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.

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 :-)

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. ...

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: ...

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!

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

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: ...

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/

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?

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 ...