Det verkar ju som de flesta börjar skriva helt på svenska nu för tiden, och jag menar inte att vara sämre :) Kanske blir så att man får några fler läsare till och med.
Jag har börjat översätta temat på sidan och lite annat smått och gott, men det kommer att ta ett tag innan allt är översatt (och givetvis kommer jag inte att översätta äldre inlägg).
Finally I have had the time to upgrade WordPress to the latest release - 2.2.2. I’m sure that there was a lot of security holes and other nastiness.
This post is by the way written in Journler and posted via XML-RPC :-)
Yesterday I attended Richard Stallman’s session titled “Free Software and Beyond: Human Rights in the Use of Software and Other Published Works” in Gothenborg.
I expected it to be two hours of Microsoft bashing (and it was too), but it turned out to be quite interesting. Even though I don’t agree with Stallman and FSF on all points and their arguments are not always “water proof”, I think it is necessary to have organizations like FSF/GNU to act as a counter weight to organizations like Microsoft and others.
Me and my girlfriend are going for a hike in Abisko late this summer. As a gadget freak I just had to purchase a new gadget for this adventure - a Garmin eTrex Legend Cx (pictured to the right). 
I have owned other GPS units before, but this one is so small, waterproof and straight forward to use (yeah I know it’s a sales pitch, but what the heck). What enticed me the most was not the possibility to see my position on a map at all times, but rather to have a very accurate trace of our hike afterwards.
I have not owned this gadget more than 24 hours, and I have already found several exiting GPS-related activities that I haven’t thought so much about before:
Soon I will have completed a set of scripts for working with the GPX-files produced when tracking is enabled. After that, my goal is to create a small Python app for mapping a track to any raster image (for instance aerial photography, scanned map etc) and showing graphs and stats from the track suitable for publishing on the web.
Pirates and treasure maps - Geocaching is playing pirates for adults (without the cannons and looting). While searching for information on how to create custom Garmin GPS maps I stumbled over the concept of Geocacing. Well, I have heard about it before but never spent time understanding what it is.
The short version can be described as:
I have already found some “cache-sites” around the area where I live and will hunt them down soon. I also plan to plant my own “cache” later so stick around, I will probably write some more about this new hobby of mine. Arrr!
If you are looking for a HOW TO on installation of Ubuntu, please scroll down a bit.
I recently bought a new laptop from Fujitsu-Siemens - the Amilo SI 1520. My requirements for this laptop was that it should be fairly cheap (max 1000 euros), run Linux with ease and feature a 12 inch wide screen.
After browsing through some local (Swedish) internet stores I soon concluded that I had to go with the high end consumer segment instead of the business segment, otherwise my budget requirement would have gone through the roof. I narrowed the selection down to either the Lenovo 3000 V100 or the FSC Amilo SI 1520. The Lenovo sported a higher build quality, but the FSC had better specs in almost any area (CPU, HDD, battery time etc). Both of them were proven to run Linux (Ubuntu and Gentoo), but the resources on the web was very limited (that is one of the reasons for me writing this article right now).
Installing Ubuntu 6.10 on this piece of hardware was very straightforward. I just chose to resize my Windows XP partition (want to keep it for some experimentation) to 10 GB and use the rest for Ubuntu.
After the installation was completed it was just a matter of installing the 915resolution package to get the native resolution (1280 x 800) of the screen.
The wireless network card (Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG, kernel module ipw3945) was detected without problems, but ipw3945 and Gnome Network Manager applet 0.6.3 did not play together. It didn’t take long until I found out that 0.6.4 supports ipw3945 and is available in the development version of Ubuntu (Feisty 7.04).
I thought it could be fun to test the latest Ubuntu (and have nice wireless controls in Gnome) so I started to upgrade my Edge to Feisty. It is a very simple procedure. Simply make sure that your system is up to date. Then run the command:
gksudo "update-manager -c -d"
If it whines about authorization problems you must execute GPG as the super user (root) one time before running the update-manager. It is also very simple:
sudo su
gpg
[CTRL+c]
exit
Then run the update-manager again.
I have read a few articles about Linux on the Amilo SI 1520 and the only thing that seems a bit tricky is the built-in microphone. I can confirm that it does not work out of the box, but I have not tried to get it working. Other than that all works fine, even the so called multimedia-buttons and suspend/hibernate.
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller AHCI (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
07:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation PRO/100 VE Network Connection (rev 02)
07:09.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd Unknown device 0832
07:09.1 Generic system peripheral [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 19)
07:09.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Unknown device 0843 (rev 01)
07:09.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 0a)
07:09.4 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller (rev 05)
After an indoor macro shoot-out this weekend I decided to submit one of my more successful (at least to my liking) photos of a yellow rubber duck against a deep blue background to InterfaceLIFT (a popular place for things that prettifies ones desktop). In just 20 minutes I got the response that they liked my “Ducky” and even wanted more (my NES controller in purple).
I will now scan through my archive of photos for more desktop material and hope to have more photos featured at InterfaceLIFT.com.
I bought some new materials for my own home studio created by plastic tubes and some papers. Some of the shots actually turned out quite nicely like these peppers on a crisp yellow background. Go to my Flickr site for some more examples.
I will probably write a post later on about how I built the studio and how it looks.
I have recently been working on a project where the target operating system is Windows XP. Since I do not have a Windows XP installation, I started writing code on Linux and since it worked fine in the beginning, I continued doing so throughout the development phase of the project. At a later stage when it was time to start testing and integrating on Windows I discovered one or two platform specific errors in the code, that I easily fixed.
The major benefit was that I could use free tools for validating the software, like Valgrind (with CallGrind enabled for profiling data), KCacheGrind and GProf that would have been hard, or even impossible in some situation if I had developed only on Windows XP.
Just for the fun of it, I tried to build it on Mac OS X 10.4 just to see if it worked - and it did! Right out of the box. That is another major benefit of multi platform development. The chances that it works right out of the box on a new platform is significantly higher than if only one target platform is used.
Since I now could build the code on three platforms without breaking a sweat, I added multiple targets to our automatic build system. That was simply to prevent that new code that would prevent the multi platform build qualities should be introduced into the system.
I have now completed a web based syntax highlighter that can prettify any code that is already available on the net (like via WebCVS/SVN, or just plain uploaded files). It has support for Java, Python, C++ and Ruby among others. To use it, simply enter a URL to some code you want to be highlighted and decide if you want line numbers or not. You can also chose to only retrieve a link that you can use on your own homepage/blog/forum/whatever.
You can find the tool in the sidebar, or simply by clicking here.
Something I have wanted for a long time is an efficient way of highlighting syntax for an arbitrary file. Like uploading a file to some server and then execute a query like this:
http://myserver.com/scripts/highlight?
url=http://www.someserver.com/MyClass.java&
language=java&
showlines=false
And it would generate a clean HTML-output with the code highlighted and pretty.
Since I have not found any site that allows me to do that (even if this one is close) I’m going to write my own service based on SilverCity. My plan was first to use GNU Enscript as many other similar services do and marry that together with Django and a database of code (i.e. each code snippet/file should be cached). Those ideas where just to wild, and after a little searching I found SilverCity which is a Python module for doing the same thing as Enscript, but not using external processes.
So the new design will make the code stay on different servers (where it belongs) and just colorize code upon request.
