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

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). ...

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! 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 :)

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. 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: ...

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. ...

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.

Very cool and inspirational video showing the progress of openstreetmap in 2008. OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

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. 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: ...

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!