Christmas Season

Woov, long time without any updates; typically me :-/.

Curling

I was in Karlstad, Sweden just more than a month ago playing curling

with the team. We (barely) made it to the quarter finals but got beaten by once-world champion Peter “Peja” Lindholm. Hmm.. We played the danish world championship qualifiers back in DK the subsequent two weekends and managed to only win a single game. Bad..

Moving

I thought I was going to move into Joeys (Joey wouldn’t be living there though) really nice apartment out in Lyngby but we still to complete some paperwork. There is a good chance it may happen Jan 1st. Stay tuned.

Work

I’m finally working on some research stuff / speculative development (which is what I should be doing full time) while at the same time acting as a consultant / lead tech on a few delivery projects and it’s difficult to balance. So I’ve started to log each and every hour in a detailed ChangeLog-ish format. It’s actually a good tool for prioritising stuff and saying no to some people.

HAL

I was interviewed, together with other freedesktop.org contributors in an OSNews.com article here. There was a typical, yet a bit amusing, slashdot comment about the pictures.

HAL is actually starting to look good

It’s quite rewarding doing the GUI bits. The Linux 2.6 sysfs tree is being used extensively to gather information from. Both the device tree at /sys/devices and the class-devices are being inspected. It’s also seems stable; I can plug in a USB hub with my IBM USB hub keyboard and more devices and it works every time. I even started writing monitoring bits for /etc/mtab and I’ll add network link detection real soon now probably based on netplug. I’ll make a release in a week or so; most of the basics are working well enough now..

Powerbook, finally

Oh, I also bought a Powerbook G4 12″ on which I’m writing on right now. It’s sweet, Mac OS X Panther is sweet, I’ll have to write a blog entry about it.

Andorra trip

Just back from my trip to Andorra

to see Stacy and Shuffle get married

I also had a great time with other friends of Shuffle

See all the pictures, and others, here (by invitation only).

Vacation and stuff

  

Life

Oh, so I have two weeks off from work and I’m actually enjoying it. Most of the time spent in the living room punching the keys on my laptop and watching CNN. It seems that this particular network got the Linux Prodigy commercial on heavy rotation and it, uhhm, feels a bit, ahem, odd.. But I guess it’s good as it helps educate all the PHB’s out there that Linux is about *choice* and not about *cost*.. Hell, I’ll gladly pay more for a Linux solution that a Microsoft solution any day of the week and twice on sundays.

Choice, choice, choice… keep repeating that to yourself.

In other news I’m almost recovered from a flue that hit my mid last week. I couldn’t really be away from work because I had three visitors from Bangalore - good to finally meet people I’ve been emailing for the past six months.

HAL

Been working a lot on HAL, especially integration with D-BUS head. The object, method and interface stuff is soo nice. So every hardware device in HAL is now an object. Given different capabilities of the device it will have different interfaces. Possibly handled by different services..

D-BUS really rocks! Python really rocks! The combination rocks even more. I plan to write a small device manager showing the device tree(s) using the PyGTK bindings soon.

Going abroad

Yay! I’ll be leaving tomorrow for Andorra to attend the wedding party of Shuffle and Stacy.

(Note: the distinct guy on the right is Joey of Craftwork fame)

So, I’ll be flying to Barcelona with friends and we plan to rent a car and drive the last stretch to Andorra. Back again monday night.. Yay!!

HAL 0.1 available

I released HAL 0.1 late saturday night, less than three weeks since my first post.

I was shocked, when I saw it made headlines on osnews.com. Woov.. Badunka… Guess I should have been a bit more careful in cleaning up the code Nah, just kidding; i’d love to get feedback on the choices I made so I can continue the implementation and specification. Update: There’s also a story at FootNotes. Update (Oct 2): As seen on Slashdot

In other news my sister is about to give birth soon.. I’m going to be an uncle.. again! Also woow…

Hacking; Power outage

Life

I’ve been told that I had a fun time at IBC

Hacking

I’ve made good progress on the HAL project, lots of discussion and feedback on both xdg-list and linux-hotplug. It’s my first involvement in open source development and the ideas of extensive peer-review and general openness seem very good.

Reading

I’ve started reading Beyond Software Architecture : Creating and Sustaining Winning Solutions and it’s very good. Right up my alley with the role I have right now at work.

Robocurl

Finally some progress; we tested the kit sunday at the curling rink and it seems to work wrt. framerate updates etc. More on that later..

Power outage

Today, at approx 1240 local time all power disappeared in Copenhagen and parts of Sweden and Denmark. Four million people was without power for three to four hours. CNN is carrying the store here and the BBC coverage is here.

We all left work at about 1330 local time. On my way home people looked disoriented and there were signs of traffic congestion.. Power was restored at 1645 local time in my apartment and fortutantly my server came up again.. I did had to tweak around with my OpenVPN scripts and manually start the MySQL database, but that was really my own bad.

I’m quite amazed that something like this can happen in a country like Denmark where we pay more than 50% in taxes. I don’t mind doing that (that much), but then I want some freakin service and not this…

There are no reports on any fatalities (yet), which is good. On the bright side, I managed to do the dishes while the power was out

Update

  

Long time since last update. A ton of things happened. My sister got
married, I’ve been in London to attend a press event at the parent
company of my employer, I’m single again, and finally, my parents
just celebrated their 40th annivesery.

Nothing has happened at the robocurl project since last update, which is too
bad. It’s currently in the hands of electricians that need to put
wires and television at the curling rink. Mind you, a curling rink
is 42 metres long and we have three cameras, two televisions and
two servers.

In other news, I made my first post
ever to a OSS list about an exciting topic I read about.
People were very nice and generally seemed to like my ideas, so I will
continue to work on my draft spec and prototype. I hope to have an improved
spec in html ready before I leave for IBC
in Amsterdam saturday night (back tuesday night).

Oh, and I’m trying out the MapLocations plugin…

So MS wants to update software on my linux machine?

Heh, was just rebooting my laptop (Red Hat Linux 9 sometimes hangs when removing the power) and when logging into gnome, gaim gave me this (message text is in danish)

I wonder how some sysadmin guy at MS reacts when he sees it.. On the topic of laptops, I think I’m going buy an apple 12″ powerbook soon - my current laptop, a 15.4″ dell inspiron 7500, is more than 3.5 years old.. It’s still the computer I use the most though

Curling season started, technology

So it’s that time of the year again - the curling season has started! Even though I have tried this numerous times, I always seem to be amazed at the shift in temperature when entering the curling rink. At this time of year the temperate difference is slightly less than ten degrees celcius. Well, in a few months it’s the other way around.

This year, Joel, Torkil and myself have developed some cool new technology to help our respective teams. We call it Robocurl… Well, at least until we find a new and better name for it!

Robocurl is to be used during practice sessions by providing three delayed AV feeds (one from the front, one from the side and one from behind) and other information we can collect and capture. The primary use is to look at the captured AV just after you have completed a shot. Basically, it’s a set of entry-level PC’s running Linux with AV capture cards in them, three analog cameras and some motion sensors. The initial setup will only feature a 15 second delayed video signal, but more advanced stuff will be added later.

This is a screenshot of the software running on one of my development boxes at home:

It is still a bit CPU hungry, even on a dual Athlon MP 1800+! Check back for updates!