of snow in most of Denmark. Luckily our flight was not canceled so it was just a matter of getting to the airport. Easier said than done, the busses was not driving because of the weather and the taxi companies phone system was overloaded. But we managed to reach the airport in time and after several hours of delay in both Aalborg and Copenhagen, we landed in Brussels late friday night.

Time for a free alternative to iMDB?

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 01:42:50 +0000

After writing my last blog post, I wrote to iMDB to hear what they thought about my first suggestion. They have a whole department for this kind of stuff :) Sadly they weren’t that happy about it: “The minimum cost to license data from IMDb is US$15,000 per year. If that is within your budget […]”. So I guess I’m back to the second solution: create a library for passing iMDB html pages. While thinking about the whole thing yesterday, it hit me (hard), that it’s quite strange there is no wiki-like site available for this. The idea is to use a wiki-like site, with a little stricter syntax so that it’s easier to pass, colored with a voting system. The same concept could also be used for music. While wikipedia does have some classic movies, it does miss the voting feature. So why hasn’t this been created before?

imdb page layout restructuring

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:22:43 +0000

Seems imdb has changed their page layout again. This is bad news for all parsers, such as MMS, which relies on the format of the html structure for fetching information. Luckily MMS has already been updated and now works with the latest page layout. Expect a release soonish. There are two things I would like to do to better this current playing catch up situation:

Find out if imdb is willing to give FOSS projects access to their xml data
Create a library, like imdbpy but in c++, to encapsulate the imdb parsing if 1 fails

Cool T-shirts

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 23:59:10 +0000

I stumbled upon the threadless t-shirt site some days ago. Very interesting concept. Their business model seems to be letting the users do the design and filtering of suggestions while they just print the shirts and run the site. They pay back the designs gets picked in cash. The only problem with the shop seems to be that some (all?) of the really nice shirts are sold out :(

Going to Fosdem

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 22:52:20 +0000

I’ll be attending Fosdem this year, staying at the Atlas Hotel. Let me know if anyone wants to meet, especially if you’re using MMS. I had that wonderful opportunity at Wacken last year and it’s always nice to talk face to face with people that you have only talked to over email.

Building a 100" projector screen

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 02:41:28 +0000

I have so far projected the picture of my Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector onto the wall. Clearly this is not optimal, so I have been looking for a screen for a while. I decided to built it DIY-style this weekend. It’s a lot cheaper than buying one from new and can give excellent results. Plus there is nothing to beat the feeling of having created something yourself.

For the project the following materials was used:

Nokia 770 tips and tricks

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 06:39:21 +0000

Having used the Nokia 770 for a while now, I have some tips and tricks to make the device even more useful.

There is no included calendar program by default so one has to install external to provide this functionality. At iola we use the Google calender service pretty extensively so this was a requirement for the application. I tried installing Dates without much luck, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to add a calendar? Anyway, next up was the GPE calendar which was recommended to me on #maemo. I installed it and this special debian package which fixes some bugs in part that handles the subscription. Viewing the calendars is working great, it easily handles my 3 calendars, but it doesn’t seem to handle adding new appointments.

My Media System on a Playstation 3

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:46:33 +0000

It’s cool that the Playstation 3 runs Linux. That means it can run all kinds of nice applications :)

The Corporation

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 18:41:52 +0000

I saw the documentary The Corporation today. Extremely interesting movie. A very cool thing is that they created a divx version of the movie and is distributing it on bittorrent making it very easy to get.Â They then plead people to donate at the start of the movie. Interesting concept, I really hope it works for them. The movie touches a number of very interesting topics related to corporations, including governments, patents, science, marketing, environmentalism etc., besides explaining in a very clear way what corporations are.

Getting Samsung SGH-E900 DUN working with Nokia 770 and Linux

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 01:25:44 +0000

It took a little while but now finally got my new phone working with the nokia 770. It doesn’t work out of the box because Samsung phones are a little different than nokia phones. To get Dial up networking (DUN) working one needs several files:

Dummy connection to simulate a real connection
gprs-ppp4 needs to be placed in /etc/ppp/peers/
gprs-chat needs to be placed in /etc/chatscripts/ and changed to your local operator. Currently configured to TDC DK.
rfcomm.conf needs to be placed in /etc/rfcomm/
start-gprs helper scripts
A resolv.conf file, since the nokia device doesn't seem to get it automatically. One can get them by connecting using a normal Linux machine.

Then it's just a matter of running the start-gprs script from a console. Hopefully Nokia will fix this is future versions so that this hack is not needed

.random

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 17:42:22 +0000

I stumbled upon twoÂ articles by Paul Graham. Interesting tips for startups.

Interesting blog with a some thoughts on wikipedia and software in general.

Lessig’s Code version 2 is out. Will be interesting to see what has changed.

Nokia 770

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 23:54:38 +0000

I recently bought a Nokia 770 to use as a remote control for MMS (among other things). The first thing one notices is the screen: very clear, big and with great contrast. The built-in IM client is great. It’s excellent for when you’re not near the computer but want to chat with people anyway. It’s quite easy to write on the screen, I’m currently using the virtual keyboard but have also tried the recognition briefly without much succes.

Purple Cow

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 22:08:50 +0000

I finished reading the first marketing book, Purple Cow. The book is truly remarkable and gives a lot of food for thought. He gave a talk at google about the subject, which also brings up some extra points. It’s a good teaser for the book but I think one will appreciate it even more if one has read the book beforehand.

Finished reading The Wealth of Networks

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 00:16:39 +0000

I just finished reading The Wealth of Networks:How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler. It’s a great book that puts the whole social production, such as wikipedia and free software, into a much greater perspective than what one normally sees and analyzes it from several new angles which I havn’t read anywhere before. The only weak points of the book is that its quite long and at times somewhat repetitive.

Stepping down as a gentoo developer

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 01:35:11 +0000

For the last couple of months, the amount of time I have spend on gentoo has been smaller and smaller to a point where it has completely stopped and thus I decided to step down as developer. Furthermore I put my dxr3 card to rest when I bought my projektor so I didn’t have the hardware anymore to maintain a lot of the packages I was maintaining. I still like gentoo a lot and still use it some of my machines at home.

New home for my homepage

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 17:13:01 +0000

My normal homepage has now been relocated to the iola domain. I also updated the information on it a little bit. The old domain should work until about end of January 2007. This blog will for the time being stay at the same location. Be sure to update your bookmarks in time :)

Have to praise Rockbox again

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 13:25:14 +0000

I blogged about rockbox two months ago when I bought my Ipod Nano and praised it to the skies. After a lot of use (almost daily) I can say that it almost just keeps getting better and better. I havn’t had a single crash or sound issue in the two months. The only weak points are the navigation which is a little to complex (or maybe I’m just stupid :-)) and a theme reset bug when it’s done charging and I unpluck it. The rate of improvements are very impressive. It’s very easy to upgrade so it has almost become a monthly ritual that when I charge it and put on new music I also update the software. Upgrading is just unpacking the new version on the Ipod so it couldn’t be much easier.

My Media System 1.0.8 released

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:45:21 +0000

Mpeg Menu System v2 has changed name to My Media System to better reflect the functionality of the system. The old name was related to the initial goal but which has since been broadened quite a bit. The new release is the fruit of much of the work I did this summer but it also features two very nice additions from outside people. One is a game module so one can play old Nintendo or Amiga games and the other one is the integration of VDR. It’s funny how easy it has been to integrate it all this time and it’s only after someone wrote a patch that I got around to configuring VDR. It’s really a great system and has been perfect for watching NFL on zulu :-)

Marketing books

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:36:05 +0000

While working on a business plan for our project at iola, it has become apparent that none of us have a good deal of relationship with marketing so I have been looking around the net for some tips/books. In my so far very limited study I have found a list of recommended books from Martin Thorborg (sorry the reviews are in danish, but the books aren’t). If you know any good ones please don’t hesitate to either write me or write a comment :)

A creative commons succes story

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:41:29 +0000

I stumpled upon this today, creative commons music succes. A truly inspiring story.

Who killed the electric car

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:44:26 +0000

I watched a very interesting movie today. The most fascinating thing about the movie was the prototype peoples love for the car. No one wanted to give the car back when they were asked to deliver them back. The people even did a small demonstration when they found out the cars were being destroyed. Most companies would kill for such a loyal following, makes you wonder just what the hell was going on…

Bought a Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:33:57 +0000

My TV crashed (luckily it didn’t burn) so I was looking for alternative solutions and finally found the perfect one. The Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector does 720p HD and is very quiet. Looking around for a modeline for X I found several ones which should work but really doesn’t. I finally found the following one which seems to work rather well:

Modeline "1280x720" 74.400 1280 1728 1768 1984 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync

I've watched different kind of content on it from TV, XviD, DVD to HD and it works really well with all. I was a little afraid that XviD ~800kbit would be very blocky but it is actually not a problem. Of course HD just looks amazing.

Joysticks are arriving tomorrow, then it’s old school arcade gaming time :)

O RLY?

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 23:22:04 +0000

Not all viruses are evil

Ipod Nano

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 12:04:49 +0000

So last week I bought an Ipod Nano. Up until now I have been using my good old 20GB Neuros Audio which has worked very well but is a little big to carry around. Someone on AAU was selling an Ipod Nano that he won for 2/3 of the original price so I couldn’t resist and bought it :)

My biggest concern with the Ipod has been the lack of proper codec support. I have a large part of my music collection in Ogg and thus it would be unusable with the Ipod Firmware. For a while I have been looking at the Ipod since it’s rather slick and found that one can install rockbox on it and then play a whole range of codecs including ogg and flac. So after I bought it I installed rockbox and so far it has really blown me away. The crossfade, games support (frozen bubble, pac man, doom? :)) are icings on the cake of a really powerful music player that plays everything worthwhile playing. Rock on! :)

How I learned not to care about spam

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 21:05:23 +0000

So about a year ago I was starting to get a lot of spam so I tried different techniques to combat the problem. Long story short, the solution I found to be the most effective was simply to use bogofilter. After using it for about a year without any retraining I finally had to retrain my filter as there was 2-3 specific kinds of mails it kept misclassifying as non-spam. During that period only 100-200 spam mails had been registered as legitimate mail and 45000 spam mails had been correctly classified. I stopped checking for real mails classified as spam after about 2 weeks of no false positives. That’s pretty damn impressive. All hail bogofilter :)

Mms used to scam people

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 01:19:16 +0000

Seems mms has been used for the greater good of scamming people into buying some lame links or software package. Mms is used to show how you can get great movies from around the world. Although at the end of the auction it does tell you that the screenshots are not of the real products you will receive :)

Direct link to qxl

Link to screenshot (when the auction ends :))

Work

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 22:30:22 +0000

I have begun working at Iola, a new company I have started with some friends from Uni. Currently it’s a bit slow as we get everything up and running but it’s going to be a lot of fun once this first fase is over.

bazaar rant

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 22:01:58 +0000

So arch has had two major implementations: tla and bazaar. Bazaar was a fork of tla and for a while was actively maintained by Cannonical. That was until they decided that the future was in bzr. That’s their right, but it left the users with a big void. Tla was not really maintained anymore since everyone was more or less using bazaar and bzr was not nearly stable enough to put your sensitive data into. It was still changing repository format ;-)

Master of science

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 13:24:51 +0000

I finished my degree about a week ago and has since been enjoying the summer. I’m starting a company in Aalborg with two from my study in about three weeks time.

Finished reading "The social life of information"

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 23:04:52 +0000

I finished reading the book The social life of information. It has some excellent points even though it at times feels a little old (It’s only 6 years old). I would recommend it to anyone interested in how we should approach implementing (into a social context) new technology and how we shouldn’t get to cut up in the hype that new technology often brings :)

Love Doctorow

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 19:25:09 +0000

I was watching Cory Doctorows speech on DRM at the Red Hat summit and I found this little quote really funny and insightful:

“DRM isn’t about stopping people from ripping stuff off. DRM is about taking those few honest people and screwing them out of every penny that you can”

Rage

Mon, 29 May 2006 19:36:32 +0000

So by accident I was looking through Rasterman’s blog and found out that he has been developing a menu system for movie playback using the E17 libraries.

I downloaded the demo movie and was fairly impressed with the nice effects. So off I go to download the thing to evaluate the good and bad things about it. It turns out to be pretty snappy on my machine but also really buggy. It is probably at the same stage bug wise as mms was 2-3 years ago. I think the lesson I learned was that you can do some cool stuff with gstreamer and that using the E17 could be cool, so I’m definitely going to look into that.

The future of HTPCs

Fri, 26 May 2006 21:55:22 +0000

So I was thinking today about what the future of home theater PC’s and where mmsv2 (or actually the next big version) fits into this.

I’ve come to the conclusion that what is really missing currently is integration. Your HTPC just stores the media and doesn’t really interface with the rest of the world. You don’t want to use your remote control to tag and organize your image collection. You want your HTPC for presentation, sort of like when you do a presentation. It should be slightly more advanced but not much. Instead the advanced jobs should be done on a regular PC and the synced with the HTPC.

Back again

Mon, 08 May 2006 20:52:26 +0000

So I’m back in Denmark. It was very hot on that little island and it seems the heat has followed me all the way back. Anyway I have my first exam of this semester tomorrow so I haven’t been doing much else for the last couple of days than reading up on that material. I wanted to apply the no-X SDL patch (with some modifications) for mmsv2 but haven’t found the time yet. After the exam tomorrow I’ll probably get it done.

A world without time

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 19:24:52 +0000

I just finished the wonderful book: A world without time by Palle Yourgrau. What I really liked about the book, other than introducing me to the work of Gödel, was the philosophical angle on the theory presented including on the relativity theory and quantum mechanics. An excellent review of the book.

Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 21:14:23 +0000

I just finished reading Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society by James Boyle. It’s really an excellent book which brings up a lot of different subjects to shed more light and from new angles to the touchy subject of the property rights. The book is a bit heavy on legal terms but I managed to get through it :-)

News from 1.1.0 land

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 22:47:26 +0000

So I have been fixing 1.1.0 to try and get rid of enough bug so that people can actually start to test it. Currently I’m fixing the Movie plugin. I found a much better way to integrate movie playback (tv viewing) between mms and mplayer so that will be available soon. What is great about it is the tighter integration (no need to define keys for mplayer specifically, just use the mms ones) and much better performance than what was possible using the old approach (the code in current patch-118). Anyway I’ll publish it soon, it just needs a little more tweaking.

Crazy patents

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 12:40:42 +0000

Found a list of crazy patents today. Some of them are really funny, such as the Religious Meditation Apparatus and Vehicle mounted toilet seat.

Great new stuff for the 1.0.7

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 21:04:17 +0000

A lot of nice things has happened in the 1.0.7 branch of mmsv2. A new graphical audio mode has been implemented (screenshots) and today I finally got a chance to look into the kcachegrind tool which I mentioned in an earlier blog post. I found two major sources of performance degration and fixed them. Performance should be a lot better for image heavy stuff (pictures and graphical modes) and for large folders/playlists.

Reached a milestone in my rating of movies on imdb

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 20:57:56 +0000

I’ve been watching quite a lot of movies lately and not to long ago I rated the 200th movie on imdb (yeah for nice round numbers :)). I really like imdb a lot. It’s very easy to find information about movies and the rating seems to be very fair (well at least most of the time :)). It is a lot better than what you find then looking at the cover of movie at the video store (How anyone can give Brothers Grimm 5/5 stars is really beyond my comprehension ;-)). Here you can see the ratings.

mmsv2 coming to EFIKA

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 01:52:05 +0000

Seems my project proposal for porting mmsv2 to the ppc machine EFIKA got approved so they will be sending me one of the machines. Really looking forward to getting this device, it seems like a really nice low-powered computer.

Profiling mmsv2

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 01:10:06 +0000

Inspired by the profiling work on Abiword by Hubert Figuiere, I installed Kcachegrind to try and profile mmsv2. His two posts on his blog explains very well how to find and fix bottlenecks in an application. What I thought was really cool about Kcachegrind, compared to other profiling solutions I have tried, was the way it handled threads and C++ perfectly. Guess being a KDE project helps a lot in this area :)

Linuxforum 2006

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 16:29:18 +0000

I will be going to linuxforum this year. Alan Cox will be there to speak together with one of the authors of VDR. Really looking forward to it. If anyone wants to meet up please let me know by email.

Google opens up their jabber network

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:38:09 +0000

The people behind GoogleTalk has now allowed their servers to talk to other jabber server. This is great news and a big step forward for the open IM standard.

Lessig talk on Google books

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 15:17:31 +0000

Lawrence Lessig has released one of his recent talks on Google books and fair use for download. The synchronization between the audio and the video is great but I didn’t find the talk as effective in using the visuals as his other talks. But the problem addressed in the talk is interesting as always. Google books is actually a really nice tool to search for things in a book, I wish it had indexed more books.

PVR150 working!

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:56:08 +0000

Somehow I got my PVR150 working. I was looking into why it didn’t work, and loaded the modules as normal when I booted. Suddently all the channels worked. Strange, seems it just needed to be worn in? ;-)

Got a Hauppauge PVR150

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 16:24:08 +0000

So I finally managed to get myself a tv-card so I will be adding support for that to mms in the near future. I have currently one problem with it though, it seems that the sound is not working on all channels :(

Merry Christmas

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 16:49:37 +0000

So what has been up since the last time I blogged? Oh yeah, my project group at the university won a prize in Venture cup (the project is Centiceps File System). We also finished the project for this semester. Sadly I won’t be able to put up the project report as usual since its confidential this time.

Email back online

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 13:42:43 +0000

Got my domain up again. The whole situation has several times reminded me of how bad their website/information-level is.

Domain suspended

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 00:31:23 +0000

Great! So I forgot to read the paper the domain dudes (dk-hostmaster) sendt me properly so my domain has now been suspended. This means that you can’t send mails to gnulinux.dk currently. I’m working on getting it back online ASAP.

Leckeres Menü

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 00:29:38 +0000

mmsv2 has been featured in the german linux magazine linuxuser. This should fit right in with the 1.0.5 release within the next couple of days.

mmsv2 1.1.0 and 1.0.5

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 16:05:36 +0000

Long time no update. Been very busy with university work so I havn’t had a lot of time to hack. I did manage to write a global searcher for 1.1.0 and convert some of the plugins to store information in an sqlite database. 1.0.5 has a new default theme and is about ready to get released. There is one open bug on the mailinglist that I want to fix before doing a release.

A talk about mms

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 16:18:32 +0000

On the 4th of October at 7 PM I will be delivering a talk on mms and open source in general. The talk is hosted by UNF Aalborg in collaboration with the local Linux User Group njlug. You can read more about it here. Be sure to stop by if you are in the neighborhood.

Cool stuff

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 21:15:02 +0000

I found a music sharing plugin for gaim plugin today. It’s part of the google summer of code challenge. Can’t wait to try it out :)

Back

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 21:02:44 +0000

So I’m back in Denmark. Niagara Falls was really something. It was especially beautiful one of the nights when they colored the sky with fireworks :) I also liked New York a lot. The city felt more international than American mostly because of all the different cultures living together.

When C++ scares even small children

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 23:59:53 +0000

Ran into the bug described here today while cleaning up some code in mmsv2 1.1.0. Luckily I it manifested itself as a link error and not calls to strange functions I don’t want to be calling 8)

Another "birthday"

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 04:29:55 +0000

3 Days ago mmsv2 was 3 years old and now it seems that I have been a gentoo developer for more than a year. Ohh yeah and my real birthday was just last month :)

Updated Nanoblogger to 3.2.2

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:38:08 +0000

I updated nanoblogger to latest cvs and added RSS feeds to the different categories. Maybe I can get listed on planet gentoo now :)

New filter for MPlayer

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 01:46:20 +0000

There was some discussion on the MPlayer mailinglist about a new filter so I though I would check it out. I was in for quite a nice suprise. The filter is very effective in removing ugly artifacts from the mpeg family of codecs. The only downside is the massive CPU usage. You can try it with -vf fspp. The code is based on this paper.

Screenshots normal:

Screenshots filter:

new GPL quake-style FPS

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 01:37:57 +0000

Stumpled upon new FPS, Nexuiz, based on the ancient quake1 (GPL) engine but with lots of goodies added. Reminds me a lot of Quake1 and Quake3 and it generally looks promising (17 maps, 10 music tracks). Even worked on 64 bit with my Radeon 8500 using the built-in dri drivers :)

Fixing mindless automaton

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 20:09:03 +0000

My friend Bo wanted to play magic online over apprentice today with me, so I installed mindless automaton to play with him. Apparently mindless doesn’t work 100% with amd64. It crashes when you either connect to another computer or wait for someone to connect to you. So I began investigating and came up with a patch. I had my old language patch applied to be able to write danish chars, but it didn’t work very well with an UTF-8 locale. So I had to redo the patch, which you can find here. It now works with UTF-8 and non UTF-8 locales :)

Disable analyzer feature in imms

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:52:41 +0000

I’ve created a patch for imms 2.0.2a which allows you to disable the very cpu intensive BPM and frequenzy analyzer feature of imms. On my machine (AMD64 3000+) it takes almost 10 seconds to analyze a single track. While you could still install imms without sox and by doing so disable this feature you would still need the fftw library installed for no reason. I’ve emailed the patch upstream, so I hope to see it in the next version of imms :)

Python for Series 60

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 17:14:01 +0000

Just found out today that its possible to run Python on Series 60 phones. How insanely great! I really need to start experimenting with coding something for my phone now. Already a great free software game for them :)

mmsv2 1.0 released

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 09:54:41 +0000

I released mmsv2 1.0 tonight. It has got quite a lot of testing since rc1 was released so I’m pretty confident about the release. I’ve added the new version to portage including ~amd64 (new in 1.0) as well. Update the features section also.

Todays update

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 00:19:41 +0000

A new release of Bazaar came out just a few hours after I added 1.1 to cvs so I added 1.1.1 today :)

Wrote an email to Gregorio Guidi so that we hopefully can close #67748 and #39203 soon.

Bazaar 1.1 added

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 01:19:00 +0000

Just committed an ebuild to cvs for bazaar. Havn’t really switched yet, but I’m pretty certain I will soon.

Radeon 9700 driver

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 22:57:44 +0000

Found the r300 sourceforge project today. Seems they are writing a free software driver for the Ati r300 family. Wanted to try it out but it seems very beta, has only been developed for 3 months and requires xorg-x11 cvs.