Projekt Børneinitiativ gik forøvrigt baglæns ved morgentide. Sigurd sad fredsommeligt og dovent iagttagende, mens Frida og far pakkede deres tasker og fik sendt Frida afsted. Det ændrede ikke noget at far midlertidigt forlod lejligheden for at hente sin cykel - Sigurd sad stadig med upakket taske og uden støvler, da han kom tilbage. Håbet er ikke opgivet endnu, men måske der skal overvejes en anden fremgangsmåde.

Hul vatpind plus sæbe

Forberedelserne er så småt begyndt

Skattens opholdssted er fundet og opgravningen kan begynde

Indeklemt bamse

Forude venter en fejring 2. med ca. 20 styks familiemedlemmer og en fejring 3. på søndag med ca. 8 deltagere. Så rent støj og logistikmæssigt er det en pæn gradvis nedtrapning.

Hvad der om morgenen vindes skal om eftermiddagen tabes, så ved afhentning i børnehave og skole var der begge børn aldeles uden initiativ til at komme videre og valgte ganske at overhøre fars opfordringer om at lette numsen. Det kunne måske forstås hvis det var mens de spillede pool, men hvordan kan de gå i stå, mens de er ved at tage tøj på? Den Voksne undres.

Der er som regel tid til 10 minutters sofadas før afgang

Regelsættet overholdes

Sigurd har sin egen poolteknik

Så galt fat er det heldigvis ikke endnu...

Dommen er altså ifølge prof’en, at der skal en helt ny rygning på med undertag hele vejen hen. Skorstensinddækningen kan ikke lappes, så der skal også en helt ny på. Til sidst kiggede han på den nye taghætte selvom det ikke er ham, der har monteret den og dommen var hård. Det er lavet med venstre hånd og hele møget skal op igen og laves forfra ellers bliver det ikke tæt. Det klyt der er lavet kan ikke tætnes.

Til sidst faldt snakken på prisen for hele balladen. Jeg sagde kækt med lun jysk humor, at det kunne vel laves for en hundredekroneseddel eller deromkring, men jeg tror den faldt til jorden, da han bare kiggede på mig og sagde….nej, Jørn. Og så var den lukket. Aftalen er så, at jeg får en mail med prisen en af dagene. Bummelum

dryp dryp dryp dryp - vi kommer vist til at lægge et nyt gulv når det engang bliver tørvejr på loftet

Derudover er de lægter som rygningen af skruet fast på opfugtet (og det drypper pletvis ned fra rygningen) i over halvdelen af tagkonstruktionen - selvfølgelig den del, som der ikke er skiftet efter stormskade i ‘99. For det ikke skal være løgn, har jeg i dag opdaget, at der er en utæthed ved den taghætte, som jeg lige har fået skiftet - så der kommer lige en reklamationssag oven i.

Da tidligere erfaringer har vist at en tømrer typisk ikke har forstand på gammel skifereternit og flere tømrere sågar har påpeget, at en blikkenslager er bedst til den slags har jeg tilkaldt en sådan for at høre om taget står til at redde eller om der skal nyt på………….Dadadadammm.

Der blæste en vældig vind den dag ude fra vest og prognosen sagde at vindstød med orkanstyrke ville ramme lige oveni fars hjemtur fra arbejde. Desværre er der en masse kedelige bygninger i en by, så udover at der var overordentligt nemt at cykle op af bakke, var der ikke så meget ved det. Heldigvis blev der skruet op for det hele ude ved Skejby, så da Frida skulle følges hjem fra en veninde, var der rigtig tryk på. Cykleriet måtte opgives og vandreturen blev i siksak.

Beskidte penge

Aften om eftermiddagen

Lektielæsning for en otteårig

Sigurd er ret skrap til kaffespillet

Der var møde på Fridas skole aka Sigurds kommende skole, og grundet manglende modtagelse af brev fik far først beskeden i går. Heldigvis var onkel & tante klar på en hastepasning af De Kære Små. Der kom ikke meget nyt på banen ved mødet, men det var glimrende lige at se de andre forældre i øjnene. Næste begivenhed er først i slutningen af april, hvor ungerne skal med.

Til mødet snakkede Jens Mose, skolens leder, om skolens værdier. Han gik meget op i åbenhed og dialog, specielt når der var noget man ikke synes om. Ved et spøjst sammentræf demonstrerede han det i går, da Toke snakkede med ham om noget med billeder: Det foregik på hans kontor og Sigurd vadede ind midt i samtalen og ville lege med nogen ting, der stod på en hylde. Toke var tilbageholdende, men Mose gav Sigurd tingen. Aftalen blev afsluttet og Toke dirigerede Sigurd ud med en bemærkning om at det var et rum til voksne. Mose svarede at rummet skam også var til børn - det var derfor han havde tingenoter på hylderne.

Hmm... Lidt selvransagelse senere erkendte Toke at han underbevidst havde opfattet friskolens lærere på samme måde som dem i hans egen skoletid, hvor lærerområder var Forbudt For Børn (medmindre man havde gjort Noget Meget Slemt) og hvor lærere, med en enkelt undtagelse, var nogen man snakkede fag med i timerne. Ak, der er noget af en forskel til friskolens lærerværelse, hvor de store elever hænger ud i frikvartererne. Til alt held er Sigurd tydeligvis ikke blevet alt for præget af fars autoritetsangst.

Ungerne opfandt et spil med lerterning, hvor nisserne skulle få juletræet

Nyt køleanlæg til arbejdet

Den kære familie

Det der med at Hanne selv skal komponere et solostykke til næste koncert for Malling Big Bang viste sig at være en fejl. Der skal godt nok være en solo, men den skal primært være improviseret. Det gjorde ikke opgaven mindre udfordrende, men Hanne virker nu ret afslappet med det.

Morgenhjælp

Skoleundervisning for mor

Aftenhjælp

Sigurd komponerer

Events

The Zeitgeist daemon (also known as the engine) is a process that exposes an event logging framework as a DBus API. The structure of these events is that they have a block of metadata that describe the event itself (this is known simply as the event metadata) and another block of metadata that describes the subject, or subjects, that this event happened to (this part is known as the subject metadata). The metadata for the event looks like:

• Timestamp – When did this happen. Milliseconds since the Unix Epoch. Note that we see events as single points in time, meaning that events don’t have a duration
• Interpretation – Abstract interpretation of this event; what happened. Fx. “opened”, “saved”, “closed”, “send”, etc.
• Manifestation – How the event happened. Fx. “user activity”, “notification”, or “scheduled activity”.
• Actor – Who triggered it. This will typically point to the .desktop file of the acting application. It will most likely be an application, but it is not required to be so.
• Payload – A free-form binary blob that you may attach to the event. This is specifically application specific and mainly intended to be a “back door” for people to do all sorts of funky hacks.

Each event has one or more subjects associated. For each subject we store:

• URI – You guessed it! The URI of the subject
• Interpretation – Abstract interpretation of the subject. This could be “Document”, “Image”, “Video”, “Email”, “Instant message”, “Contact”, anything.
• Manifestation – How the subject is stored. This could be something like “File”, “Mailbox”, “Web page”.
• Origin – A URI pointing to the origin or “patron” of the subject. For files this would be the parent folder. For YouTube videos it would be http://youtube.com
• Mimetype – The format of the datastream representing the subject. Fx. text/plain, application/xml.
• Text – Textual information added to the subject. This is not applicable for for types of subjects.
• Storage – Identifier for the storage medium this subject resides on. We use this to make it possible for queries that return only events for subjects that are “available now”. Fx. some clients don’t want to show events for files that are stored on you USB pen drive when it is not connected.

Ontology – Or Data Description

In reality the metadata fields we store don’t contain simple strings like “Document” for the subject interpretation. It’s a bit more complex than that – sorry! We store a URI pointing to a formal definition of something categorized as a Document. This formal categorization is called an ontology if you want a word to confuse your friends with. We are fortunate enough that someone already wrote such a spec, namely the Nepomuk Ontology. So instead of just “Document” we store the string”http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/03/22/nfo/#Document“.

Since Tracker also uses the Nepomuk ontologies you may take these formal classification strings and plug them directly into Tracker to find everything that Tracker considers a document.

We will also have an ontology for the event metadata as this is not covered by Nepomuk. We are actively working on this.

Getting Data Out – Querying the Event Log

We employ a template based query API for searching our log data. You send us a list of event templates you want to look for and how you want it sorted and we give you the results. So if you want to find all “open” events on subjects of type “Document” simply create an Event object, set the interpretaion to “open”-event and add a subject to the event template with the interpretation set to “document”. All other fields should be left blank. Send this template to us and we will give you the matches.

The list of event templates is collected into a big OR-query to imbue the consumers with more power.

Getting Data Into Zeitgeist

There are really no limits to what kind of events we could store. If you have a spare mobile with a in-built accelerometer and glue it to your front door then you could send an event over bluetooth to your desktop each time your front door opens. Probably there are better use cases?

The point is that the usefulness of Zeitgeist stands and falls with the events that you push into us. We can store anything that you can model using the structures I outlined above. I am pretty certain that people will not agree on the kinds of data they want logged, but we are ready for anything

Normal users would of course not need to think about getting their data into Zeitgeist. What developers need to know is that we have a simple DBus API to insert events (surprisingly called InsertEvents). It is called InsertEvents and not AppendEvents or something like that for a reason. Namely that you are allowed to insert events that are in the past. This is useful if you want to import your Firefox history or what ever. If you try to log an event twice the engine will throw an error at you, so no need to worry about dupes.

Ok. I think that about wraps up what I intended to say for now. Hope it’s useful to at least one person out there!

The weather wasn’t really with us as it started raining in the afternoon – but no more than could be handled with an umbrella and a couple of thin raincoats. Unfortunately the Christmas theme wasn’t all that prevalent (as in there weren’t a lot of Christmas decorations) and they had apparently decided to cut back on the restaurants which meant that we had to get by on waffles and “æbleskiver” (a Danish donut-like thing).

But we did manage to score 8 Christmas stockings and the kids really enjoyed the short (almost nonexistant lines) at the rides and just walking around looking at all the stuff built from Legos.

So it all ended up being a nice trip for whole family.

Frida: Far, har vi en ren stegepande?
Far: Ja, der har vi vel nok. Hvad skal du bruge den til?
Frida: Til at slå dig i hovedet!
Rart med en betænksom datter.

Sigurd byggede en model af en forhindringsbane, hvor hoveddelen var lim, og efter aftensmaden gik han og Frida amok i nisseri. De havde en eller anden leg, der involverede nissetøj og en pose med gaver til forældrene. Sådan gik en halv times tid, til Frida ville se Far til Fire i Byen (det er den der med Lille-Per og juleballet i Nisseland). Sigurd kunne nu ikke samle sig og efter at have forstyrret en del, tog far ham med ned på værelset for at lege med LEGO og lægge ham i seng.

Da det blev sengetid gik Sigurd helt i baglås, græd og skældte ud. Der var mange ting i vejen med hans liv og primært var det at I behandler mig dårligt!. Det var far ked af at høre og ville gerne vide hvad det dækkede over. Det viste sig at være noget med at Frida havde de bedste ting (læs: En Nintendo) og måtte være længere oppe. At Sigurd fik for meget skæld ud (der blev ikke angivet om det var i hjemmet eller børnehaven) og at det var for lang tid siden han havde været i LEGOland. Trumfen kom med Frida har haft 8 fødselsdage og jeg har haft 5. Og det er snyd!.

Sigurd var vitterligt meget ked af det og havde behov for knus og for at komme ud med det hele, så far hørte tålmodigt på klagerne og forsøgte at forklare hvorfor tingene var som de var. Sigurd mente ikke at hans alder burde betyde forskelsbehandling i forhold til Frida, men en god mængde knus, nærhed og rugbrødsmadder fik ham til sidst på ret køl igen.

Morgenrod

Oprydning på Fridas værelse

Kamppilot Mons

Montage

At glæde sig

Tre hofnisser og en arbejdsnisse

En Mons blev fundet udenfor

Sigurd blev lidt træt i fødderne

Ingen mast uden klatring

Flyv lille flagermus

Velvalgt tapet

The stay here in Bolzano has been very nice. Fresh mountain air and very warm conditions compared to my usual Danish habitat. I want to give a warm thanks to our sponsors and organizers for making this possible, the whole arrangement has been run very smoothly and I don’t have a single thing to complain about. So big props go to sponsors:

And let us not forget the horde of local Bolzanites (what’s the correct term for people living in Bolzano again?) who helped us around the city and helped us at the CTS (our hacking venue). They showed an extraordinary display of patience and hospitality helping the flock of geeks around Thanks guys and girls!

As I mentioned in the first paragraph we’ve been extraordinarily busy hacking. More or less skipping lunch and supper, hacking until we collapsed from fatigue. I was working fully in the engine team and I really really wanted us to have the new engine in a working and unit-tested state after the hackfest (so we can give you a development release during the next week hopefully). I had a moment of despair in the middle of the week where bugs just continued to pop up and we had a hard time coming up with the right architecture. With a relentless effort from the entire engine team we pulled it through in the end though, and I am really happy about our new design and API. Perhaps I am just a tiny bit biased, but I really feel that our new design feels “just right”

The UI team where very busy as well and I saw lots of very cool stuff being hacked out. Let’s hope that they choose to share some of the bling with us I know as a matter of fact that they made huge progress on the Gnome Activity Journal and I can’t wait to have a release of this ready on top of the new engine.

That’s all for now, I intend to follow this post up with a more technical post later. Ciao!

Hvis jeg var hård til at lave rust, havde vi nok taget to år til

Det havde vi ikke mod på så den blev skiftet ud til en:

Nærmere bestemt en Skoda Octavia Ambiente Combi 1.9 tdi i sort. Jeg skal se om jeg kan få nogle rigtige billeder op senere. Selvom designet er morfar er det en rigtig fin vogn og angiveligt med få fejl, så må vi se om det holder. Dieselmotoren trækker i hvert fald fint og foreløbig kører den omkring 21 km/l til og fra arbejde med let fod på speederen, så det er bestemt tilfredsstillende. Officielt står den til 19.2 km/l.

Efter denne investering holdt fjernsynet op med at du’:

B&O MX4000 - 21" årgang 2001 købt brugt i 2002 - RIP 2009

Da den nye bil har drænet kassen blev plan snedig at skaffe et nyt brugt billederørstv, da de kan fås for en slik. Istedet faldt jeg tilfældigvis over et brugt Philips 32PFL5522D:

til en meget fornuftig pris og så i kort afstand fra hjemmet. Det er egentlig et ok panel, bestemt ikke noget vidunder hvad angår billedekvalitet, men jeg har også set langt værre, så en god mellemvare. Største minus er manglen på MPEG4 understøttelse i den indbyggede DVB-T tuner, så vi klarer os uden de nye kanaler indtil videre.

It’s going to be great to catch up with the other developers and finally meet them face to face. It’s always an odd feeling meeting people in real life for the first time when you talked so much with them on various online mediums.

My personal aim for the hackfest is to do a lot of coding and really push Zeitgeist closer to production readiness. We done a lot of drafting and discussion lately, so we are really set to get the actual coding done now. I have a lot of travelling time before I get there so I expect to get a head start on the hacking

Huge props to the sponsors and organizers!

The problem was that with Fedora 12 I was no longer able to sync with my Palm Pilot using J-Pilot (and I wasn’t able to get any connection at all using pilot-xfer -l -p usb:). The bug report is #529259.

Since I was able to run the command as root I figured it had to be a permission issue. So I set about figuring out how udev works – and I found a really great document about writing udev rules. In particular the parts about udevinfo and udevtest where helpful.

Of course since I now knew a bit about udev I was ready to try writing a rule myself. What I came up with was a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/99-palmpilot.rules with the following content:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{product}=="Palm Handheld",MODE="0666"

And with that I am now able to sync my Palm Pilot again.

nurse in white by Reza Vaziri. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic.

Yesterday was the daughter’s first school dance. She has been looking forward to it for a long time, and I think she enjoyed it. However when she got home it was quite late, so she was tired and grumpy. Hopefully she will be more talkative after school today.

Today I also took her to the school nurse for a standard checkup. Her vision is fine, she can see colors, her hearing is fine, her motor skills are fine (both fine and gross), her height and weight are as they should be.

All in all everything about her is just the way it is supposed to be for a girl her age – which probably explains why I sometimes think she’s acting weird (if this is what having a 6-year-old is like I dread the teen years).

With the 2.30 module deadline passed it seems appropriate that we give a status report from the Zeitgeist team.

Since there have been a good deal of confusion about what Zeitgeist is, and isn’t, about I will try clear this up in this mail as well. I will try to stay low on the buzz word factor and leave some of the more exotic use cases out to avoid too much speculation.

Zeitgeist in 1 sentence

Zeitgeist is an event logging framework used to keep a log of user activity in a structured way.

What new services do we provide for UIs and applications

Zeitgeist provides a DBus API to query and update the activity log. Clients can query on time ranges, the acting applications, mimetypes, and Nepomuk classifications of the subjects and events. Sorting can be done on various criteria such as usage frequency and recent usage.

Concrete examples could be “Get me most used files of mimetypes x,y or z between the months January till March”

One can also query for documents that are used in context with others. As in “Which documents/websites are used with http://youtube.com within the last week”.

It is also possible for the applications to get notified when the log is updated. This is for instance used by the Parental Control application as well as the GNOME Activity Journal.

What Problems can we solve

The straight forward use case is as a GtkRecentManager on drugs. Zeitgeist removes the need for each application to parse a big XML file to retrieve recently used documents. It also removes the need to ever truncate your usage history, our database format is compact and can easily contain years of history. My estimation is that 1M log entries will take up about 80mb (give or take 20mb).

Open up for a range of query capabilities that GtkRecentManager doesn’t provide. Instead of simply storing the most recent usage event on a resource we store all usage events. This way we can not only answer when the most recent use case was, but also account for the entire usage history.

One use case that is already in the works is having the most used resources within the last 3 weeks for an app in the context menu in a window list. This is for example done in Docky.

Looking past just logging resource usage we will also start monitoring window and document focus times. This opens up to a whole new world of contextual relevancy that I wont elaborate on here. I am trying to stick to the more down to earth aspects of Zeitgeist.

Which processes/daemons do we run

Zeitgeist itself is a single DBus daemon. Where the picture gets a little more fuzzy is how we collect events. The long term goal is for apps to submit events, maybe hooking directly into GtkRecentManager, or in any case provide a very convenient way for apps to do this. Apps like Pidgin or Empathy would probably need some plugin for logging usage statistics of your contacts.

Right now we resort to less elegant ways of collecting events, like running a separate daemon harvesting Firefox’s history, GtkRecentlyUsed’s and other applications’ history (this daemon is also known as the datahub). The datahub is already on its way to becoming redundant now that a Firefox extension is in the works (and one for Epiphany already exist). It is our intent that the datahub should eventually go away as application support becomes widespread, but it
may eventually still prove useful for usage together with online service.

How resource hungry are we

Normal memory usage is around 5-10mb for the core Zeitgeist daemon. The datahub process (and I repeat; we want to get rid of this) is about 12mb.

What dependencies

Right now the daemon depends on SQLite, Python 2.5, python-gobject, python-xdg, and python-dbus. For the datahub we additionally need python-gconf and python-gtk2, but the datahub is optional.

Future plans

We have spend a lot of time planning and designing lately. When we have a stable reference implementation of our design in Python we plan to use that as a template for a C implementation. To be clear – the C version will be log-format and API compatible with the Python version.

We plan to make good use of the upcoming Zeitgeist hackfest and should have a 0.3 development release ready shortly after. If we are happy about the 0.3 series we will rename it to 0.9 and go for a 1.0.

Regarding Gnome 3.0 I think we are in a situation much like Owen Taylor recently outlined for Gnome Shell on the release-team mailing list. If we are desperate for Zeitgeist to be included in a Gnome 3.0 this March I believe it would be doable. It will require that we really bust our backs and cut some corners, but it’s doable. Personally (not speaking for the Zeitgeist team here) I am not sure it would be a very good idea for the same reasons Owen mention.

Relation to Tracker and Other Semantic Technologies

The very short version of this is that Tracker and Zeitgeist does not depend on each other in any way. The catch however is that either one becomes a whole lot more powerful when working together. To take an example consider tagging. Zeitgeist is just a log so we don’t manage your tags, we are however fully equipped to understand events concerning your tags. So you manage the tags via Tracker and track their usage in Zeitgeist. The combined power enables one to reason about what tags relate to resources in a temporal manner, even with resources that are not tagged.

In the Zeitgeist world we call an application like Tracker a Repository. Nepomuk or Desktop-CouchDB might work as other Repositories. If there is some confusion in this area it is understandable, since we do have some Repository-like features in our 0.2 series. This is however removed from the 0.3 series. It is still undecided if we want to define a minimal Repostiory DBus API for Zeitgeist and then ship a reference impl. of this API (which would run in a separate process). Any full fledged Repository would be able own the Repository service on the bus and Zeitgeist would not run its own. But again let me stress that a Repository is not needed for the Zeitgeist Log daemon to be useful.

Oscar og jeg hygger stadig Oscar vokser (det gør jeg forhåbentlig ikke, men jeg ved det ikke, for vores vægt er gået i stykker).

Den der rytme har jeg stadig ikke fundet, men jeg har fundet lidt tid, så i dag har jeg læst Svend Aukens politiske testamente, og så har jeg ryddet bordet, så der blev plads til et puslespil.

Det er kun 1000 brikker, men jeg har på fornemmelsen at det godt kan komme til at tage lang tid. I dag blev der tid til at blogge, selvom det blev kort, så må vi se hvornår der bliver tid til at se mere på puslespil.

I decided to make a change. I have been buying the various X-titles for the past 15 years, and I think I need a break. I will keep on buying X-Factor for some time because Peter David just keeps on writing great entertainment.

Unfortunately couchdb currently crashes in Fedora 12 Beta – see bug #530904. When that bug is resolved I am almost certain the following steps will work

1. sudo yum install mercurial python-twisted python-twitter couchdb

2. Install python-paisley. As this isn’t currently packaged by Fedora you can download a package I made: python-paisley-0.1-1.fc12.noarch.rpm

3. sudo service couchdb start

4. Add accounts to your $HOME/.raindrop file as specified in Raindrop/Install

5. hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/raindrop

6. cd raindrop/server/python

7. ./run-raindrop.py sync-messages --max-age=5days

8. Open http://localhost:5984/raindrop/inflow/index.html

Have fun.

church

I finally got around to filling out the correct form and mailing it in, and I am now no longer a member of the Danish church.

It turned out to be so easy, that I am quite embarrassed I didn’t do it sooner. I filled out the form, mailed it, and waited 4 days. Then a letter arrived informing me that I was no longer a member. Enclosed was a new certificate of baptism that had been updated to show that fact that I was no longer a member. I now have to return the old certificate of baptism (I actually had 3 lying around), and then it is case closed.

Thank you very much! Of course she did insist that we share them, but that was fine by me.

Oscar og jeg lever i vores egen lille boble. Mads er her også det meste af tiden. Det er et godt sted at være.

Nogle gange opdager jeg at der er en verden udenfor boblen. Det er ikke altid en positiv ting. Jeg tror at verden udenfor har forventninger til mig, men Mads siger at det skal jeg ikke bekymre mig om, for de fleste kan godt forstå hvis der ikke er overskud til ret meget andet end Oscar. Der er også folk som jeg holder af udenfor boblen, og når det ikke går godt med dem, så bekymrer jeg mig og så ønsker jeg at hjælpe, men det er der ikke ret meget overskud til, og jeg er ikke sikker på at jeg selv har så stor forståelse for mit manglende overskud. Det går heldigvis godt med de fleste af dem jeg holder af – også dem uden for boblen, og selvom det ikke går så godt, så er der heldigvis flere end lige mig der kan hjælpe.

Wow, I must admit that the latest news from JetBrains takes me quite by surprise! But what a sweet surprise it is!

Scala and Git support out of the box you say? This is more than welcome – now the next generation development experience is enabled out of the box.

I can’t help but wonder why they did it though? Growing pressure from Netbeans and Eclipse? I’ve always thought that Idea was the better of the three – thus expecting it to generate a fine revenue? Perhaps not - or perhaps JetBrains had a sudden fit of philanthropy? Or perhaps open source is just a superior development model. No matter the true motivation I am pretty hyped about this

Nej! Det spørger folk om for tiden. Har I fundet en rytme? Nej, men vi har det godt. Oscar er helt fantastisk og vi er glade og så er resten vel ikke så vigtigt?

Jeg synes det er svært at finde tid til ret meget andet end at amme og sove, men det går til gengæld ret godt. Og så passer det heller ikke helt, for vi har alligevel lige en aftale de fleste dage. En bedsteforælder eller nogle venner, der kommer på besøg eller en tur til høre-screening (den gik forresten både hurtigt og hyggeligt og Oscar kan høre) eller et besøg et andet sted.

Nogle opprioriterer deres blog, når de får børn, fordi de selvfølgelig gerne vil fortælle om junior. Jeg tror min blog bliver nedprioriteret, for jeg vil gerne bruge mine vågne timer på andre ting (først og fremmest junior).

Now my son is only 2 but he managed to play the game just fine. All the kid has to do is shake the wiimote or mash some buttons on it. Simple enough. The colors are bright, the characters are cute – what else can you ask for? The only real problem is that the game features English speech, so I have to be nearby to give the instructions.

The game consists of 6 minigames of which 2 are dancing games (which the son did not care for at all – but you can mash buttons and make stuff happen while the characters dance, so it was okay), 2 are “push any button and stuff happens” games. Which only leaves 2 actual games: One is a very simple game where you shake the wiimote to blow up bubbles (great fun!) and the other is a pattern matching game where you have to figure out which character matches a given silhouette.

So even though 500 points isn’t a lot it still seems a bit much for what is basically 4 very small minigames. I guess it all depends on the replay value (which I can’t comment on yet). However given that this is the only Wii game that targets really young kids I think it is a must-have for families with small children.

A minor feature release.

The parser has (once again) been updated to understand the new order list format. The downloader has been updated to handle the new date format used in the new releases list.

Now go download it.]]> Software http://sorenelle.blogspot.com/2009/10/engelsk-efterar-09.html <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_VzrvFg52w-4/Ss8EPEqrh-I/AAAAAAAAANA/TBonJ7-mIyk/s1600-h/yale+freshmen.jpg"><img style="MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px;WIDTH:320px;FLOAT:left;HEIGHT:213px;CURSOR:hand;" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5390531935983077346" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_VzrvFg52w-4/Ss8EPEqrh-I/AAAAAAAAANA/TBonJ7-mIyk/s320/yale+freshmen.jpg"/></a><span style="font-size:78%;">Yale Freshmen</span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Date taken: 1964</span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Photographer: Bill Eppridge</span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">cop. Life inc.</span><br /><br />I går afsluttede Lotte og jeg årets biblioteksintroduktion for de nye studerende på Engelsk.<br />Formen er fuldstændig identisk med den vi bruger på Nordisk; mens indholdet selvfølgelig er tilpasset behovene på Engelsk: Virginia Woolf er emnet for opgaverne, i stedet for Karen Blixen; og Lotte fokuserer på Literature Online, Early English Books og Cambridge Collection Online m.v. - istedet for tilsvarende, danske informationskilder.<br /><br />Det bliver dermed til 10 identiske 3-timers kurser på 8 arbejdsdage, hvor vi hører os selv (og hinanden) sige det samme, igen og igen. Alligevel kan vi godt holde humøret og stemningen oppe, netop fordi ingen hold opfører sig ens - og for dem er det jo gudskelov nyt stof.<br />Helt overordnet er der den forskel, at holdene på engelsk større - mellem 20-25 deltagere mod typisk en 15 stykker på Nordisk - der dermed kommer til at sidde meget intimt i mit lokale med 12 computere.<br />Samtidig kan vi også mærke, at de engelskstuderende kommer som led i deres semesterkursus i Academic Research and Methods. De er i forvejen mere sporet ind på metode og redskaber i arbejdet med litteratur og informationskilder. Og helt konkret løser de opgaverne hurtigere, og er bedre til at navigere rundt mellem de redskaber vi stiller til rådighed for dem.<br /><br />Ligesom med stort set alle andre studerende, har de dog store problemer med at finde en bestemt artikel, ved at søge den frem via det tidsskrift, den er publiceret i. Kan de ikke slå artiklens titel op i katalogen, mener de fleste, at "den har vi ikke". Uanset hvilket fag vi har givet biblioteksintroduktion til, så er den største udfordring, at få dem til at forstå, hvordan de skal finde frem til artikler i (e-)tidsskrifterne. Forhåbentlig er vores opgaver med til at klargøre det for dem; men der er ingen tvivl om, at det for mange stadig er et mysterium.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2251158843612013474-4630098578286884582?l=sorenelle.blogspot.com'/></div> Søren Elle tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2251158843612013474.post-4630098578286884582 Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:35:00 -0700 http://sorenelle.blogspot.com/2009/10/nordisk-efterar-09.html <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_VzrvFg52w-4/SszfFCeKQgI/AAAAAAAAAMw/xffmcAH9cu4/s1600-h/freshman.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389928131711353346" style="FLOAT:right;MARGIN:0px 0px 10px 10px;WIDTH:266px;CURSOR:hand;HEIGHT:320px;" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_VzrvFg52w-4/SszfFCeKQgI/AAAAAAAAAMw/xffmcAH9cu4/s320/freshman.jpg" border="0"/></a><span style="font-size:78%;">Tom Peterson, a freshman at University of Michigan's Medical School, posing beside pile of his first year's textbooks.<br />Location: Ann Arbor, MI, US<br />Date taken: 1950<br />Photographer: Alfred Eisenstaedt</span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">© Time Inc.</span><br /><br />Sidste uge var Nordisk Uge for Lotte og mig.<br />De godt 100 nye studerende på Nordisk har vi til biblioteksintroduktion i et tre timers forløb, fordelt på 6 hold - i alt 18 timer over 4 dage.<br /><br />Planlægning og afvikling af denne undervisning går (næsten) efter en snor, i samarbejdet med Henrik fra Nordisk, der står for deres studieintroducerende forløb.<br /><br />Indholdet har været næsten det samme i de sidste 5 år, så der sniger sig efterhånden en anelse rutine ind i vores afvikling af de tre timer: Første time en kort intro til bibliotekerne, efterfulgt af øvelser i katalogen. Anden time består af opsamling på deres opgaver; en kort gennemgang af bibliotek.dk, samt Lottes gennemgang af databaselisten, og udvalgte ressourcer på den. Tredie time består af en rundtur på SB - herunder bogtårnet.<br /><br />Også i år må vi dog konstatere, at vi begge tror på det vi gør (selvom det kunne være fristende at lave om...). Vi synes vi får samlet op på alle deres tvivlsspørgsmål, og får givet dem et overblik over bibliotekets muligheder. Så med mindre en evaluering fra de studerende skulle give os et andet indtryk, så bliver det nok på samme måde igen næste år.<br /><br />I vores undervisning tager vi udgangspunkt i Karen Blixens <em>Den udødelige historie</em>, efter aftale med faget. Det viste sig dog undervejs, at den ikke længere var "den røde tråd" i resten af det studieintroducerende forløb. Vi gik derfor til sidst over til i stedet at spørge holdet om, hvad de p.t. beskæftigede sig med - for så at tage udgangspunkt i det.<br />Hvor de tilsyneladende er til stede og interesserede, i Lottes gennemgang af Bibliografi over Dansk Litteratur med eksempel i Karen Blixen; så sker der alligevel ting og sager, når emnet i stedet er lige netop den novelle de lige nu skal analysere (<em>Hosekræmmeren</em>) - det kunne bringe dem helt ud på kanten af stolen...<br /><br />I øvrigt måtte Lotte flere gange melde forfald i år, på grund af møder. Det gav plads til gæsteoptrædener af både Irene og Gitte fra Statsbiblioteket. Det var rigtig hyggeligt at prøve, og en anledning til at se på undervisningen med nye briller.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2251158843612013474-6833712404720732291?l=sorenelle.blogspot.com'/></div> Søren Elle tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2251158843612013474.post-6833712404720732291 Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:28:00 -0700 http://sorenelle.blogspot.com/2009/10/spansk-efterar-09.html <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_VzrvFg52w-4/SszUPwCGcII/AAAAAAAAAMo/P6Bb9HIMPBw/s1600-h/spanish+students.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389916221112479874" style="FLOAT:left;MARGIN:0px 10px 10px 0px;WIDTH:318px;CURSOR:hand;HEIGHT:320px;" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_VzrvFg52w-4/SszUPwCGcII/AAAAAAAAAMo/P6Bb9HIMPBw/s320/spanish+students.jpg" border="0"/></a><span style="font-size:78%;">The professor teaching 52 students.<br />Location: Arganda, Spain<br />Date taken: December 1945<br />Photographer: George Rodger<br />© Time Inc.</span><br /><br />Som de tidligere år, har de nye spanskstuderende haft 2 gange 2 timers undervisning i litteratursøgning under deres studieintroducerende forløb.<br /><br />Første undervisningsgang indeholder den - efterhånden traditionelle - introduktion til bibliotekerne og katalogen. Denne undervisning var også i år varetaget af Zbigniew på bedste vis.<br /><br />I hvert fald dukkede de alle op til anden undervisningsgang sidste fredag, og de så endda forventningsfulde ud...<br />Anden omgang på biblioteket har til hensigt, at bidrage til at knytte det studieintroducerende forløb tæt sammen med deres sideløbende fagkursus i Latinamerikas historie efter 1800. Jeg har derfor hvert år en dialog med Lene fra Spansk, om hvilke elementer, der skal indgå i undervisningen.<br /><br />I princippet skulle der ikke være nogen særlig afvigelse fra sidste års indhold; men jeg besluttede mig nu alligevel at lave lidt ændringer. Dels ville jeg have lidt mere "luft" i forhold til sidste års program; og dels var min erfaring dengang, at i hvert fald nogen ikke havde fået tilstrækkelig struktur på informationssøgningen. Jeg valgte derfor at nedprioritere min gennemgang af forskellige søgestrategier; og droppe mit show om vurdering af troværdighed ved netsteder - og i stedet lade de vigtige pointer indgå i en gennemgang af opslagsværker.<br /><br />Første time startede med en kort opsummering af hvad de havde lært sidst, og en oversigt over hvad jeg ønskede de skulle lære denne gang.<br />Dernæst gjorde jeg en del ud af at bibringe dem den struktur at en litteratursøgning starter med 1) Overblik, terminologi og forslag til kernelitteratur fra opslagsværker; fortsætter med 2) Søgning i relevante, bibliografiske databaser; for at afsluttes med 3) Fremskaffelse af relevant litteratur ved at bruge katalogerne.<br />Til sidst viste jeg dem - meget omhyggeligt - hvor de kan finde alle disse baser og opslagsværker: Via Sprogbibliotekets fagside, og via Statsbibliotekets databaseliste.<br /><br />Den sidste del af timen viste jeg dem, hvordan man overordnet kan søge litteratur i databaser. Hovedvægten er på basen MLA (med eksempel i Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Cien anos de Soledad); men med en kort afstikker til JStor (med eksempel i Populisme i Venezuela).<br />Min vægtning er dels på at anvende emneordene til mere præcis søgning, og dels på spørgsmålet om hvordan man skaffer de ønskede artikler.<br /><br />Anden time starter med at de studerende får 5 minutter til at komme op med forslag til, hvor man hurtigt kan skaffe information - og forslag til videre læsning - om begrebet "modernismo".<br />Deres input (som oftest Google og Wikipedia...) bruger jeg derefter som oplæg til en fælles diskussion af validering og kvalitetsvurdering af informationskilder; samt en fremvisning af nogle af de opslagsværker, som vi stiller til rådighed via databaselisten.<br /><br />Jeg TROR de fik et fornuftigt udbytte af gennemgangen af databaser. Til gengæld er jeg temmelig sikker på at udbyttet af gennemgangen af opslagsværkerne er til stede. Netop fordi jeg havde tid nok, havde jeg også tid til at inddrage deres aktuelle problemer, og anvise hvilke opslagsværker, der kunne hjælpe dem her og nu. DET gav pote.<br /><br />Jeg havde det faktisk også hyggeligt. De to hold, de studerende var opdelt i, var af meget ulige størrelse. Før frokost havde jeg et hold på 16 studerende; mens holdet efter frokost var på bare 4 personer. Det gjorde at jeg oplevede begge undervisningsgange som helt nye, og havde fornøjelsen af fordelene ved begge holdstørrelser: Masser af interaktion internt med et stort hold; og en uformel og intim stemning med det lille hold.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2251158843612013474-8001812693128074121?l=sorenelle.blogspot.com'/></div> Søren Elle tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2251158843612013474.post-8001812693128074121 Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:46:00 -0700 http://mona-wwwbloggercom.blogspot.com/2009/10/koncertprogrammer.html <div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_XRo-TRY-hcE/Svbg7HcRJ5I/AAAAAAAACBk/4KjDSehXkZI/s1600-h/4060257723_cdffd9ffc44.jpg" style="margin-left:1em;margin-right:1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_XRo-TRY-hcE/Svbg7HcRJ5I/AAAAAAAACBk/4KjDSehXkZI/s400/4060257723_cdffd9ffc44.jpg"/></a><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://mona-wwwbloggercom.blogspot.com/2009/11/koncertprogrammer-billeder_08.html">Se flere billeder</a><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://mona-wwwbloggercom.blogspot.com/2009/11/koncertprogrammer-billeder_08.html"></a><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><br /></div>I Statsbibliotekets Arkiv findes en uregistreret samling af danske koncertprogrammer.<br /><br /><strong>Se et udvalg af koncertprogrammer i samlingen herunder:</strong><br /><br /><strong>Programmer fra koncertsale:</strong><br /><br />Hornung &amp; Møllers sal. Sæson 1914/15 – 1961/62.<br /><br />Kasinos Koncertsal. Sæson 1914/15 – 1932/33.<br /><br />Odd Fellow Palæets store sal. Sæson 1899/1900 – 1970/71.<br /><br />Palæ-Koncerter (Odd Fellow Palæets store sal). Sæson 1895/96 – 1930/31.<br /><br />Odd Fellow Palæets mindre sal. Sæson 1914/15 – 1969/70.<br /><br />Statsradiofoniens Koncertsal. Aften-folkekoncerter 1942- 1962.<br /><br />Statsradiofoniens Koncertsal. Folkekoncerter 1933 – 1950.<br /><br />Statsradiofoniens Koncertsal. Torsdagskoncerter 1933- 1983.<br /><br />Statsradiofoniens Koncertsal. Fest- og Søndagskoncerter 1927 – 1975.<br /><br />Tivolis Koncertsal 1902 – 1983.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Programmer fra kirkekoncerter:</strong><br /><br />Domkirken - Vor Frue Kirke, København 1845 – 1982.<br /><br />Sct. Nikolaj Kirkesal, København 1922 – 1973.<br /><br />Vor Frelsers Kirke, København 1914 – 1970.<br /><br />Aarhus Domkirke 1908 – 1981.<br /><br />Sct. Lukas Kirke, Århus 1927 – 1975.<br /><br />Sct. Mortens Kirke, Randers 1914 – 1982.<br /><br />Thisted Kirke 1915 – 1982.<br /><br />Viborg Domkirke 1914 – 1982.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Programmer fra musikforeningskoncerter:</strong><br /><br />Det Kgl. Kapel 1915 – 1979.<br /><br />Det unge Tonekunstnerselskab 1921 – 1980.<br /><br />Bornholms Musikforening 1902 – 1961.<br /><br />Faaborg Musikforening 1903 – 1981.<br /><br />Odense Byorkester / Odense Symfoniorkester 1915 – 1972.<br /><br />Odense Musikforening 1878 – 1972.<br /><br />Randers Philharmoniske Selskab 1945 – 1979.<br /><br />Musiksamfundet Brage, Randers 1897 – 1968.<br /><br />Silkeborg Musikforening 1902 – 1961.<br /><br />Vejle Musikforening 1893 – 1958.<br /><br />Aalborg By-Orkester / Nordjysk Symfoniorkester 1943 – 1975.<br /><br />Filharmonisk Selskab, Ålborg 1943 – 1976.<br /><br />Aarhus By-Orkester / Jydsk symfonisk Orkester 1938 – 1980.<br /><br />Aarhus By-Orkester / Jydsk symfonisk Orkester. Sommerkoncerter 1948 – 1980.<br /><br />Aarhus Musikforening 1858 – 1952.<br /><br />Aarhus Philharmoniske Selskab 1920 – 1973.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Programmer fra sangforeningskoncerter:</strong><br /><br />Akademisk Orkester og Kor 1902 – 1972.<br /><br />Cæcilia-Foreningen 1863 – 1947.<br /><br />Herrekoret Bel Canto 1908 – 1958.<br /><br />Københavns Drengekor 1933 – 1960.<br /><br />Sangforeningen Brage, København 1893 – 1948.<br /><br />Studenter-Sangforeningen 1840 – 1971. <br /><br />Studenter-Sangforeningen 1854-1921. Programmer samlet af Grundtvig.<br /><br /><br />Relateret indhold<br /><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://mona-wwwbloggercom.blogspot.com/2008/10/arkivet.html">Arkivet</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8946464739530150843-4944660298371504831?l=mona-wwwbloggercom.blogspot.com'/></div> Mona tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8946464739530150843.post-4944660298371504831 Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:34:00 -0700 http://bumlebi.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/oscar-er-kommet-hjem/ Oscar blev født den 1/10-09 kl. 05.14; 3800 gram og 53 cm lang. Han kom hjem i dag Han har ikke fået sin egen hjemmeside endnu, men han er blevet fotograferet: <img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=bumlebi.wordpress.com&blog=5013768&post=285&subd=bumlebi&ref=&feed=1"/> http://bumlebi.wordpress.com/?p=285 Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:22:25 -0700

Oscar blev født den 1/10-09 kl. 05.14; 3800 gram og 53 cm lang. Han kom hjem i dag Han har ikke fået sin egen hjemmeside endnu, men han er blevet fotograferet:

Not so long ago Alessio Bolognino approached me with a patch adding a preliminary spatial window switching to WinWrangler, like Thomas blogged about a while ago in the Metacity blog. Before we move on let me quickly clarify that by “spatial window switching” I mean that you switch windows not by focus-order, but by selecting neighbouring windows in the directions up, down, left, or right. This makes good sense in a tiled window setup (like WinWrangler provides for any EWMH compliant WM).

The problems start to arise when you begin thinking about just how to select the expected neighbour window. The problem is easily solved if the windows are tiled in a perfect grid. Here the first problem lies – even though WinWrangler has manually constructed the window grid it is not guaranteed to be perfectly aligned. A skew grid can happen if the WM respects the size increment step hints from the apps. Concretely; Gnome Terminal likes to increment its size in steps corresponding to the current character size. Metacity respects these hints – Compiz doesn’t.

The initial approach used edge-detection of the windows, which led to some unexpected behavior in the skew grid case, as well as relying on some very strict logic to select the neighbour window. Strict logic maps surprisingly bad to human perception – surprisingly, yes; you think it maps bad, but in fact it maps really bad.

I tried porting the window selection to something which was based on the windows’ centers of gravity instead of edge detection. This worked a lot better, but now I turned my testing towards a normal non-tiled session. Consider the setup below:

Window 1 has focus and I hit Left

Undoubtedly this is very subjective, but I would expect window 2 to get the focus. But as you can tell the red X (center of gravity) in 1 is closer to the X in 3 than it is to the X in 2. Meaning that my algorithm would select window 3 as the neighbour. Bummer.

While walking the dog I was thinking about hideously complicated algorithms to always “do what I think”. It was then I had one of those EUREKA moments. Just change the geometry!

This needs some explanation. You see I am really a Math major in Topology. I think that normal flat Euclidian geometry is for sissies. When measuring distances in a flat plane the distance between points (x1, y1) and (x2, y2) is found as we all learn in kindergarten:

Distance between two points in Euclidian geometry

But what if the points do not lie in a flat plane? Maybe we stretch the plane like a rubber membrane so the points lie on a curved surface:

Windows' centers of gravity on a curved surface

In this case the distance down to point 3 might actually be longer because the plane has been stretched. On such a plane differences in the Y-axis will yield a relatively bigger distance than it would in Euclidian space. The distance formular could now look like:

Non-Euclidian distance function, strecthing the plane in the Y-axis

As it turns out this actually selects the expected neighbour – “expected” for my deranged mind at least

Needless to say we need to stretch the plane in the X-axis when we want to select windows up or down from the current active one. This is left as an exercise for the eager reader.

I really like this solution. It was a very simple code change to get it working and I got to go all nostalgic on my Topology past You can try it out from WinWrangler trunk (bzr branch lp:winwrangler) – it requires GtkHotkey 0.2.* it will not compile with GtkHotkey from trunk. You trigger the switching with the hotkey <Control><Super>Up|Down|Left|Right.

Happy window switching!

As part of our obligation to preserve our online cultural heritage, Statsbiblioteket and Det Kongelige Bibliotek in Denmark continuously harvest the danish web (the *.dk-domains), digitize public danish television, rip all danish-produced music and generally just collect whatever we can get our hands on. The terabytes add up (120TB for the web pages so far, more for television, radio and so on) and the machines are happily harvesting, ripping and wolfing down the bytes into semi-safe storage (2 geographically and architecturally different setups, checksummed, re-checksummed etc.). All fine and dandy.

Except that access to most of the material is rather limited and that search is … well, pretty much non-existing.

Such things tend to change over time, preluded by meetings, committees, deals and whatnot. As technicians, we are normally not directly involved in all the politics surrounding this, but in order to get some concrete arguments, we were asked to try and index some of the harvested web material and do a search demo, where web material was presented together with our normal material (books, cds, articles et al).

The harvested web material is stored in ARC-files, so the obvious choice for a quick test was NutchWAX. Setup was easy, some 100 million documents was indexed (about 2% of the harvested web material) and searches were sub-second on a modest machine. A great success in terms of answering the “is it even feasible to do this?“-question.

The “but does it makes sense to do integrated search for such different data sources as web and library books?“-question could not be answered by this, so naturally we had to hack something together with Summa, our precious hammer. Due to other highly-prioritized assignments, we only had about a week to get it to work, so corners were cut where possible. Using the ARC-reader from Heritrix and the Tika-toolkit for analyzing the wealth of different data, the aptly named Arctika was born. Arctika handled the web stuff and an aggregator handled the integration with our standard library index.

It could use a lot more work, but it worked surprisingly well for a quick hack. We were able to demonstrate everything we wanted: The integrated search made sense, the ranking generally pulled the good stuff to the top (admittedly, tweaking the ranking for different sources would surely be needed for a real application) and the faceting system clearly helped give an overview of material types & sources and provided an easy means to do temporal navigation in the search-result: Limiting searches to a specific period of time is quite usable for investigating the media handling of major events.

So what’s the dark part? Well, legislation. As always. That and money. Harvested web material is sensible, only legally accessible for the selected few professors. On top of that, showing snippets from harvested web pages seems – at the moment – to require compensating the content owners, according to EU-law. Opening up for all the material at once will probably not happen in the foreseeable future.

Happily we don’t need to do everything at once. If we limit the public accessible index to websites from the government and companies, it should be legal to show the search-results and the stored versions (hello continuity). Add the recorded television and radio to the mix, pour in scanned newspapers, integrate with old-school books and presto, we have something great. Danish culture at our fingertips, past and present.

Dreaming, I know. But on the technical level, we just need the green light from the bigwigs to make this happen.

A screenshot, you say? Why, yes, of course. We present this super-cool bling bling interface with a stupendously large amount of interesting information to you. Slightly marred by the need to sensor out some sensible information and the fact that indexing time was capped at half a day to make the deadline.

Sample search in Arctika

I år har vi en lille terrasse-køkkenhave. Det er gået ret godt.

Terrasse-køkkenhave 1

Terrasse-køkkenhave 2

Lille æbletræ

Our fine usability guys hard at work.

If I have 4 windows on a workspace with a Gnome Terminal being the active window and activate the 2/3 Layout it looks like this:

Warning: The 2/3 layout is quite addictive – I have never been into the tiling-window-manager-deal, but Metacity+WinWrangler really hits the spot for me

You activate the 2/3 Layout by pressing <Control><Super>3.

WinWrangler 0.2.3

I just pushed WinWrangler 0.2.3 online with the new hotness enabled – get it before the cool kids at launchpad.net/winwrangler/0.2/0.2.3

Secret tip

If you desperately want to change the hotkeys of WinWrangler you don’t need to recompile it – simply edit ~/.config/hotkeys/winwrangler.hotkeys

Vi inviterede gæster på vores “næsten 2-års-dag” fordi vi tænkte at vores 2-års-dag lå lidt for tæt på min termin, og vi havde en rigtig hyggelig dag.

I går var det så faktisk 2 år siden vi blev gift, og vi er tæt på termin, men jeg havde det strålende, så vi brugte dagen til at spille vores nye wii-spil “Little Kings Story”, som vi fik til vores “næsten 2-års-dag”, og så tog vi i biografen og så “Inglourious Basterds” og ud at spise på “Rick’s”. Gavekortet til middagen var også en næsten 2-års-dags-gave. Alt i alt 3 rigtigt gode oplevelser, som kan anbefales.

Det kan tage knap 5 måneder at lægge et puslespil på 9000 brikker. Det tager ca. 3 minutter at skille det ad igen…

Jigsaw 9120 Pieces Tidy Up 1

Jigsaw 9120 Pieces Tidy Up 2

Jeg har forresten været på orlov de sidste 4 uger, og så skulle man tro der var tid til en masse spændende blog-indlæg, men åbenbart ikke. Så dagens indlæg får lige et par anbefalinger med: se filmen “Slumdog Millionaire” og læs bøgerne “The Gargoyle” af Andrew Davidson og “Trækopfuglens Krønike” af Haruki Murakami!

Det smarte ved den nye udgave i forhold til den jeg har er, udover en farveskærm med touch, at man kan tilslutte sin USB-disk med musik direkte til den nye Squeezebox. Det betyder at farvel til den PC jeg har kørende 24/7 som musikserver. Normalt plejer jeg at vente til hypen er ovre og hente den her slags gadgets på brugtmarkedet, men et farvel til dedikeret musikserver er så stor en fordel, at jeg regner med at bestille den her boks så snart den lander i DK. Vejledende pris er ca. 2300kr.

For lige at spille for galleriet, så har de inkluderet en SD kort læser, så man kan bruge billeder direkte fra sit digicam som pauseskærm. Virker lidt overflødigt, da man også kan smide dem på USB-disken som man tilkobler, men hva’ det er da en nice to have feature og har sikkert ikke kostet mange dollars at få med. Så mangler jeg bare et SD-kort på 100-200gb, så kan jeg helt undvære den eksterne USB-disk og spare den sidste sjat strøm væk.

Hvis der er nogen der om kort tid mangler en passiv kølet PC med indbygget UPS - call me.

Inspired by the new GtkHotkey release I also made a new release of WinWrangler (olde screencast), 0.2.2, fixing the bug that made WW more or less useless under Compiz.

Rumours: The word on the street has it that there might, or might not, be some work going on to add a Win32 backend to GtkHotkey. I didn’t tell you!

A quick Googling defines Excursion as: “a journey taken for pleasure”. Considering what I am about to blog about the title of this blog post might be a bit misleading, but you gotta give me one for the rhyme

As you might or might not know, doing recursion in Java is simply a bad thing. This is mainly because Java can’t do tail recursion. You can use recursion in Java if you are absolutely positive that you are only going to do a very limited number of recursive calls. If you could possibly go over 100 calls you should consider making it a for or while loop instead, if the Java runtime performs somewhere around 1000 recursive calls you will get a StackOverflowError. This is really bad – you see if you read the StackOverflowError docs you will see that it is a subclass of VirtualMachineError. The docs for VirtualMachineError says:

Thrown to indicate that the Java Virtual Machine is broken or has run out of resources necessary for it to continue operating

This means that you have pretty much no choice but to log a fatal error and abort the JVM.

There are ways for making the recursion limit of the JVM bigger by setting some system properties, but that is really just a band aid and I would advise against using them.

The Real Life Case: XML Parsing

Java 6 ships with a new XML parsing library, the core class of which being XMLStreamReader (also known as the “push parser”). I must say that it is quite a nice library and a huge improvement over SAX parsing, while still keeping a blazing performance. We use it in Summa and has been very happy with it.

The problem came when we started indexing documents like this one: java-recursion-lection-1.xml. You can definitely expect to find similar structures out in the wild (as we have seen here at work). The basic document structure is as follows:

<mydocument> <mytag> SOME TEXT BLOCK </mytag>
</mydocument>

If we just want to extract the text block it would be annoying with a standard SAX parser because a SAX parser splits up characters segments into arbitrary chunks and you have to collect them into one string yourself. The push parser API makes this a lot easier because it defines the property XMLInputFactory.IS_COALESCING which, when set, requires the parser to collect all the text chunks into one string. So extracting the raw text contents is easy peasy lemon squeezy:

import javax.xml.stream.XMLInputFactory;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamReader;
import javax.xml.stream.events.XMLEvent;
import java.io.FileReader; /** * A small excursion in Java recursion. */
public class JavaRecursionLecture1 { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { XMLInputFactory inputFactory = XMLInputFactory.newInstance(); inputFactory.setProperty(XMLInputFactory.IS_COALESCING, Boolean.TRUE); XMLStreamReader reader = inputFactory.createXMLStreamReader( new FileReader("/home/mke/Documents/java-recursion-lection-1.xml")); parse(reader); } public static void parse(XMLStreamReader reader) throws Exception { while (reader.hasNext()) { int event = reader.getEventType(); switch (event) { case XMLEvent.START_DOCUMENT : System.out.println("Document start"); break; case XMLEvent.START_ELEMENT : System.out.println("Element: " + reader.getLocalName() ); break; case XMLStreamReader.CHARACTERS : // Warning: Here be StackOverflowErrors System.out.println("Char data:\n" + reader.getText()); break; } reader.next(); } }
}

Except that this will throw a StackOverflowError if you run it on the file I linked you to. “What is up with that, there is no recursion here!” – you ask?

The problem here is that XMLStreamReader is highly recursive underneath the hood. My file contains lots of XML entities and the parser will make a recursive call each time a new entity is found in the stream. Looking at the heart of the implementation you will see that the author(s) actually where very minute about making sure that all recursive calls where tail calls. This would have been very robust had the Java runtime supported tail recursion – alas.

There are two ways to work around this misfeature. The first one is to don’t set the IS_COALESCING property, and then change the switch statement to something like this, using reader.getElementText() instead:

switch (event) { case XMLEvent.START_DOCUMENT : System.out.println("Document start"); break; case XMLEvent.START_ELEMENT : System.out.println("Element: " + reader.getLocalName() ); if ("mytag".equals(reader.getLocalName())) { System.out.println(reader.getElementText()); } break; case XMLStreamReader.CHARACTERS : // Warning: Here be StackOverflowErrors System.out.println("Char data:\n" + reader.getText()); break; }

This is not particularly elegant since it hard codes our <mytag> element. A more generic way is to provide your own coalescing implementation of getText():

/** * Use this method in response to XMLEvent.CHARACTERS event instead of * XMLStreamReader.getElementText() on a XMLEvent.START_ELEMENT. The former * approach will * @param reader the XMLStreamReader to pull character data out of, * the reader is expected to be in a XMLEvent.CHARACTERS state * @return A string containing the full character data as one string * @throws Exception if the Jupiter aligns with Mars */ public static String getCoalescedText(XMLStreamReader reader) throws XMLStreamException { StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(); char[] buf = new char[1024]; while (reader.getEventType() == XMLEvent.CHARACTERS) { int offset = 0; int len; while (true) { len = reader.getTextCharacters(offset, buf, 0, buf.length); if (len != 0) builder.append(buf, 0, len); if (len < buf.length) break; } reader.next(); } return builder.toString();

And then in the switch branch checking on character events do:

 case XMLStreamReader.CHARACTERS : // Warning: If you expect a StackOverflowError here, you are // going to wait a long while! System.out.println("Character data:\n" + getCoalescedText(reader)); break;

Anyway – this became a long an code-full post. All I really wanted to say was Avoid recursion in Java unless you know exactly what you are doing.

Lately, like the past few months, I’ve been ever increasingly annoyed with application windows of all kinds. Why is it that almost all applications pops up tonnes of small windows for all kinds of odd purposes? Talking about elegance I am pretty sure that we could provide a more elegant solution without a new window popping up in 95% of the cases.

For instance I really like the new GtkInfoBar as seen in GEdit below, one less dialog right there:

I also think that Apple has been ingenious with their Sheet Windows:

For those unfamiliar with sheet windows they roll out from the top of your window and acts as document- or application modal dialogs, but contrary to dialogs they are not full fledged windows, but appear as “attached” to the application.

I am not saying that we should blindly copy the competition, but I really think that we could give our users a really smooth ride if we don’t pop up new windows unless we absolutely have to.

Window Manager?

I actually think that most modern window managers do a respectable job, but when apps start throwing random windows all over the screen there’s really not much they can do to make it look pretty. But why do the apps create all these windows that I am talking about then? Well, I don’t think they have ever had much of a choice. With the inclusion of GtkInfoBar in Gtk+ this has become a bit better, but we can take it so much further.

Example

Let me stress that I am not picking on Synaptic in particular, it is just a convenient example. In general I like Synaptic a lot. Try counting the number of windows spawned when installing a new package. Counting the root password dialog and a single “find” action into the entire process I counted 7 windows. I can think of no reason (other than toolkit constraints) that there would ever be more than 1 window needed.

The One Window App

I think it would be cool to try and constrain applications to only one window (with the obvious exceptions like file managers etc.). Preference- , warning-, and Utility dialogs could all be integrated into the main window in some manner.

As a first stab one could convert all (modal) dialogs to borderless overlay windows and dim out the background. These overlay windows should be immovable and stick to the parent window when it is moved, much like the sheet windows mentioned above. This might even be testable by hacking up GtkDialog.

More advanced window-internalling techniques such as rollouts and morphing window layouts would likely require bigger changes in the applications.

I am on Crack

Yeah, I know that this is all a pipe dream, and that there are lots of pitfalls and stuff I haven’t considered. All these pesky windows are just getting to my nerves!

I hope that there are at least someone out there who agrees with me on this whole deal… Somebody..?

… anybody?

Plus/Minus 1: Jeg skrev totalt antal dage var 143, men vi blev færdige med puslespillet i onsdags, dag 143 kl. 18.46 (ca), og jeg kan ikke huske hvornår på dag 0 vi startede, så vi må hellere tælle både den første og den sidste dag med, altså total: 144 dage.

Billede:

Big World Map 1611 Jigsaw; 9120 Pieces

Vi tænker at vi skal prøve at flytte puslespillet, eller altså pladen med puslespillet ned på gulvet, så vi måske kan få et bedre billede. Hm, og jeg tænker at det skal være snart, for jeg skal jo bruge pladsen til det næste puslespil…

This had me pretty much bursting with energy for the remainder of the work day. I spent it playing around with CouchDB and Scala. Both wicked (like wicked) good examples of quality software design where you can just tell that a huge deal of thinking was spend by a lot of bright people. Can’t wait to continue my adventures here.

While driving home the sun was shining and I had the windows down and the car stereo blasting No Diggity by Blackstreet, the newly purchased Wii Sports Resort safely on the passenger seat, and was simply having a blast. I wore the T-Shirt my wife gave me for my thirtieth. It says Rockstar Programmer

Puslespillet er nu færdigt, og der var slet ikke blevet nogen brikker væk. Tak for hjælpen til vores gæster. Desværre Toke, ikke noget live webcam feed. Billederne kommer en af de næste dage!

Fin lille maskine med inbygget UPS i form af 4 AAA-batterier. Blæseren man kan se i siden har jeg koblet fra, så den er lydløs. Den er specificeret til at kører et rum som er max en 50-60 grader, så mon ikke det går. Beklager at kameraet havde en dårlig dag og det gælder vist alle billederne i dette post.

Windows som var på Dell’en fra den blev købt, blev nu erstattet med en FreeNAS løsning med Squeezecenter (hjulpet på vej af SlimNAS). FreeNAS er som bygget til det VIA board, da det kræver meget lidt maskinkraft. Eneste problem er, at det er langt fra plug&play inden man har det hele op at køre. Jeg rendte ind i alle mulige problemstillinger omkring netværk, filformater og scripts, som ikke gør som de skal, hjemmekogning af brugbare bootbare USB sticks etc. Jeg skal spare jer for det hardcore tekniske og blot nævne, at det hele endte godt.

Så meget gejl skal der åbenbart til for at få det her til at køre. Div. laptops med Windows og Linux, den nye maskine med skærm og tastetur tilkoblet, en USB-pen til FreeNas systemet og nogle store USB-disks til file swapping imens det nye filsystem rulles ind, et par børnestole samt en kagetallerken med krummer - and off you go!

Et lidt skarpere men stadig crappy billede præ fil-jongleringen.

Jeg har nu musiksystemet op at køre på noget “affaldshardware” og har dermed fået frigjort en Dell bærbar - lækkert. Det performer overraskende godt på trods af, at hardwaren er meget begrænset, FreeNas kører fra en USB stick (USB 1.0) og musiksamlingen er lige nu koblet til igennem en ekstern USB disk ligeledes via USB 1.0. Indtil videre ingen hakker i musikken med to afspilningsklienter. Selv WEBGUI-adgangen til konfiguration af Squeezecenter svarer også tåleligt.

Nogen der mangler en Dell D620 bærbar - call me.

Yesterday I had the pleasure to announce on the mailing lists that Summa has reached the first milestone in migrating to SourceForge, and here follows the blog post

From now on all Summa code is hosted and developed in the “summa” project on SourceForge now, in addition all bugs have been migrated from our old GForge solution to a Trac instance hosted via the cool new “hosted apps” functionality on SourceForge.

We will also move the mailing lists over in the near future. The fate of the Summa wiki is still left unclear.

I must be frank and admit that I have long felt that SourceForge was in a bit of a standstill applying only visual refreshes every now and then, and never fixing the real issues with the site. However the new Hosted Apps approach is simply sweet! There is a huge list of popular open source products you can choose to run on your site as a hosted apps (see an incomplete list here). For instance; some may surprised to know that popular version control systems such as Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar is supported as well as Subversion. Right now we run only a Trac issue tracker and a Subversion repository.

On a personal note I must still admit that my heart lies with the recently open sourced Launchpad, despite the recent kick-assiness from the SF team.

I went to the Ticer Summer School 2009 on Friday 31st of August to to talk about Summa as part of a panel on Integrated Search alongside Jørgen Madsen (Primo), David Lindahl (eXtensible Catalog), and Benoît Pauwels (VuFind).

Tilburg University Campus

Thomas Place made the introduction explaining the basic concepts of Integrated Search. Afterwards we each presented our systems followed by a short question and answer session. I think it was during these presentations that people realized how similar most of the systems actually were.

After a coffee break each of us once again got up to do a second presentation – this time focusing more on a specific feature.

• Jørgen Madsen: Joining Catalogues – Clean-up and Deduplication
• David Lindahl: Metadata Handling and FRBR
• Mads Villadsen: Facetting and Clustering
• Benoît Pauwels: Web 2.0 Features of Integrated Search

Each presentation was once again followed by a longer question and answer session.

My slides from both of theses can be found on the Presentations page on the Summa Wiki.

The day concluded with a panel discussion based on questions from the audience. All during the day the people from the audience had been very good at asking relevant questions, and I think they really managed to get to the core of the issues regarding usability, faceted searching, and integrated search itself.

This is the first time I have been part of a panel in this way, and also the first time I have been at a Ticer Summer School – and I found both things to be a really great experience. I have never been to anything that has been as well organized as this, and all the people were very interested and engaged in the discussions. The other panel members were well prepared, open for discussion, and willing to talk freely about any issues. I can only hope that I was in the same league as them.

All in all I had a really nice time, and if I ever get the chance to do something similar again I would be very interested.

Som eksempel vil jeg bruge min nyeste name generator: WoW name generator

Trin 1. Domæne navn

Første udfordring var at finde domænenavn til projektet. Helst et med nogle relevante søgeord for projektet.

Jeg købte 3 forskellige:

• online-generator.com
• online-converter.eu
• online calculator.eu

da jeg i denne fase var jeg stadig i tvivl om, hvilken retning projektet skulle have.

Trin 2. Struktur

Med domæne navnet på plads fulgte strukturen på selve sitet. Også her famlede jeg noget i starten og dækkede over de første fejlslagne eksperimenter med at lave 301 redirects gennem min .htaccess.

Jeg endte med følgende struktur: online-generator.com/name-generator/wow-name-generator.php.

Igen var fokus at får brugt de vigtigste søgeord i url’en. Og derudover at have en overskuelig struktur, der er let at vedligholde og udvide.

Trin 3. Indhold

En masse ressearch med bla. Google søgeordværktøj for at prøve at finde gode søgestrenge. Efterfølgende undersøgelse af konkurencen på de udvalgte søgeord.

Trin 4. God HTML mark-up

Næste trin var at skabe en god HTML struktur på selve siderne.

Det handler i korthed om at:

• Side titler med søgeord (WoW Name Generator)
• Kort og rammende metadesription med de vigtigste søgeord (Generate cool World of Warcraft name with the WoW Name Generator)
• Få og relevante metakeywords (wow, name, generator, world of warcraft,)
• Overskrift hieraki.
  • H1 (WoW Name Generator)
  • H2 (Names from the WoW name generator)
  • H3 (Random wow names)
• Masser af overskrifter i mange niveauer med tilhørende pragraphs (brug af paragraph istedet for break tagget).
• Brug af søgeord i så mange forskellige html tags som muligt

WoW name generator

Trin 5. Tekster

Google kan godt li’ tekst og især lange tekster. Derfor er dele af mine tekster tæt på spam.

• Jeg bruger mine søgeord meget. (World of Warcraft names from the WoW name generator)
• Jeg bruger søgeord mange forskellige sammenhænge. (WoW Gnome names, WoW Orc names and WoW Troll names.)

Søgeoptimeret tekst er gemt af vejen i bunden af siderne. 

Trin 6-8. Justeringer af tekster

Google tager ca. en uge om at indekserer mine nye sider. Efter yderligere ca 14 dage har jeg kunnet bruge Google Analytics til at se, hvilke søgeord der skal satses på.

Dette er blevet gentaget flere gange. Google er også glad hyppige opdateringer.

Trin 9. Linkbuilding

Jeg har i første omgang brugt et par at mine egne små-blogs m.m. til at skaffe de første links. Ellers er jeg ret blank på området.

Så jeg kontaktede en ekspert i linkbuilding, Claus Heinrich, gennem hans webmaster forum, og spurgte om hjælp til international linkbuilding. Claus har været super hjælpsom både gennem forummet, men har også hjulpet bag kulisserne med at få nogle gode værdifulde links.

Jeg har kun tilmeldt sitet til ganske få link kataloger. Det er en ren jungle, at finde de få kataloger, der har en reel værdi.

Istedet har prioriteret linkbuilding via social bookmarking. Jeg har oprettet konti ved delicious, digg, stumble upon og et par andre steder. Her er f.eks. min favo.dk profil.

Social bookmarking er super godt, fordi du kan deeplinke til dine sider, og har selv kontrol over linktekster og tilhørende beskrivelser.

Jeg har også prioriteret at have store iøjnefaldende bookmarkings-knapper på siden, for at understøtte at mine brugere bookmarker mine generatorer.

Trin 10 ?

Tja…?

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Den fragter os sikkert hjem - til ankelhøjt græs, træls.

Det tager sin tid og mange genstarter for græsslåmaskinen at tygge sig igennem den mundfuld.

Heldigvis kalder arbejdet mandag.

Jeg er stødt på problemet med de meget brede knapper i IE en del gange efterhånden. Derfor dette blogindlæg.

Løsningen er simpel:

input {
overflow: visible;
padding: 0 4px;
}

Efterfølgende skal du så selv sætte en passende padding på dine knapper, da ovenstående fix fjerner paddingen helt.

Du skal dog være opmærksom på at denne løsning kan have visse bivirkninger eller måske ikke virke efter hensigten, hvis din knap er placeret inde i en tabel.

Se evt. denne post for en diskussion af problemer med padding på knapper placeret inde i en tabel: IE button width fix

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Kører starteren hurtigt nok, så man ved der er strøm nok på - tjek! Lyser forvarmerlampen i intrumentbordet og klikker forvarmerrelæet som det skal - tjek! Så er der ikke mere at gøre i kabinen, så ud i mortorrummet. Kommer der brændstof igennem de klare slanger, som går fra brændstoffilter til pumpen - tjek! Er magnetventilen i pumpen ok - tjek!

Mistanken falder så på resten af forvarmesystemet. Da det er en gammel dieselhakker, så skal der virkelig forvarmes igennem inden den vil i starte. Egentlig ville jeg normalvis måle på gløderørene, men hvis et af dem var gået, ville den sagtens kunne starte alligevel, den ville bare gå ujævnt og ryge som død og helvede (been there…) og det er MEGET sjældent at alle 4 gløderør smutter på samme tid. De bliver i første omgang frikendt. Jeg kigger videre og falder over en bladsikring på 80A, som ikke ser ud til at have det godt.

Sikringen er helt færdig. Sandsynligvis er den irret over, men den kan også være brændt over....

80A bladsikring som mangler den ene side

Klokken er 6.15 og det er udelukket, at VW kan hjælpe på det her tidspunkt. Så enten er det en hjemmearbejdsdag her sidste dag inden ferien eller også er det endnu engang tid til hacking.

Jeg beslutter mig for det sidste og allierer mig med en gammel stump ledning og en afisoleringstang.

Tænk at man kan blive så glad for at se en gammel stump ledning og en tang

Jeg kortslutter forvarmesystemet, ved at forbinde batteriet direkte til skinnen, som giver strøm til gløderørene. Det gnistrer en del, da gløderørene er nogle strømslugere, men det går. En moderne bil forvarmer på max 1-2 sek, min skal have minimum 7 sek. Efterfølgende smider man ledningen og løber ind og starter og vupti den er i gang. Den kan uden problemer køre, men samme manøvre skal gentages næste gang man starter (hvis den ikke er varm) indtil, man får skaffet den fordømte sikring.

Disclaimer:

Selvom du sandsynligvis ikke kunne finde på det, så gør ikke det her på din moderne dieselbil. Der sker en masse andre elektroniske ting, når man drejer nøglen på sådan en ny svend og derfor vil hele kortslutningsballaden sandsynligvis ikke virker, men derimod stensikket trække et eller andet elektronik med i graven.

På min bil er kortslutning som med influenzavaccine for en 85 årig - det er risikoen værd.

As a part of our quest trying to optimize the speed of our search front end I recently tried out the Yahoo js and css minifyer – YUI Compressor.

At first glance the nice things about the YUI Compressor are that it is a Java based (we are a Java friendly team), open source and fairly easy to work with. The YUI Compressor handles both javascript and css but in this post I have chosen to focus on the js part.

The test integration into my IDE (Intellij IDEA) and the project was quite easy because somebody has taken the time to write YUIAnt. I just downloaded the YUI compressor version 2.4.2 and the YUIAnt.jar and added them to the project and modified my build scripts to run the compressor when the website is deployed to the web server. The beauty of this is that you naturally don’t have to look at the minified javascript when editing and if you for some reason want to debug the code run time you can easily setup a debug option in your build script and bypass the compressor for on the fly debugging. If you aren’t into all this build script stuff or have a simple project there are lots of online YUI Compressor sites out there where you can paste you js code or css and get a compressed version in return.

The version 2.4.2 of the YUI Compressor nearly worked without problems. For some reason – I didn’t bother to investigate further – the YUI Compressor had some issues with unterminated Strings in the jscalendar-1.0 library. I just excluded the directory and went on with my small non scientific test using Firebug as my test environment.

The first screen shot shows the size and load times for our js files. Business as usual – the YUI Compressor is disabled.

The next screen shot shows the size and load times for the same js files now with the compression enabled.

The file sizes have been reduced and the overall load time has shrunk approximately half a second. When the file sizes are very small the load times are very sensitive to queing effects but the file size is in most cases reduced. In the case of bigger js files the improvement in speed as well as size is clear. I have tried to compensate for caching effects in both cases (compress/not compressed). It seems that there is about a 20-25% reduction in file size and approximately the same reduction in load time for the js. These numbers are without using the obfuscation option (reduction of variable names to the shortest possible length and other tricks) simply because I don’t thing we will be comfortable with this knowing that it might cause errors.

As I am new to this I am interested to hear about any major drawbacks compressing/minifying may have.

This is of course a small step and not something which alone makes the difference between a slow and a fast site but I am hoping that attention to a number of different optimization issues will make a big difference in the long run.

Jeg pinger 20-30 blog nyhedstjenester, som Google crawler uafbrudt. Men at et blogindlæg uodover at være crawlet også er indekseret og søgbart efter sølle 7 minutter. Det er fanme sejt.

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The code for our search front end has over time grown to a considerable size and we have started to suspect that the web site’s response time could be better. With this in mind I have for some time now been keen on looking into optimizing the speed of our front end – especially when the underlying search engine Summa has proven to be blazingly fast.

There are a lot of things we could do better such as:

1. Optimizing the javascript code by trawling through the lot and removing redundancy as well as rewriting some of the methods to be more efficient.

2. A thorough cleanup of the css. There is a lot we can do here as we have loads of redundancy, classes which are not in use anymore and declarations which could be handled way cooler. Another thing I noticed is we like divs – loads of divs.

3. Taking a critical look at our numerous DOM transformations. Some of them are down right unnecessary.

4. General optimizing of the server side code. In fact this part isn’t all that bad but a general clean up once in a while doesn’t hurt anybody.

Because my summer holiday is coming up soon I have chosen to start with some light weight stuff. I have tried out the newest version of the YUI Compressor – tool to compress/minify javascript and css. As we don’t use minifying at the moment we should be able to benefit from it performance wise. In order not to clutter up this post I will post my experience with this in a separate post soonish.

Blandt andet denne solnedgang fredag aften i Spirbakke mile. 

Spirbakke mile, Vindhvarre Mile og Engelsk Mile er nogle af de små miler der ligger syd for Skagen på vejen mod Råbjerg mile

Søndag morgen på Råbjerg mile. Vi havde hele milen for os selv til klokken ti. Derefter blev milen meget hurtigt overbefolket.

Se flere af mine Billeder fra Danmark .

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Before you read on, heed my words that this post might be a wee bit technical… If not extremely technical – caveat emptor

The Problem

In our continuous quest for a blazingly fast Summa, we ran into a performance problem extracting and sorting huge result sets from our caching database. Concretely we store ~9M rows in a H2 database, all records are annotated with a modification time (henceforth mtime) and we use this timestamp to determine if we need to update the index. When updating the index we read records from the database, sorted by this mtime column.

This means that for the initial indexing we create a sorted result set of 9M records. The first observation is that we should definitely have an index on the mtime column. Even with that, many databases will take some time for such queries and it might lead to big memory allocations or temporary tables being set up. We don’t want any of that. We want lightweight transactions and speed!

Take One, LIMIT and OFFSET

The naive approach (atleast, the first thing that I tried!) is to use the LIMIT and OFFSET Sql statements to create small result sets, of size 1000, and then do client side paging, something alá:

 SELECT * FROM records ORDER BY mtime OFFSET $last_offset LIMIT 1000

Here we increment last_offset by 1000 each time we request a new page. However this solution will perform extremely bad. The database server will need to discard the first last_offset records before it can return the next 1000 records to you, when we are talking millions of records this can be quite an overhead. The database can not apply any smart tricks to make this fast because it has no a priori way to find out where the record with offset last_offset into the result set begins.

Take Two, Salted Timestamps

So what can we do? The thing that databases are fast at is looking stuff up in indexes. We need to make it use some indexes to calculate the pages… 

The idea is to use the index on the mtime column to calculate the offset, then when we request a new page we use the mtime of the last record in the last result set. This may just work out because we sort everything by mtime. Maybe like:

 SELECT * FROM records WHERE mtime>$last_mtime ORDER BY mtime LIMIT 1000

Alas, this contains a subtle bug. Since we might insert more than one record per millisecond the mtime of a record might now be unique. This means that we might skip some records in between pages or include some records in multiple pages.

If we somehow force the mtimes to be unique the above query would actually work. One solution is to always ensure that there is at minimum 1ms between each insertion – this is way too slow for us, so we deviced what we have dubbed Salted Timestamps.

Instead of using 32 bit INTEGERs for mtime we use 64 bit integers (a BIGINT on most Sql servers). We move the actual timestamp to the most significant 44 bits and then store a salt in the least significant 20 bits. The salt is basically just a counter that is reset each millisecond, meaning that we can add 1048576 records per millisecond before we run out of salts. With this construct way we get a “timestamp” that still sorts correctly and we can even create a UNIQUE index on the mtime column.

Conclusion

We have adopted the approach with salted timestamps as described above for Summa and so far it has proven to perform quite well (avg. ~2000 records/s). An added bonus is that we only put very light load on the db, because the transactions are small and fast. You can find an implementation of this scheme in the DatabaseStorage* class and the timestamp handling in the UniqueTimestampGenerator* class in the Storage module in the Summa sources.

*) Most sorry that these links require a login (which is freely available, but anyway) – we are working on a solution with anonymous access. More on that later.

For 1½ måned siden startede jeg Online Name Generator Projektet, der hoster forskellige navne generatorer som f.eks. Project Name Generator.

Projektet er et webmaster projekt, der udspringer af min interesse for:

• Brugergrænse- og applikations-design
• Simpel applikations-programmering
• Søgemaskineoptimering

Dette indlæg giver en hurtig oversigt over projektet. Senere vil jeg skrive mere om de enkelte elementer.

Brugergrænse-design

En webapplikation skal være let, overskuelig og hurtig at bruge. Derfor er brugergrænse-fladen på name generatoren skrabet for overflødig information.

Se 4 principper for brugervenligt layout.

• Sørge for tydelige hierarkier (navn og generator-knappen er store og centralt placeret på siden)
• Dele siden op i tydeligt definerede områder (Name Generator, Bookmark-boks, menu, overskrift er tydeligt definerede og adskilte)
• Benytte konventioner, der er opstået omkring Internettet (understregede links, topmenu, stor knap til vigtig funktion)
• Minimére støj (her er jeg p.g.a. af søgemaskineoptimering og annoncer blevet nødt til at gå på kompromis. Har forsøgt at afbøde ved at benytte de ovennævnte 3 principper)

Derudover har jeg fokuseret på:

• Tydelig stor sidetitel, så brugeren med det samme kan se, hvor han er.
• Navnet bliver generet med kun et klik. Konkurenter kræver ofte indtastning af navn, kategorier. Og tit “husker websiden” ikke indtastede og valgte informationer.

Se Superhero Name Generator som et eksempel.

En mere clean og overskuelig brugergrænseflade kunne være opnået ved at fjerne al den overflødige tekst. Men teksten er nødvendig af hensyn til søgemaskineoptimeringen. Derfor har jeg gjort teksterne meget små eller placeret dem længere nede på siden, hvor ingen alligevel læser dem.

Søgemaskineoptimering

Den internationale konkurrence på Google er stor. Derfor er god søgemaskineoptimering alfa og omega for hele projektet.

I korthed er min strategi koncentreret om:

• Et domænenavn med søgeordene “online” og “generator”.
• Masser af tekst, med mange overskrifter i flere niveauer, hvor søgestrengene og søgeord gentages i forskellige sammenhænge
• Udgående links til bla. Wikipedia og andre sites der rangerer højt på relevante (men ikke direkte konkurerende) søgeord.
• Indkommende links. I første omgang sites jeg selv har adgang til at lægge links på. Dernæst udvalgte linkkataloger, og på sigt forhåbentlig links fra brugerne.

Har overvejet at tilknytte en Wordpress blog til online-generator domænet, hvor jeg kan skrive små korte ”nyheder” på.

Programmering

Alle navne generatorer er programmeret i JavaScript. Det har den fordel, at navne genereres på brugerens egen computer. Det gør genereringen af navne lynhurtigt. 

Jeg har opdateret generatorerne flere gange i forløbet, så de er blevet mere komplekse, og laver mere komplicerede navne.

Find f.eks. Vampire names med vampire name generator.

Økonomi

Har tilknyttet en adsense konto til name generatorerne. Men min stategi er at holde annoncer meget diskrete i starten. Når/hvis der er kommet lidt flere besøgende og nogle flere indkomne links, vil jeg give annoncerne en lidt mere fremtrædende plads.

Økonomien i projektet er dog til grin, og jeg skal være heldig, hvis jeg kan dække udgifter til domænenavn og webhotel. Projektet har udelukkende sin berettigelse i, at jeg synes, det er skide sjovt.

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As has been mentioned in many different places the code4lib 2009 videos are now online.

Those that missed the finer details in Toke’s talk about complete faceting of 100 million documents can go see the video here. Lots of good, nerdy stuff.

Toke and Mikkel also both gave lightning talks. Mikkel’s talk about how easy it would be to set up a Summa installation in the Gobi Desert was on day three, and is available here. He is on somewhere near the middle of the video (number 5 of 9).

Toke’s talk about Flash Disks and how they will save everyone of us was on day two, and can be seen here. His talk starts about a third of the way into video as number 6 of 16 (he is actually on twice – the first first attempt without any graphs in his slides is number 4…).

Watching the videos really make me want to go to code4lib again next year.

Microsoft har endelig taget konsekvensen af deres meget forskellige browsere og for første gang selv lavet et værktøj, som kan bruges i arbejdet med at gøre visningen af websider i IE6, IE7 og IE8 nogenlunde konsistent.

Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview er stadig i beta, men er fuld funktionsdygtig.

Download og installation af SuperPreview 

SuperPreview kan downloades fra Microsoft Expression Team Blog. Nederst i blogindlægget om Super Preview ligger et link til download.

Traditionen tro er dette Microsoft produkt stort og tungt. Det tager en rum tid at hente og installere SuperPreview. Mange mange megabytes, og så lige et krav om også at downloade og installere et .NET framework.

Førstehåndsindtrykket af SuperPreview

Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview ser superlækkert ud. Grænsefladen er flot designet i mørke moderne farver. Den er samtidig simpel og overskuelig.

Man skriver en url i adressebaren og SuperPreview henter siden og viser den i to seperate vinduer. Man kan vælge at rendere i browserne IE8 (hvis du har den installeret), IE7 og IE6.

Eller du kan vælge at vise et billede i det ene af vinduerne.

Funktioner i SuperPreview

Funktionerne i SuperPreview er dog begrænsede. Du kan stort set kun sammenlige renderinger i de forskellige browser-versioner. Det er SuperPreview så tilgengæld god til. Du kan få outline’et de forskellige html elementer/tags, og zoome helt tæt ind på områderne, så du tydeligt og helt ned på pixel-niveau kan se, hvor forskellene er.

Du kan desværre hverken klikke på links for at se undersider, eller justere på stylesheetet, som du f.eks. kan i IE developer tool eller Firebug.

Det bedste værktøj i Expression Web SuperPreview er nok muligheden for at holde en webside op mod et billede. D.v.s. at hvis du udvikler ud fra en Photoshop mockup, kan du sammenligne billedet, med renderingen i din browser. Du kan få vist alle afvigelse med stor præcision.

Konklusion

Hvis jeg skal komme til at bruge SuperPreview, kræver det, at der bliver udviklet flere funktioner til programmet. Som minimum skal der være mulighed for at inde fra programmet at manipulere og eksperimentere med stylesheet’et.

Hvis jeg derimod sad som rendyrket HTML og CSS udvikler, og skulle lave HTML og CSS efter Photoshop-forlæg fra en designer, ville jeg skynde mig at downloade SuperPreview med det samme. Der vil være tid at spare, hvis man skal ramme et Photoshop oplæg 100%.

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Skal vi lige ta’ den igen? Microsoft kontakter mig, fordi jeg har frabedt mig at blive kontaktet af dem.

Microsoft opfordrer mig i mailen, til at ændre indstillinger, så de lovligt (i modsætning til nedstående mail) kan sende reklamer til mig.

Her er mailen fra Microsoft.

Emne: Indstillinger for kommunikation i Windows Live og MSN

Kære bruger af Windows Live!

Vi kontakter dig vedrørende dine indstillinger for kommunikation i Windows Live og MSN.

Med dine nuværende indstillinger har Microsoft ikke tilladelse til at sende dig reklamemateriale eller invitationer til undersøgelser om Windows Live og MSN. Vi vil gerne kunne gøre dig opmærksom på vigtige produktopdateringer, så hvis du vil ændre dine indstillinger, skal du gå til din kontoprofil her for at ændre indstillingerne.

Med venlig hilsen
Windows Live-teamet

Bemærk! Du kan også ændre dine kontoindstillinger ved at åbne din browser og skrive: http://account.live.com. Når du har logget på din konto, skal du klikke på Marketingindstillinger under Yderligere indstillinger. Fjern derefter markeringen i det øverste afkrydsningsfelt, og klik på Gem.

Microsoft prøver at dække sig ind under, at mailen er teknisk support. Men indholdet er klokkeklart målrettet at få mig til at godkende deres markedsføring.

God markedsføringsskik?

Jeg har et afslappet forhold til Microsoft, og bruger med glæde mange af deres produkter. Men jeg jeg bliver irriteret, når virksomheder overtræder mine grænser og bryder ind i min privatsfære. Og det har Microsoft gjort i denne sag, hvor de udover at bryde loven også bryder med enhver god markedsføringsskik.

Microsoft har monopolligende tilstande på en lang række områder, et stort rekalmebudget og derfor rig mulighed for at få mig i tale. De har bestemt ikke behov for at skabe sig flere fjender, ved at overtræde god markedsføringsskik.

Alt i alt synes jeg at Microsoft har udvist mangel på respekt overfor mig som bruger. Og jeg tror kun de kan få negativ udbytte af denne kampagne. Så næste gang håber jeg de vil lytte lidt mere til den sunde fornuft, og lidt mindre til drengene i markedsføringsafdelingen.

Jeg har selvfølgelig orienteret Microsoft, om dette blogindlæg, så de har en mulighed for at forsvare sig, hvis de ønsker det.

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Da jeg i dag bladrede mine gamle billeder igennem, faldt jeg imidlertidigt over billedet af elgen. Der et eller skræmmende ved den elg. Den virker alt for menneskelig.

Ja, faktisk minder den mig en smule om NATOs nyudnævnte generalsekretær Anders Fogh Rasmussen?

Jeg ved snart ikke, hvad jeg skal tro? Er det en tilfældighed, er det naturen, der spiller os et puds… eller er jeg bare helt galt på den?

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