ninjin's weblog (because blog sounds terrible)

Detecting endianness when making a FreeBSD port makefile

2009-03-09T14:00:00.003+01:00

The title really says it all, my porting foo and Google foo was insufficent when I was working on a port for the IMS Corpus Workbench this weekend. I had to turn to the good people at #bsdports@EFnet and to aid me was @stass. He supplied me with what I at time suspected to be the only way, to use a regexp to extract the information from endian.h (yuck!). Here are the two options he provided.


LITTLE_ENDIAN!= ${EGREP} \
'^#define[[:space:]]+_BYTE_ORDER[[:space:]]+[^[:space:]]+$' \
/usr/include/machine/endian.h | ${AWK} '{if ($3 == \
"_LITTLE_ENDIAN") print 1;}'

LITTLE_ENDIAN!= ${AWK} \
'/^#define[[:space:]]+_BYTE_ORDER[[:space:]]+[^[:space:]]+$/
{if ($3 == "_LITTLE_ENDIAN") print 1;}' \
/usr/include/machine/endian.h

These work just fine for an ordinary shell but the same thing in a makefile needs some small adjustments. I prefered the purely AWK one, so here it is.


LITTLE_ENDIAN= ${AWK} \
'/^\#define[[:space:]]+_BYTE_ORDER[[:space:]]+[^[:space:]]+$$/ ' + \
'{if ($$3 == "_LITTLE_ENDIAN") print 1;}' /usr/include/machine/endian.h

Now hopefully the Google Bot will crawl over this and allow the next porter to find what I could not. Once again, thank you @stass. =)

Njorak isn't dead (yet (now lives on a lone E6400))

2009-01-05T03:25:00.008+01:00

Yes, I admit it! I am still a Dvorak typer. I tried going back recently when learning Vim using my new Vim book, but I just can't. Something about Qwerty makes me squirm when trying it. Perhaps it's just that I have become accustomed to the strangeness of Dvorak but in general I don't see any reason to switch back. Sure, I am not that quick when I get in front of someone's Qwerty laptop, but I'll manage.

Now with my new Dell E6400 it's time for yet another njorak layout. Since Swedish characters are too precious to miss out on, but not precious enough to get rid of all the good things about pure and clean Dvorak (hmm, I does sound like a fanatic don't I?). Here it is, the all magical njorak for Dell Latitude E6400 using the Windows key to access Swedish characters.

! njorak, not-quite-dvorak. Version 1.2
! By Pontus Stenetorp
! Derived from us dvorak, accesses Swedish characters through
! altgr or similar combos. Also swaps caps and esc.
! Apply it to an ordinary dvorak keymap using xmodmap.
! Dell Latitude E6400 version
! still dedicated to spatrik

! Set up Swedish special characters
keycode 43 = d D aring
keycode 44 = h H adiaeresis
keycode 45 = t T odiaeresis

! Windows key on a Dell Latitude E6400
keycode 115 = Mode_switch

! Swap escape and caps lock
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Escape
keycode 66 = Escape
keycode 9 = Caps_Lock
add Lock = Caps_Lock
add Control = Escape

I have also added a Caps-lock Escape switch to this version. The reason, there is never a good reason not to remove caps-lock. The only I reason I can come up with is that it's not expected behaviour for anyone who is new to your layout. But being a Vim user (and a Dvorak user, which makes most people perplexed when trying out my keyboard) and also having taken a couple of seconds to ponder on which key I use the most, the switch really is a sane thing to do.

Portssearch alias and portmaster

2009-01-04T02:00:00.012+01:00

In order to manage FreeBSD ports I have used portupgrade for some time. It provides neat facilites such as the command portinstall and portupgrade, I am sure that the use of these commands is pretty straight forward. The standard way to install a port is the following.

> cd /usr/ports/category/portname
> make install clean

Instead portupgrade allows you to do.

> portinstall portname

Or

> portinstall category/portname

One problem with portupgrade is that it's written in Ruby. One might argue that this is not really a problem, but when you have a fresh FreeBSD install you don't want to drag in Ruby as your first package. This takes time and you would rather focus on something else.

Luckily there is an alternative that I quite recently stumbled upon. portmaster supports pretty much the same set of operations but is written in shell script. It's quick to install and you are ready to go in a jiffy. It also handles fetching and port configuration first and then starts building and installing.

> portmaster category/portname

The only problem is that it enforces the use of category/portname as arguments. This is most likely to avoid conflicts since the portname might conflict with other portnames. To resolve this portupgrade presents all "likely" matches and asks you to choose from them, portmaster just dismisses your arguments as invalid. I have considered adding this functionality in some way. Perhaps printing "likely" matches and/or conflicts and then terminating would be a good option?

So, now we have a tool to handle port installation with ease. Then we need a way to search for ports when we don't know the actual name or category. There are of course several such tools but out of the box ports supplies the following way.

> cd /usr/ports
> make search name=searchstring

Or if you want to search in dependencies etc. you can always use key instead of name. But this usually give you far too many hits to browse through. But the output even from name is usually a bit too much, listing dependencies, web addresses and maintainers. For example.

> cd /usr/ports
> make search name=hugs98
Port: hugs98-200609_2
Path: /usr/ports/lang/hugs
Info: An interpreter for the functional programming language Haskell 98
Maint: haskell@FreeBSD.org
B-deps: bash-3.2.39_1 bison-2.3_4,1 damageproto-1.1.0_2 fixesproto-4.0 gettext-0.17_1 gmake-3.81_3 inputproto-1.4.2.1 kbproto-1.0.3 libGL-7.0.3 libGLU-7.0.3 libICE-1.0.4_1,1 libSM-1.0.3_1,1 libX11-1.1.3_1,1 libXau-1.0.3_2 libXdamage-1.1.1 libXdmcp-1.0.2_1 libXext-1.0.3,1 libXfixes-4.0.3_1 libXi-1.1.3,1 libXmu-1.0.3,1 libXt-1.0.5_1 libXxf86vm-1.0.1 libdrm-2.3.1 libglut-7.0.3 libiconv-1.11_1 m4-1.4.11,1 pkg-config-0.23_1 xextproto-7.0.2 xf86vidmodeproto-2.2.2 xproto-7.0.10_1
R-deps: damageproto-1.1.0_2 fixesproto-4.0 inputproto-1.4.2.1 kbproto-1.0.3 libGL-7.0.3 libGLU-7.0.3 libICE-1.0.4_1,1 libSM-1.0.3_1,1 libX11-1.1.3_1,1 libXau-1.0.3_2 libXdamage-1.1.1 libXdmcp-1.0.2_1 libXext-1.0.3,1 libXfixes-4.0.3_1 libXi-1.1.3,1 libXmu-1.0.3,1 libXt-1.0.5_1 libXxf86vm-1.0.1 libdrm-2.3.1 libglut-7.0.3 pkg-config-0.23_1 xextproto-7.0.2 xf86vidmodeproto-2.2.2 xproto-7.0.10_1
WWW: http://www.haskell.org/hugs/

Usually I remedy this using grep, but perhaps I could do better with some scripting? I quickly hacked together an alias to add to my cshrc that would allow to simply type.

> portssearch searchstring

For example.

> portssearch hugs
Port: hugs98-200609_2
Path: /usr/ports/lang/hugs
Info: An interpreter for the functional programming language Haskell 98

Port: ohugs-0.5_5
Path: /usr/ports/lang/ohugs
Info: Interpreter for Haskell with object-oriented features

All this with just two lines, an extra line to work around some difficulties with escaping strings.

set AWKSTR='{ if ( $0 ~ /^Info:/ ) { print $0; print ""; } else { print $0; } }'
alias portssearch "make -C /usr/ports search name=\!:1 | grep -E '^(Port|Path|In
fo):' | awk '$AWKSTR'"

The only problem I have encountered so far is when a port lacks a comment in it's Makefile and Info: is left out you end up with some ugly output. Like this.

Port: japanese/diclookup-emacs20
Port: japanese/navi2ch-emacs20
Port: textproc/dictum-emacs22

But it's usually a non-issue. For now, I am happy with portmaster and my little portssearch alias.

For more information on portmaster see http://dougbarton.us/portmaster.html

Philosophy of change

2008-12-24T07:41:00.007+01:00

Recently I involuntary got involved in a religious debate (yes, again). My observation of how my counterpart argued became apparent pretty quickly. Change, is bad. Now, we should further define change in this particular context. Change, as in changes made to laid down principles or things considered to be facts.

If you become a part of a doctrine, a book that rigidly defines good and bad, your habits and your afterlife. You get the feeling of certainness, at least when it comes to these things. Certainness feels good, doesn't it? You can stop worrying about these specific issues, because they have been taken care of. This observation upon religion is not new, but what are the consequences?

Any change made to these principles or any element that might cause your principles to change is now causing you to feel less certain. Can god exist if we have evolved from microbes? Can my morale be justified if we are not created? Asking those questions hurt, I know, I have been there. You are faced with what seems to be two options, to abandon your principles and become a "devil", someone with no morale or certainty or to shut your eyes, perhaps even work against these "forces". For these "forces" must truly be "evil" if they tempt you to doubt? Even though they make no such claims.

But I see it in another light. I see change as good. My opponent brings up things such as Einstein proving that the ether is not a necessity. That it is indeed possible that science is wrong and that it _will_ change. I agree, I wholeheartedly agree that science will change and I think that most likely science is wrong. Wrong of course means not in perfect harmony with the physical world. Theories will change in accordance to future observations.

But my opponent and I don't agree upon change. I think that change is good, I don't think that the claims of science are rigid and forever true. Instead, they will change, but most likely for the better. You proved me wrong, thank you, thank you for allowing me to discard what was faulty and move on. To me, change is good, change is the very essence of living. I strive to pass something on, not what I learnt from those before me, but what I learnt, verified and tried to take further. This goes both regarding morale and knowledge. For how else can my children be wiser than me? I am the rope, humanity is the rope dancer.

Sorting all the mail

2008-12-21T23:56:00.006+01:00

I am subscribed to numerous mailing lists, ranging from FreeBSD to Python. As a result, I get a couple of hundreds of mail every day. Most of my mail boxes, such as the one I got from my school can't withstand such a bombardment for very long. Within matter of days the inbox will be full.

My old solution was to use Thunderbird on my workstation to filter out all the mails into a directory structure on my disk. That way the mails were pulled from the server and stored at a place where storage space was plenty. It worked, but it was a bit ugly. As soon as the machine was turned off or my connection went down I would have my inbox filled until a got home and started the workstation again. Now, not being at home and not having a workstation things needed to change. But how?

GMail is kind of neat, and free. You get a couple of gigabytes of storage and Google gets to index your mail and give you relevant ads. The only thing that really bothers me is that GMail sometimes uses a different terminology which clashes with ordinary email terminology. You use "labels", which really are folders on the IMAP server (took me a couple of seconds to understand what it meant to "tag" an email and to "archive it"). Sure, GMail is to date _the_ best and most intuitive way to display mails, but it is a bit confusing at times. Would I make a similar user-interface definitely, there's a lot of thought put into it.

Anyway, on to the point. I unsubscribed my old email, signed up for a GMail account and subscribed my new email to about 75 lists. Then used the GMail UI to "label" all my incoming mails from the mailing lists, mails from Python/Dev are now labeled as python/dev and are thus stored in the //INBOX/python/dev directory. It's tedious, I got there. I then added my GMail account to my mail client of choice (Thunderbird) and I could read them just like in the old days, but being accessible from any computer and not having to worry about filling my inbox.

Now, everything could have been just fine. But Thunderbird was not playing along. As a default Thunderbird won't check other boxes than the inbox. This is most likely due to the fact that it takes quite some time to check all the directories. But I just won't find it comfortable to click every single folder every time I want to check for mail. You can force Thunderbird to check every single one of them, but doing so requires you to edit the properties for all your directories (no, you can't change more than one at the time). This, is tedious, _very_ tedious.

To make matters worse, for my ordinary inbox I sort mails by date. This is really good for simple conversations but for a mailing list like FreeBSD/Current, it just becomes a huge mess. For these cases you want to sort by threads, as in, a conversation becomes a tree, the first mail is the root, all mails are leaves and an edge is established to the mail which the mail replied to. This also requires you to change the properties on a per-directory basis. I have three operating systems and a workstation at work. I don't want to reboot to check my mail, so setting it up would force me to make about 200 clicks per client. This is not acceptable, so I turned to Google.

I found the following. There is a configuration editor and there is a way to achieve this without grinding your teeth for all too long.

Check all IMAP folders for new mail
http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/tips#beh_downloadstartup

Sort order for mail/news not configurable by default
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86845#c74

Just remember that you need to delete the old directories information files in order to rebuild them with the new defaults (in my case, threaded sorting). Why not use a one-liner? Remember to shut down Thunderbird before applying it and then start Thunderbirds afterwards and you are all done.

find ${PATH_TO_GMAIL_INBOX} -name '*.msf' | xargs rm

I hope you enjoy the "easier way to do it" (tm) as much as I did.

SSSB and automation

2008-12-21T09:03:00.008+01:00

Recently I began reading up a bit on this whole web thing (yes, I lost my interest in coding HTML and web pages back in grade school). Things have changed and I better learn a bit since it will be beneficial for my work on my thesis. I wanted to try out authentication and HTML forms. Here's the story.

SSSB is a company that rents out flats to students in Stockholm. Back in the good old days (see 2005) you registered and for every day you got a day in line. These days could be traded in for a flat when you needed one, the more days, the better the flat. But, those things changed, the rules of the game are basically the same but you need to log in now and then to show that you are active enough. This of course, is tedious, most other non-student flat renting companies in Stockholm either don't bother or charge a fee. Already back in 2005 this annoyed me a bit but now being in the US and all it's a gun to my head. If I forget I will not have anywhere to live when I get back, or worse, I may loose three years of days. This seemed like an excellent task for a small hack.

The script I created has been tested a bit, but as always, use it at your own risk and take into consideration any moral implications. I will most likely not deploy it, but at least it might prove useful to someone.


#!/usr/bin/env python

'''
Author: Pontus Stenetorp
Version: $Id: sssb.py,v 1.2 2008/12/21 08:07:04 ninjin Exp $

Simple script to keep logging on the SSSB website to keep your days in line
for a flat in Stockholm. Meant to be executed by cron now and then.

This does not violate the agreement on sssb.se but the morality of automating
this is somewhat questionable. *sigh* I remember the good old days before this
log in every 'n' days silliness.
'''

import os
import random
import sys
import time
import urllib
import urllib2

### Constants
## User settings
USERNAME = '1234567890'
PASSWORD = '1234'

# The maximum amount of days to wait between logins, this value should be
# lower than the actual required amount of days (90)
WAIT_MAX = 90/2

# The minimum amount of days to wait between logins, this is to not log in
# all too often
WAIT_MIN = 14

# Faking is _not_ nice, but it is sometimes the only option
FAKE_USERAGENT = True

# If you want to fake, you may choose from the list below and give the index
# here. If set to negative the script will choose one at random and note it
# in the data file for future logins.
FAKE_USERAGENT_INDEX = -1

## Web page specifics
SSSB_URL = 'http://www.sssb.se/index.php?page=login'
VALUES = {'m6input_username': USERNAME, 'm6input_password': PASSWORD,
      'mact': 'FrontEndUsers,m6,do_login,1', 'm6returnid': '794',
      'page': '794'}

## Script internals
DATA_FILE_PATH = os.path.expanduser('~/.sssb_data')

# Look for this to confirm a successful login
LOGGED_IN_MATCH = 'Du %sr inloggad som:' % ''.join(['&', 'auml;'])

SECONDS_PER_DAY = 60 * 60 * 24

# If you are honest you will show that you are actually running a script
REAL_USERAGENT = 'SSSB login Python script 1.0'

# Thank you http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/browser_ids.htm for the user-agents
# A mix of user agents to choose from, ranging from MSIE to Opera on several
# operating systems.
FAKE_USERAGENTS = [
      'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; SLCC1; ' +
      '.NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET ' +
      'CLR 1.1.4322)',
      'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SU 3.1; SLCC1; ' +
      '.NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Tablet ' +
      'PC 2.0; .NET CLR 3.5.21022)',
      'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8pre) ' +
      'Gecko/20071019 Firefox/2.0.0.8 Navigator/9.0.0.1',
      'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) ' +
      'Gecko/20050519 Netscape/8.0.1',
      'Opera/9.60 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.1.1, Opera/9.02 ' +
      '(Windows NT 5.0; U; en)',
      'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Opera 8.00',
      'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 ' +
      '(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.21']
###

def main(argv=None):

  def read_data_file():
      data_file = open(DATA_FILE_PATH, 'r')
      last_login, next_login, user_agent = [line.strip() for line
              in data_file]
      data_file.close()
      return int(last_login), int(next_login), user_agent

  def write_data_file(last_login, next_login, user_agent):
      if os.path.isfile(DATA_FILE_PATH):
          os.remove(DATA_FILE_PATH)
      data_file = open(DATA_FILE_PATH, 'w')
      data_file.write(str(last_login) + '\n')
      data_file.write(str(next_login) + '\n')
      data_file.write(user_agent + '\n')
      data_file.close()
      return

  if not os.path.isfile(DATA_FILE_PATH):
      if not FAKE_USERAGENT:
          user_agent = REAL_USERAGENT
      elif FAKE_USERAGENT_INDEX < user_agent =" random.choice(FAKE_USERAGENTS)" user_agent =" FAKE_USERAGENTS[FAKE_USERAGENT_INDEX]" next_login =" 0," user_agent =" read_data_file()" current_time =" int(time.time())">= next_login:
      opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor())
      data = urllib.urlencode(VALUES)
      request = urllib2.Request(SSSB_URL, data)
      request.add_header('User-agent', user_agent)
      response = opener.open(request)
    
      logged_in_line = [line for line in response if
              LOGGED_IN_MATCH in line]

      if not logged_in_line:
          print 'FATAL: Log-in failed'
          return -1

      next_login = random.randint(
              current_time + WAIT_MIN * SECONDS_PER_DAY,
              current_time +  WAIT_MAX * SECONDS_PER_DAY)
      last_login = current_time
      write_data_file(last_login, next_login, user_agent)
  return 0

if __name__ == '__main__':

  sys.exit(main(argv=sys.argv))

At line #53 you may notice a strange ''.join(), Blogger finds it a good idea to translate my escaped Swedish characters. This is a remedy, so enjoy the special Blogger version which is slightly uglier than my own version.

EDIT:
Blogger is really _terrible_ at displaying code, one almost weeps when you take a look at it. All the 80 width formatting killed by static width. *sigh* Paste it into an editor and take it away from this awful place.

P990i USB issues

2008-06-21T12:40:00.003+02:00

Recently I got a new cell phone, my old one being 9 years old it was quite a change. I wanted one that played music, had WiFi (since I spend most of my time at school and then I could check things up without using my laptop) etc. I found a used Sony Ericsson P990i for 1000 SEK which was quite reasonable.

It all worked fine until I transfered some music to it and the sound was all choppy and made my ears bleed. I phoned SE and they said that they never had heard of such an error. I was puzzled, what could cause this?

I tried analyzing the encoding of the files, nothing strange about it. But when I transfered a song that I considered to be more likely not to contain errors it played flawlessly. How come? It was encoded in the same way. I even checked using SE encoding and transfer tool.

Then I got it, when I played the song transfered from the phone to the computer it was still choppy. What must have happened is that SE tries to make the P990i act like a USB utility but somehow does not do it accurately (I find this likely, the phone needs a bundle of drivers), or that FreeBSD has some sort of bug in the USB handling (I find this unlikely). The first file was transfered using FreeBSD, ending up corrupted, and the second one using Windows, working just fine. This is not a pleasant surprise but now I can finally use my SE head phones.

The curse of being an amateur photographer

2008-03-05T23:14:00.004+01:00

The biggest curse of being an amateur photographer, is that you never ever get a picture of yourself. I still don't have a picture of myself where I don't look like a complete fool.

Last Tuesday I brought my camera to school (to take photos for KTH), a friend snatched it and tried it out and took a picture of an unsuspecting me. It's alright I suppose, but the focus is all off and I look far too serious. If it was me, I'd take another set but... that's impossible. Thanks Auno for taking it, being your first shot it's really decent ;)

Stallman, the return

2008-03-03T22:46:00.011+01:00

This is going to be a long one, bring a cup of tea and get reading.

Richard M Stallman (I will refer to him as Stallman from now on) visited KTH back in 1986 and held a famous lecture. At that time he and FSF also received a considerable amount of money from KTH as a thank for producing useful software for the university, 5000 USD I believe.

Last Tuesday he was back, this time it was not due to the computer club (in which I am a member) but by the union "Unionen" (it means "The union" in Swedish. Yes, I know, it's a terrible name).

Now, how does yours truly get into this mess of free software gurus, unions and university staff? You see, back in 1996 Stallman received an honorary doctors title from KTH, but he didn't attend the ceremony. I know one of our elder professors (he's a nice chap and I have helped him out in the past, I also look up to him as a teacher, but don't tell him ;) ).

The day before Stallman arrived I didn't know if I was to attend the lecture or not, after all, I pretty much know Stallmans opinions on software and I had a deadline that Wednesday. Then, out of nowhere comes an email and I am asked if I can help out with some things just before Stallman arrives and during the lecture. The next morning when my friends woke up I asked whether or not it was alright for me to take three hours off and help out at the lecture. They said that it was alright and I informed my friend the professor that I could help him with what he wanted and bring my camera in-case KTH wanted pictures. I also asked for three of the posters KTH had made for the event, you will learn more about those later.

Now, before we proceed you should know the following. When being awarded an honorary doctors title you receive a hat, it's a symbolic thing really. Because you don't really get to keep the hat.

FSFE (FSF in Europe) was to bring Stallman to KTH at roughly 17:15, so I was there at 16:30. F1 which is the largest lecture hall at KTH had half it's seats taken at 17:00 and we counted an approximate of 700 people (probably more) when the doors closed. It was packed, people in the stairs, I have not seen that many people in a lecture hall before. At ~17:00 Stallman arrived. Meeting him was a strange feeling, he looks like a hacker, talks like a hacker and certainly behaves like a hacker. He's very very frank, no "excuse me" just "I don't hear a word what you are saying." if you didn't speak up well enough. It took a while for yours truly to adapt from his usual very humble and nervous self. I should mention that I did not greet him or anything, picture me as the man in the background waiting for something to do, like bring this or that. My dear professor took care of all the official business.

Stallman wanted to prepare before the lecture (and plug in his laptop), so he was lead into a lecture room near F1. Unfortunately there was to be a lecture in German, so he had to leave in a hurry and was lead into the lecture hall before the huge crowd. He just relaxed, plugged in his laptop and a water boiler and waited for the clock to turn 17:30. I took the opportunity to take some photos, as you can see below. I also managed to talk to the photographer from Computer Sweden, he pointed out something about "Well, I prefer to use natural light sources, when he noticed my flash". I thought "Well, why not?" and switched from my normal zoom to my much more light sensitive 50mm lens and tossed my flash into the bag.

After being introduced by a representative from Unionen, Henrik Eriksson (the professor I mentioned earlier) took the stage.

Ironically, the best shot I got is probably the shot of him. Not one of the ones I took of Stallman, well well, I am still an amateur photographer. First Henrik asked how many that were present back in 1986, I spotted two people raising their hands, there couldn't have been more than 10. Henrik then explained how all went well that day back in 1996, cannon shots were fired (Stallman pointed out "But they missed me!" and grinned) at the doctors ceremony but no Stallman was there. After reading the text which explained why Stallman received the title of honorary doctor at KTH another professor approached him and placed the hat on his head.

Now, that's a picture that you won't see every day. For more images see my dA account, since this blog post is supposed to be more of a story, not a set of images.

Henrik then reclaimed the hat, he also mentioned that it quite looked like a magicians hat and that there probably were rabbits in it. Stallman the made a quick sprint, grabbed the hat and mimicked petting a rabbit, the crowd burst out in laughter.

Now, the main event. Stallman was to speak for roughly an hour and half. For those who don't know Stallman, he's about as radical as you get when it comes to software. You don't think software is politics? That software isn't closely related to the state of our society? Well, Stallman does, and he will tell you.

The speech was exactly what I expected from Stallman, he presented his view on how all software was to guarantee four freedoms for it's users. He made jokes now and then about software vendors and Bush. The only thing that surprised me was that he often pointed out that "Just because mentioned Microsoft as an example, don't think that this just applies to Microsoft, all proprietary software vendors are capable of doing this and many do". He also made an interesting remark about piracy, "When people ask me what I think about piracy, I say, burning ships is very bad", this made the crowd burst out into laughter once more.

To be honest, you can find a ton of better sources than me on Stallmans views so just read one of those instead of my interpretation. Instead I will present some points he made.

*Four freedoms of software and how the GPL guarantees them.
*How freedom of software guarantee a free society without unjust control.
*The GNU project and how it was like back in the good old days.
*How GNU/Linux is split into separate camps due to all the distros and this potentially stops what he wants to achieve with free software. He want users to care about what they are using, not just to go for "Well this works"
*How attitudes like Linus Torvalds hurts the movement since he won't side with the philosophy of the GPL.
*And more...

Personally, I agree with him on some of his views, for example that free and open source software might benefit our society in many ways. But in just as many ways I disagree with his views. I am happy for what he has done, but I won't stand beside him. His views are in many ways a religion, good and bad, it's all there.

The aftermath is Swedish papers has been very much about Stallman being paranoid. He mentioned a lot of things about cellphones being able to track you, programs spying on you, credit cards etc. etc. I agree that it might sound like he is all afraid of being tracked, but I think the answer is much more reasonable. Stallman is a freedom fighter, a radical one. He wants people to have, in a way, an ultimate power over their devices. He wants them to be able to choose whether or not they want someone to know anything about them. It's a philosophical stand, not a statement of some paranoia. I was once told that you should never rush to the conclusion that someone is stupid if there is a more rational conclusion, and although I am not a Stallman expert this very much seems to be the case here.

Afterwards, Stallman stayed and wrote autographs in exchange for a 30 SEK donation to the FSF. I got one for free on one of the posters which I handed to another Stacken member. He promised to put it on the wall in the computer club room. What ever you say about Stallman, he has been influential and probably will be for the years to come. For good or for bad? I guess we won't know for sure for at least another 20 years.

Observations on my way home

2008-02-17T13:07:00.004+01:00

When walking home this Friday I noticed something peculiar. Usually when a pedestrian enter a store he moves in an arch, much like my sketch to the right. He also maintains roughly the same speed as before entering the arch until he reaches the door to the store where he slows down slightly, opens the door and enters the store.

But one store is different, here, people enter the store in a radically different way. They maintain normal walking speed and keep their eyes fixed straight forward, unlike when entering other stores where they always look around observing other stores and pedestrians. Then, when they have passed the point when at other stores they would begin their approach in an arch, they suddenly turn at a sharp angle and increase their speed substantially. They maintain this increased speed pushing the door open with force and does not appear to slow down until inside.

The reason might be, that the store is the most well known adult video store in Stockholm.

Swedish Anti-Piracy Commercial

2008-01-05T13:14:00.000+01:00

Now and then Swedish anti-piracy agencies and the Swedish movie and music industry makes a commercial in order to tell us, the people of Sweden, how morally wrong piracy is. If you just cut the crap and don't argue whether piracy is wrong in the first place, the latest movie, and all other movies they have ever made, has a pattern. Let's describe the latest one.

A person walks up to a public toilet and pays the fee of roughly 5 SEK (about 1 USD). Just as he enters the booth, another person forces his way into the booth with him. He is then forced to pee along with a stranger although he paid for the booth himself and the stranger does various embarrassing things and is not the least embarrassed about "stealing" his spot.

Something like this is usually the theme, previously we have seen people borrowing movies from rental shops without paying.

Now, what is the problem with this? It portrays the person conducting piracy as someone who is stealing from a customer or a store. Is this really the case? I certainly don't think so, a person conducting piracy don't steal anything. They certainly do some economic damage, but they don't steal. By portraying them as simple thieves, the industry leaves an open goal, their opponents laugh at them and most Swedes just think that they are silly. They look stupid, and won't get paid.

What should the industry show instead? You don't have to be a genius to come up with an honest and probably better commercial. So, here you are STIM, APB, SF and so on, here's my suggestion, all for free. Instead of portraying the person who you so clearly, don't want to continue copying your material, as a thief, which he is not and will never associate himself with and therefore will continue copying your material and you have run down your many million SEK commercial down the drain. Why not show him what he actually does, show him how a movie is made, show him how money spent on a movie get people paid for their hard job, show him the set of actors and so on, showing numbers and faces. Don't go all silly and show sentimental letters, just facts, "When you condone piracy, all these people get nothing and to you, they give you the very best of their efforts". This will work, this is honest, this is what piracy is all about and how you might actually win. Stop acting like idiots with a multi-million SEK budget who are unable to send a message but able to make great movies, albums, etc. It ain't that hard, all you need is the ability to reason.

Glögg review 2: Tillmans Glögg av Svarta Vinbär

2007-12-06T23:00:00.000+01:00

I have had the luck of finding a really strange bottle of glögg. Tillman, which is a small rather local brand, makes glögg using black currants instead of red wine. It's also completely alcohol free, let's see how good it gets.

The smell is stronger than usual, it reminds me of some glögg sweets that I stumbled upon last summer in a small candy shop. It doesn't smell like glögg usually does, but it still is rather pleasing. I suspect the smell is because of the black currants, because after the initial aroma of spices it's something like a strong cup of black currant tea.

The taste is a little less punchy than one would expect from a sip of glögg, there is a lot of taste from the berries and it's not even remotely as sweet as one would fear. But, you miss the wine, the taste just won't last as long and be as deep as wine. But it is not a bad substitute for red wine, unlike most mixes of grape juice and other juices that makes glögg taste terrible you do enjoy drinking the strange mixture of black currants and glögg seasoning. I would certainly recommend it, perhaps not for a big party, but certainly as a pleasant and refreshing Christmas beverage for yourself or in the company of a friend or two.

Tillmans Glögg av Svarta Vinbär
3/5
Price: ~40SEK per bottle of 750ml

Glögg review 1: Blossa lättglögg

2007-11-18T21:12:00.000+01:00

As you have seen in my profile, I like glögg. Glögg is rather typical for northern europe and is served hot with raisins and almond during the winter season. It's most of all associated with Christmas, but some (like me) enjoy it from mid November to mid January. Glögg is made from wine, traditionally red but nowadays also white. It's seasoned, which gives it a unique sweet and rich taste. Do note that during my test sessions, I do not add almond, raisins or eat ginger snaps. It's only the glögg and nothing else that I will test.

Since a lot of people never hear of this excellent beverage I thought that I'd make a set of reviews of different kinds of glögg with low-alcohol content. There are plenty of brands and flavours to chose from when it comes to high-alcohol content, but for low-alcohol there are about eight kinds to chose from. But I will try to find more.

First out is the true classic "Blossa lättglögg". When you think of glögg, this is the brand that first springs to mind. It's sweet and has a rather spicy taste. You can clearly make out the traces red wine somewhere amidst all the other tastes.

Currently, this is my personal favourite. But it's rather plain, most Swedes ought to be used to this taste, so it's really nothing special about it. You just see it as what defines glögg. Therefore, I can't give it five out of five. Since, you can't stop thinking that perhaps there is another glögg out there, one that is richer, leaner and will taste even better with your ginger snaps. I therefore give it four out of five, it's good, really good. But still, there is nothing special about it.

Blossa lättglögg
4/5
Price: ~25SEK per bottle of 750ml

Those who want to know more about glögg should take a look at the Wikipedia article.

Friday night, is physics and Python night

2007-11-17T01:21:00.000+01:00

It's Friday night, you don't have anything to do. Well, you could of course work. But after working hard for more than a week and not even having a weekend last weekend you don't want to do that. Besides, your studies and your employer must let you have some fun.

What I did was dig up Python, some upper secondary school physics and my Fundamentals of Physics (as I am a CS student I have only taken one course in physics at university level) and started to hack some code. Planetary orbits and gravity, I thought, could look rather nice when simulated. So a few hours later I have constructed a small program that simulates the effects of gravity.

What you see is a "sun", well, it's really just a much bigger astral body (just like a sun) and some smaller planets moving in orbits around it. The lines represent gravity vectors, speed vectors, acceleration vectors and so on. They are just there to help me debug the whole thing.

It has been a rather nice Friday night in my opinion. Perhaps I should hack a little more on the concept, who knows. Now I will get some sleep and tomorrow it's all school work and work again.

Is God dead?

2007-11-15T10:29:00.000+01:00

Idling in the web I read the following about a Norwegian trying to prove that God doesn't exist.

-"Our project is nothing less than proving that God doesn't exist. In each program I will commit a deadly sin in a new country. ... If God doesn't react by the end of the series he is declared dead."

Well, I wouldn't care if God was dead. But this Norwegian clearly know nothing about how to prove that God doesn't exist. Any believer might just as well say "He chose not to act". In order to falsify the existance of God you need God to be falsifiable. Otherwise it's like beating someone capable of changing the rules of the game while playing.

An example of this. Say that I have constructed a device that can detect with 100% accuracy if God is within a 25m radius. I start the device and it says that God is not within 25m. I claim that this is a proof that God doesn't exist. How ever, any believer might simply say "You can't detect God if he doesn't want to be detected." or "He wasn't there at the time, since he doesn't want to proved, he wants to be believed.". Thus, any godly being can't be proven to not exist. Any attempts at doing this are futile and therefore should be ignored. It's better to spend our time at tasks that may lead to results that benefit us, rather than to chase ghosts.

Article in SvD (In Swedish)

Misuse of statistics?

2007-11-08T09:49:00.000+01:00

DN has published an article by Pressens Mediaservice, some news agency (I haven't looked into it very much). The article is about the failure of Radiohead's latest CD release which was available for free, on line. You could chose to pay if you wanted to. The article deems this as a failure, since 62 percent chose not to pay.

Now, 62 percent is a lot, but it's not even close to what we would need to know in order to deem it a failure. How many downloaded it? How much did they earn? How much do they usually earn? How much does an old-fashioned way of distributing a CD cost? Perhaps knowing this and probably even more, we will have knowledge enough to judge whether it was a success or not. As it is now, the company who carried out the analysis (Comscore, and if they judged it a failure based on only these numbers it's time to give a free and mandatory course in statistics to each and every employee) or a journalist at Pressens Mediaservice have taken misuse of statistics to a whole new level. Statistics is a powerful tool, but one is not to take only so much that it provides a point of view that you want to present or that you feel comfortable with. Stay true to the data, at all costs, data never lies, people do.

Link to the article in DN (Swedish).

Visions of the future

2007-10-10T09:09:00.000+02:00

This morning I began pondering upon how we envision the future. Given a rather vague description in a text will most certainly result in an envisioned picture of your imagination that is very real indeed. You will "see" much more than the author originally intended and this of course is a good thing. The text and story should be more likely to suit your taste.

Now, through this argument rises an interesting question. How different would that inner picture be? It would be very interesting to give the text below to several subjects. Shall we say five families and that the experiment is carried out at the age of twenty for five generations? This of course will risk the older family members to pass on their visions, so perhaps a choice at random among the population currently 20 years of age is more appropriate? But then instead we risk not to have a similar social context instead, which could affect the result. Considering both options above, I'd say that determining several social attributes and then choosing randomly within several combinations at each experiment. The same combination for each experiment, so there would be several lines of pictures. This is likely to yield better results than the first two options.

Now to the text, I imagine something like. "When he got home from work later that day, the stars were already visible. As he reached the doorstep, he stood still for a moment and looked up at the serene sky." How different could that image be? Perhaps this is the very reason that some books never feel old, unlike films which age very quickly. Does our imagination aid us when reading, turning the authors hints about a world into our very own creation?

Learn Swedish online?

2007-09-09T12:13:00.000+02:00

For some reason, a bunch of people in Japan want to learn Swedish. ^^ It's a bit charming actually, but are there any language resources out there? I set out on a small quest to find some.

Since I work and study at the Computer Science department at KTH, the first thing I thought of was Lexin, Stava and Granska.

Lexin is a Swedish to many-languages dictionary, it's a good tool both for us Swedes who sometimes need to check our spelling twice, or when translating Swedish. Give it a try, it's the best Swedish dictionary that is available for free.

Lexin also offers a set of images, marked with the Swedish names for the things in the picture. Like the ones you get in elementary school books. The text is in Swedish, but try out the 33 image sets.

Stava is a spelling tool and also some grammar checking is done. I think one of the creators hinted me that it did beat Microsoft Word's Swedish grammar checking in a scientific test. So although it looks simple, it's far superior to anything I have found on the web. The only drawback is that it is in Swedish, but it's fairly easy to make out which buttons to press and how it suggests change of spelling.

Granska is a grammar checking tool, it's fairly new compared to the previous two tools. And to be honest, I only know that it has proven to be very good at detecting a grammatic mistake called "särskrivning" in Swedish. For example, unlike English, Swedish is very liberal when it comes to forming new words by using two words and turning them into a single word. "Get" goat, "Ryggsäck" rucksack and "Tillverkare" maker can be turned into "Getryggsäckstillverkare" Goat rucksack maker. This is a perfectly legal word, although rather strange. The language group at the CS department is responsible for this and it aims to aid non-native speakers of Swedish.

I think this is all the CS department has to offer at the moment. So I set out onto the world wild web for more resources.

Stockholm School of Economics has a good 40 page introduction to Swedish. It's free and basic.

Leif Stensson has made a quick guide to Swedish grammar, although not finished it gives some insight into Swedish grammar.

FSI has a rather large collection of audio files for practising pronunciation, I checked out the first one and it was quite al right. This is in fact the only good audio resources I did find.

Transparent Language has a Swedish Proficiency Test on line, it's not very extensive but might give you a hint. It's not easy though, so study for a while before looking at it.

I hope you get some help using these links, and good luck on your Swedish studies. Att lära sig Svenska är en utmaning, men en utmaning som i slutänden troligen ger dig en hel del glädje.

Unix Party pin?

2007-09-02T12:26:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I watched the movie Contact, based on a novel by Carl Sagan. I found it rather interesting, but that's not why I am making this post. On one of the computer monitors at the antenna array in New Mexico, there is a pin. Saying "Unix Party". I am not American, but I think it resembles to a political party pin, used during US elections. I have done some research about it, but I haven't found anything. Does anyone know anything about this? I would be happy to know more about this little novelty.

I took a photo of the screen. It's a bit blurry, but you can clearly make out "Unix Party".

Respecting and understanding differences

2007-08-31T23:10:00.000+02:00

Lars Vilks has recently become rather famous. I have never cared much for his art, it's a bit too strange for my taste. How ever, lately, conservative Muslims have reacted with anger to his latest work. Apparently, Vilks thought that it would be a good piece of art to make a statue of the prophet Muhammed. Swedish law allows you to publish, make, etc. all sorts of things. We call it freedom of speech, basically you are allowed to do most things if the intent is not to offend. Vilks intent can be discussed, but most likely he is trying to get some attention along with creating a debate on whether or not you can mock anything. To be honest, the statue is rather silly and deserve little attention.

Personally, I think you have the right to make fun of anything. As long as the sole intent is not to offend or humiliate a living person or group of individuals. In a democratic society you can make blows and take blows. Making something holy and making it taboo is not the way of an open society. If I was Vilks I'd make a piece of art mocking most religions. That way, I'd think it was more fair. And perhaps there would be some debate among believers (concerning why some burn flags and others ignore it as a silly piece of art) instead of focusing on a single religion.

As I mentioned earlier, it really deserves little attention. The right thing to do is to protest peacefully at the publisher and criticise those who you do not agree with. An excellent example is the protest in Örebro, they were aimed at the paper and Vilks. I don't agree with them on whether or not it should be published, but it was nicely done and they showed their point of view.

As with all things, there is also the wrong thing to do. For example, if you would go and burn flags. You are no longer criticising Vilks and the paper that published his works. You are instead blaming a group of people, who most of them don't give a damn about Vilks, of being the source of your discontent. Doing so is no longer a protest, but an attack on an open society. You could also proceed to threatening the artist and thus placing you and your beliefs above Swedish law, thereby eliminating all doubts that you are not a citizen who believes in freedom of speech (apart from your own freedom to do and say what ever you like of course). Why not burn a doll of a man who had nothing to do with the whole thing, apart from being the same nationality as the artist.

Why can't fanatics act rationally? Why are they so blinded that they can't see how they should show their point of view (without being considered to be mental cases that are better off locked away from society)? Well, I guess that's what makes them fanatics.

Pro-life?

2007-07-29T13:47:00.000+02:00

I just can't understand how you can be Pro-life and debate that life is sacred and all. Then go home and just eat a piece of meat and don't think about how you just choose to kill a living being. A living being, very well capable of more "living" than a foetus.

All lives are not equal, that's just the way it is. We don't value strangers as much as friends. We'd rather see the entire Nazi party hanged in 1933 than to let them live and cause the killing of millions of innocents. Not considering everyone and everything equal is not a sin, it's natural, and human. Do the quiz below (the parents agree in the case of foetus abortion below, so the choice is entirely yours, which is more sinful?), don't tell me that you have a hard time deciding on which lives to spare. If you do, you are the one who is having a problem with your ethics, not me.

Note:
I should have included, a man and a man as number six, but I was busy trying to draw something that vaguely resembled the text. I am not an artist in any way.

Panorama of the view from the "Math tower"

2007-07-23T22:26:00.000+02:00

The mathematics department resides in the clock tower at KTH. Therefore it's is called the "Math tower" by the students. You have access to a balcony just above the clock and I have been planning on taking a panorama from there. The outcome was not perfect, there are some ugly seams. But they are not that bad. I want a sunny clear day, perhaps in the winter. That might be perfect for a view of Stockholm.

Link to a the larger version (even though you can spot the seams easier).

Link to the larger version.

Panorama of Rynningeviken

2007-07-20T12:49:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I took myself time to process one of the panoramas from my trip to Örebro and Lindesberg back in early June. I have gotten a lot better but I still have a lot to learn. I am not at all pleased with the look of a 220 degree panorama. I really should read up on more general info on panoramas before processing the other two panoramas I have from that trip. The outcome is linked below.

(As usual Google won't allow me to upload obscenely large images, so here is a link to the real deal)

SvD on science or when journalism goes bad

2007-07-12T17:09:00.000+02:00

Today, three scientist posted an article in Göteborgs-Posten, a fairly large Swedish paper where they claim that a rather new Swedish anti-hangover pill Revigör has no effects on hangovers what so ever. I will translate some parts of the article, trying to shorten it down.

"Worried about a hangover? No problem, now Swedish doctors have developed an effective medicine that makes you feel well the day after! This is the message brought to you by Revigör advertisement."

"Revigör comes at a price of 50 SEK and each box contains three pills which ingredients are vitamins, sugar, salt and coffein. But there are no proofs of living up to it's claims."

These are the main things the scientists point out.

First, to have been developed by a Doctor Haglund, yet this person has not published any scientific articles or papers regarding the effect of alcohol. Although Revigör claims that he "has dedicated his life" to the effects of alcohol.

Secondly, Revigör claims to be "a result of Swedish research" and "to have been tested and shown good results in a double-blind placecontrolled study done by doctors from Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University". Yet, no such study has ever been published. The scientists contacted the owner of the company that produces Revigör and asked for the study. He replied that it was a company secret and that they only share it with business partners. All that are familiar with how science in all forms in conducted, know that you can never make any claims related to an unpublished study. You can't just say "I have proof, but I won't show it". The scientists then point out that it's of economic interest to the company whether or not the study is correct and that one therefore could doubt their motives on keeping it secret.

The scientists the proceed to explaining how it is possible to sell a product that has scientific claims of medical effect and no proofs, in Sweden. This is due to the company labeling their product as vitamins and nutritions instead of medicine. Thus bypassing the Swedish laws and regulations on medicinal products.

Lastly the scientists implies that a people taking medication against hang-overs might be more likely to drink more. They supply no proof of this, but argues that this is not something of good. Especially since Revigör can be sold to people already drunk and that Revigör states "Revigör should not be used to increace alcohol consumption".

It all seems rather well, until Svenska Dagbladet decides to make an article regarding this. They choose "Scientists warns about hangover medicine" as a headline, the original headline was "Hangover medicine is a scam". Thus doing the classic "Scientists warn of X", which is rather popular in the Swedish press. The article mainly focuses on a very poor statement made by Fredrik Spak, one of the scientists. He says "To fool consumers into believing that they can drink any amount of alcohol without the effects of a hangover can in the end lead to addiction", this part, I can't understand. This is not at all what is claimed in the original article, no mention of addiction is made. Either Spak is out of his league and making claims he can not back up or the journlist at SvD has screwed up totally when quoting him (which judging by the rest of the article is not entirely unlikely).

This, however spurred a couple of angry comments by readers and several bloggers have commented on "The evil scientists, who think drinking is bad". All this because of one statement and the fact that SvD switches the focus from the "medicine" being a scam to it being harmful. I have never experienced such a poorly written article. The original article consists to about 80% on debunking the claims of Revigör and about 10% to any possible effects a false medicine might have. Then why does the SvD article consist of the opposite proportions? Also, why does the readers immediately think that the scientists are against them drinking? At no point does any of them say that they shouldn't drink, the only comment is the one of Spark which is totally irrational. I believe that this big mess is partially SvD's fault. Do they have a science part of the paper? Did they even read the first article made by the scientists? I don't have a job for this summer and if SvD needs someone to help them establist some basic understanding on how to write articles about science and even more important, how to keep true to an original article. I am free, and not that expensive.

Now, due to bad journalism the only scientific fact is lost. Revigör makes scientific claims, yet cannot support them. Thus making it a perfect example of pseudoscience. And yet... why is neither the journalists at SvD or the Swedish bloggers upset about being lied to?

Links:
The original article in GP (in Swedish)
The article made on the subject by SvD (in Swedish)
Revigörs homepage (in Swedish)

SvD and the war terrorism

2007-07-04T11:25:00.000+02:00

It has been quite some time since I felt the need to comment on a newspaper article but I can't let a thing like this pass uncriticized. SvD writes today as a part of an article on terrorism (translated from Swedish).

"Yesterday in the papers pop singer Dilba was complaining about how she was treated after making a "joke" about blowing up airplanes at Arlanda airport. She had been treated "like a terrorist" and been told that she was not allowed to board her aircraft to the US. Instead she should be thankful that society is taking terrorism seriously. The anti terrorist measures she is complaining about is working."

Then the article proceeds to other matters. Let me first say, what a load of complete crap! Does anyone believe that following up on every clue no matter how trivial, will make us safer? Terrorists are not likely to go up to security guards and tell them that they are carrying a bomb. Let us look at the two parties in this story. Why does Dilba joke about blowing up airplane? She is clearly sarcastic about it. This is probably since she as a customer is annoyed to be searched and thinks that the whole procedure is ridiculous. She is therefore "complaining" in her own way, although it's is a stupid move. The staff on the other hand are acting all jumpy, they hear the word bomb and goes nuts. They know what they are looking for and better safe than sorry right? But acting like this is not to take the threats seriously. It's to take things out of proportion and go paranoid. The companies clearly don't mind security at all, they only care about looking secure. So that they can point out that in fact they are doing something. Real security would involve calm and reasonable employees who upon Dilbas remark says "Really? Well, cut the crap. What are you really going to do on your stay in the US? Did we check her bag?". We should praise real work to prevent terrorism, not silly security acts. Real terrorists are smarter than Dilba and therefore the security staff should be smarter as well.

Link to the article (in Swedish).
Link to the article about Dilba (in Swedish).

Making a Multi column JList

2007-07-02T11:29:00.000+02:00

I have a small project going on that involves making a Swing GUI. Swing has all the elements I need, apart from a multi column JList. I did some browsing and found an example that worked. But I thought that it was rather static and decided to make a quick hack which was dynamic and in my opinion easier to understand. It should also be fairly easy to change the code into whatever you want it to render. For example in my project I will make it render even and odd indexes differently.

The license basically says, "Do what ever you want with it, just don't claim that you made it and don't try to endorse your product using my name in case you use it in your product.". I hope someone finds it useful.

HINT: Blogger is not that good at displaying code. Here is a link to a source file containing the code.


/**
* Copyright (c) 2007, Pontus Stenetorp
* All rights reserved.
*
* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
* modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
*
* * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this
*   list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
*   this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
*   and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
* * Neither the name of the author nor the names of any contributors may be
*   used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without
*   specific prior written permission.
*
* THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS"
* AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
* IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
* ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE
* LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR
* CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF
* SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS
* INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN
* CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE)
* ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE
* POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
*/

import java.awt.*;
import java.util.*;
import javax.swing.*;

/**
* An example using a ListCellRender capable of rendering columns to render
* a Multi-Column JList into a JFrame. The example should be fairly easy to
* follow, if you are mainly interested in how to make a ListCellRenderer and
* how to modify it after your own taste, just skip everything but the
* MultiColumnCellRenderer class.
*
* @author Pontus Stenetorp
* @version 2007-07-02
*/
public class MultiColumnExample extends JFrame {
   // See Serialization for more info, this is to remove a warning.
   private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
  
   private static final int ROWS = 17;
   private static final int COLUMNS = 7;
   private static final int ELEMENTLENGTH = 7; // The length of the element Strings.
   private static final String TITLE = "MultiColumnJListExample";
  
   private ArrayList data;
   private JList list;
   private MultiColumnCellRenderer cellrenderer;
  
   private MultiColumnExample() {
 // Set up the JFrame
 super(TITLE);
 this.setResizable(false);
 this.setBackground(Color.LIGHT_GRAY);
 this.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
 this.setLocation(800/2 - COLUMNS * ELEMENTLENGTH * 5, 0);
 
 // Create the JList
 data = new ArrayList();
 this.addExampleData(data);
 list = new JList(data.toArray());
 cellrenderer = new MultiColumnCellRenderer(COLUMNS);
 list.setCellRenderer(cellrenderer);
 
 // Play around with the colours and rendering settings.
 list.setSelectionForeground(Color.WHITE);
 list.setSelectionBackground(Color.BLACK);
 int column = 1;
 cellrenderer.setFGColour(column, Color.WHITE);
 cellrenderer.setBGColour(column, Color.BLACK);
 cellrenderer.setSFGColour(column, Color.BLACK);
 cellrenderer.setSBGColour(column, Color.WHITE);
 
 // Add the JList to the JFrame and display it.
 this.getContentPane().add(list);
 this.pack();
 this.setVisible(true);
   }
  
   /**
    * Adds some example data to a given ArrayList.
    * @param arraylist The ArrayList to add data to.
    */
   private void addExampleData(ArrayList arraylist) {
 Random rand = new Random();
 final int MAXVALUE = (int) Math.pow(10,ELEMENTLENGTH);
 for(int i = 0; i < ROWS; i++) {
     String[] datacolumn = new String[COLUMNS];
     for(int j = 0; j < COLUMNS; j++) {
  // Let's have a String if it's even.
  if(j % 2 == 0) {
      // If you don't understand this bit, search the web for ASCIITABLE
      char[] tobestring = new char[ELEMENTLENGTH];
      for(int u = 0; u < ELEMENTLENGTH; u++) {
   tobestring[u] = (char) ('a' + rand.nextInt((int)('z' - 'a')));
      }
      tobestring[0] -= 'a' - 'A'; // Uppercase the first letter
      datacolumn[j] = new String(tobestring);
  }
  // And some funky integers if odd.
  else {
      datacolumn[j] = String.valueOf(rand.nextInt(MAXVALUE));
  }
     }
     arraylist.add(datacolumn);
 }
   }
  
   /**
    * A simple example of a ListCellRenderer capable of rendering several columns.
    * The ListCellRenderer is also capable of manipulation of the colour of
    * specific columns. You can of course add more functionallity with ease just
    * by adding say different colours depending whether or not the index is odd
    * or even using %. Feel free to use it and play around with it.
    *
    * @author Pontus Stenetorp
    * @version 2007-07-02
    */
   private class MultiColumnCellRenderer extends JPanel
 implements ListCellRenderer {
 // See Serialization for more info, this is to remove a warning.
 private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

 private JLabel[] labels;
 private Color[] fgs; // Stores the foreground colours for each column.
 private Color[] bgs; // Stores the background colours for each column.
 private Color[] sfgs; // Stores the foreground colours for each column when selected.
 private Color[] sbgs; // Stores the background colours for each column when selected.

 /**
  * The JList has to hold objects of type and length String[columns].
  * If no Color has been set to a column it will use the default
  * colours of the JList.
  *
  * @param columns The amount of columns that the JList stores.
  */
 public MultiColumnCellRenderer(int columns) {
     setLayout(new GridLayout(1, columns));
     labels = new JLabel[columns];
     fgs = new Color[columns];
     bgs = new Color[columns];
     sfgs = new Color[columns];
     sbgs = new Color[columns];

     for(int i = 0; i < columns; i++) {
  labels[i] = new JLabel();
  labels[i].setOpaque(true);
  add(labels[i]);
     }
 }

 /**
  * @param column The column you wish to set the foreground of.
  * @param colour The Color to render the column foreground with.
  */
 public void setFGColour(int column, Color colour) {
     fgs[column] = colour;
 }

 /**
  * @param column The column you wish to set the background of.
  * @param colour The Color to render the column background with.
  */
 public void setBGColour(int column, Color colour) {
     bgs[column] = colour;
 }

 /**
  * @param column The column you wish to set the selection foreground of.
  * @param colour The Color to render the column foreground with.
  */
 public void setSFGColour(int column, Color colour) {
     sfgs[column] = colour;
 }

 /**
  * @param column The column you wish to set the selection background of.
  * @param colour The Color to render the column background with.
  */
 public void setSBGColour(int column, Color colour) {
     sbgs[column] = colour;
 }

 public Component getListCellRendererComponent(JList list, Object value,
     int index, boolean isSelected, boolean cellHasFocus) {
     // You might want to change this line in case you don't use String[]'s.
     String[] celldata = (String[])value;

     for(int i = 0; i < celldata.length; i++) {
  labels[i].setText(celldata[i]);

  // Colour logic, highly configurable.
  if(isSelected) {
      if(sbgs[i] != null) {
   this.labels[i].setBackground(sbgs[i]);
      }
      else {
   this.labels[i].setBackground(list.getSelectionBackground());
      }

      if(sfgs[i] != null) {
   this.labels[i].setForeground(sfgs[i]);
      }
      else {
   this.labels[i].setForeground(list.getSelectionForeground());
      }
  }
  else {
      if(bgs[i] != null) {
   this.labels[i].setBackground(bgs[i]);
      }
      else {
   this.labels[i].setBackground(list.getBackground());
      }

      if(fgs[i] != null) {
   this.labels[i].setForeground(fgs[i]);
      }
      else {
   this.labels[i].setForeground(list.getForeground());
      }
  }
     }

     super.setEnabled(list.isEnabled());
     super.setFont(list.getFont());
     return this;
 }
   }
  
   public static void main(String[] args) {
 MultiColumnExample mce = new MultiColumnExample();
   }
}

Links:
Link to a source file containing the above code.
This was the code that I found and decided to make my own example.
Thanks to Eli Bendersky, without your post I wouldn't have figured out how to post my code.

Wiimote under FreeBSD using bsdmoted

2007-06-05T17:12:00.000+02:00

I have recently acquired a Wii and the Wiimote is an interesting creation indeed. Some attempts to reverse engineer it has been made and I found that FreeBSD has a driver. Sadly though, it lacks good documentation so I thought that I would walk through what I made in order to make it work.

First of all, we need to enable Bluetooth device support by loading the ng_ubt Bluetooth module into the kernel.

If you want it to load upon boot add the following line to /etc/loader.conf

/etc/loader.conf
ng_ubt_load="YES"

And load the module immediately in order to detect any Bluetooth devices. Afterwards check dmesg in order to check if any device was detected. In my case I had to remove the BT USB stick and then insert it again for it to work properly. Somehow it seems that the O/S won't detect it properly if ng_ubg wasn't loaded when the device was first detected.

# kldload ng_ubt

Then we need to make config for the Bluetooth daemon, the default conf will do just fine.

# cp /usr/share/examples/netgraph/bluetooth/rc.bluetooth /etc/rc.bluetooth
# chmod +x /etc/rc.bluetooth
# /etc/rc.bluetooth start ubt0

Now we are on to starting the bthid daemon. First let's use the default conf. If you are unable to start bthid due to some load command (yes, I admit that I have forgot which command it was AND lost the link to the solution). Then you need to upgrade to the latest STABLE RELENG_6, where the problem has been solved.

# cp /usr/src/usr.sbin/bluetooth/bthidd/bthidd.conf.sample /etc/bluetooth/bthidd.conf
# /etc/rc.d/bthid start

Now on to getting your Wiimote's BD_ADDR. You will probably have a bundle of BT devices nearby if you live in an apartment. I detected "Willy's mobile" for example. Press 1 and 2 simultaneously on the Wiimote and it will enter a detectable mode. Then execute a following command and note down all BD_ADDR of the devices that responds.

# hccontrol -n ubt0hci inquiry
[a list of devices]

When you request the name of the device (the Wiimote should still be blinking on happily in 1 + 2 detectable mode) it should respond accordingly. It will of course use another BD_ADDR.

# hccontrol -n ubt0hci remote_name_request 12:34:56:78:9A:BC
BD_ADDR: 12:34:56:78:9A:BC
Name: Nintendo RVL-CNT-01

Now you need to fetch the bsdmoted source. Get the latest version from. http://sourceforge.net/projects/bsdmoted/
Extract it somewhere and cd into the directory. Then clean, compile, install clean.

# make clean
# make
# make install
# make clean

You now need to configure bsdmoted with some info from the Wiimote. Execute the following command to do this.

# bthidcontrol -a 12:34:56:78:9A:BC query >> /usr/local/etc/bsdmoted.conf

Now you only need to start the bsdmoted daemon.

# bsdmoted

The binds are the following:
A is the left mouse button.
B is the right mouse button.
+ and - are used to calibrate the sensitivity .
Use 1 and 2 to switch between IR-mode and tilting mode.

I did not get the IR-mode working, but perhaps you do. Enjoy!

Recommended reading:
The FreeBSD handbook on Bluetooth.

bsdmoted links:
The bsdmoted Sourceforge page.
Chuan-Heng Hsiao's bsdmoted page (videos showing that it actually works).

Going home... well... sort of

2007-06-05T00:08:00.000+02:00

Returning to where you grew up brings you a certain feeling. A feeling of things that have been lost forever. You feel old, happy and sad. And for some reason, you want to return home, to where you currently live. Meeting friends and family is nice, but it stirs up a lot of emotions. It's exhausting.

I had the chance to take a lot of photos, wandering around Örebro and Lindesberg. Here are some of them. I will process a few panorama photos that needs to be stitched in the days to come (or tonight if I'll take a cup of tea in order to stay awake).

Let's begin with some flowers.

Then some flowers and bees.

Then some animals.

A "Skäggdopping" or Great crested grebe in English.

I am not sure which bird this was, I guess I should ask my mother to remind me on what was told about it.

A "Gräsand" or a Mallard I believe it's called in English.

In my hometown Lindesberg this relic has been left standing near the railway station. It's a pump for filling up the water tank of steam engines.

It seems that the railway company has taken actions against birds deciding to rest too close to the electric lines.

In Örebro I found this old sign on a door to a house from the early 20th century. Roughly translated into English it reads "Begging and the sale of merchandise within this property is strictly forbidden".

In health... and a panorama

2007-06-02T02:06:00.000+02:00

Today I felt better, I managed to get some work done and ship a patch to a customer. I also remembered that cjg and I tried to make a 360 degree panorama photo from the KTH clock tower last summer. Eager to try it myself this time with my rather new camera I set off to the tower. It was closed, so I wandered around campus for roughly 2h and the sun was setting. Finally when I walked through one of the computer halls I found a view. The result can be seen below, it's a rather huge picture so I recommend opening it in a separate window. The only editing done, apart from making it a panorama from several smaller pictures, is removing some flaws made by my camera.

(singe Google don't want to host the whole image, here is a link to the real thing)

What you see is, starting from the lower left corner is the Engelbrekt church, the flag of the KTH student union beneath the flag is the one of KTH;s administrative buildings, the tall distant building is "Nyponet" a 21 story building with student apartments, next with a rather tall chimney is what I believe to be an on-campus heating plant and finally the tower of the KTH library (KTHB).

A tutorial on how to make panorama pictures.

In sickness... and strawberries

2007-05-31T11:59:00.000+02:00

Last Monday I wrote my final exam for this semester. As it usually happens, I got sick the same day. I have caught a rather bad cold and has been more or less down and out since then.

Yesterday I bought some Swedish strawberries to cheer me up (and get some vitamins, minerals and all other things I know are good for me). They were not cheap. For those of you who doesn't know, strawberries is the most exotic thing that grows in Sweden. Most fruits are imported and thus not tasting as good as they would in more southern countries. So, strawberries is a special thing for many of us Swedes. I serve them in a bowl, with milk, some cream and sugar. For a moment it actually felt like summer, but the weather says otherwise. I also took some photos, since I think strawberries are rather beautiful.

This summer I will study three courses in physics. I trust most of them to be very interesting, but I will provide further comments on this as the courses begin next week.

Lastly, in the news. DN writes about the right-wing Swedish government looking over routines for state television and radio. In Sweden we have two television channels run by the state and four radio channels. They mostly provide music and programs which they commercial channels are not interested in. Debates, classical music and so on. They also has to provide it for a large majority of the Swedish citizens. Where I used to live we didn't have any commercial radio channels since the population was only about 10'000, lately one or two commercial channels have become available (and only playing horrible popular music anyway). To finance all this, the state claims ~4 SEK a day from everyone who owns a television. We even have people employed to check in on you if you are paying. Sadly, our government seems to like this solution. I think it's an old (and bad) idea, that was a good idea back in the middle of the 20th century. Back then some people didn't own a TV and would probably not like paying for channels they couldn't watch. Now, things are different. Most people own a television and it takes money to check whether or not someone owns a television and to administrate it all. Why not let it be a part of the tax instead? Thus making the system more efficient and making it impossible to avoid paying for your TV. The increase in tax will be unnoticeable and people will not complain about such a marginal increase. I just can't stand bad solutions to simple problems...

Link to the article (in Swedish).
Link to more comments made by the Swedish minister of culture (in Swedish).
Link to the first statement made by the Swedish minister of culture in SvD (in Swedish).

Thoughts and photos of a salt crystal

2007-05-17T12:37:00.000+02:00

I have taken three out of five exams for this semester now. The next one up is discrete mathematics, it scares me a bit but I guess I'll do fine as usual. I will just get a cup of tea and read through the chapters once again this afternoon and then focus on getting it all to work in practice. After the math exam it's just a silly course in economics that is more or less a walk in the park.

I have applied for three courses at KTH for this summer and two courses at another university. I have received letters of acceptance from the second university but I'd rather study at KTH. I hope to take courses mainly in physics with some connection to computer science or a field related to computer science so that I can apply my knowledge in courses to come.

Instead of going on about bad things I thought that today I would just mention some news that made me happy. S. Korea and N. Korea seems to be getting along better. SvD (in Swedish) writes that regular communications between the countries might be resumed, hopefully this will result in Koreans being able to see their relatives and exchange knowledge, goods and so on. Thus leading to less tension in the area.

DN (in Swedish) says that Amazon is apparently going to sell non-DRM-damaged music. Finally! A company that realises that damaging a product makes it useless. Now I don't have to buy CD;s and rip them in order to play them on my computer.

Lastly, a couple of months ago I visited my mother and she had bought some kind of sea salt. The package also contained larger crystals which I sought out and brought one of them home. The photos didn't end up that well, but I really like the shapes.

Photos of a deep pink flower

2007-05-06T17:23:00.000+02:00

There is a tree just outside my window. Last year it bloomed beautifully and since I bought a camera after Christmas I have waited for it to bloom. Then when it burst into bloom I waited for the sun to reach it. The building next to mine cast a huge shadow over the tree. But today, when writing one of my home-exams I finally got the chance.

I took the first two using a chair and raising the camera over my head. That tree is pretty tall. For the other two I just used a chair.

Teaching mathematics

2007-05-06T11:40:00.000+02:00

The following text is a translated version of a post at tjuvlyssnat.se which publish overheard conversations which are considered funny. Pay them a visit if you can read Swedish, some are quite amusing.

\begin{translation}
One might wonder whether or not it sounded worse this time...
On a train from Linköping to Norrköping.
Two girls about 23 years old and probably teacher students are discussing teaching.
Girl 1: It was so embarrassing, last week when I went with Lisa...
Girl 2: Umm?
Girl 1: Yes, we were discussing whether or not we could "fill in" during a math lesson. And there was a guy opposite of us, he was clearly listening to our conversation.
Girl 2: Mmm...
Girl 1: Well, we came to talk about how to divide by zero. Three divided by zero has to be three, five divided by zero must be five.
Girl 2: Mmm...
Girl 1: Then we notice that the guy barely can keep himself from laughing. Oh, we must have seemed so stupid... Three divided by zero must of course be zero.
Girl 2: Yes, it has to be, haha!
Girl 1: We felt so embarrassed!
\end

I really hope that all teacher students who are to teach mathematics are not like this. I have had math teachers that barely can cope with math at a middle school level. The class was at a virtual stand-still for a week when he filled in. Math, like any other subject needs motivated and well educated teachers... otherwise we end up with people in their twenties who still don't know the basic rules of division *shivers*.

Link to the Swedish version.

Converting several textfiles between Unix and Windows linebreak using Perl

2007-05-03T22:51:00.000+02:00

I have a bunch of text files and I want to move them to Windows (which as usually only follows one standard (it's own) and is unable to properly interpret Unix line breaks (unlike most Unix text-tools that can manage both standards)). If I just move them they will look horrible and my client will complain. So, what to do. Time to deploy a friendly Perl hacker (fadern), which I happen to know. Tinker a bit and soon you will have a one-liner that solves your problem.

Unix -> Windows
> perl -pi'.bak' -e 's/\012/\015\012/g' *.suffix

Windows -> Unix
> perl -pi'.bak' -e 's/\015\012/\012/g' *.suffix

These commands will create backups of the changed files with a .bak suffix. If you feel that you don't need that just remove '.bak' from the command. Just remember that if you screw up it's permanent.

Bibles in hotel rooms

2007-05-03T18:04:00.000+02:00

Scandic hotels in Sweden decided to remove the bible from all their hotel rooms about a month ago. This caused the Swedish church along with several smaller churches to call a boycott against Scandic. The reason for removing the bibles was, according to Scandic, the lack of drawers. Instead they were to offer bibles, Korans and other holy books in the lobby. That you might bring to your room.

The whole thing led a hectic debate between those who were happy about the decision (see Swedish Humanist association) and the ones who thought that the bible ought to be there (see the Swedish church, other Christian groups in Sweden, but no non-Christian groups) due to tradition and the spiritual need of those who end up in the hotel rooms. Some even claimed that it's was terrible of Scandic to keep the porn available but not the bible.

I am a member of the Swedish Humanist association so what I write is probably not to the liking of members of any church, but I want to reflect upon the matter. I have no interest in whether or not the bible is the word of god but try instead to focus on whether or not you can (from my point of view) morally justify bibles in hotel rooms. Now, on to my analysis.

First of all, Sweden today has several cultural minorities represented, Muslims, Buddhists and so on. Why should Christians have the right to push their holy book into the living room of others? I have tried to justify this, but the only fact that is slightly relevant is that Sweden has been a Christian nation is not an argument in favour of keeping them. History is important, but why should we not take into account the changes in recent years? Why did not any Muslims complain? One might wonder.

Secondly, why should a chain of hotels force a bible into the bedroom of their customers? Are the customers not capable of bringing their own holy books? Do Scandic want their customers to read the bible? Should we force ideals and laws upon people and not leave it up to them to decide what to read for leisure? I would certainly feel uncomfortable to find Mein Kampf in my drawer when I checked into a hotel. Hell, I want the Communist Manifesto, the Koran and all other holy books in a private library in my hotel room! That would at least be fair. Or perhaps... why not let people go down to the lobby and make an active choice on what to read?

Lastly, I was rather annoyed by the claims of the porn offered on the TV to be a problem. There is an important difference between the porn and the bible. I choose to bring the porn into my room, if I want to see it, I order it. The bible is there whether I want it to or not. If you don't want to watch any porn, fine... just go down to the lobby and bring a bible instead? Perhaps they will even care to bring it to your room for a small charge? Or watch God channel for that matter.

Today, I found that Scandic will keep the bibles. A pity, I liked the way things were going. Now a bunch of fundamentalists have once again proven to prevent people from making active choices when it comes to their view on life and all that it brings.

Link to the latest SvD article (in Swedish). You can find links to the older articles in the series from the list inside the article.

njorak for IBM Thinkpad X41

2007-05-01T22:21:00.000+02:00

Stuck on my laptop I still need to do email correspondence. Doing email correspondence means that I need to write in Swedish. Writing in Swedish means that I need Swedish special characters. So I just quickly hacked together a IBM Thinkpad X41 version of njorak. I hope you don't mind loosing the Caps Lock key, something had to go. Most likely I will rework this version and then scrap it. But for now it's a quick fix.

! njorak, not-quite-dvorak. Version 1.1
! By Pontus Stenetorp
! Derived from us dvorak, accesses Swedish characters through
! altgr combos.
! Apply it to an ordinary dvorak keymap using xmodmap.
! IBM Thinkpad X41 version
! dedicated to spatrik

keycode 43 = d D aring
keycode 44 = h H adiaeresis
keycode 45 = t T odiaeresis

! Caps Lock key on the IBM Thinkpad X41
keycode 66 = Mode_switch

Crimes commited using public computers

2007-04-30T16:38:00.000+02:00

Earlier today the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, SvD for short. Published an article about cyber crimes being committed using public computers at libraries and internet cafes. The police, of course, are not happy about this, most libraries in Sweden don't have user accounts but simply lend their computers to anyone. There are how ever good examples of libraries that enforce user accounts. Most crimes commited are related to personal affairs, such as slander, insults and threats. It seems that our youth has understood the importance of covering your tracks. This I consider to be a good thing, because when they grow up they will not offer access to anybody without ensuring that they will be able to trace him or her later on. In a best case scenario this will lead to all libraries having user accounts, and in a worst case scenario the libraries ending up logging everything, which is unnecessary and will only invade on the users privacy. All the necessary logs are kept (or at least should be kept) by the accessed host.

But what about all other points of access? Cafes? WiFi? Schools? Especially in the WiFi case I doubt that the police will have much to go on. We could of course charge the owner, but if a Swedish court rules in favor of full responsibility for your internet connection people will get afraid and WiFi sales plummet. Since this is not clear from a juridical point of view, this is the very reason that I will not use WiFi at home. I simply don't want anyone breaching security and possibly leaving me responsible with what ever crime they want to commit.

I am looking forward to seeing how our courts will handle this and how our laws will change.

Article number one in SvD (In Swedish)
Article number two in SvD, a response from the public library of Stockholm (In Swedish)

Passwords

2007-04-30T16:11:00.000+02:00

E24 has published an article about common passwords, in Swedish of course and in my opinion it's not really worth reading. It contains barely no substance and no analysis at all. Passwords that are simple to crack is nothing new and it's a fact that most users don't even bother thinking twice before selecting "carla" as a password. After all, how can the attacker know that I fancy that girl? If you have read a bit about password security however you realize that an attacker won't make any guesses but will fire an arsenal of dictionary words. Against this, poor carla won't stand a chance.

Administrators such as myself try to force the users to use decent passwords, such as enforcing policies of mixed case, alphanumerical mixing and so on. Does this work? Not really, users usually just make a quick workaround and we are back at square one. Some good reading on the subject is Schneiers analysis of the cracked MySpace passwords.

For more critical services such as SSH the best option is likely to be to abandon passwords altogether, they do more harm than good. A good alternative are cryptographic keys, they will allow you easy and secure access. At the cost of slightly more trouble when setting them up. I guess that rules them out as an option for everyday users at MySpace though...

Ports maintainer

2007-04-30T00:15:00.000+02:00

Some time ago cjg and I decided to try porting some software. Since we both code some Python now and had some interest in coding audio we took upon ourselves to port two modules for Python that involved audio. cjg was done within an hour, I was not. He is a far better FreeBSD user than me (and coder for that matter) and after a few hours of sweat and blood I managed to succeed in my porting aswell. This of course took a lot of help from cjg, so I claim that he deserves atleast >= 50% of the credits for "my" port aswell. Of course, I forgot to blog about it but porting software can be a lot of fun and is great training for ones patience. Perhaps this is one step closer to becoming more involved in my O/S, who knows. Atleast I hope so.

Link to "my" port.

"Good" commercials

2007-04-28T22:54:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I discovered a poster in the subway that made me smile. They are rather nasty towards new age, belief and psycho dynamic therapy but what the hell. I don't mind giving any of those fields a kick in the but now and then. They all claim to help people but are unable to prove it unlike other means that are scientifically proven to be both effective and harmless. Since they are Swedish I will supply a translation. Alvedon is a brand of painkillers made by AstraZeneca.

"Heahache? Try a pair of healing hands.
Or trust in Alvedon"

"Headache? Try self hypnosis, stare at the sign for ten minutes. Or trust in Alvedon"

"Headache? Call Saira Solskensöga, 08-50 52 22 05.
Or trust in Alvedon"

Translators note: Solskensöga is literally "Sunshine eye" and is refering to a "typical" name of a fortune teller.

More computer woes and spring

2007-04-27T00:04:00.000+02:00

Two days ago my workstation died, I won't even get a signal upon boot. If only I had the time to look into it, but exams and all. I simply have to use my laptop for now.

I am planning on starting my own company, in order to make it easier for my clients (currently only one) to pay me for the work I do for them. Now, I only need a good name. I will also get paid for some work and I do think that I will get through the summer, work is scarce when you lack business contacts and don't like doing web pages.

It's spring in Sweden and when walking across campus I have noted that we have some lovely trees blooming. I promised myself to take photos a week ago and now I finally took myself a 30 minute break and did it. I like the outcome, the flowers sure are pretty.

The tree is right outside my dormitory (on campus) and the weather was just right. Clear blue sky and a warming sun.

HDD issues

2007-04-10T17:10:00.000+02:00

During the last three weeks I have had several HDD;s failing. What it might be that makes HDD;s cause DMA errors, I do not know. R/W on specific sectors on one of my workstation disks caused a core dump. The same thing happened to my old reliable Pentium 3 last Wednesday. I have lost some minor data, but recovering it is tedious. And now a pretty old 8.1Gb drive in another computer has begun to cause DMA errors. Nothing serious yet but taking last weeks errors into account I am worried. I am running dangerously low on HDD;s and I have promised to set up a CVS server for a bunch of students. *sigh* I might have to purchase a new one, less food, more hardware.

And this is what happens to HDD;s that don't behave...

Highpoint RocketRaid 2210 under FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE

2007-04-06T23:51:00.000+02:00

Today I have fiddled with raid, it has been a pleasant ride. Highpoint has supplied good documentation and most problems has been related to my old hardware. When you get hardware for free, there is bound to be trouble. Only one minor flaw from Highpoint's side, you have to change the configuration file for the raid management tools in order for it to even detect the raid controller. This is mentioned once in the FreeBSD specific installation guide for the driver but not in the CLI-tool guide. The configuration file should look like this.

/etc/hptcfg
rr2210
hptmv.status

rr2210 should be replaced with your driver name. I named my driver rr2210.ko as you can see. After doing this, simply start or restart the daemon using.

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/hptdaemon.sh

And you should now detect your controller.

One last thing, why did Highpoint comment out

echo "The daemon is running. Please stop it first."

In the rc-script? I enabled it again anyhow, things like that can lead to headaches just being given exit 1.

Now, back to using that lovely raid card.

A wonderful "Swedish" thing?

2007-04-02T23:08:00.000+02:00

I was in town today and bought some things. One of the things I bought was this.

Now, ask yourself. What is it?

The answer is hidden here: It's a multi-purpose pump from France! And YES, I did think twice before purchasing it. cjg pointed out that the designer must have had previous work experience elsewhere, I have no idea what he is implying.

Transform into infinity

2007-03-30T14:45:00.000+02:00

I guess eight has a secret identity...

I thought about this some time ago and bet I am not the first one to think of this. Yesterday my lecturer made a similar joke on turning 8 into infinity by twisting it. Inspired by xkcd's (http://www.xkcd.com/c184.html), great comic.

Nominated

2007-03-30T09:18:00.000+02:00

Last September I began my "career" as a teachers assistant. I have had a lot of fun teaching, preparing for lessons, doing overtime since some students won't finish their Python labs on time (in particular I remember a 2 1/2 h session of debugging and explaining, but in the end she got that program working as it should and hopefully she learned a lot) and answering odd questions by e-mail and IRC during weekends. If my memory doesn't fail me, I have mentioned that I love this. But some things are worth mentioning twice.

Recently CSC announced this years winner of the Gerd Eriksson price for best teachers assistant of the year. I didn't win, but that doesn't matter. What does matter to me was that I was nominated, someone or some persons took the time to write a letter about what I did well. That brings you warm feeling and once again it makes me want to become even better. I got some blackboard chalk from Gerd herself (she is a teacher at CSC), I believe that my handwriting might improve using a thick kind of chalk and I think my handwriting is terrible. Perhaps I should also practice on blackboard disposition? *ponders* It's a bit like being on stage but I am less nervous about it. What should I do to become a better teacher?

Why does seeing their smiling faces when they reach understanding make me smile? Am I gifted? I just can't believe that I am. Practice makes perfect I hope, both for teachers and students. For now, I will enjoy the moment and be truly happy about it.

"Charming"? I must say that no one has ever called me charming before *continues to ponder*.

New "cleaner" njorak version

2007-03-21T17:39:00.000+01:00

I made a few minor adjustments, this one is not quite as forgiving as the last version. Since you still need to use Shift + Mode_switch + key in order to get capital letters I figured that I could just clean it up a little. Also, I removed the option to use App on EZ-Reach 2030 since... well... I did mention that it was less forgiving.

! njorak, not-quite-dvorak. Version 1.1
! By Pontus Stenetorp
! Derived from us dvorak, accesses Swedish characters through
! altgr combos.
! Apply it to an ordinary dvorak keymap using xmodmap.
! EZ-Reach 2030 version
! dedicated to spatrik

keycode 43 = d D aring
keycode 44 = h H adiaeresis
keycode 45 = t T odiaeresis

! Start button on EZ-reach 2030
keycode 115 = Mode_switch

New chair

2007-02-21T23:06:00.000+01:00

I have spent some of the money I have earned, I usually save money since I don't know what to spend it on. But a chair, I did need a new one. My old chair was a chair from IKEA which cost about 500 SEK and was more than broken. It made noises and the seat had stopping pouring out. Since I spend a lot of time in front of my computer I decided that this time I would get a decent chair.

A good chair costs money, a lot of money. In Sweden we have a company called Kinnarps, they make chairs for large companies and they make good chairs. Very good chairs. The problem is that they are expensive, about 5'000 SEK and more. Especially if you want one with seat and back moving independently and many other neat features that makes your back go "AHHH!". After trying out a few chairs at their store in Stockholm I ordered one and today I received it. It cost a lot, but it was worth it, well worth it. My back hasn't felt this good for quite some time and I hope for it to last for at least ten years. I recommend Kinnarps, although I think that it was a little bit of trouble ordering, since I don't own a company. If you are looking for money well spent so that your back will survive all that coding, you do want a decent chair.

Now, I have to get back to studying. I have a lot to do, but at least now my back won't hurt after 8h sessions.

An image of it:
http://www.d.kth.se/~ninjin/images/chair.jpg

A lot of things...

2007-02-13T00:29:00.000+01:00

To do that is. I have many things on my mind and especially on my to-do-list. This isn't really the best feeling in the world but at least it keeps my mind off feeling down because there is nothing to do. My main concern right now is my Japanese, since I only have learned two languages properly. Swedish and English that is, I have pretty much lost myself on how it feels to study languages. I was fluent in English back in eight grade and since then I have barely bothered about grammar, making new sentences and so on. Instead I have just been exposed to and used every day English. The problem is... I have grown to respect languages.

I respect them so deeply that I feel insecure when it comes to even making a single sentence. Now, this might seem like a good thing but at this stage in Japanese I should play and make tons of mistakes. I just have to use the darn thing and by doing that I will most likely learn more words, more grammar and in the end I might even be able to talk it without sounding like a complete fool. The only problem is, how do I convince myself that I can do this? How do I expose myself to more Japanese? I do seriously doubt that watching Anime is a good idea, it's a bit too fast. Perhaps reading? Manga? Books? I better ask my teacher, because I am not going to let myself get a bad grade or possibly fail a course because I am too set in my ways... One ought to be able to change I suppose.

What makes a lecturer happy

2007-01-26T23:45:00.000+01:00

I know, I know... it was only a few moments since the last post but I am in the mood of writing things down. I guess I am a bit emotional right now.

I hold lectures in a course concerning Introduction to Computer Science, this mostly involves general programming practice but also some algorithms. I hold practice lectures for smaller groups around ten people. I now have about four months of experience and I hope that I am getting better and better by the day.

This term I have been forced to move my group from the morning to the afternoon. I have lectures an Algorithms Data structures and Complexity, *sigh* if only it wouldn't have been a lecture I would have skipped it. Along with this a few other lecturers have quit for this term, since they didn't have time to teach. This lead to two small groups splitting up and having to spread out among the other groups and my old group having to switch to my new afternoon group. A bit chaotic yes, and a bit hard to see my point but we'll get there.

A lot of the members of my old group was not happy about me leaving, they seemed to like me. Although, in my view I am confused, has a terrible handwriting, sometimes has a hard time to get to the point, gets lost in my own sentences, etc etc. That made me happy, but I expected most of them to still take the morning lecture to avoid having a two hour schedule gap. Seven of them still attended this Thursday... that really touched my heart. It makes you feel all warm inside and motivates you even more to see if you might even be able to make further improvements. They are a nice bunch, really good CS students over all.

Now, as if this wasn't enough later that evening I was asked if I could take in even more members. I had one of the groups that lost their lecturer for one lesson back in October. And now about six of them wanted to join my group... MY group?! I couldn't believe this at first, I mean... I deeply respect the other lecturers and consider most of them to be far better than me... and they asked ME?! My world spun once or twice. They even told me why they prefer me, I was shocked to say the least. I will not mention why and who they prefer me to... but I just couldn't believe it and I still can't quite grip it. This is a great responsibility, I know that I can improve and perhaps I then can teach them even more. I truly am one happy lecturer at this point, perhaps I have found something that I am good at... maybe *smiles*.

Discrete math

2007-01-26T23:36:00.000+01:00

This term I have a course in Discrete mathematics, I don't know why but I somehow feel all exited about it. The first lectures has really been a lot of fun, a part from some proofs which can sometimes be horrible (when it comes to graphs). Somehow I like graphs...

Last Friday I hacked together a small program for graphs, this was quite amusing. I implemented some algorithms and played around. I did have comments regarding my mental health how ever, since I spent Friday night with an open math book next to me. Perhaps I can actually be good at this field of mathematics... or is it yet another field where I find a lot of fascination but still can't really grasp the whole thing? As it was with logic. One thing is for sure though, the old math fear from high school is gone since I started at KTH. At least that is a good thing ^^

njorak

2007-01-14T20:58:00.000+01:00

I have been a Dvorak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard) user for almost two years now. Since I am a Swede and I also require some Swedish special characters in order to write proper Swedish, such as å, ä and ö. At the time I started using Dvorak I typed 90%+ English, so I didn't really consider it a problem to not have these characters.

How ever, things change. When I started at KTH I began writing a lot more in Swedish. Nowadays I'd say I write about 50% Swedish and people started complaining about me lacking certain characters =( Well, one person in particular. I had plans on somehow integrating Swedish special characters into the Dvorak layout, but unlike Svorak (www.aoeu.info) I didn't want to change anything to the default layout. Now, XKB isn't really the nicest and most intuitive thing to play with. So my attempts mostly ended in a lot of frustration and nothing done.

Today, I started out looking at XKB again. It all ended with me not being able to understand why it did what it did. And for the first time ever I tried xmodmap instead. Now, xmodmap was entirely different. I quickly managed to get it the way I wanted to but now I faced another issue. My EZ-Reach 2030 keyboard (http://www.typematrix.com/ezr2030/) lacks an altgr key. Which I needed to place the Swedish characters where I wanted to. I asked a couple of friends to run xev and hand me which keycode altgr was using, I got ISO_Level3_Shift from both of them. Happily I entered it as the key for a spare key on my keyboard, but, nothing happened. This of course, being unwanted and unexpected was soon cast aside by some web browsing. I found that I should use Mode_switch. The result can be found below. This is just a first draft, but should make "someone" ;) happy.

The name njorak derives from the Swedish sound "njo", which is a sound you make when you somehow agree and disagree at the same time. Since I probably would answer the question "Is this really Dvorak?" with "njo".

! njorak, not-quite-dvorak.
! By Pontus Stenetorp kth se>
! Derived from us dvorak, includes Swedish characters
! altgr combos.
! Apply it to an ordinary dvorak keymap using xmodmap.
! EZ-Reach 2030 version
! dedicated to spatrik

keycode 29 = f F aring
keycode 30 = g G adiaeresis
keycode 31 = c C odiaeresis
keycode 32 = r R Aring
keycode 33 = l L Adiaeresis
keycode 34 = slash question Odiaeresis
! Start button on EZ-reach 2030
keycode 115 = Mode_switch
! App button on EZ-reach 2030
keycode 117 = Mode_switch

Enforcing the use of more secure passwords under FreeBSD

2007-01-11T12:17:00.000+01:00

Usually I am a very nice guy when it comes to handing out shell accounts, but when it comes to users using dictionary words as passwords I draw a line. In order to at least force them to do some thinking before choosing "password" as a password I do the following.

Add these two lines to your /etc/login.conf

:mixpasswordcase:\
:minpasswordlen=8:\

This will enforce a minimum length of eight characters and force them to mix case. And don't forget to rebuild the database, in case you didn't notice the comment in login.conf.

# cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf

Now, you have a standard for passwords. Even though it's fairly weak, it's better than nothing.

Mounting remote directories using sshfs under FreeBSD

2007-01-05T16:36:00.000+01:00

Another tutorial, this time on the usage of sshfs. cjg (http://cjg.mine.nu/) told me about it a few weeks ago and it really is one neat way to mount directories remotely.

As usual it's optimized for 80 char width so here is the link.

http://www.d.kth.se/~ninjin/texts/cs/sshfsfreebsd.txt

Setting up a OpenVPN client with bridging using OpenBSD

2007-01-03T12:51:00.000+01:00

Here's my first try at writing a how-to, I set up OpenVPN under OpenBSD recently and it was quite a challenge since there were close to no guides on the subject. Therefore I decided to write my own, since it's optimized for 80 chars width I will post a link to the file.

I hope it helps you in some way.

http://www.d.kth.se/~ninjin/texts/cs/obsdvpntut.txt

Installing Python Snack module under FreeBSD

2006-12-31T13:32:00.000+01:00

Apparently Snack (http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/) in ports doesn't want to play with Python and I am eager to play and don't want to look into it. So if you have no patience ;) just install the Python module manually.

Get Snack using ports
# portinstall snack

Fetch the source code
# fetch http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/dist/snack2.2.10.tar.gz

Untar it
# tar xvf snack2.2.10.tar.gz

Copy the file that we are interested in to the Python module directory
# cp snack2.2.10/python/tkSnack.py /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages/

Clean up the thrash (keep in mind that there is some useful example code in the demos directory)
# rm snack2.2.10.tar.gz && rm -rf snack2.2.10/

And then start playing with Snack.

EDIT 05/01/07:
(Added it as a text-file aswell. http://www.d.kth.se/~ninjin/texts/cs/snackfreebsd.txt)

The execution of Saddam

2006-12-30T11:59:00.000+01:00

I'll try to make this short, I do in no way claim to know the answer to "how do we please those that the bastard made to suffer?".

How do you best bring justice to a man whom has done so much "bad" that all punishments are insufficient? What is it that such a man fear the most? Death? I seriously doubt that Saddam had any real "fear" of death. It would be a quick end for him, and he'd leave a ton of conspiracies and legends for his fanatics to breed on. Killing that man serves his own ends, especially if you make the executioners wear black hoods and look like a bunch of thugs. Is that the look of a just deed?

Now, let's instead focus on what would have been a proper punishment? In my opinion he should be kept locked up, so tight that he couldn't lead any outside movement, face all charges. For who has dealt justice for the Curds? For the people of Iran? The people of Kuwait? And so on. Would you like a serial killer to skip the trials of his later victims? I say not. We should not only have sought to kill Saddam in his physical form, but also the myths surrounding him. So that we made sure that the truth of his reign and his deeds were known and available to his followers and enemies. His black print placed properly and truthfully in history. Since now, they live on. And what better way to punish a man than to face his own deeds? For if there is no god, who will make him face his own deeds but we mortals?

Gateway mayhem

2006-12-29T14:33:00.000+01:00

At approximately 3:30 AM when I decided to reboot my gateway for some testing the HDD decided to go evil on me. For unknown reasons reading from the HDD would cause the whole system to get stuck in a ide-not-ready loop >.<> /etc/fstab.new

I'll be damned ;P I saved myself from using ed. Now I just might need to get a new HDD *sigh*, but at least I have my net back up.

Christmas presents

2006-12-26T20:39:00.000+01:00

And it all came to an end... visiting relatives, eating...

Christmas has it's downsides, presents. Don't get me wrong, I love that my relatives/family thinks about me and buys me presents. But I don't have room for all this stuff and my back is killing me after traveling with ten times the load I traveled to them with. What's so wrong with cash?

It's not all their fault, I should have seen to it that they got my wish list but they would still give me a ton of stuff. They don't like to give money, since they think it doesn't show that they care about me. But what I need is not a ton of gibberish that sure looks nice but I don't have room for it, I don't have a villa like them, I have 20sqm!

I would have been all jolly if I got the 1000 SEK which all this stuff would cost, then I could save room and buy things that I actually need. Like a freezer and a new chair.

For my birthday next month I will mail a simple list to them and beg them to give me either a specific book (I will supply the ISBN) from a list or cash. I do love them... I truly hope that they don't get me wrong.

Hogfather

2006-12-22T10:52:00.000+01:00

I took the time to see Terry Pratchet's Hogfather, now that I am on holiday. I must say that it was far beyond my expectations. Having seen just about enough of the cartoon version of Soul Music, I expected Hogfather to be just as bad. Transferring Pratchet's books to the screen seemed to me an impossible task, you can't have that many jokes, puns, comic reliefs etc. etc. in a movie... not unless you change it, without ruining the whole thing. I thought it to be impossible, I was wrong.

Hogfather is a dark story. Well, just as dark as it the book I guess, the Discworld is not known to be a nice place after all. I must say that I was impressed by the screen work and the special effects that made it all the darker. But in all this darkness are the characters, Pratchet newer fails when it comes to creating peculiar characters and bizarre settings. Seeing the wizards, death and all the others on the screen was not horrible. I very much enjoyed it, nicely woven into the dark fabric and a just as cryptic plot as always when it comes to Pratchet, it kept me etched to the screen for 3 hours.

And the ending... wow... I will only mention that I didn't expect that much "good" philosophy. At least it was among the things I least expected. All in all, not the best I have seen this year, but well worth watching. But skip the end of part 1 where they spoil half the fun of part 2 by showing what to come, I wish I had.

Hogfather was aired on Sky one, if you can't see it on air, you ought to get it by other means.

Holiday

2006-12-20T16:20:00.000+01:00

I wrote my last exam for this term today, feels as if the one who wrote the exam knew all my weak spots. I hope for a degree of four and doubt that I did well enough for a five. *sigh* I had hoped for a great ending but I didn't deserve a five anyway, I don't know my laser physics that well.

Now I should try to enjoy my first holiday since last Christmas. I spent the easter holiday coding on a project for school and summer taking classes in law. I feel somewhat empty... hollow... all the stress and pressure is gone. Perhaps I am well on my way to becoming a workaholic? But I don't really care, I want something to every day, to somehow feel a purpose and have goals set. Besides, I have never had so much fun studying as here at KTH.

Now I just ponder on what I should do next, I have a few coding projects of my own, but where to start? I wonder if they offer courses over Christmas? Perhaps 5p of philosophy, that would be both fun and rewarding.

My (poor) English

2006-12-18T10:18:00.000+01:00

*sigh* It seems that not actively using English for over a year has it's downsides. I make a lot more grammatical mistakes and misspell a lot more words than I used to. Back then I chatted away and talked English almost every day, now I just talk English when I meet an exchange student and only write in English when I really have to. I really should try to regain what I have lost, one can't have a CAE certificate and talk/write English like an average Swede.

Am I Evil?

2006-12-17T21:18:00.000+01:00

People with faith seem to have a need to point out if something is evil or not. For example, Hitler was evil, Mother Theresa was kind hearted and so on. This of course requires the need of an absolute moral values that exists without the need of individuals to decide whether or not a given action is evil or not. Why is that?

I have a hard time understanding how such a construction would be possible, impossible if there is no god of course. Then he would simply say alakhazam and there would be some link between every action and a set of specified values. But let us assume that there are no values, no good or evil. What would be the consequences?

Some people with faith claim that in such a case all of man would fight among themselves in an endless turmoil, making nothing but carnage and that all good things in life come from the all mighty god and his values passed on to man. I don't think that this is the case, I would rather say mankind is very much capable of taking a set morals at any given time given a number of circumstances. How do people with faith explain all the evil in the world today? Are the people who do "bad" doing it conscientiously? Do they strive towards doing wrong because they are "evil"?

I'd rather explain it by simply stepping beyond good and evil, they do "bad" because we see what they do and compare it to our morals and say that it is bad because we don't share their opinions and views. Hitler was just as human as any believer or disbeliever for that matter, given the circumstances that surrounded him I am convinced that any of us would have made similar reasonings and taken similar actions.

We are no better than any of those we see as "evil", but we have the chance to understand how they became "evil" and by doing so we might even learn what it really means to be human.

It's alive!

2006-12-17T20:45:00.000+01:00

For some reason everyone need to dump a load of thoughts and opinions at the web. This phenomena is generally called a blog (short for web log I reckon). Apparently I feel the same need to give Output as well as Input... thus making I/O instead of I.

I would want to host this at my own homepage but since I am lazy and doing end term exams I think Google can handle this for me and ease my burden (at least for now). You can find a lot about me and what I do at www.d.kth.se/~ninjin/ I'll spare you my introduction and hope that you will read it in case you wonder what kind of being I am.

Well, on to dumping random thoughts, rants, anger etc etc on the web.