Google PowerMeter

I really want to see Google PowerMeter adopted in Sweden, I guess it will be a long time coming, but an overview of power usage would be excellent.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/power-to-people.html

For that matter I would like to see Mint.com adopted by Swedish banks though I am sure they will argue that they have to do it themselves with some stupid software developed by a kid out of University that knows nothing about UI, and banks that complicate everything as much as possible.

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mplayer - disable LIRC

Been trying to use mplayer from the shell on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) and LIRC was giving my problems, but I couldn't find any help with the following mplayer error:

Well all you need to do to is to disable LIRC support by doing the following:

Edit

And put in the line:

And that should sort it out.

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Installing Windows 2008 on MacBook Pro 10.5

Windows 2008 Server is probably the most robust operating system to come out from Microsoft whilst still supporting most of the modern features users demand. The robustness and speed of it is just two of the advantages it has over Vista.

To install on a MacBook Pro its probably easiest to use Windows 2008 Server x86 CD 32bit. 64Bit and bootcamp is not recommended at the moment!

First steps of the installation:

1. Step one is to start up the bootcamp assistant whilst you are running OS X.


2. It will take you through the procedure


3. Put in the DVD when prompted


4. Follow through the questions asked for the install


5. When prompted to enter a password make sure to use one of these three: numbers, symbols, capital letters, lower case letters. Password policy is setup on Windows 2008!


6. It will continue to install and any reboot needed will take you back to the installation

After this is done the OS is installed, but as a workstation OS its a bit of pain to use.

Next steps straight after installation

1. Start by downloading a webbrowser that you can actually use. IE is quite restricted so to even download something you must go into options and change the privacy options


2. Insert your Leopard disk and install the drivers that you need, then reboot


3. From here you can change the resolution of the desktop to the native display resolution

All the steps after this are optional, but are probably good to know:

Enable themes

1. Open up "Server Manager"


2. Click "Action", "Add Features"


3. Choose "Desktop Experience"


4. Go into the Service panel


5. Enable the themes service (its probably disabled, so you need to double click it and enable it


6. Select a theme by right clicking on the desktop and selecting personalised


7. Aero theme can be found at:
   
   C:\Windows\Resources\Themes
   
   

Enable wireless networking

1. Open up "Server Manager"


2. Click "Action", "Add Features"


3. Choose "Wireless LAN Service"


4. Let it install

Enable hibernation

1. Open up a command prompt and type


2. 
   
   powercfg.exe /hibernate on
   
   

For more information on turning Windows 2008 into a workstation check out:

http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/

And for a program that easily enables the features of a workstation on Windows 2008 server:

http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/2008/07/17/windows-server-2008-workstation-converter/

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Linksys wireless with Ubuntu server

Been trying to get a linksys wireless card working on my server with Ubuntu 8.04. Its not the easiest thing.

My output of lspci shows:

And my lshw -C network:

And my output of iwconfig:

So the hardware apparently is a little tricky but I have downloaded the firmware and drivers that should support it with the correct wrapper.

Except its really not working yet.

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InspireUX

Words in inspire user experience designers: http://www.inspireux.com/.

Nice list of quotes, one to add to the news reader that's for sure.

I particularly agree with:

"In design, space is not the problem. Attention is."

"Making assumptions about our users leads us to design for ourselves"

"The worst misstep one can make in design is to solve the wrong problem"

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History of Python

A nice start to the series History of Python.

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Arstechnica on windows 7

Arstechnica does its usual good job of looking in depth at Windows 7 Beta, and then they compare it to Vista:

"Windows 7 shouldn't make anything any worse"

Outstanding.

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UI design in the open

This is just great:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/redesigning-a-u.html

A summary of the post that basically Bug Labs has hired IDEO to redesign their hardware user interface for BUGbase and to do it in the open.

Updates on the design process can be sees at: Bug Blog, Bug Community, and the IDEO blog.

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Whats in a pixel?

Really interesting talk hosted by Panavision about Digital Camera systems.

http://media.panavision.com/ScreeningRoom/Screening_Room/Demystifying_Part1_480p.html

First part is about pixels and worth watching if you have ever wondered what is resolution and what is a pixel about in the camera domain.

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Why blog?

From http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/001395.html

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Hilarious look at Adobe's UI

So what's wrong with Adobe's UI: Well this is a very funny tumbl log of plenty of comments of things that could be done better:

http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/

Things that particularly standout are issues with there cross-platform UI. Although praised by many as a good example, it just shows that some of the finer details are missed.

Via UIEye.

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As seen on the T-Bana

Someone has been dressing up the T-Bana (Stockholm's subway/Metro/Tube system).

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Newly updated

As promised I have updated this site to the latest version of WordPress - 2.7

Its actually really impressive, and really shows why I updated to an off-the-shelf blogging tool instead of sticking with my own home grown set up several years ago.

I also cleared up many of the problems with images being aligned on the site, and finally have decent code previews thanks to the CodeColorer plugin by Dmytro.

There is probably some work to be done on making sure the feeds are 100% and then on to the design - the grid is totally messed up, but at least I feel confident in the software backing this up now.

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Apologies for the RSS feeds

It seems that my move of feeds from feedburner to the google feedburner service has messed up my RSS feeds quite a bit. Not sure what has happened or why the links on my site got messed up, but its probably something to do with the plugin that I had installed.

All in all it highlights the need for me to update this site from its current version of WordPress to the latest version.

I will be doing that shortly. Hopefully then the RSS feeds will resume properly.

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Looks like Django is really taking off

Since the introduction of Google's appengine which includes support for some of Django's code, and the template system there has been an incredible amount of press for Django.

At the moment there is no backend support for AppEngine in Django (and DB2 support is still lacking - there was a blog post about a year ago but nothing seems to have happened since, and I would love to be proved wrong on that one) but it must only be a matter of time before this happens so for the moment you have to disable the ORM support. Pity, but I can see why.

But I am glad that Django is getting the attention that it deserves, I have long know that Python is well used in Google (and Yahoo for that matter), and now we should see even more people using Django which can only be a good thing for the ever-growing community.

Here is an excellent write-up on Google App Engine http://www.dougma.com/archives/81

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Quick update

So, lots of thing have been doing on lately and I have been rather remiss in updating this old blog, I suppose getting things done takes a precedence over writing about things that are happening at the moment..

So a couple of weeks ago my Mother came to visit me in Stockholm as I hadn't seen her in ages, and it was a good way for her to see the town that I lived in, not having been to Sweden before. It also gave her an opportunity to meet Kristin which was good.

On the night that she came over it was her Birthday so we took her out to Sonja's Greek, just around the corner from us in Södermalm. On the Friday we just relaxed a bit, as I had to work, then on Saturday after working we met up at Medborgarplatsen for a couple of drinks before going to Humlehof on Folkungagatan for a nice meal. Sunday we had booked Falstaff at the Royal Swedish Opera house which was really nice, I particularly enjoyed watching the music being played, and the hall itself is splendid.

Monday was mum return home, but for us the start of lots of things to do in preparation for the move in to our new apartment. Cleaning, packing, moving things is now the order of the day and whilst not on its own the most fun thing to do with our spare time - I think that its worth it.

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Installing ffmpeg on OS X

This is a work in progress for installing ffmpeg on OSX by a custom compile

This is another thing that I have needed to do and decided to put what I am doing in a blog post, I might need it in the future or it might be helpful for others.

So firstly download LAME - this is needed for supporting MP3 audio files, such as those in FLV and also for vorbis support. LAME src can be located on sourceforge.

Unarchive the file (lame-3.98b6 at the time of writing )

CD lame-3.98b6

./configure --with-vorbis

make

sudo make install

The first time I did this I noticed a problem running make so I "make clean" and then went through the process again.

Next up we want support for AAC audio, and you can get packages called FAAD2 and FAAC from www.audiocoding.com/downloads.html for these and then unarchive them ( FAAD 2.6.1 and FAAC 1.26 at the time of writing).

CD faad2

autoreconf -vif

./configure --without-bmp --without-xmms --without-drm --without-mpeg4ip

make

sudo make install

Then faac

CD faac

./bootstrap

./configure --with-libmp4v2

make

sudo make install

x264 ( http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html )

CD x264

./configure --enable-pthread --enable-pic

make

make install

liba52

wget http://liba52.sourceforge.net/files/a52dec-snapshot.tar.gz

tar -xzvf a52dec-snapshot.tar.gz

CD a52dec-0.7.5-CVS/

./configure

./configure --enable-libmp3lame --enable-x264 --enable-liba52 --enable-GPL

And for amr_wb and amr_nb go into their directories and do the following:

./configure

make clean

make -j2 > /dev/null

sudo make install

Basically the -j2 switch is for enabling dual cores when compiling.

Now we get around to compiling ffmpeg itself:

./configure --enable-shared --disable-mmx --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libamr-wb --enable-libamr-nb --enable-nonfree --disable-vhook

make clean

make -j2 > /dev/null

sudo make install

And that should be it though I am currently trying this configuration and it seems to work well:

./configure --enable-shared --disable-mmx --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libamr-wb --enable-libamr-nb --enable-nonfree --enable-libx264 --enable-libfaad --enable-GPL --disable-vhook

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Django and URLS naming

Django URLs naming can be a pain sometimes, unless it is just me but an easy way to debug is to use Django's shell and import urlresolvers:

python manage.py shell



>> from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse

>> reverse('nameofurl')

If there are arguments in the URLS field (for instance passing in the slug):

 >> reverse('nameofurl', 'slug')

Then it should resolve the name to the URL path needed. If it doesn't, well something is wrong. We got a weird Traceback when using Python 2.5 though:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<console>", line 1, in <module>

  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 297, in reverse

    return iri_to_uri(u'/' + get_resolver(urlconf).reverse(viewname, *args, **kwargs))

  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 282, in reverse

    if lookup_view in self.reverse_dict:

  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 221, in _get_reverse_dict

    self._reverse_dict[pattern.callback] = (pattern,)

  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 178, in _get_callback

    self._callback = get_callable(self._callback_str)

  File "/Users/azimi/Code/Python/Django/django-trunk/django/utils/functional.py", line 130, in wrapper

    result = func(*args)

  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 47, in get_callable

    lookup_view = getattr(__import__(mod_name, {}, {}, ['']), func_name)

  File "/website/xmlrpc.py", line 8, in </module><module>

    dispatcher = SimpleXMLRPCDispatcher() # Python 2.4

TypeError: __init__() takes exactly 3 arguments (1 given)

>>> reverse('homepage')

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<console>", line 1, in <module>

  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 297, in reverse

    return iri_to_uri(u'/' + get_resolver(urlconf).reverse(viewname, *args, **kwargs))

  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/django/core/urlresolvers.py", line 284, in reverse

    raise NoReverseMatch

NoReverseMatch

</module></console></module></console>

Looks like something is broken in support for python 2.5 on OS X with django, but I wonder if it is just us thats found this.

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Microsofts WorldWide Telescope

This looks really awesome, Microsoft research have combined the feeds from satellites and telescopes all over to create a window into the universe. The Ted video will show more:

There is more information on their website http://wwtelescope.com/ and release should be in spring time sometime.

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