More on FoneLink and phones

A couple of days ago, I raved about the FoneLink program from novamedia, a very slick program for transferring information between my nokia E61i and a OSX machine. After a few more days of use, I realize that iSync still has its niche - the everyday simple syncing is probably better than with iSync. Bur for transferring documents, sounds, pictures, and in general organizing the content on the phone, FoneLink is better.

After blogging about FoneLink here, I got in touch with novamedia. I obtained a bit more information from them about a few issues that I and maybe someone else wonders about.

First, the note or description on events and todos. The reason this does not appear on the E61i and similar phones is that it is not supported by the default calendar app from Nokia. We can beg Nokia to fix this, or we can maybe use something else like papyrus (which I still have not got around to evaluate). At least, FoneLink can not solve this problem.

Further, I had to more questions for the FoneLink guys. As most of you know, the smartphones from SonyEricsson has really terrible support on OSX. So my follow-up to novamedia was whether support for the smartphones (like M600i , P1 and so on) from SonyEricsson was planned. On this question I was told that it is in the works, and probably available in about 3 months time. That will be really great - maybe I can go back to my favorite smartphone :)

My other question was about combining usb and bluetooth for syncing a device with FoneLink. Usually, you just want to connect with bluetooth for the everyday syncing, but from time to time you have larger amount of data you need to transfer. Today, a device in FoneLink is a combination of the device and the connection, so my E61i over bluetooth and the same E61i over usb is two different things. This mean that I can not choose the connection to use dependent on the amount of data I need to transfer. Now, there are ways around this but it will be rather neat if it get supported out of the box. I was told that novamedia is working on this, although I did not get an estimate on when we can expect this to be available.

So much about FoneLink and the great guys at Nova Media doing this fine application.

I have another problem with my E61i - predictive text. With all the smartphones I have had the last years, I have been able to start typing a word and the application I use, whether it is email, sms, or some other text, will suggest matching words from the dictionary. This is something I just expect to be in place, so I didn't gave it a thought at all when buying the E61i. After fiddling with settings and buttons quite a few hours, and reading manuals as well, I went to google. Just to find out that there are no predictive text support on this phone. Some claim in formus and the like that you don't need this on a phone with qwerty keyboard. But they are plain wrong. The M600i from Sony Ericsson for instance, have this - and a full keyboard, and I wrote messages much faster and more comfortable on that one than I do on the E61i.

So if someone hear me - please!

And while I wait for the perfect device, I note that every small device has it strengths and weaknesses. Maybe the manufacturers do this to have people like me hunt for the perfect all the time. I have been on the search for 10 years now, and I am still searching.

For a few days my plan was to replace the Fujitsu Siemens P1510d I am writing this on with the Oqo O2. But now I read online that there seems to be some quality problems with the oqo, which gives me some doubts. The most recent device seems to be the Everun from Raon. In addition there is the new Q1 ultra umpc from Samsung which seems to be interesting, as well as the Fujitsu U8240. I doubt any of these are the perfect device, but maybe close enough that I am willing to give them a try... The big question is of course how well they can run Linux, as I am allergic to bad operating systems.

Take care, folks!

Nokia E61i and FoneLink

Today, there was a post on JKonTheRun about a product named FoneLink. This is supposed to be a better piece of software for syncing information between a Mac and a Symbian S60 based phone.

As I have both a Mac (actually, a couple of them) and the Nokia E61i, I wanted to give it a run. I grabed the demo version at the webpage. Installation was OSX-smooth as usual, and then I launched the application. And, man, this was a smooth experience. It quickly figured out which was the relevant phone among my bluetooth connections, and started collecting information after my confirmation that this was the right device to collect from. It went stright away making a backup of all the information in the phone, but it is also possible to put the backup procedure into the background to perform other tasks at the same time.

I just mess around in the application for a while. This works really smooth, and seems to be so much nicer than the iSync. If I can get this to sync my Mac and the Phone regularly whenever those are close to each other bluetooth-wise, I think this is a keeper.

For those who like to know such things - the notes in events and todos does not seems to be synced over to the phone with this application either. Have to look more carefully into that (and have not got around to test papyrus yet, as suggested in comments here).

This was just a short notice, I have to go to bed now. More on FoneLink if I buy it!

Notes on Nokia E61i

A few weeks ago I switched smartphone. The last 6 months I have used the HTC TyTN on a daily basis, and was satisfied with the hardware although I of course have a hard time with the operating system. As I already have written up something on the HTC, I don't want to go into any detail on that. But as you already know, I switched to the Nokia E61i, running the 3rd generation of the S60 system - a old and well proven operating system, but still new to me. As I now have used this phone for a few weeks, I want to write up some of my initial impressions. Just be warned, this is not a proper review. Consider it more as a random stream of thoughts.

Let us start with the conclusions! The e61i is a solid phone, with a solid operating system. So far I have had to reboot the phone just a couple of times to fix problems with some applications, but not by taking out the battery as I had to do each other day with the TyTN; only third-party applications was locked up and the phone was still functional. So reboot have only been a convenience thing. Other things on the positive side is good messaging functionality, easy access to, and well-functioning wifi system, and great selection of software due to the S60 system. So all in all I am satisfied, and will probably keep it for a while. But read on, there are quite a few things on the negative side as well. For instance, the camera is totally crap.

The S60 system

In the past I have used Windows mobile 5, Sony Ericssons Symbian/UIQ (P800i and M600i), as well as the more regular Sony Ericsson system. While these systems are quite different, the Symbian S60 can be compared to the first two. It is obvious that the S60 have been around for a while, with a lot more bugs nailed out. It feels more solid. Maybe not super-fast all the time, but it does the job. On the negative side, though, there are often too many steps to go through to complete an action. If I want to send an SMS, for instance, I have to go through 5 steps (depending on how you count) on the S60, while on the Sony Ericsson UIQ there are only about 3 steps if you want to send to someone you send to regularly. I haven't done a scientific comparison as I should as a researcher, but in general I feel I have to use more time to perform the same action on the S60 compared to the other two.

On the positive side, you can't get past the large selection of software available for the S60. Maybe comparable to WM5, and far more than what's available for the UIQ. The putty ssh-client is very usable. I also use Fring for Skype/MSN/GTalk and the Gmail application. All work very well. Also, S60 is generally better supported when it comes to sync/desktop access than the other two. While the situation in general is good for all the systems if you use Windows on your computer, the S60 is far better if you are either a linux or osx user like me.

The E61i hardware

The E61i is light, and it is slim. While the form factor is a bit unusual, it is easy to carry around either in a shirt pocket or in your jacket. I even stick it in the back of my jeans if I have to. But generally I carry it in a Krusell pouch with a belt-clip. As the weight is so low, I hardly recognize it's there.

The display is very good. It's bright in almost any light condition and have better colors than I have had on any phone in the past (and as you know, I have tested quite a few...). While the resolution is not extremely high considering the size of the screen, I have find it to be sufficient for all my needs.

When it comes to the keys, I have to say they are good. The feedback is nice - when I type messages I rarely mistype. As there are many keys on the phone, there are also room for a few shortcuts which helps out with problem I have with to many steps to perform certain actions in the S60 system. But, there is a big downside for me here. It is not comfortable typing on the phone. While the phone is wide for a phone, it is still to small to hold and thumbtype comfortable with my not so very big hands. The TyTN have the keyboard as a slide-out in "landscape" orientation. Hence the keyboard is wider, and much more comfortable. My hands starts aching even when I type moderate sized emails on the E61i, so I rarly do that. Still, if I have to type a message, the system is very capable, and works all the time. So compared to the other smartphones I have used, I have to rate this above them.

I will make the story on the camera supplied in this phone very short. Nokia had some left overs on the shelf. They put it into the E61i. Period. It's too crappy. To be honest, though, I am not sure whether it is the camera it self, or the totally crappy, horrible post processing done in the phone after a picture is captured. It seems that they sharpen every image beyond any reasonable imagination, and bump the saturation as well. Does not look good at all.

Other thoughts

The Nokia E61i is equipped with Wifi, Bluetooth, 3G/UMTS, Edge, gprs. A lot of connectivity. From time to time I am not sure which one of these is being used. Probably this is just some details in the S60 symbian system I have to figure out. An example: I open the E-mail application, and connect to my IMAP account on wireless lan in my house. I leave this running in the background, and open the webbrowser to check something. In this case I have recognized that the webbrowser from time to time use either the UMTS or the Edge connection instead of the wifi, althought wifi is already connected. I can not explain what is going on, and whether the fault is mine or Nokias. Maybe I am even mistaken... At least, there are things to be sorted out here.

The conclusion was already given above, so I stop here.

In other news, I have start looking for a replacement for my Fujitsu Siemens P1510 (which I write this on). I am looking at either the oqo O2, or some of the newer UMPCs. Fujitsu Siemens is also out with a small thingy. But I'm not in a hurry on this.

Also, I will travel to WWDC'07 and then USENIX'07 (in San Francisco and Santa Clara, respectively) in mid-june. If someone want to meet up and discuss Qtpfsgui on Mac, small devices, have a flickr-meetup, or something else - please drop me a comment!

Take care.

New version of qtpfsgui!

Hi folks, it's been a while. I haven't had to much intersting to blog about lately. I have been busy doing other things instead, like cutting down trees in my garden, compiling software, chopping trees, fixing brakes on my car, more garden stuff, on so on... Anyway:

The 1.8.8 version of qtpfsgui for Mac is out, and I have compiled a version for Mac tonight. You get it in the regular place, our at sourceforge. New with this version on OSX is that the Documentation from the Help menu in the program should work, even if you put the application bundle somewhere else than in /Applications. Giuseppe is also working on internationalization, and I have tried to get this to work on OSX as well. How sucessfully that attempt is remains to be seen. I work on Norwegian translation, by the way, but that is far from finialized.

The last few releases, I have created a package which includes the necessary Qt libs. I have not got any feedback on this, and I really do not know if it is of any use to anybody. I can continue preparing that kind of image, but I don't see the point spending that extra time if no one use it. So, the release I have created this time requires that you already have Qt installed, or that you head our to Trolltech, and grab the Qt libs there. If you want me to continue creating the image with qtpfsgui and Qt bundled, please tell me to do so!

Please, go to sourceforge and grab the new qtpfsgui!

Take care!

Nice to know - MacOSX

The print subsytem on MacOSX is simply CUPS!

For a long time I have had one simply, but nagging issue with my Mac computers - printing from the command line. But it hasn't bothered my enough to actually solve the problem. Today, however, one of our Mac converts (or at least wannabies) entered my office with the intention of insulting the Mac. He started like "I want to run acroread from the command line," remember, his background is Linux. No problem I said, you just use open -a AdobeReader.app. No, no, he goes, I just want to process some PDFs into postscript. Why do you want to do that - the Mac handle pdf quite well? And the reason was that, because we didn't knew how to print from the command line, he send jobs to printers through a Linux server. And the Linux server needs postscript.

Aha, great opportunity to solve the cli printing issue. Now, I know of course that lpr is available. Problem is, though, that if I use that from the commandline, I don't know what the names of the printers are supposed to be - the argument to the -P option. And by default, the printing system thinks everything should go to the printer in Letter format, which does not work very well with our European printers. They want A4. And I know how to change paper size to A4 in the GUI, but this will not be the default anyway. At least not when you print with lpr from the command line, should you be lucky enough to hit the right printer.

I have heard some whispering about the print subsystem just beeing cups in the past. So I just gave it a shoot, typing in http://localhost:631 in my browser. And I just goes wow, wow, wow. Because what I see is just the regular, no-frills, cups admin system. With all the printers listed. And selecting "configure printer", I have the option of changing default paper size. I can even see the names of the printer queues. So, selecting one I like to use, changing the paper size, and then try out lpr -Pprinter file.pdf, and run off to the printer. And what do I see? The file.pdf appears as it should, on A4 paper and everything is just fine.

After clicking around in the cups admin system for a few more minutes, I had the printer I like to use most set as default and the paper size set to A4 for the most important once. I also figured out that I can do a grep on the file /etc/cups/printers.conf to get the list of available printers. Looking at the names, it is quite easy to figure out the mapping from printer to queue name. The grep commando I use is this one:

sudo grep "<Printer" /etc/cups/printers.conf | awk "{print \$2}" | sed "s/>$//"

Hope this of some interest to someone out there in the void!

Take care,

Qtpfsgui 1.8.7

I have uploaded a couple of new dmg's of qtpfsgui, v. 1.8.7, to sourceforge now. The one named qtpfsgui.1.8.7.dmg contains only the program itself with core libraries. For this to work, you need to install Qt4 from trolltech. The other version, qtpfsgui.1.8.7.qt.dmg, has Qt4 bundled in, but unfortunately I am not sure how well it works. Feedback is welcome!

Take care, and have fun!

Qtpfsgui 1.8.5 with Qt bundled

Seems like there might be a problem with the qtpfsgui image that have Qt libs bundled in. When using the version without Qt bundled, and a full Qt installed, everything works fine. Using the other version (on another Mac without Qt installed globally) everything works fine until I try to save the tonemapped image. Which does not work.

So, for now, go to trolltech and get the full Qt (Get it here!), and use the qtpfsgui 1.8.5 without Qt.

I report back when I have fixed the problem!

If you need hypre on your Mac!

[This piece was originally written for the hypre support mailing list. I guess this can be of some use to people in the same situations, so I also post it here. If you don't understand what this is all about, you can visit the hypre webpage at LLNL, or you can just move on...]


Hi hypre-list,

As far as I can tell, MacOSX (Darwin) is not supported by hypre. We are however building a piece of sotware at Simula Research Lab, Norway, where we have added hypre as one of the dependenices (mainly for BoomerAMG), and since we need to support MacOSX, I went through the necessary steps for building hypre on MacOSX. I share it on this list as plain text now. If you in the future want to support Mac, and want help with testing or anything (patches?), just contact me!

I have to admit, some of my changes are a bit hack'y, my motivation was to get things going; I'll see if I can clean up things later. For reference, I am working with hypre-2.0.0 as downloaded from http://www.llnl.gov/casc/hypre/software.html in mid-april 2007.

This is how I run configure:
LDFLAGS="-framework vecLib -flat_namespace" CXX=g++-4 F77=gfortran ./configure --without-MPI --enable-shared --prefix=$HOME/software/hypre --without-fei --without-superlu --without-mli --with-blas --with-lapack


* First, I needed to add a "Darwin" section in the script src/configure, around line 9885:
---8<---
Darwin*) FFLAGS="${FFLAGS} -fno-common -fPIC"
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -fno-common -fPIC"
CXXFLAGS="${CXXFLAGS} -fno-common -fPIC"
BUILD_F77_SHARED="${F77} -flat_namespace -dynamiclib -undefined dynamic_lookup"
BUILD_CC_SHARED="${CC} -flat_namespace -dynamiclib -undefined dynamic_lookup"
BUILD_CXX_SHARED="${CXX} -flat_namespace -dynamiclib -undefined dynamic_lookup"
;;
---8<---

* Next problem was with multiple definitions of symbol 'final_innerprod_result', which appear as a global symbol in both src/struct_mv/struct_innerprod.c and src/struct_mv/struct_overlap_innerprod.c. To fix this, I changed the symbol to 'final_overlapinnerprod_result' in src/struct_mv/struct_overlap_innerprod.c.

* The common way to use blas and lapack on MacOSX is with the '-framework vecLib' LDFLAG. Because of this, the variables 'LAPACKLIBDIRS' and 'BLASLIBDIRS' in config/Makefile.config contains 'null' after finished configure. This is probably something that should be fixed in config/Makefile.config.in or in the configure script, but for now I just removed 'null' such that those variables read:

LAPACKLIBDIRS =
BLASLIBDIRS =

* There are some paths that seems to be hardcoded that end up in LDFLAGS in Makefile.config; after configure I have '-L/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-redhat-linux/3.2.3' in there. On Darwin, gcc exit with an error if non-existent directories are passed in with -L flag, so this path must be removed. Also, /usr/apps/libs and /lib are in there. I removed all three in the configure script.

* On Darwin, dynamic libs should have the suffix .dylib, not .so. Unfortunately, .so is hardcoded into the hypre buildsystem. I tried to do something such that the same buildsystem could do both .so and .dylib, based on platform, but it took more effort than the hour I was willing to spend :) Renaming the compiled .so into .dylib seems to be sufficient, at least to compile and run some of the tests. So, while this is something that have to be fixed if Darwin is to be supported, it is not a showstopper.

As far as I can tell from the notes I made during my work on this, you'll have a working hypre on MacOSX after working through these steps.

Hope this can be of some help!

Qtpfsgui 1.8.5 for MacOSX

The new version of qtpfsgui, v.1.8.5, for MacOSX can now be downloaded from the qtpfsgui page at sourceforge. New with this release is that you have a choice. You can either get a small package with just the qtpfsgui program, or you can get a larger package that bundles the necessary Qt libraries. I know there has been some confusion about this in the past.

If you want to run other Qt applications as well, or you already have downloaded and installed Qt v.4 from Trolltech, you can choose the small package, names qtpfsgui.1.8.5.dmg. If you just want to run this, and don't want to care too much about dependencies you can grab qtpfsgui.1.8.5.qt.dmg.

New with this version is also that I have put the manual into the application bundle. Unfortunately, the path to the manual is hardcoded in for now, so it will only work if you place the qtpfsgui application bundle in /Applications. If you do that, you can open the manual directly from the Help menu.

For other, non-Mac related, news for the program, check out the sourceforge projectpage.

Go create some HDRs! And comments are welcome, as always!

How I get the Nokia E61i working for me

These are some notes a made while setting up the Nokia E61i phone such that it works for me.

My main requirements are:

• Beeing able to call people from my phone (!)
• Reading email, both my company imap account and GMail.
  
• Syncing events and contacts with my MacOSX computer
• Ssh from the phone
• Using phone as modem for the Mac
• Using phone as modem for my linux laptop
  
• More secondary, IRC, GTalk, MSN, etc. from the phone.
• And probably some more

During the first day, I just poked around on the phone, tried to figure out the Nokia S60 system. As I always have been a Sony Ericsson guy, this is all new to me. But fortunately quite easy to figure out. And I was of course able to call people and send SMS right away.

Email

Setting up email for my company account took me a few minutes. First time I started the email application on the phone, it asked me whether I wanted to set up an account. Sure, I did, so I went through the wizard, entering in imap and smtp server, account information and so on. After that, nothing works. Of course, I knew that our server requires SSL/TLS, but as I was not asked about security during the wizard phase, I just assumed it detected these things by it self. But it didn't. After consulting the booklet that came with the phone, I figured out where to go. After turning on SSL/TLS for both in- and outbound messages, and entering account information for our smtp server, I can send and receive messages. It even supports the concept of selecting a subset of folders on the imap server for synchronization, and actually just shows me thoses selected folders when I open the mail application. A life-saver for me. Now, I have set the phone up to automatically download email from 3 different folders, every day of the week between 16:00 and 02:00, every half hour. That should cover my requirements just fine.

Then I moved on with GMail. First, I opened the webbrowser using the WiFi connection we have at home. Entered in http://gmail.com, and on the top of the GMail page I was asked whether I want "Faster GMail for phone". Of course I want faster GMail, so I followed the link. This downloads a S60 (or maybe Java?) application that works quite nice on the E61i. So far I have to select the internet connection to use for the GMail application each time I start it, but I guess this is something that can be adjusted.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is of course working flawlessly on this device. New to me was that I had to go into the Bluetooth system after pairing a device to mark it as an authorized device. On devices I have had in the past, this was a question during the pairing phase. But as soon as I figured this out, it really doesn't matter - just different ways of doing things.

After sending a few pictures to the desktop Mac just to see that Bluetooth is working, I proceed to the syncing issue. Actually, I attached the usb-phone cable first, and started iSync, but scan for new device in iSync does not find the phone. So I went to goole instead, and found this page at Nokia where it is possible to download an iSync plugin for many Nokia phones, the E61i beeing among them. As told on that page, I closed iSync, installed the plugin. Then I used the "Setup new Bluetooth device" in the Bluetooth system on the Mac, and put the phone in discoverable mode. The phone was detected just fine, and I had the option of selecting it for iSync use and as a modem. I selected both. Now iSync started up in the configure new device mode, with some reasonable defaults. I adjusted which calendars in iCal to synchronize with the phone and did a few other adjustments. Then I pressed the "Sync Devices" button in iSync, and suddenly all my events and all my contacts are on the phone. Quite nice.

As I selected the phone for use as a modem during the Bluetooth setup, that is probably ok already, but it remains to be tested.

Other connectivity from the phone

Ssh from the phone is coverd by installing PuTTY for S60. As stated on the s2putty page right now, I went for the "unofficial build" of PuTTY, as some nasty bugs on v.3 of S60 have been clean up in some recent builds. This PuTTY works very well. Actually, I went to the s2putty page using the browser on the phone on my WiFi connection, dowloaded a zip with the application. Within a minute, it was downloaded, installed, and running. As the E61i have a full keyboard, even with a Ctrl key, I can connect to a linux server at work, attaching a screen I have running, and instantly chat on irc channels and read news. And do all sorts of other things I regularly do in a shell.

As I want to be able to use Skype, GTalk and maybe even MSN from the phone, I also installed fring. The installation and getting started part is very nicely covered on that webpage, so I want say anything more about it. Just go there, type in the required information. You will then get a text message with download instruction, and in just a few minutes you have all the internet-phone and chat connectivity you ever want.

From time to time I may want to IRC directly from the phone. To cover this, I installed mIRGGI. It just works. Probably, I will usually use PuTTY, and the screen on my linux server, if I need to use IRC, but you'll never know. It is nice to have.

As you can see, most things are comming along quite nice. I guess there will be annoying things creeping up when I dig deeper down, but so far I am happy with the E61i. I will get back with a review on how it works for me in the daily life after I have used it for a week or two.

Stay tuned, and take care!

Already there!

My new phone showed up today! Stay tuned for more information.

Have to move on...

It feels like it was yesterday I bought the HTC TyTN. Of course it was not, it was back in November 2006 according to the archives in this very blog. Back then I threw out the Sony Ericsson M600 due to lack of support for MacOSX, and bad support for Linux too. Although I have been quite happy with the TyTN during these months, there are some issues of course.

First it is the OS. I have never had a phone in the past I need to reboot that often. Sorry Microsoft. In the past I just told everyone that you are bad, and that people should choose something else (Linux, MacOSX, Symbian, Whatever). Now that I have actually used a Windows Mobile for some months, I can put so more momentum into those statements. Sure, WM6 will fix all the problems. Right, I don't believe it. And there are no WM6 upgrade for TyTN out there yet. When the phone is working it is quite ok, though. Even though I can not get the Imap client to just show me subscribed folders, and the camera freeze quite often (easily fixed with a reboot...), I can read and send messages, receive and call contacts and listen to music, snapping photos (as you can see over at my photoblog) and browsing web quite well. So the TyTN is not that bad. And the full keyboard is a life saver, the best I have ever had on phone or pda so far. Based on all the nice things with the phone, I can actually live with the bad OS, and keep it.

It is the second problem that make me switching again. The hardware is not holding up much longer. Every other time I switch the phone out of standby now, the screen just goes white. Turning on and off again usually fix the problems, but from time to time I also need to pull out the keyboard and push it back in again. Then there are the keys on the front. Earlier I could scroll with the directional buttons and press the mid button to select. But this does not work so well any more. Some of the other keys have problems as well. I suspect the reason to be the connection between the bottom "keyboard" part and the upper "display" part. There must be some weakness in the design there. Maybe this can be fixed by sending the phone off to support, but in the long run I can't live with this stability. When I get a new phone probably check out what support can do for me - if they can fix the problem on the TyTN I'll probably keep it as a backup; and for use on HSDPA networks...

The big question is then - where should I go now? Back to the SE M600i is not an option, as it is still not supported very well on MacOSX. That throws out the rest of the SE smartphones as well. And I do not want a Microsoft WM5 or WM6 device. That rules out most of the other smartphones on the market, at least with a qwerty keyboard, which is one of my requirements. And as you all know, iPhone is not out yet. And it will not have a real keyboard anyway. But Nokia have something - the revised version E61i which has a full keyboard, all the connectivity I need but the HSDPA, which is not that important yet anyway, since it is in general not available. MacOSX support also seems to be quite ok for Nokia S60 phones, and there are ssh client software available.

I have therefore ordered a Nokia E61i today. As it is on stock, it should appear already tomorrow or on monday. A report will appear here shortly after that.

So long folks, take care.

If you ever make my mistakes!

Recently, I created a quick and dirty webapplication using Turbogears and SQLObject. During the initial phase, I had some problems with unicode strings, but figured out that I could use UnicodeCol in SQLObject, and append '?sqlobject_encoding=latin1' to the dburi setting for the turbogears project.

Later on, a new requirement for the project came up. Someone had to be able to download a file with infomation in an excel file. From before I had created excel files from mysql data in PHP and Perl using the SpreadSheet::Writer module (and the PHP equivalent). I just assumed this to be a walk in the park, recreating the same functionallity in my turbogears site. As you might expect (or even know), I was wrong. To this date, I can not find the same or a similar well-working module for Python. As an old (not that old really) Perl hacker, I have at least some amounts of the right lazyness. I can of course just reuse my old PHP solution, using some suitable rewrite rules in the apache2 config for the turbogears site. And this is where my problems begin. Getting things up and running is easy enough, we are only talking reading mysql data here, and figuring out the tables in mysql that the SQLObject based model is using is simple. But, and this was the hard part, I figured out that I had done something stupied. The mysql-tables is actually latin1, as I have told SQLObject in the dburi setting. But the texts inside these latin1 tables is encoded by Python in some unicode form, using latin1 characters. Which mean that when I read mysql data in PHP and feed into an excel file, I don't get the right thing. Using default values, I get garbage. Trying to set either latin1, iso-8859-1, or utf-8 as character set for the excel file also yields garbage.

Somehow, I have to translate the encoded unicode strings (by Python) into something that at least works in PHP, which in the next step can be put into an excel file and still be readable.

And then, by accident, I stumbled upon the solution. There is a function in PHP called utf8_decode. It's purpose is to convert a iso-8859-1 encoded unicode-string into single-byte iso-8859-1. Which happens to be exactly what I was looking for.

It took me a couple of hours of googling and experimenting before I ended up there. Now that I know the solution the whole thing is of course obvious. But if you make the same mistakes as me, you may like to read this, and save a few hours.

The right solution, of course, is to use utf-8 all the way. If the unicode data have been stored in unicode mysql tables as unicode, the whole thing should have worked right out of the box. So doing that may save you from the whole problem. Good luck!

Truffet av en bil!

For all my faithful english readers. This is about the crach I had today. On my motorcycle. And I keep it in Norwegian this time. Sorry. You can just learn Norwegian, though. Right.

På vei hjem fra jobb i dag skjedde det som ikke skal skje. Jeg ble truffet. Truffet ganske så brutalt. Rett bakfra. Litt bakgrunns-informasjon er nok på sin plass. Jeg kjører motorsykkel. Og som alle andre motorsyklister liker jeg veldig dårlig at noen
får lyst til å kjøre i meg. Det kan nemlig gjøre vondt. Veldig vondt. Vondt for sykkelen, og vondt for meg. En sykkel skal kjøres når det er vår, den skal kjøres når det er sommer, og den skal kjøres når det er høst. Den skal ikke stå på verkstedet. Når den får vondt må den på verkstedet. Derfor liker vi veldig dårlig at den får vondt.
Og så var det føreren da. Han får også vondt. Ryggen verker, er øm og er stiv. Han får slenge innpå noen piller som legen har gitt. Så får han ta en tur på røntgenstua. Der sier de forhåpentligvis at alt er bra. Men om det skulle bli plager i etterkant er det fint å ha noen papirer å vise frem, om at man ble undersøkt. Forsikringsselskapene vil nok like det.

Nå lurer du veldig på hva som egentlig skjedde. Denne syklisten er for lite EBS. Det var det som skjedde. Hadde han vært skikkelig EBS hadde han nok kjørt på det grøde lyset. Men han var rolig idag, var på vei hjem fra jobb. Solen skinte, det var vakkert vær å kjøre i, og han stresset ikke. Utover Mosseveien. Der hvor Ljabruveien tar av er det et lyskryss. Han kjører her hver dag, så han vet det. Før han kommer til lyskrysset møter han noen blinkende oransje lys. De blinker ikke hver dag, bare av og til. Og idag gjør de det. Lyskrysset like der fremme, rundt svingen, er i ferd med å skifte fra grønt til rødt. Han bremser. På høyre side av veien står det noen fotgjengere. De vil over, og har trykket på knappen. Motorsyklisten gløtter i speilet, ingen der, bremser greit raskt ned, og stopper. Beina settes i bakken. Da hviner det, før det smeller, før han ligger der. Hva skjedde, tenker han. Setter seg fortumlet opp, ser på sykkelen som ligger slengt. Glass rundt omkring. En bil veldig nær. En fin bil er det, men ikke nå lengre. Sykkelen var også fin, men ikke nå lengre den heller. Ikke starter den engang. Og skjermen bak og setedelen er ødelagt. Er hele sykkelen blitt skjev? Det kan se sånn ut, men det gjenstår å se. Og hva med han bilføreren da? Så han ikke lyset? Nei, han gjorde vist ikke det. Han så noe annet, eller satt i andre tanker og så ingen ting. Han så ihvertfall ikke den sinna Hornet'en som sto der, med en not-EBS som tar seg bryet med å stoppe for rødt lys, oppå. Sånt kan skje en vakker vår dag.

Så nå sitter jeg her da. Sykkelen er satt på verkstedet. Der har de vår-kjør med vår-puss av syklene til alle de som er alt for sent ute. 3-4uker sa han, det vil det minst ta før han kan begynne på min. Så der ryker April. Kanskje litt av Mai også. Ikke rart sykkelen er lei seg, den vil jo være der ute på veien. Der det skjer. Ikke stå inne i en mørk garasje.

Mens sykkelen står inne skal nok jeg skaffe seg ryggskinne. Det hadde jeg nemling ikke. Jeg hadde ryggsekk med en Macbook Pro oppi, men det er dumt å la den være ryggskinne for mange ganger. Kanskje oppgradere forsikringen litt også, det var vist ikke noe veihjelp med der. Og så må jeg vel ringe med forsikringsselskapet og mase om oppgjør, sende regninger for bilberging, konsultasjoner og medisiner. Og håpe at alt går glatt. Tross alt sto jeg stille på rødt lys, så det skulle være enkelt for dem dette. Håper jeg.

Det var dagens historie. Jeg får komme tilbake til saken når jeg vet noe mer. Om sykkelen som står der i den mørke garasjen. Om forsikringen. Om skrotten min, om den er like hel og fin, bare den får slappet av litt. Og om bilisten, stakkars, som fikk ødelagt sin fine bil. En spesiell bil var det. Jeg kan ikke si mye om den, det blir alt for identifiserende. I guttedagene var det en slags drømmebil det der, bare synd at jeg skulle stifte bekjentskap med den på nært hold på den måten. Men jeg er jo ikke noen guttunge lengre heller, og tross alt var det bare et bur. Som alle andre bur.

Programming GPU!

I'm attending a short introductory course on parallel programming on graphics processors (GPGPU) today. There is a writeup of some of the stuff I learned over at my tumbler-page.I keep it over at tumblr as it needs to be cleaned up a lot to make it reasonably interesting for other people. But if you read and think like me you may find it interesting!

If I ever do some real GPGPU my self, I may write up something here :)

iPhone release date

As reported "all over" the net now, Apple will go public with iPhone on 11. June. And that is not a coincidence, as that's the same day Apples developer conference WWDC starts.

And guess what - I ordered my tickets for WWDC yesterday - I will be there in the middle of the buzz, and report back right here on the blog on what's going on. I also figured out that Usenix Annual Tech will be the following week in Santa Clara. It is high time I go to the Annual Tech, so I will probably rent a car and drive down there, at least for a few days.

I'm looking forward to it already - it is always nice to be in San Francisco.

Btw, I don't think I will buy an iPhone. Really. It's probably not usable over here in Norway anyway, and it will lack a few things I really need. We'll see what happens if I get to hold it in my hands....

On SQLObject

I have recently used SQLObject in a few projects. My first encounter of SQLObject was as a component of TurboGears, a framework for creating web sites. But I soon realized that SQLObject can be quite handy on its own.

What is SQLObject then, really. I don't want to do a full tutorial on SQLObject, so please head over to the SQLObject website to familiarize yourself with it. In short, it is a object oriented wrapper to SQL databases, for Python. You can freely choose among several different backends, like SQLite, Mysql, Postgres, and so forth, and most of the details of the particular backend you use will be hidden within SQLObject. If you want to create a table with SQLObject you simply say

class MyTable(SQLObject):
name = UnicodeCol()
date = DateCol()

(assuming you have done from SQLObject import *, which you of course have not). SQLObject takes care of all the SQL woodoo, and you can go ahead saying things like

mt = MyTable(name="someday",date="2007-03-28")

To get rid of the entry again, you just say

mt.destroySelf()

In addition to get rid of the object within your Python code, this also removes the corresponding row in the table on the sql server.

So far all good, and quite stright forward. Next, you want one-to-many relations, or maybe many-to-many relations. No problem, SQLObject can handle those as well, using MultipleJoin or RelatedJoin, together with ForeignKey. Assume that you wants a many-to-many relation between the MyTable above, and some other table:

class FooTable(SQLObject):
 name = UnicodeCol(alternateID=True, length=50)
 mytables = RelatedJoin('MyTable')

To get symmetric behaviour, you also wants

  foos = RelatedJoin('FooTable')

inside MyTable. With this setting, you can still use destroySelf(), and SQLObject figures out the right thing. So, that was many-to-many relations.

Now, I had a one-to-many relation in my code, like this:

class Foo(SQLObject):
 name = UnicodeCol(alternateID=True, length=30)
 mybar = ForeignKey('Bar')

class Bar(SQLObject):
 name = UnicodeCol(alternateID=True, length=30)
 foos = MultipleJoin('Foo')

So, this is a one-to-many relation, as Bar may have many Foo's, but Foo only link to one Bar. Then I did something like:

b = Bar.byName('mybar')
b.destroySelf()

Only to discover that I got errors next time I tried to do anything with the Foo's. Reason was that there was Foo's still linked to the Bar I destroyed. Thinking about it, this make perfectly sense. It also shows that SQLObject is not perfect in some sense. It does what you tell it to do, even when that is evil. This can be both good and bad, depending on how you look at it. Fortunately, the fix is quite easy:

if len(b.foos) > 0:
 print "There are still Foo's linked to this Bar"

Then of course more lines, if you want to deal with it in code - like relinking the Foos to other Bars, or just leave the user with that message - probably followed by some raise to signal an exception.

If you go out there search the blogs, you will find people telling you that SQLObject is not good. They are probably right. But to me, it felt just right from the very beginning. When I dig deeper into it, I will probably complain too. But so far I am happy. Nevertheless, I see that something called SQLAlchemy is mentioned together with turbogears now, and I guess SQLAlchemy is a replacement for SQLObject. I have to check that out, maybe it is even better. Until then, I stick with SQLObject, at least for non-turbogears apps, because I think it does its jobb very well.

Take care folks, and keep that Python code flowing from your hands.

Could it be a favourite?

Now, this is something. Spotted this over at Gizmodo today:

HTC Shift is the UMPC for UMPC Haters - Gizmodo: "HTC Shift is the UMPC for UMPC Haters



It surprises even ourselves when we say that HTC's Shift should be the UMPC device that makes us—who were mild on UMPCs before—a fan of the platform. Instead of using a split keyboard or a *shudder* on-screen circle pad, the Shift makes like the Advantage with its sliding and flipping screen. With the input problem solved, you can really enjoy the 7-inch touchscreen, 30GB hard drive, Tri-Band UMTS/HSDPA, Quad-Band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, Bluetooth 2.0, Wi-Fi, and Windows Vista."

Look at those specs! With a 7" screen, this shouldn't be far from my PictureBook in size, which I have blogged about earlier - go search if you wonder what that's all about. Size should be just right for an ultraportable, the built in connectivity looks like what I have missed on all my small computers (except the HTC TyTN) so far. And the ability to run Vista probably make it possible to run a real OS as well, like linux. And the device even have a nice look.

I am so close to order a Flipstart as soon as that will be possible, as I really need a modern small computer. But this looks much more like what I am after.

Q3 of 2007 is ETA. That's way into the future. Can I wait, or do I need something in between?

Here we go again

What should I say - you know the drill now. It's a new version of qtpfsgui out. The upstream maint. working really hard, so I have to keep up. So, v.1.8.3 of qtpfsgui for mac is out. This time on sourceforge, where it really should be. But sourceforge is a crazy system, I think I did it right, but it is hard to tell.

If sourceforge does not work for you, you may also grab qtpfsgui at my other site

Take care!

An updated dmg of qtpfsgui 1.8.2

I recompiled the qtpfsgui v.1.8.2 today, with debugging info turned off; that is enabled Release mode in Xcode. I also added the icon used on the Linux version, such that it shows up in Finder and Dock. Enabling release mode actually reduced the size of the binary to 1/4 of the original size . I was quite suprised that the difference was that big. The program even feel a lot more snappy.

So, reminder to self: Turn off all the debugging before I throw apps at folks, at least if I don't want them to debug for me!

Go grab from at the usual place. I see if I can get it up on sourceforge as well. But I also realized that 1.8.3 of the app is already out, so there will probably be another update on this before I can call it a day :-)

Take care folks, and let the HDR flow from your Macs!

Flickr: Popular cameras

Flickr: Camera Finder: "Most Popular Cameras in the Flickr Community
% of members

* Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT
* Nikon D50
* Canon EOS 20D
* Nikon D70
* Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi"




Flickr shows this graphics on their site in the popular cameras section. I think it is in particular interesting to observe the trends of the XT compared to the XTi. When XTi first is out, the curves for XT and XTi continue increasing - XT owners keep their XT and discusses with spouse about switching gears. Flickr attract a few of the new XTi owners. Then suddenly the XT curve starts dropping almost with the same rate as XTi increases; XT owners have made up their mind, or convinced the spouse - lets go for the new stuff. The decrease in XT isn't as fast as the increase in XTi in this period, as some of the new XTi flickr memebers keeps the XT around because it still works, and they are more familiar with it. After a while, this stabilize - some XT owners think XT is good enough, some thinks the new XTi isn't good enough and decide to wait for the next one, some keeps both, etc...

It is also interesting to see that this whole story is completely decoupled from the other cameras, like the Nicons and Canon 2oD/30D. Different camps.

Now, what about me? I (or my wallet (or my spouse)) have decided that I wait until the next one. Really, I want the 40D i guess, whatever that will be. I presume EF-S mount (x1.6 crop), DigicIII, better high-iso/noise ratio, etc. But I'm not sure what my wallet (or my spouse) decide.

That's enough for todays observation. Take care, folks!

New version of qtpfsgui!

Hi there,

Giuseppe Rota has released a new version of qtpfsgui over at sourceforge, it's now at version 1.8.2. I have compiled an universal binary, but have not packaged it up yet. Stay tuned, it will appear here, and hopefully at sourceforge as well, tomorrow. For now, adventurous people can grab a zip-file with the app.

The problems with my 1.8.1 on PowerPC was presumable due to some alignment problem, and should be fixed in this version. For those of you who know what I'm taking about, I'm happy to get some reports!

Update 19.03: One user reports that the colorproblem on PowerPC with the 1.8.1 version is fixed (by upstream maintainer, Guiseppe Rota) in this version.

Second update 19.03: The dmg for v.1.8.2 is now up at one of my other places. There seems to be a problem with sourceforge tonight, but as soon as that is sorted out I will make this as a release there. Future releases of the MacOSX version of qtpfsgui will probably only be at sourceforge, but I will continue to comment on it here.

Python, flickr, and Unicode

I found a script the other day, for generating a wallpaper based on images from flickr. In its original form, the script expected one or more tags as argument and get a number of random pictures from flickr that have these tags. I wanted to make it a bit more interesting, so I looked at API at flickr to see what is available, and discovered the getHotList method. I added this method to the python wrapper of the flickr api I am using (one of those listed under Python at the site), and changed the logic slightly to fetch the 3 most popular tags during the last day if no tags are given as argument.

And now comes the interesting thing. The getHotList gives you tags in unicode, looking like u'mus\xe9edelelys\xe9e' (one of the popular tags today). But when this tag is fed into flickr.photos.search to retrive urls for some images, an exception is thrown, as the method can not use this tag format. More or less obviously, it needs to be on an urlencoded form, as we are communicating through http. Reading documentation here and there, I figured out that unicode was expected, but more on an ascii form. The tag mentioned here should look like 'mus%C3%A9edelelys%C3%A9e'. After quite a few minutes with google, I figured out a possible solution:

tag = urllib.quote(tag.encode('utf-8'))

Looks kind of funny to me, but it works.

Lesson learned: Unicode is not unicode is not unicode.

Maybe I should reconsider

I haven't bother to look very close into the 802.11n topic. As all of you know, we have for some time now been able go to our store and buy Draft-n equipment. That is supposed to be hardware implementing what is now know as the draft 802.11n specification; the new fast Wireless network. And further supposed to be easy upgradeable or cooperative with final Draft-n (or just -n) hardware.

My position on this up to now has been to not buy Draft-n stuff, because of 1) can I be sure it will actually work with final-stuff, 2) there isn't much of client support yet, and 3) I expect the final stuff to be just around the corner. I truly belived that, until I read over at extremetech today:

Draft 2 of 802.11n Standard Sails Through: "Following those changes, Draft 3.0 is expected to emerge in late 2007 and gain approval by early 2008. The IEEE says Draft 3.0 will, for all intents and purposes, be the 'final 802.11n' in all but name, and that the final spec is now expected in April 2009."

April 2009! That's not just around the corner. I'm not sure I can wait that long. At least that is a problem if we want to go for VoIP on WiFi at work. Not that we are seriously considering that at the moment, but it is really something I like to be able to do not very far into the future. I probably have to go back to the place, which I do not know where are, where I can think long and uninterrupted thoughts, figuring out what is the best thing to do. Should we go draft-n now? Should we go draft-n when it is really Draft-2.0-n or is it best just waiting.

Besides, draft-n is popping in on clients all over the place now. Apple have it, thinkpad-which-we-dont-like-after-lenovo-takeover seems to have some new models with it in the pipe, Dell have cards, Engadget have reported on Asus laptops with it, which we do love more than lenovo these days. And the list will go on and on, and I do not want to be left out in the slow and cold dark.

That was just a few thoughts an evening in the middle of march.

Take care, folks!

Updated version of the qtpfsgui

Today, I finally manage to build an universal binary qtpfsgui for MacOSX. This time the only external dependency is Qt, at least should be. The program works for me on intel-mac, but I have to test it tomorrow at work where I have access to a power-mac. Also, I have to verify that I actually have removed the external dependencies as much as possible. If you don't have Qt installed, get it from trolltech. The download link to the MacOSX binary may be a bit hard to find, this is a direct link!

Please, if you like to try the program, go grab it here. And if it works for you, I very much like to hear about it!

I will probably write up a bit more on the process of creating all the components as universal binaries, and then some issues on qmake. But now I have to make some dinner for me and the kids.

Update: I have now verified that this binary also run on PowerPC, MacOSX Tiger.

Update on qtpfsgui

In addition to the fink-packages mentioned in my prefious post on the qtpfsgui DMG image I have created, you also need to install the package libexiv2-0.12-shlibs from fink, since I link qtpfsgui dynamically against this lib. If you get exiv2 from some other source, make sure that you enable shared libs.

My First DMG Image

After playing with MacOSX for quite some time now, I finally created my first dmg image today. I am working on creating a universal binary of qtpfsgui, a program for creating HDR images. I have not manage to create the universal binary yet, but I have at least compiled a version that can be used on intel macs.

I will guess more fancy tools for creating dmg's exist these days, but I found a step-by-step walkthrough on the net which did the trick for me. For future reference for myself, and for others stopping by, I
provide the steps here. Most of this is taking place in a terminal window:

# create a dmg image of some suitable size
1>hdiutil create -megabytes 10 qtpfsgui.dmg -layout NONE

# mount, but don't mount!
2>hdid -nomount qtpfsgui.dmg
# record det /dev/disk returned from that command

# create filesystem
3>sudo newfs_hfs -v QTPfsGUI /dev/disk1 #insert correct device

# eject the unmounted image, and re-mount for real
4>hdiutil eject /dev/disk1
5>hdid qtpfsgui.dmg

# Now, use e.g. finder to put some files into the image, and eject it when ok
# then convert to a readonly compressed image (suitable for 10.1+)
6>hdiutil convert -format UDZO qtpfsgui.dmg -o qtpfsgui.1.8.1.dmg

# mount to check that everything is ok
7>hdid qtpfsgui.1.8.1.dmg

That's all it takes to create the image. If you want to test the program for your self, you are free to grab the image. Beware that before you can use the application you have to install some prerequisites: QT4, libexiv2, libfftw3 and libjpeg. QT4 can you get from Trolltech, the creators of QT4, while the easiest way to get the rest is probably from the fink project. Install the fink packages exiv2, fftw3, and libjpeg. After that you should be abel to use qtpfsgui on your intel mac. If not, bug me!

Remark: I am not in any way resonsible for the qtpfsgui program itself, I am just trying to package it up for the Mac. The program itself is the creation of Giuseppe Rota.

Bye bye, Valla

I følge aftenposten har Valla trukket seg som LO leder. Det er en trist dag for norsk presse og kringkasting, for Hallo i uken og Nytt på nytt, og mange, mange andre som kommer til å savne den mest mandige LO lederen vi har hatt på lang, lang tid.

Alle vi andre? Tja, vi bryr oss kanskje ikke så mye. Ihvertfall vi som ikke er medlemmer. Men alle ledere der ut: Behandle dine medarbeidere rettferdig og riktig. Ikke vals over dem. De må merke at du bryr deg om dem og deres meninger. Så kan du til slutt være sjef og bestemme. Og aner jeg hva Yssen/Valla saken egentlig handler om? Nei, jeg har ikke fulgt med så mye...

Update on the vim-blogger plugin

Today I wanted to install the vim-blogger plugin I mentioned in an earlier post, on another computer. I couldn't remember exactly where I found it, so I just went to google and searched. And figured out it was hard to find - first this very page was the only relevant thing I managed to dig up.

After a while I found what I was looking for, and figured out that proper attribution should have been given the first time I mentioned the plugin. It is "the geek wannabe" over at http://djcraven.blogspot.com who has created the plugin. The plugin can be downloaded here, and djcraven provide some documentation in this post in his blog

Thansk, geek wannabe for the great tool!

Take care

A new place on earth

There is a new fully buzzword compliant place for bloggers available, tumblr. The idea seems to be that it should be really easy to blog, even if you have very little to blog about. Of course, I have to test it out! You can check out my entry into that thing. My review goes like this:

1. Signing up at tumblr is very easy. Go to tumblr.com, hit Sign Up, type in email and a password, and pick a url (the part in front of tumblr.com), and you're halfway there. Wait for a confirmation email, confirm, and you're in.

2. If you're like my, you want to configure template and stuff right away. Up in the right corner you have a link saying "Change settings" once you are logged in.Hit it, and a nice interactive web2.0ish page is loaded, where you can pick a template, and adjust colors, and see a more or less live preview as you test away. On the settings-page you can also adjust what the url of you blog should be. You may even choose a custom domain name which probably mean you can have tumblr on your own domain. I haven't tested that out yet. Finish by saving changes. This should take you back to the front page. If you don't like the templates, you can go custom as well, which brings up the template for you to edit in a simple textarea. You can update the preview by pressing a button. Beware, you should now change colors inside the textare, not using the color-edit-section. You figure out why if you try!

3. Start creating posts. There are shortcuts for regular posts, photos, quotes, links, conversations and videos on your tumblr dashboard. You can also grab a button for your bookmarks bar for quick access to creating link-posts. I have only tested the regular post and the link thing so far, but those seems to work ok.

4. Will I use this? I don't know yet, we will see in the future!

Vi elsker ministere med gode matteegenskaper!

Festministeren, eller idrettsminister som han kalles for anledningen, Trond Giske uttaler i Aftenposten følgende etter Petter Northugs rykk i ski-vm:

Det som skjedde var helt mirakuløst, Petter fikk jo 80 meters forsprang på 50 meter. Det er ikke så verst å være trønder på en slik dag.

Mirakuløst er nok helt riktig ord - Selv den godeste Einstein ville ha problemer med å forklaret et rykk på 80 meter i løpet av en distanse på 50 meter, gitt at konkurrentene ikke beveget seg bakover. Gratulerer Giske.

Og gratulerer til de norske gutta i VM selvsagt. Jeg aner ikke noe om deres ferdigheter i matematikk, men gå på ski kan de ihvertfall. Og det er alt vi forventer fra den kanten.

Ikke min oppgave, men noe må da lagres...

For de som ikke aner hva nam er, og heller ikke kjører mc, les videre eller gå et annet sted. Av og til faller noen utsagn i baren som bare bør tas vare på. Jeg er vel kjent med at dette er en oppgave som egentlig tilligger andre, og jeg er stort sett bare en lurker i baren. Men allikevel, følgende utsagn må jeg bare lagre. Noen (Herr Bang) spør i en tråd (sitat):

Hvor ble de av alle sammen, alle de gamle heltene?

Gikk de hjem?

Hvorpå "mac" svarer følgende bevingede ord:

Det hviskes fortsatt om heltedåder og bragder, om DoD'eres overdådige treff i De Dype Skoger, om DAMN og 900 cc bæplukkere og ovloV, om buddhister fra Flatlands, fartsmonstre fra Finland og besøkende brødre fra Sveariket med uendelige powernaps etter tusener av mil forkledt som arkeolog på italiensk stål. Det ryktes om en velformet hekk innpakket i italiensk skinn som nesten forårsaket en ulykke, en figur med raket skalle, bukkeskjegg og balluminium, en annen med seilersko som motorsykkelstøvler. Det mumles om brorskap, dårskap, barskap og farskap. Om telt og hotellrom, om Baren(tm), om Bjørnepalasset, om Grava, om EBS(tm) og EBB(tm). Om MacAllan og Aass. Om slosskamper med laservåpen, Jägermeister og gocarts. Om vinterlagring av Ducatier i blokkleiligheter, om scottoilere og katter.

Noen gikk sin vei, noen ble, og noen gikk og kom tilbake igjen. Og nye kom til - alle på to hjul, på evig jakt etter neste sving, neste bakketopp, neste vannhull. På nye sykler og på gamle sykler. I bunnløs vinterdepresjon og på jakt etter våren.

Sånn kan de sies. Snart kommer våren, og vi kan atter plukke frem redskapen folkens. Jeg føler snøen smelter allerede.

Will there ever be a new PictureBook?

I guess you wonder what this post will be all about? With good reason, as most of you may never have heard about the Sony PictureBook laptop. Go search for it on google (just use the search box over there at the right) - it was a great ultratiny laptop in its time (think 2000ish). In some respects it is flat out the best notebook I ever had. The list of laptops I have had the pleasure of using in the past currently contains:

• IBM ThinkPad 570
• Sony PictureBook C1VFK
• Fujitsu P2120
• IBM ThinkPad T41p
• Fujitsu Siemens P1510D
• Apple MacBook Pro 17"

These are computers I have used from 1998 until today.

All these was or is great computers, but also very different. Adding Sharp Zaurus C860 and HTC TyTN, which are more PDAs than laptops, and you have my complete list of carryable computers. But as a system administrator I have also been involved in setting up a lot of other models as well, including most X and T models from IBM, different Dells, Fujitsu Siemens, Acer and Asus. So I have quite some background here. When I say that the PictureBook is the best, of course I have to define in what sense it's the best. Sure, it is not a good desktop replacement because it is slow. But I don't need a desktop replacement as I want to keep the desktop computer. The PictureBook is the best notetaking, travel, meeting, watching-tv, sitting-in-the-livingroom-with-the-computer-on-the-lap computer.
The most important thing with the PictureBook is not the size or weight, but the formfactor. Smaller computers exist, and lighter as well. Sony did the smart thing making a small computer that is somewhat wide, but not very deep. By fitting a display with the unusual resolution 1024x480, the display is wide enough for all applications, but you need to scroll vertically. To make that easy, a jog-wheel was put on the right edge, very easy accessible. The width cater for a good keyboard - to this day the keyboard on the PictureBook C1VFK is one of the best I have ever used; on par with the IBM 570. So even though the computer is not tiny to the extreem, it is easy to carry around, weight is just 1kg and because of the short depth, it is very easy to stick into some bag or under your arm or just hold with one hand. Again because of the short depth, you can always use it on plane or bus, even in the cheapest seats. And because of the good keyboard, you can keep typing for hours.
My wish is therefore: Look at the Sony PictureBook, you guys out there creating notebooks. Make something similar, maybe with a 1280x600 display or something like that. Stick a Core duo cpu into it as well as the connectivity, disk and memory of today. Computers like the Oqo O2 are too small to be useable and too big to carry everywhere (we have cellphones/pdas for that). The keyboard on the new small Sony thing, UX50/90/180, is just terrible and highly unusable (yes, I have tested one). Computers like the Fujitsu Siemens P1610D does not have a keyboard in the same league, and the bigger irons we can save for the desktop. Please, give me a good carry-around computer! 1kg is ok, the cellphone is what I carry everywhere. And the size of the PictureBook is also ok. Give us tools we can actually feel good with!

Do I have to change phone already?

According to this post in engadget, there is a new device comming up from HTC:



While my HTC TyTN still does a fine job, there are certain things with this device that seems to be particularly interesting. First the display of course; 5 inch and more resolution than the TyTN. Next better cpu. A camera with higher resolution and built in GPS is always nice to have.



I have to follow this closely. Maybe I can have this while I wait for the iPhone. This device is probably to large to be the only phone in the pocket as well, so I can still keep the iPhone when it appears as my phone. Hmm, though decisions to make!

Do I want the iPhone?

I will not add much to all the buzz about Apple's iphone, there is already way
to much said about it as it's still months out in the future. For us living in
Norway, I guess it will take almost a year before we can get our hands on it,
unfortunately.

What I will say is: First, I want one! Second, as it is clear now that the
operating system is MacOSX, I really hope that Apple is clever enough to add a
terminal, a bash shell and a ssh client as optional install items on a dvd that
will follow the phone. That will make it so much more interesting! If we even
can get a python interpreter and some GUI toolkit to do programming right on
the phone, we will be happy!

The vim blogger plugin

The other day I found a plugin that make it possible to post to blogger directly from the editor Vim. As you see I don't blog a lot, and an important reason for that is that the interface for actually posting something to my blog is so awkward.

The other reason is of course that I do not have interesting things to say all the time. That is not likely to change, but with this plugin I hope I can do at least some more posting.

Velkommen til steinalderen

Forleden dag tok jeg den eneste fornuftige bussen jeg kan benytte til
arbeidet. Jeg bor langs E18 i Ås, og jobber på Fornebu. De aller fleste
offentlige kommunikasjonsmidler jeg kan benytte vil forutsette at jeg bytter i
Oslo. Men Timeekspressen kjører en rute fra Mysen/Ørje som går direkte til
Fornebu. Riktig nok går bussen innom bussterminalen på Grønland i Oslo, og den
bruker lang tid. Men jeg kan sitte på samme buss hele veien, og gjøe noe
fornuftig. Altså et bra tilbud som kan få folk som meg over fra privatbil til
kollektiv transport.

Denne spesielle ruten, linje 9 i Timeekspress systemet, har ganske få avganger
som kjører gjennom Oslo og videre til Fornebu. Faktisk bare 2 om morgenen og 2
om ettermiddagen. Siden dette er en så bra tjeneste med potensiale til å bli
benyttet av en del mennesker skulle man tro at om man gjorde endringer så
ville det bli for eksempel ved å utvide med flere avganger. Men hold dere fast
folkens. Et eller annet supperåd i Oslo har bestemt at slike gjennomgående
ruter - det skal man ikke ha noe av. Buss får gå til Grønland og snu der. Man
kan ikke bare komme her og kommer her liksom, sitte på ut av Oslo igjen på
andre siden. Så fra nyttår avsluttes dette tilbudet.

Så hva er alternativene? Timeekspressen har ingen annen rute som passer, så å
gå av på Grønland blir bare tull - derfra kommer jeg meg ikke videre. Jeg må
nok heller bytte til sporveiens rute 31 på Oslo S. Da får jeg ikke overgang
selvsagt, og må betale full pris, så det blir dyrere. Dessuten er det en
melkerute, selv når den kjører ekspress. Så lang tid vil det ta. Men det er en
fin bonus da. Jeg må vel vente mellom 5 og 35 minutter før 31-bussen dukker
opp, så da kan jeg slurpe inn deilig 20-minusgraders januar luft mens jeg
venter. De har tenkt på alt disse folka. For å ikke glemme all mosjonen. Inn
på buss, av med skjerf og stor jakke (som jeg trenge når jeg skal vente på
31-bussen), opp med arbeidssakene. Oopps, fremme på Oslo S snart, ned med
tingene, på med jakke, skjerf og hansker, ut av buss, vente, hutre, vente. Inn
på overfylt 31-melkerute-buss, glem å jobbe for det er det ikke plass til her.
Setene er vonde også. Dessuten må jeg uansett stå og svette med den store
jakka på. Og skjer. Og hansker.

Nei, takk skal du jammen meg ha. Jeg tror jeg tar bilen isteden. Lenge leve
det kollektive Norge. Og det flotte supperådet som har bestemt dette.

Ha en fin dag da dere!

What to do in a Lisa tutorial

You are sitting there in a training class at Usenix/Lisa06, or any other lisa for that matter. It supposed to be really good. The most knowledgeable person in the world on the target. Ok, that's a bit over the top, but at least hi should be good. Then you just realize that he is a very lousy speaker. You have paid good money to be here, so what should you do? You should not leave, that's not polite. But, see, stuff is happen right there behind your back:

1. Bring up your laptop
2. Pull up your irc-client. Sure you have one, right?
3. Connect to irc.sage.org
4. join #lisa??, insert the current year.
5. have Fun!

It is as simple as that. A large crowd, with all the knowledge and great humor, can make event the most boring lecture quite fun.

I don't know. I'm probably just a bit bored. I think rehearsels should be mandatory for instructors people have to pay that much to get to listen to. Rehearsel in front of a board of referees, that is.

That's my idea for the future!

Take care, and be nice to bad instructors. And tell the organizers what you think!

The nerds are gathered!

With the usual buzz and fuzz, Lisa'06 kicked off tonigth with a beginners BOF (with some oldtimers and not-so-oldtimers sitting in the back). The training chair Dan Klein delivered the goods as usual, with a lot of humor. Everyone feel welcome, there is plenty of sodas around, the wiki and irc-channel (#lisa06@irc.sage.org) is up - everything is in order. Quite a few of the crowd are heading over to a nearby place for something stronger than soda... others just go out for dinner. By the way, there seems to be about 1200 attendees this year. Not bad consider the topics!

Tomorrow morning, at 9:00, the real thing starts, with tutorial and training on lots of interesting topics, by fine lectures. I will start out with a light topic, on distributed source code management systems. We have converted from CVS to subversion, but folks are not satisfied, and have started looking into mercurial (Hg). I have to figure out what is the best option, and what this really is all about. Theo Ts'o (of linux kernel fame) will be the lecturer, so this should be really good.

After lunch I will attend intermediate topics in DNS admin. This is something I don't know much about, and want to look into. Maybe I have time for some reports tomorrow night.

Take care, folks.

From 35000 feets

Wow - internet up in the sky; that is quite cool! Right now I am on a SAS flight to Washington DC (to Lisa'06), cruising away in some 850km/h. As Connexion is shutting down the service, the service is also free. It's maybe not extremely fast, but decent enough to read email and browse the web. And making blogposts as this.

Hopefully, SAS and Star Alliance can find a new partner such that we can keep this great service. If we can get poweroutlets in the cheap seats as well it will be very good.

See you at Lisa, folks, and take care!

New phone choosen!

As I reported earlier, I gave up on the SonyEricsson M600i, due to the problem of sync that phone with MacOSX. For a while I have looked around, and hesitated, but it turns out the best solution right now is something unspeakable...

My choice is: HTC TyTN. Allthough that phone uses the winblows mobile 5 operating system, it seems to be the best smartphone around that both have WiFi, qwerty keyboard, and possible to sync with Mac. To sync it, I have purchased missing sync from Mark/Space, it works quite well. It was some issues with connecting TyTN and the Mac on bluetooth, but once up it is a ok combination.

Maybe I care to give a more thorough review of the features of TyTN and how it pairs up with the Mac later on, but for now I just want to say that I can sync appointments, contacts, and I can mount the phones' storage as a drive. That I can both use skype and IM clients on the phone is of course a plus :-)

Take care,

Updated entry on my Unix commands in Norwegain page

For a long time, I have not made any updates to my page at http://home.simula.no/~aasmundo/unix, where I describe various tips and tricks for linux/unix users, in norwegian. Today, I looked up something for my own use, and created an entry on ssh tunnels. The entry goes like this:

Ssh tunnel

Av og til har man behov for å kunne koble seg til en maskin som befinner seg
bak en brannmur på en eller annen måte. For eksempel kan du tenke deg at du har
satt opp en linux maskin for noen som ikke er så kjempeflinke i linux, og de
ønsker å ha den stående hjemme, hengende på en adsl-forbindelse og gjerne
NAT'et bak en trådløs router. Hvordan kan man løse en slik utfordring? En fin
mulighet er å sette opp en ssh-tunnel fra maskin til en annen maskin som du
alltid kan nå. En slik tunnel kan settes opp med følgende kommando:

ssh -f -N -R *:20022:localhost:22 -lbrukernavn maskin.fastip.net

Opsjonene har følgende betydning:


-f: Tving ssh til å kjøre i bakgrunn.


-N: ssh skal ikke starte noen spesiell kommando på maskinen man kobler
til. Uten denne opsjonen vil et shell bli forsøkt startet.


-R: angir tunnel fra annen maskin. Alle maskiner (*) som forsøker å koble
seg til maskinen vi kobler oss til, på port 20022, vil bli sendt videre til
denne maskinen (localhost) på port 22, der ssh som regel kjører.


-l: angir brukernavn vi vil benytte for å koble oss til


Endelig oppgis maskinen med fast ip som vi vil koble oss til.
For å ta vare på sikkerheten er det nok lurt å definere en
spesiell bruker for formålet, og passord/passphrase må håndteres på en
passende måte. Det er også en del utfordringer med å holde forbindelsen oppe.
Dersom adsl-systemet får en dynamisk adresse (som er bakgrunnen for hele denne
løsningen), vil tunnellen måtte restartes dersom adsl-systemet får en ny
adresse. Man er selvfølgelig også avhengig av å ha tilgang til en maskin med
fast ip.

By the way...

If someone has some suggestions regarding my previous post on new smartphone, I welcome comments!

Time to move on

A few months ago, I bought the Sony Ericsson M600i smartphone. Initially, I had a few problems with it but most of thoses error was fixed with a firmware upgrade.

One thing remains, though: Synchronization with Mac OS X or Linux. This is really important for me. I like the keyboard of the M600i, I enjoy the screen and the multitasking capabilities. But I _need_ sync. So much that I have now returned to my older Z800i phone. That phone lack most of the capabilities, but I can sync it using iSync.

I have waited through two minor upgrade of OSX (4.6 - 4.8), but the M600i is still not supported. And from what I can see, Sony Ericsson will not fixed the problem eiterh.

So it is time to move on. Someone (windows user...) need a new smartphone?

take care,

Ubuntu under Parallels

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg! If you do that, inside a running ubuntu in full-screen, under Parallels, you can enable full resolution. So, on my 17" MacBook Pro I now have 1680x1050 resolution.

Really slick :-)

Just a quick follow up on yesterdays post

I wrote 'I'm not sure I like turbogears' in my previous post. Right now I don't remember why I wrote that. I have django up and running, and are doing some tests with it. But as I don't remember what I did not like with turbogears, I have decided to test that one as well. 

So that's what I do tonight.

Python and Ajax.

From time to time I need to implement some webstuff, where "need" may be as in work or as in "want to", related to private stuff. With all the buzz around Ajax, I guess everything I do in this respect should be "Ajaxified". In addition, I don't want to use PHP anymore, that's so stone age. Python is the rule these days. That leaves me with the question: how to use Python to make "Ajaxified" websites?

There are several python tools for creating webstuff out there, some of the main players are:
     * Django
     * Turbogears
     * Plone/zope
     * 
I guess there are many more, but which of them have Ajax tools? Django does not really, Turbogears uses MochiKit but I'm not sure I like Turbogears. I don't want to use Plone/zope. We use that in my company (Plone that is), and it is great for large corporate websites, but I don't want that for small sites created more or less for fun. And what about Ajax.

As you understand, I am searching. And this is a buzz compliant post. If I end up with something, I will probably make a post about it here.

Take care!

Still no support for M600i on MacOSX

Ok, folks - I am just polling on this. Still, there does not seems to be any support for m600i in iSync, no 3rd part vendor, nothing. I guess I have to switch to another phone. If not GCalSync (http://www.gcalsync.com) can make it. That will be a sync directly to the google calendar, but that's just fine with me as my main calendar is there anyway.

Take care, folks.

The new Apple MacPro

So, the new MacPro with dual core Intel Xeon processors is released. No doubt, its a kewl machine. 

I just want to  give a few of my own toughts after having heard the keynote deliverd by Jobs and his coworkers at WWDC'06 today. 

First, regarding performance the only comparison we saw was against Opteron was a performance per watt. I don't doubt that this is an interesting comparison for lots of people, but it also leave us with the tought that the new MacPro is not the fastest computer around.

Next, the standard graphics adapter delivered is a Nvidia 7300 card. Come on, Apple, you could have done better than that. Of course, there are other cards available as upgrades/built to order and keeping the price down on the standard configuration is really important to spread Mac to even more users. But you could have put at least a 7600 card into the box. 

Besides this, the only thing that is wrong with the new MacPro is that I have to get rid of my PowerMac dual G5.

Take care. 

M600i as a modem

First, I was not able to use my M600i as a modem from my MacBook. Then my colleague discovered some scripts made by Ross Barkman, available from http://www.taniwha.org.uk/. By using the CID1 script from that page, I can now use the M600i as a modem on 3G (UMTS) and GPRS networks. 

Great work by Ross, and my colleague Martin who discovered them!

Me from an airport near or far, through M600i. 

That was the summer!

Tomorrow I have to get back to work again. So, summer 2006 is history. Or maybe not completely, it is still nice and warm in Norway, and I plan for another week of vacation later in august - hopefully I can go swim in the fjords a bit more then. 

As I am back to work, there will be updates of the blog from time to time. And WWDC is comming up the next week, and I will be there, so expect some comments on that! 

Update on M600i

I have now used the Sony Ericsson M600i for a few days, and want to
give a status update. I think what's going on is that I adapt my
habits to the equipment, and therefore the equipment start feeling
better over time. So also with the M600i.

Initially, I had some problems with the built in Opera 8.60 browser,
it crashed on me a few times and things like that. Now, I think it
functions quite well. Probably because I visit pages that I know
works. Still, there are no pages that I need to visit regularly that
does not work, so it is probably ok for general use.

As for email reading, there seems to be something funny going on in
the network I am using. I tried a whole lot of different settings for
both imap for my regular mail accont, as well as pop from my gmail
account without any success. Then I tried pop against an account I
created with the Ventelo, the provider of the cellphone subscription,
and alas, then it works. Maybe the block pop and imap traffic? At
least something strange is going on. Anyway, as soon as I got things
right with my provider, I can send and receive email on the phone. It
is quite comfortable both to read and write messages as well.

So, in general I am quite happy with the M600i, but I still need to
figure out stuff. Maybe I write down a more complete review later on
(but don't hold your breath, it may never happen!)

Take care, and have a nice summer :-)

It took some time!

Finally, after a maybe 6 or 7 years wait, I can finally suspend/
resume my laptop!

What I am saying? Ok, this story need some background. Again, those
who are reading this blog on a regular basis, knows that I have quite
a few computers. I am talking laptop running linux this time.
According to an article at linux.com: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?
sid=06/05/24/1716222, it should be possible to suspend/resume a linux
laptop with only ACPI bios, as long as a recent kernel is used. This
is something I searched for for years, but eventually gave in and
installed software suspend (and later switched to MacOSX). But I
still have the small FSC P1510D, which only supports ACPI, no APM.

To make the story short, I grabbed the script from the article,
checked that I had the necessary commands available on my system, and
gave it a try. And guess what, it works quite nice.

The strange thing is that recent distribution, like Debian unstable
which I am running, does not come with a thing like this preinstalled
and integrated. These days, all it should take really is to shut the
screen down and put the laptop in your bag. But, hey, we're approaching!

To be fair, this could have been supported on my laptop for a few
months, I have not upgraded my kernel that recently. I discovered
this now due to the mentioned article. But it is true that I have
tested this in the past (of my 5 last laptops all but one have
supported ACPI only) without any sucess. It's essential stuff like
this which make people switch to MacOSX. But as I am not putting in
any effort to help the development of Linux in this direction, I
can't really blame anyone - that's the nice and bad thing about open
source!

Take care in the summer folks - Norway is getting really hot these days!

OS X upgrade and M600i

For a small moment, we kept our breath, as we installed the update to Mac OS X, v. 10.4.7. Eagerly, we started up iSync to check whether support for our new cool phone was added - the Sony Ericsson M600i.

But, no. Not this time. On to something else. Maybe the M600i must rest in the drawer until either Apple or Sony Ericsson releases some updated software.

Take care!

Amobil :: Telenor tester super-3G

Amobil :: Telenor tester super-3G

Yet another option for decent net connectivity not to far into the wilderness... (The rest of this goes in norwegian, as I link an article in norwegian).

Som en oppfølger til 3G løsningen basert på NMT-450 som jeg kommenterte for noen dager siden, skriver Amobil idag at Telenor har satt igang tester med HSDPA, en utvidelse av 3G (UMTS) teknologien. Jeg vet lite om dette, men går utifra at det dreier seg mer eller mindre enn software som man kjører oppå den eksisterende infrastrukturen, kanskje på samme måte som EDGE i GPRS. Det skulle i såfall tilsi at rekkevidden på HSDPA blir tilsvarende rekkevidden i 3G; ikke fantastisk, men ikke helt ille heller. Og mer interessant, så langt ut i ødemarken som jeg holder til til daglig, er det ikke usannsynlig at 3G støtten snart er ok (det er av og til 3G dekning i dag, litt avhengig av atmosfæriske forhold virker det som).

Så, hva snakker vi om? HSDPA skal kunne gi 3.6Mbps, altså langt bedre enn de 1.2Mbps'ene som ADSL leverandørene klarer å pushe på linjene ut til meg idag. Vi får vel regne med at dette også er en asynkron tjeneste, men det er sikkert mulig å få noen hundre Kbps den "andre" veien. Dermed skulle HSDPA være en bedre løsning enn det som kan tilbys av ADSL idag.

Alt dette er selvsagt helt i det blå, siden Telenor ikke har sagt noen ting om om og i såfall når noe slikt kan bli lansert for sluttbrukere. De skal selvsagt melke kua maks først, sånn de har gjort hele veien, fra før ISDN tiden. Og jeg lever sikkert godt med crappy ADSL fra Bluecom en stund til jeg - helt til flere i familien blir aktive surfere og skal dele båndbredden med meg. Det blir ihvertfall spennende å se hva som blir første teknologi som gir noe mer enn 1.2Mbps ut i villmarken.

Bondehilsen fra ødemarken Follo!

take care,

Don't buy M600i if you're a MacOSX user!

Today, I received a brand new cellphone, Sony Ericsson M600i. It's a business oriented phone, which should be strong on messaging and keepting track of appointments and the like. It also comes with an RSS reader, which is quite cool, and decent Web (Opera) and email software.

Unfortunately, there is no support for this phone in iSync on MacOSX (10.4.6). Hopefully such support appear in the near future, but for now I will advice you MacOSX users out there to avoid this phone.

Also, the software in the phone seems to be a bit buggy. While I was doing some experiments with the webbrowser it seg.faulted a couple of times. Among other places, I tried to visite calendar.google.com, which wasn't especially sucessfull. Compared to other SonyEricsson mobiles I owned in the past, this one also seems to operate quite slow; this may be to buggy and bloated new software. So, stay away from this one for a while and wait for software updates, both in the phone and on MacOSX. The idea with this phone is so great, so hopefully it wouldn't last to long before we see the necessary updates. I'll report on this later on (if what I need ever appears, before I move on to something better :-)

Take care!

digi.no - Snart får Norge sitt tredje mobilnett

digi.no - Snart får Norge sitt tredje mobilnett

Kanskje det endelig er en mulighet til å få noe mer enn 1.2Mbps ut på bondelandet! Bor man litt lengre enn et par kilometer fra nærmeste adsl sentral i dette landet, er det jo umulig å få noe særlig hastighet på ADSL. Og all utvikling (ADSL2+ osv) dreier seg om å få stadig raskere linjer, på bekostning av linjelengden. Det er fint å se at noen forsøker å få til noe annet av og til - bedre dekning i grisgrendte strøk.

Det hører med til historien at jeg bor rett øst for Oslo, i Ås kommune, så man skal ikke så veldig langt ut på landet før problemene dukker opp!

Take care,

The Macbook Pro has arrived

Hey folks, 

just a quick note to let you know that I am now playing with a brand new Macbook Pro with 17" screen. Pretty unusual stuff for me; the largest screen on any laptop I have used in the past was 14", and I thought that one was actually a bit to big. So this is huge...

Anyway, I'll let you know more about the setup and how it works later on. 

In other news, the oldest niece of mine, my older sisters oldest child, turned 18 yesterday. It's actually quite odd - it's a new generation coming up and we are soon the oldtimers. Old the best to you, Trude, and God Bless; may you have many, many, many great years.

Take care,

Confused about my recent posts?

You are with good reason. Somehow, a draft I thought was accidentally was deleted from the server actually showed up as published today. So there you are, two different versions of more or less the same post; written with a few days in between and with the content recreated from memory because the original post was lost (but wasn't anyway...)

Now, I'll read both posts my self and compare ;-)

Take care!

Me and my computers

For those faithful readers of the blog, you know that I currently use an AMD64 computer at work, running Ubuntu linux, and small FSC P1510 laptop running unstable debian and an dual G5 PowerMac at home.

It's time for updates! Allthough I used to be a strict Linux person, over the later months I start liking MacOSX quite well, and even though my home computer is a dualboot (MacOSX and Ubuntu linux), I tend to prefer running Mac on it for different reasons. In addition to that, more people in our company start running apple computers, so the sysadmin folks need to update their knowledge.

Fast forward - I have ordered a 17" Macbook pro, it should appear hopefully this week. I will probably not install linux on it at all, at least that's the plan right now... I'll report on who the machine feels for me anyway, later on.

As that's a quite big portable computer, I will need something smaller. But the difference between the P1510 and the Macbook is probably not big enough to justify keeping both. Therefore, I will probably try to get my hands on the new Sony UX (check out UX at sonystyle).

As this is not easy to get hold of in Norway, I'll probably try to pick up one when I'm in San Francisco in august.

Take care

Me and computers

As all me faithfull readers know, I mostly use Linux computers, but also have an Apple PowerMac at home. Although that computer have Linux (ubuntu dapper beta) installed, MacOSX tend to see more and more use on it. The reason is that some of the stuff I do at home simply work better on OSX, like playing music. So, instead of rebooting into linux all the time, I just get what ever I need to work on OSX - which is usually possible as I mostly rely on open source software.

Now, this has gone quite far, and in the company I work, Apple users seems to pop up here and there. Therefore, I and a colleague will visit the WWDC in San Francisco in august. And what is more natural than bringing an Apple laptop there. Alas, I have ordered an MacBook pro with 17" screen and 2GBs of memory today. That will be great fun! For the moment, I consider not installing linux on it at all, but we'll see how that goes.

While I have the FSC P1510, which is a quite small computer, Sony has announced their new Vaio UX recently - a real laptop computer in a very small housing. It has a 4.5" screen with great resolution; 1024x600, have wifi, bluetooth and even gsm/edge builtin. My plan is to get hold of one as soon as they hit the street, and then pass the big P1510 on to someone worthy of it - probably someone in the sysadmin group in the company which need something like it. It will, however, take some time, as Sony expect the UX to appear around 5. july, and considering the really bad decisions about Sony Vaio and Norway in the past, I can not expect to just by it in the store around the corner. Maybe I pick up one in SF...

At least for now, I will keep the PowerMac at home and the Amd64 in the office, since this complements the architectures I need to know about and build software on. Now we just need someone who wants to build our PyCC software on Windows, to ensure full cross platform compatibility.

I'll report when things starts to show up!

Take care!

Lei av å være verdens rikeste (N24.no)

N24 skriver:

Lei av å være verdens rikeste (N24.no): "Lei av å være verdens rikeste

Bill Gates synes ikke det er noe stas å være verdens rikeste mann. "

Det problemet er det jo veldig enkelt å bli kvitt skulle man tro. Om han ikke har det som den rike unge mannen i evangeliet, som Jesus spurte om ville bli fullkommen. "Selg alt du har, og gi det til de fattige, så skal du få en skatt i himlene; kom så og følg meg!" Han gikk bedrøvet bort, for han var veldig rik.

Take care,
Mandus.

New car!

I bought the family a new car yesterday. A slightly old (born 96) Volkswagen Caravelle TDI, the looong version. In that car, 8 persons can have a comfy ride, together with a lot of stuff.

So that's what occupied me the last few days. And the day after tomorrow, I'll travel to Madrid. Check out my photoblog, pictures of the new car, and from Madrid will appear!

Dr. Scient

Yesterday, I defended my thesis, and everything went well. So, finally, after 9 3/4 years, I have finished my Dr.Scient studies, and am now a dr. in scientific computing.

Well done, Mandus.

The trial lecture and the defense

Maybe some of you wonder what is going on - I promised to report on the progress of the preparations for my trial lecture, and said a few words. After that complete silence...

First, I have worked very hard the last 2 weeks - and tomorrow is the big day. And I think I have the presentations ready by now, although I have to test them a few times to check that I can stick to the schedule.

Next, I have to say that I didn't came up with extremely much interesting content. I tried to investigate the "formal verification" field to see whether there was something there that could be of any use, and find quite some material to read. Unfortunately, most of what I found is still to preliminary to be of any real value for practical verification of scientific codes. So I ended up with the standard pile of tricks, method of manufactured solutions beeing the most prominent, or the most advanced.

The presentation of my thesis is the toughest one, though, as I have to present what I am been doing the last couple of years (I started in -96...) in about 30 minutes. Though call, but I'll manage.

Take care, and wish me good luck tomorrow!

Preparation for the trial lecture

Maybe just for my own future reference... I will now briefly document the preparations for my trial lecture and defense of my Dr.Scient thesis.

So far I have worked on a "mindmap" using kdissert to organize the different aspects of the topic for the trial lecture that come to my mind. I have also search google and other places for relevant information. During thursday and friday I discovered at least 2 books and about 20 papers that seems to be relevant. I am now reading a paper by Salari and Knupp which are very relevant, as it discuss code verification by the method of manufactured solutions, which is a common approach in computational science and engineering.

As I move forward I also want to investigate to some extent the field of more formal code verification in computer science. From what I know from before, it is not possible to prove correctness of a scientific code (in the multi-million lines of code range) using such formal theories, as usually it is required that some special programming language is used, as well as the complexity can not be infinitely large. I am also not sure whether or not these to fields are talking about the same thing, as the interest in comp. sci & eng. is to verify that the output of the code is correct, and does not care that much about how it become correct (ok, I do simplify things here...), while traditional CS probably are more concerned about the correctness of the code itself.

Another topic is how we can relate verification of scientific codes to verification of experiments in other natural sciences, like physics or biology. I have to look further into this as well.

Now on to the reading to see what more I can discover!

The topic for my trial lecture

Today, I have received the topic for my trial lecture. The title of the lecture is:

Verification of Scientific Codes

Not a bad topic at all. Alltough this is something we don't think about every day, it sure is an important part of what I do. If we can't say anything about the correctness of the programs that we write inorder to say something about scientific problems, how can we then use the program to draw any conclusions for the problem that we investigate.

Also, a few years back we discussed this topic within the group, and one of my coworkers even produced some software that target some of the issues within this field. So I have someone to ask, and do have some ideas my self as well.

A trial lecture is never a walk in the park, but at least this is something that I can relate to, so I think it is an ok topic.

Now, on to diggin' out references, reading material and start producing slides for the talk. You wan't see much of me the next two weeks...

Take care folks,

Samsung Q1 - infoSync World - origami

Samsung Q1 - infoSync World

Is it just me, or isen't this very much like the previous U50/70/71 models from Sony? I thought we should expect something new. Ok, you know that I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but for all the hype I at least expected something actually new...

By the way, why can't any pda or small laptop maker consider making something with a formfactor comparable with the Psion models - a decent keyboard, ok display, good batterylife, and software and communication hardware (bluetooth/umts/wifi) up to todays standards. That will be a killer piece of hardware.

In other news, I am at the winterschool at Geilo, on Navier stokes and automation of PDE/FEM software (http://www.fenics.org), this week. Cool stuff!

My Ph.D thesis hot off the press

Not exactly true, but I have paid unipub a visit today, to hand over the press ready pdf-version of my thesis.

Now I only have to prepare a couple of presentation, and give them, as well as answering a few questions from the comitee, before I have earned the right to call my self a Dr. It's been a long and interesting journey, and I'm glad I can see the end.

The important date to remember is 30. March.

Take care folks!