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. ...

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?

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

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 :(

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.

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: ...

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. ...

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

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. 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.

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