The web page should be up and running shortly.
The reason for the long down time is a series of unfortunate events, starting with previous server CPU overcooking, caused by a faulty CPU fan. Then when ordering new parts the web shops had a bit of fun on my behalf. First board that i ordered was defect, it had a short circuit in the power connection. Second board i received, was the the board i had ordered at all. Although it said so on the outside of the box, the inside was quite different. But now finally i have a working new (extremely overpowered for this purpose) board that should give me lots and lots of joy.
Oh and just like every body else i am chickening out on XHTML and going for the buzzzz HTML5.
After talking a lot about coding convention with a college of mine the thought about complete tokenised programming came to me. Why is it that when our IDE's and text editors are so intelligent and so well knowing about the structure of the code and what it should look like, that the editors can not simply show the code in the preferred coding convention of the reader/writer, and when it is time to save the code, it is converted into the coding convention of the company or project that the code belongs to.
Pushing this idea one step further it would become that you would "configure" tokens in your editor and the code would "automagicly" appear as it normally would when programming. I am not sure this is a good idea, but think it is an area that is worth investigating. Chances are this could prevent some general programming errors since the configuration of each token is only possible when everything is defined.
If the first part, making code convention irrelevant for the individual programmer, could become a reality. Then religious views about where to put white spaces should be a thing of the past. But of course it does require two separate configuration, one for view and one for saving. What parameters should be possible to set could be a rather big task, but looking at how it is done in Eclipse it should be possible to make some "generic" configuration.
Got an Android phone yesterday. Since i am not used to touch screen or smart phones in general. I did not go all in, so have bought the cheapest Android phone on the market (LG GT540). Have not used it a lot yet. But can for sure see the idea. Some things in the system still have some work to do. But it has to be said that this phone only has the Android 1.6. So hopefully a lot of the minor things have been fixed in the newer versions.
Giving a short review of the LG GT540, it is deficiently a nice phone. The build quality seams very fair. The picture on the screen is really amazing. Did not expect the image to be so clear, and for a phone and the size of the screen the resolution is amazingly high. A couple of down sides though, are the touch sensitive screen which feels very cheap. This being a resistive touch screen this was kind of expected. But it works fairly well, considering the price. The other down side is the the camera. It is very nice that there is auto focus on the camera (even manual focus actually, quite amazed by that). But when making an image with 3Mpixel (not sure if the chips actually is 3Mpixel) there is so much noise, fragments and the image looks as if it has been processed like hell. Would not mind getting a raw sample from the chip to see the actual resolution. My best guess is that to compensate for having a very small lens, LG had to process the image like mad, to correct all the errors this lens gives. Even the phone that this one is replacing (a 5 year old Sony Ericsson w800i), that have a 2Mpixel camera, The images are much sharper and nicer to look at. So if good camera in your phone is important to you. This is not the phone for you. Another good thing, that i did not expect, is that the interface is working smooth and fast. There are a few applications that do take a bit of time to start, but nothing serious. Taking everything into account i really think this is a very nice cheap Android phone. So is budget a consideration for you, this is definitely a phone to consider.
Just to give a short update on the Win32 Rawstudio compile. During the LGM 2010 in Bruxelles, i finally had a compiled and working version. Working in the sense that the window open with all the widgets. There are a lot of path problems that has to be fixed before being able to open any images. But it is getting there. Hopefully in time for the Rawstudio 2.0 release.
Porting software from Linux to Windows is not as easy as it should be. Have now spend too much time setting up a GNU build environment under windows, using MSYS, MinGW and GnuWin32. They have some nice utils, that is fairly easy to setup. But most of the builds are way to old to be useful. So basicly ended op having to compile and "install" all required tools and libs. Of course the classic GNU "./configure && make && make install" worked for most, then there where really some libs that gave a lot of trouble. Why does it have to be so hard to make things work on cross platform?
But now I have a build environment, and can start on the really hard part; making the software run on both Linux and Windows. Feels like hitting one wall after the other. A "simple" thing like creating a DLL, have shown to be quite the bigger problem then first anticipated. The examples found online are to simple, and the application know to do it right are too complex. Someone should write a good tutorial or sample application for doing it the right way using auto tools. Know that I am not the right man for the job. But maybe I have to become that in the end...
Have completely forgotten to write about this years Libre Graphics Meeting. Was a fantastic trip. Event though the trip to Canada was quite long. It was nice to see a lot of familiar faces. The talks where as last year very interesting. This year we talked a bit more with the people there and got some really interesting discussions for instance about how to collect user statistics. Are absolutely going next year too.
At work our office is placed on top of a movie theater. Having felt the vibrations when an action movie is running an idea sparked, about testing how much seismic vibration this actually created. Not having access to a seismograph, we found the next best thing. A Wiimote. So wrote a small python script that simply dumps the acceleration data and a time stamp to a text file, and used gnuplot to visualise the data. Unfortunately the Wiimote is not precis enough, so can conclude the Wiimote is not the best seismic detector.But here is the script. seismograph.py - it uses the cwiid python library, so does not run on windows. Sorry about that.