ksymeon

Debian 6

2011-02-28T23:41:00.002Z

What a nice surprise, when my Linux Format arrived today with a copy of Debian 6! My favourite distro's latest incarnation. :-)

No time to waste, I've got a VM running with a dual-core CPU and a gig of RAM, and the installation started.

A couple of moments later (after following my own instructions to setup ssh etc.) and I have a perfectly functioning Debian install on my desktop.

Now, on to my apt-get list of useful things to install:


apt-get install apache2
apt-get install mercurial
apt-get install curl
apt-get install zip
apt-get install make
apt-get install gcc

Install VMWare tools and then, fire up the Software Centre from System -> Administration -> Software Centre and choose to your heart's content.

Got Google Chromium browser (synchronised my bookmarks), even installed the Free-Pascal compiler and Lazarus (what a good job they've done). In general Debian 6 did not surprise, looks nice and simple and feels solid. Well done!

A new PC

2010-08-05T23:27:00.001+01:00

That's it. I've done it! I have just ordered a bunch of new kit from ebuyer and dabs. I'm building a new workstation. I know, all these macs and sh*t, however, with a mortgage and a kid there's no money for a Mac. So back to basics: Windows and a custom-built PC. In other words get as much umpf as possible for your pennies.

My only requirement was memory tbh. I wanted lots. I wanted 32GB of RAM or something like that. Then I had a look at the prices. So I settled for 6! With another 6 at christmas... :-)

OS? Well, not much choice, I will start with 64-bit Windows 7, but I might give Ubuntu a partition. Problem is I need to run LightRoom and PhotoShop, so not much room to argue really.

My problem now is... the moment I placed the order, it occured to me that I'm gonna have to literally PULL THE PLUG from my old PC. You see, I'm bloody emotional, I can't let go that easily. All my previous computers (and I've built a few) were built side-by-side with the machine I was replacing. So even if I was building a new PC, I could still power on the old one, until such time that my bond with the new PC meant that the old one could go in the wardrobe or even get dismantled and sold in pieces.

I've been finding it very hard to get rid of my laptops. The one I had with me in the navy I gave it to my friend Mits and years later I got it back! Crazy.

This time however, I have to remove the PSU, the disks, the CPU fan. I don't have spares for these. That means that's it. My faithful "Oberon II" will cease to exist, I have to switch the power off and that will be it. "Oberon II" will never live again. :-(

It's not emotion about the hardware, the individual disk or the graphics card. I don't give a damn sh*t for those. It's the "setup", it's the "essence", it's the "software"! It's the fact that everything is in its place and it works.

Still. One has to be excited about a 4-core CPU a new full tower box that has room to breathe, a Velociraptor to boot from... Watch this space for updates ;-)

The iPad is here

2010-05-02T12:47:00.000+01:00

Thanks to my dear friend from NYC and his... accomplice :), I have had an iPad delivered a couple of days ago. I haven't actually managed to do much on it yet, I have spent my minimal free time in the evenings having the iPad lying on my desk connected to my desktop, while I was trying to find any decent specialized iPad apps in the AppStore, which is not as easy as it sounds.

Quickly let me get through what everybody else has already said: looks stunning, feels sturdy, screen is amazing and bright, battery life exceptional. That all we all know. Here is my take on the rest - a very quick first impressions review...

Ergonomics
Sturdy feeling generally and the thick bevel allows you to handle it very easily. On the desktop surface is perfectly usable. It's like a normal notepad instead of a pen you use your fingers. Admittedly you can write faster than you can type on one hand, but for casual use it's perfect. In bed lying on your back it's unusable, too heavy. Lying in front is ok, but the iPad has a large screen, I'm looking to push my head upwards all the time which is not confortable on my back. Leaning against the wall and having it on your lap is fine, although I can't imagine typing is fun. In fact, as I haven't used it for anything serious so far I can't really tell whether typing is confortable or not. But then again, the pad is not for typing books, it's for casual browsing. On the sofa, armchair etc. it's where the iPad shines. Haven't watched an F1 Grand Prix with it yet, but I'm looking forward to it...

AppStore
Unfortunately living in the UK means that we can't access the AppStore yet (until the iPad is released later this month), so we can't download iWork and iBooks. This leaves us with the only option of getting some stuff down through iTunes and synchronizing with the iPad. A bit inconvenient but early adoption comes with the need for tricks.

Touch Interface
I think we are still in very early days of touch interfaces. The iPhone taught us all how to use our fingers again, and what we see today is the evolution of these interfaces. It comes through the development of the screens and drivers (number of touch points, momentum) but also it comes through the way that individual developers use them. I haven't read any Touch Interface Guidelines yet, but there's plenty of them.. The iPad from that respect feels like it has the best capacitive screen yet, but still some apps are suffering from the way this interface is used. Maps is a good example, Calendar is a bad example.

iPod Apps
iPod applications run in a little window in the middle of the screen, or if you press the [2x] button they get stretched almost to the edges of the screen. The aspect ratio is unaffected and they don't look bad, but the [1x] button still remains on screen... which means that you can accidentally touch it and zoom it goes... Somehow I feel it would be a good idea to either setup the zoom mode for all and individual apps in the settings area.

Internet Browsing
It's amazing what the portrait form factor can do to the looks of a website. Almost everything looks prettier, this is the view that designers design websites against. Browsing in portrait mode is 10x better than landscape.

Videos
Well video playback depends on source quality, so assumming we're talking about proper videos here the quality is outstanding.

Best Apps

It has to be Maps and Photos from Apple, TweetDeck and Granimator from the rest.

Best Games

Fieldrunners looks amazing, however FlightCtrl HD must be the winner. It is a different class altogether with its multiplayer mode, gameplay has improved and generally is probably the most polished game in the AppStore today. The 1024x768 has a great potential and I expect to see extraordinary graphics in the months to come.

Conclusion
I always wanted a bigger iPod ever since I got the first generation "Touch". I had realised at the time that I was using the iPod more for browsing and casual games rather than listening to music on the move. The first iPad has gotten the stick from many people but for me it represents the beginning of a new era of computing. It's the social pad that should live in the lounge and people would pick it up, read the news, check the weather, read their email, catch up with their Twitter and RSS feeds. I expect that the next version of the OS will be adding a wealth of new features, most importantly I would like to see "Profiles" which would mean that I can share my iPad with other members of my family, without having to see their emails, personalisations and bookmarks. That would get my first vote for improvements.

I would also like to see a video camera so that people can video chat, the position of this device in your hands makes it perfect for that kind of interaction. I especially look forward to my mum video chatting to her grandson without having to deal with PCs, Cameras and mice. That is most definitely a scene from the future, I just hope it's not too far away from today.

Other than that, I'm over the moon with the iPad. As time goes by, I will see where it fits with my lifestyle, but currently it lives on my desktop, my bedside table and my bag.

Apple vs. Adobe

2010-04-09T22:38:00.003+01:00

So Apple releases a new "Terms and Conditions" prohibiting Flash developers from using Adobe's tool for cross-compilation of Flash code to native Objective-C and I wonder:

Why such hatred?

In my eyes Adobe was one of the very few companies publishing their software for Macs when the Mac had a close-to-zero market-share, it made the Mac user synonymous to the Photoshop or AI user and put simply it supported the Mac during the dark ages of Windomination. Now that the Macs are cool and have a (still comparatively small) market share, why does Apple turn their back to a company that invested millions in making their software work for their platform?

When you are a platform maker what you really want is people to write software for you, and people who make tools that create software to make them available to your platform. You are the creator of an ecosystem and you want software to populate it.

I understand that running Flash directly on the iPhone, as a Safari plugin let's say, would hurt AppStore's sales, but writing a game on Flash (or even Java) and cross-compiling it, why would that hurt? The software will still be sold as part of the store. The developer would be able to sell to a new market without learning a new language.

I'm just wondering. If you know the answer please leave a comment.

:-/

ToolBox III - Public Beta Trial

2010-03-19T18:43:00.003Z

It's been a couple of months now, that I have been designing the next version of ToolBox and last night I managed to finally get a beta version out on my web-site.

It's been hard work trying to refactor code (clean it up/modernize it along the way), then build new functionality and incorporate a few libraries and technologies I've been playing with these past few years (for example a new image manipulation engine, a new TileGrid component).

This beta has the potential of becoming a release soon, I had to draw a line on new features and stop there, otherwise I wouldn't be able to release it soon enough. The new version has many changes underneath, but in terms of user interface it allows you to fully customize a ToolBox.

For the first time users can choose to display text below an icon and also create a secondary text comment for each icon and display that on the ToolBox. What is more, the primary icon text that is displayed is now decoupled from the hint, which can be quite descriptive and long. The hint is only displayed as a floating (and trasparent) panel or on the status bar of the ToolBox window. Many thanks for these suggestions are down to users who have contacted me through the web, asking or suggesting new features.

I have also decided to extend the image effects a little bit and allow people to choose their own images for wallpapers which can now be positioned on the ToolBox in a number of ways (tile, center, fill, stretch). The effects are a little "PhotoShop" within ToolBox, applied in layers (e.g. emboss then color tint). My personal favourite is to create a sepia version of the Windows wallpaper behind the window.

A number of customizations is now available around text display. For the first time you can have bold and italic text, you can change the color of the Title Bar text, Status Bar test, primary, secondary, overlay text of an icon. You can easily inherit text properties from the primary text and icons can override only select text properties to display things in a certain way.

Another big new feature is the Web Browser support. ToolBox discovers the browsers that are available on your system and when you create URL shortcuts (try dragging a URL from Chrome straight onto a ToolBox!!!) you can then select which browser to launch it from. A web designer, for example, can create shortcuts to the same page using different browsers in order to be able to quickly launch and check for display differences.

All of these customizations of course generate the need for theming. The ToolBox properties dialog is more equivalent to a "Theme Builder" interface as absolutely everything can be customized there, however I realise that most users would not want to have to learn what all these buttons and selectors do :-)

My plan is to introduce a few themes and allow the users to create themes which they can then share on the web. Then probably have an alternative easy interface for setting the properties of a ToolBox that allows less customization. We'll see.

The new beta requires a lot of testing and there are areas that I am still improving. Most importantly there seems to be a Windows API bug in the function that gets the bitmap contents into a memory array which seems to break the ToolBox redrawing when the picture is more than 512K in size :-( I am trying to move away from having to use this function, but I didn't have the time as yet to do it.

Looking forward to some suggestions and bug reports :-)

New ToolBox here.

Pascal features you can fall in love with

2010-02-27T21:33:00.009Z

I am a bit sentimental I admit it. For years and years and years I've been writing and teaching Pascal, Pascal OOP and Delphi (not since 1999 though). Ever since the early days I had a certain fondness ofn the Pascal enumerated types and the Ord() function.

The Ord function returns a cardinal number (integer) for any given ordinal type. Ordinal Types are cardinal numbers like byte, integer, shortint etc., chars (!) and enumerated types. So Ord(0) = 0, and Ord('@') = 64 as 64 is the ASCII code of the '@' char in the order of the ASCII characters. Nice.

In the same category as Ord(), are the functions Pred(), Succ() and procedures Inc() and Dec(), which increase and decrease ordinal numbers. Things like Inc ('A', 32) is a valid thing in Pascal, and increases the ordinal value of 'A' by 32, making it an 'a'. Thus making the nicest of capitalisation routines that you can find in any computer language:

if (c in ['A'..'Z']) then // convert char c to lower case
Inc(c, 32);

Digressing. The reason I've written this post was to talk about enumerated types. Consider:

type
   TTile = (tlSpace, tlWall, tlBrick, tlDoor, tlLeft, tlRight, tlUp, tlDown, tlLeftLocked, tlRightLocked, tlUpLocked, tlDownLocked);

With the declaration above, Ord(tlSpace) = 0 and Ord(tlLeft) = 4. I needed a way to toggle the "lock" of a tile, all tiles being lockable except tlSpace..tlDoor. The answer?

case Ord(f_board[i]) of
4..7  : Inc (f_board[i], 4);
8..11 : Dec (f_board[i], 4);
end;

That's it. If the order is between 4-7 increase the order by 4, if it's 8-11 decrease it. You could also write this for even better readability:

case f_board[i] of
tlLeft..tlDown             : Inc (f_board[i], 4);
tlLeftLocked..tlDownLocked : Dec (f_board[i], 4);
end;

Now, you can comment that this is not safe enough when changing the order of the enum, or moving enums around, but with a nice Unit test you won't be disappointed. One of the nicest things in Pascal is the declaration of sets with the double dot operator '..' and the inclusion of sets which the compiler converts to a bit operation. It's really cool and fast.

GetDIBits vs. Scanline vs. Pixels[] in Delphi Bitmaps

2010-02-21T14:35:00.005Z

I've been always wanting to sit down one day and solve this problem; test the speed of manipulating pixels on a Bitmap using the three options:

- the convenient but understandably slow Pixels[],
- the "interesting" Scanline property and
- the Windows API GetDIBits and SetDIBits.

I have been traditionally using Pixels for quick work and the Get/SetDIBits for low-level pixel manipulation such as the filters used in ToolBox. Never really used the Scanline property in anger, I was always thinking, DIBits "had" to be quicker. Little I knew...

I have been experimenting with two tools that I've written and never released to the public domain. The first is the BMPCreator which I wrote in order to create 256-level grayscale bitmaps, the other is the IconCreator which uses a grayscale bitmap and applies color maps to it, giving you the ability to create different colored versions of the same icon (like in my database visualization tool VirtualTreeNavigator).

Yesterday I wrote a little test app to test the above techniques for speed. The drill is, get a 32-bit bitmap and change every pixel one-by-one to a certain color. Here's the results:

Pixels[] Property

Simple loop and access of the Pixels array. The code looks like this:


for y := 0 to bmp.Height-1 do
 for x := 0 to bmp.Width-1 do
     bmp.Canvas.Pixels[x,y] := color;

Scanline Property

Declare a pointer to an array of integers (32-bit number) get the scanline pointer for each line of the bitmap and use it as a normal integer array for each pixel. Code looks like this:


type
    TIntegerArray = array[0..MaxInt div SizeOf(integer) - 1] of integer;
 PIntegerArray = ^TIntegerArray;
var
 scanLine : PIntegerArray;
...
for y := 0 to bmp.Height-1 do
begin
 scanLine := bmp.ScanLine[y];
 for x := 0 to bmp.Width-1 do
     scanLine^[x] := color;
end;

I have tried a variation of the code above, where you get a pointer to the first scanline (last line for Windows Bitmaps), and do the arithmetic (y * bmp.Width + x) for yourself but it didn't work as nicely as the example above.

GetDIBits and SetDIBits

The idea here is that we allocate memory for a big enough buffer to hold the bitmap's pixels and use GetDIBits to read the picture
into our array. Then we use our array as a two-dimensional or one-dimensional array, where every bmp.Width pixels
there's a new scanline. The code looks like this:

var
 p      : pointer;
 bufInt : PIntegerArray;
...

clBMPHelper.GetDIBitsFromBitmap32(bmp, bmp.Width, bmp.Height, p);
bufInt := p;

for y := 0 to bmp.Height-1 do
 for x := 0 to bmp.Width-1 do
     bufInt[y * bmp.Width + x] := color;

clBMPHelper.SetDIBitsToBitmap32(bmp, bmp.Width, bmp.Height, p);
FreeMem(p);

As one loop of the above is quite quick, I have run the test multiple times (1000x).
The GetDIBits/SetDIBits allocation and deallocation of memory however, meant that
I had the option of allocating the memory, then running the test 1000 times, then deallocating. The clBMPHelper methods look like this:


procedure GetDIBitsFromBitmap32 ( const bmp : TBitmap; const a_iWidth, a_iHeight : integer; var p : pointer );
var
 bi  : TBitmapInfo;
 res : integer;
 error : cardinal;

begin
 FillChar (bi, SizeOf(bi), 0);
 with bi.bmiHeader do
 begin
     biSize := SizeOf(bi.bmiHeader);
     biWidth := a_iWidth;
     biHeight := a_iHeight;
     biPlanes := 1;
     biBitCount := 32;
     biCompression := BI_RGB;
 end;

 // Allocate the memory for the pointer
 GetMem(p, a_iWidth * a_iHeight * 4);

 // now get the bits
 res := GetDIBits (bmp.Canvas.Handle, bmp.Handle, 0, bmp.Height, p, bi, DIB_RGB_COLORS);
 if res = 0 then
 begin
     error := GetLastError;
     raise Exception.Create('clBMPHelper.GetDIBitsFromBitmap32: Cannot get Bitmap data with GetDIBits'#13#10+
                            'Error '+IntToStr(error)+': '+GetErrorString(error));
 end;
end;

procedure SetDIBitsToBitmap32 ( const bmp : TBitmap; const a_iWidth, a_iHeight : integer; var p : pointer );
var
 bi  : TBitmapInfo;
 res : integer;
 error : cardinal;

begin
 FillChar (bi,SizeOf(bi),0);
 with bi.bmiHeader do
 begin
     biSize := SizeOf(bi.bmiHeader);
     biWidth := a_iWidth;
     biHeight := a_iHeight;
     biPlanes := 1;
     biBitCount := 32;
     biCompression := BI_RGB;
 end;

 // now set the bits
 res := SetDIBits(bmp.Canvas.Handle, bmp.Handle, 0, a_iHeight, p, bi, DIB_RGB_COLORS);
 if res = 0 then
 begin
     error := GetLastError;
     raise Exception.Create('clBMPHelper.SetDIBitsToBitmap32: Cannot set Bitmap data with SetDIBits'#13#10+
                            'Error '+IntToStr(error)+': '+GetErrorString(error));
 end;
end;

Results

Algorithm \ (Width x Height)	100x100	400x400	1600x100	100x1600
Pixels[]	4,700	81,300	81,300	81,200
Scanline	31	296	218	578
GetDIBits^(*)	187	1,593	1,609	1,735
GetDIBits^(**)	47	781	781	797

^(*) Allocation, GetDIBits and SetDIBits/De-allocation of memory each time (1000x times)

^(**) Allocation of memory and GetDIBits before the 1000x loop, SetDIBits and De-allocation at the end

Times in milliseconds.

Conclusion

The numbers above speak for themselves. The Scanline property is the best way to manipulate pixels on a bitmap. GetDIBits supposedly is the quickest option, but only if you keep a big enough array for the Bitmap's bits in memory and work there. If you do have a Bitmap already in memory though, and you need to keep it there, the most economical, practical and quick way of manipulating pixels is to use the Scanline property.

Back to my code now, to convert some of my trusted utils to use scan lines... :-)

And you thought Chrome was the best...

2010-02-13T20:58:00.003Z

Wowdi! Didn't expect that. "The Register" reported the news about Opera 10.5 beta and I immediatelly went to download the latest version. Using my own "benchtests", i.e. the little JS/HTML5Canvas expirements I wrote during the last few months (Mandelbrot and 3D Dissolve JS), I compiled the following list:

Browser	Mandelbrot (ms) ^(*)	Dissolve (fps) ^(**)
Chrome 4.0	1248	48.1
Firefox 3.6	1277	51.3
Opera 10.5beta	369	72.3
Safari 4.0	2551	49.2

(*) Lower times (in milliseconds) are better
(**) Higher FPS rate is better

There you go then, Opera annihilates the competition with a beta! That will make some Google and FF engineers scratch their heads a little bit. Firefox 3.6 came with a lot of improvements closing the gap to Chrome. Opera now comes and from being the slowest browser in JS now becomes the fastest with a difference! More than 3x the speed of Chrome in Mandelbrot? That is absolutely amazing.

Very well done guys, you are obviously doing the right thing up there in the North. Well done!

iPad - The future has arrived

2010-01-27T20:51:00.002Z

Just been watching the video at http://www.apple.com/ipad/. I've been grinning, I've been laughing, I've been drooling. This is EXACTLY what I was expecting for 3 years now. Ever since I bought my first-gen iPod touch, I've been thinking about this device with the same interface but just a bigger screen. I have even bothered to get into Photoshop and mock up an ideal iPod touch (screenshot to follow). For 3 years the rumours were everywhere, now this is reality.

But two more months of wait? What am I supposed to do now?

I think I'll just download the SDK and pretend that I own one using the emulator...

Well done Apple, you've got everything right! Even the price!

3D Dissolve is coming back...

2009-12-30T01:14:00.003Z

The moment I laid my hands on HTML 5 and the canvas element, I knew exactly what I would attempt next. These Christmas days I managed to getaway to a small village in Northamptonshire with the family (now we are three...) and had some time to convert that tiny 3D engine that I had written back in March 1996 in Turbo Pascal 7. That was 14 years ago! Here's the file header :-) LOL:


{ Obj3d v1.0  written by K.Symeonidis }
{           (c)1996 by CyLog Software }
{                                     }
{                          March.1996 }
{                                     }
{ This is my first attempt for a fast }
{ 3D Graphics engine                  }

With Obj3D I wrote a couple of demos in TP7, then converted it (v1.50) to Delphi and with it I wrote a few more demos for windows this time. In 1997 we wrote with Ioannis Tsoukalidis the "3D Dissolve" screen saver which proved to be quite popular on the baby-internet. Dissolve managed to get a couple of updates since then, the latest version running happilly on my machines throughout the naughties ('00s).

Back to my canvas and HTML 5 enthusiasm/obsession and my Christmas holidays...

I converted Obj3D, then wrote the example "Random Dissolve Sphere" (the opening 3D object in Dissolve) and put the camera and world into action!

A couple of bugs later and I had the first glimpse of my 3D engine this time running on the highly optimised V8 Google JavaScript engine on Google Chrome.

On my laptop Chrome managed to get around 47fps which is quite decent. Firefox 3.5 manages just above 40fps. The code is still very premature and I expect the rate to drop a bit after implementing all the features. However, I'm optimistic I can squeeze some power out of the old code by optimizing for the canvas element.

Surprisingly Opera 10.01 on my desktop PC (Core2Duo 2.12GHz) goes up to 53 fps, but the fastest I've seen so far is on Safari on my MacBookPro (Core2Duo 2.66GHz) with 55 fps! Given the CPU frequency Opera seems to be the quickest JS engine at the moment.

Even on the iPhone 3GS it seems to be running with an awful 4.5fps, but still viewable.

Credit to the JavaScript engines out there (Chrome, Safari, Opera, FF), these guys have done a very good job. Spot the missing browser vendor... :-\

For those of you eager to have a look, here's a link to preview 3D Dissolve JS.

Comments welcome.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year/Decade!

Quick Perforce Setup

2009-11-22T18:38:00.003Z

This serves as my personal quick guide to setting up perforce on Linux.

Create a new directory (e.g. /u01/p4root), download p4d from http://www.perforce.com/ and copy it to the above folder. Set execute permissions and chown it to the Linux perforce user that will be running the server process.

Start the Perforce server with:

p4d

Create a user:

p4 user

Set the email and save the user. Check the users:

p4 users

Set the security level to strong passwords:

p4 counter -f security 2

Set the user's passwd:

p4 passwd

Restart your server and then login:

p4 login

Type your password, this will ensure your server is secure.
Create a client workspace

p4 client

Give it a name, set the "revertunchanged", "share" for line ends, "rmdir" options.

Depots

List the depots:

p4 depots

Delete the default depot:

p4 depot -d depot

Create some depots:

p4 depot ...name...

List the depots again:

p4 depots

Map the depots to your client by using p4 client.

Type Maps

Set the typemaps:

p4 typemap

Use the following for typemaps as a starter:


binary //.../*.bmp
binary //.../*.doc
binary //.../*.gif
binary //.../*.jpg
binary //.../*.png
binary //.../*.ppt
binary //.../*.psd
binary //.../*.vsd
binary //.../*.xls
text //.../*.dfm
text //.../*.dpr
text //.../*.pas
text //.../*.iml
text //.../*.ipr
text //.../*.xml
text+k //.../*.css
text+k //.../*.html
text+k //.../*.java
text+k //.../*.js
text+k //.../*.sql

Delphi vs everything

2009-10-27T22:09:00.003Z

I am making my first baby steps into Cocoa/iPhone development for the Mac and I can now see how much ahead of its time was Delphi when it was developed. Having seen almost every other Java GUI development tool and framework I can almost reluctantly declare it: "After so many years and Delphi still has the RAD edge"

Makes me feel sad really, such a good IDE, language and compiler (still the fastest there is??) and yet the product has been sold and resold and still can't generate enough revenue...

If only we had Delphi's GUI and compiler, IntelliJ Idea's editor and refactoring abilities, Java's language and VM and Apple's beautiful UI in one simple product...

Is it too much I am asking for?

Schumacher for 2009 F1 World Champion anyone?

2009-07-30T20:49:00.003+01:00

I remember watching Michael's last race and thinking how historic that moment was. I am going be glued to my sofa for Michael Schumacher's unexpected return to F1. This is unmissable.

And then... this thought crossed my mind... "Can he? Can he really be world champion this year?" I couldn't remember exactly the points situation, so I had to check.

And here's the funny bit: Jenson Button has 70 points and with 7 races remaining, oh yes, it can be done. It's still a mathematical possibility. If Michael wins all 7 remaining races he gets 70 points and with 7 wins vs 6 Button wins we would be on top. Of course Button needs to score zero points and some other talented individuals be totally eclipsed by the... not-so-talented ones. It did however put a smile on my face, it's funny that there is still 1 possibility. Out of how many billion I do not know.

I would certainly not bet on it, but then again I'm not a betting man ;-)

No respect

2009-07-15T09:59:00.002+01:00

I have no respect for people who write code like this example below:


        if(this.hasActionMessages()){
    return false;
    }else{
    return true;
}

Why Google has done it again!

2009-06-08T00:35:00.004+01:00

It was only this morning that I started looking into the HTML 5 canvas tag and this evening (after the Apprentice) I sat down to play a little bit with it.

As it happens... I decided to write a little Mandelbrot set just to test the graphics, thinking that obviously such a demanding algorithm would push the browsers to the limit and prove to be a good benchmark.

It's after midnight now and I'm writing this in a hurry, so here's the link for my implementation:

http://www.atopon.org/mandel/

And here's the results:

Google Chrome 2.0.172.28      : 1425 ms
Safari 4 Public Beta (528.17) : 2399 ms
Safari 3.2.3                  : 4223 ms (on my MacBook Pro)
Opera 9.50 Build 10063        : 5578 ms
Firefox 3.0.10                : 6309 ms

All of that on my desktop PC running Windows XP, relatively powerful but nothing extraordinary.

More to come, I'm eagerly awaiting FF 3.5 and I should really update Opera and Chrome.

For the moment Google wins! Again!

Oh, and btw HTML 5 rocks!

Ubuntu 9.04 and Asus Eee PC 901

2009-06-06T18:06:00.003+01:00

I had to try this. It's been a while my Eee PC was not very well. The 4GB SSD boot disk with Xandros was full, updates were not working, the whole experience was bad. Xandros in all its simplicity and goodness, got it really wrong, how did that partition get full so easily? (it was not my files btw).

I had a USB stick with Ubuntu 9.04 in my bag for a couple of weeks now, when I downloaded it and installed it on VMWare I decided to create the live USB stick and try it on a few laptops, so today I thought "Why not?" and went for it.

The installation was a dream. I chose manual partitioning, mounted '/' to the 4GB disk and '/usr' to the (slower but massive) 16GB one. After the install I've got 3GB available on the first disk and 10GB on the other. Brilliant!

Ubuntu deserves all credit here. The OS works like a treat on the little 1024x600 display, the wired and wireless networking just works and so far it's been a tremendously good experience. So good that I had to write this! :-)

My Eee PC has got a new lease of life. Well done!

Linux add swap space file

2009-05-04T18:47:00.005+01:00

To add swap space for Linux, you'll need to add either a swap partition or create a new (big) file and use it for swap:

To add a new 1GB file I do this:


root@debian> 
mkdir /swap

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap/swapfile_1gb bs=1024 count=1048576

mkswap /swap/swapfile_1gb

swapon /swap/swapfile_1gb

To enable the swap file for the next boot, edit /etc/fstab and add this:


/swapfile  swap  swap  defaults  0 0

To check that the swap file is used, type:


swapon -s
free

That's it!

bs: blocksize
count: number of blocks 1 million blocks x 1K = 1G

My Quick Guide for a Linux setup on VMWare (Ubuntu/Debian)

2009-05-04T12:02:00.011+01:00

This post is written for Debian but will work for other Debian based linux distros like Ubuntu. Debian is my personal favourite as it is stable, clean, fast and easy-to-use/configure. There is a wealth of information about Debian on the net, and the debian.org web-site is quite comprehensive and helpful.

So you have installed a Debian 5 (Lenny) distro on a virtual machine in VMWare and cygwin on your windows desktop. This is a quick guide (doubles as a reference/reminder for myself) on how to install stuff and get you going.

As stated above I assume this is where you are:

You've downloaded an ISO image from your favourite distro web-site (Ubuntu/Debian).
You have installed the distro on a VMWare instance and you gave it a name (e.g. 'debian5')
You have a 'root' account and your own named account (e.g. 'username'), advisable to use the same username you use for Windows (helps when accessing your computer from cygwin)
You have cygwin installed on your PC. (I will need to write a guide for cygwin installs one day)
You have WinSCP and Putty installed somewhere on your PC.

On your Linux box, through the VMWare console, open a shell and log in as root:


su - root

Update your system and install ssh:


apt-get update
apt-get install ssh

Find out what the IP address of your linux install is by typing:


ifconfig

On your PC now, edit the %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file and add an entry for your linux box, i.e.:


192.168.xx.xxx debian5

where 'debian5' I assume is the name of your machine.

Ensure you can ping your Linux box from your PC command line:


ping debian5

After this, you can open a WinSCP session to your linux box to verify that ssh is working properly (for the time being).

Now, the next thing I do, is to open the .bashrc file from the root's home folder and add the following lines:

export PS1='\n\[\033[1;31m\]\u\[\033[1;37m\]@\[\033[0;31m\]\h\n\[\033[0m\][\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\]] '
umask 077
alias l="ls -lFa --color=auto"

This gives you a nice prompt and a nice alias for "l".

Do the same for your named user, edit /home/username/.bashrc and add:

export PS1="\n\[\033[1;36m\]\u\[\033[1;37m\]@\[\033[0;36m\]\h\n\[\033[0m\][\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\]] "
umask 077
alias l="ls -lFa --color=auto"

This gives you a different color for the prompt for your named user.

At this moment, we have SSH installed and we can connect to our Linux virtual machine from Windows using WinSCP or cygwin (try ssh -l username debian5). I now much prefer to minimize VMWare and use cygwin, Putty and WinSCP for the rest. We can fully administer our Linux install using these tools and we don't have to use the mouse too much. Such fun!

From cygwin try:

ssh debian5 (<-- this uses your named account (good to have macthing usernames for Windows/Linux) ssh -l root debian5 or ssh root@debian5

I now usually create a '/u01' folder where all my machine-wide stuff goes, like special installations of java, tomcat, and other tools that are not OS related go.

Logged in as root:


groupadd admin
mkdir /u01
chown username:admin /u01
chmod 774 /u01

Using ssh with Public Key Authentication

On your PC (client), you need to generate a key pair. Using cygwin type:


ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/ksymeon/.ssh/id_rsa): 
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): 
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/ksymeon/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/ksymeon/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
e8:bb:5f:d5:e0:f1:49:88:01:38:c1:cd:7d:b4:94:99 xxxxxxx@xxxxxx

You now have the public and private keys in your .ssh folder on your cygwin install.

Next thing to upload your public key to your linux box. The content of your public key needs to be added to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 file on your linux box. You can have multiple authorised keys for your account. I use different keys for each different machine I use to connect to my servers, i.e. my laptop has a different key than my desktop.

Using cygwin log in to your linux box:


ssh debian5

Create the .ssh folder under your home (~) folder:


mkdir .ssh
chmod 700 .ssh

Open another local cygwin shell, copy your public key securely to your linux box:


scp id_rsa.pub debian5:~/.ssh/temp.pub

From your remote cygwin shell, get into your .ssh folder and check the temp.pub is there:


cd .ssh
ls -lFa

Append the public key to your authorised keys and delete it:


cat temp.pub >> authorized_keys2
rm temp.pub

Now, back to you cygwin prompt, try to ssh again into your linux box:


ssh debian5
Enter passphrase for key '/home/xxxxxx/.ssh/id_rsa':

You see that instead of your password, the passphrase is required.

You can now add your public key to other accounts, for example the root account if you would like to log in as root directly from your PC. Otherwise you can always log in as yourself and 'su - root' after you are in.

This is as far as I can go now, more to come in a different post.

MyBrute

2009-05-03T22:25:00.003+01:00

Thanks to my friend psarog, for pointing this out... Here's the latest in social game-working:
http://ksymeon.mybrute.com

Beat me up, Scottie...

It's time for a Mac

2009-04-26T11:35:00.005+01:00

Finally, I succumbed to the pressure and bought it. After months of procrastination and countless visits to the Apple shop, I managed to make the decision and splash out for a 17" MacBookPro with a non-glossy (antiglare) display.

My first impressions are very positive. The Mac is an amazingly beautiful piece of hardware and the OS is just a joy to work with.

the antiglare display

Having seen both displays in the shop I am absolutely certain I made the right choice. I've also used it in bright sunshine and put simply it's the best screen I've ever used outdoors without a problem.

the keyboard

The backlit keyboard it's just beautiful. Although my friend vpapanik has opted for a completely blank keyboard, I must say that when the lights go off the glow from below is quite pretty and useful.

the performance

This machine (I bought the 2.66GHz not the 2.93 one) is actually fast! Running my CPU-demanding Maze to produce a really large maze, was 15% faster on a virtual Win2k machine on the Mac, than my massive desktop Windows PC (Core2 DUO 2.13GHz)!!! That was a nice surprise.

the OS

Having UNIX in the back-end skinned with Leopard's pretty pictures makes such a nice environment to work with.

the Software

Not surprisingly the software that comes with the Mac (and I include iWork as well) looks consistent and purposely designed with the user in mind. iPhoto is nice, although I much prefer the more powerful (and much more expensive) Adobe LightRoom for my picture workflow so I haven't used it that much.

overall

All in all, the experience is worth it. I bought the Mac with the view of writing applications for my iPod; at the moment I'm only staring at the surface. But in terms of having a powerful (and not-very-portable) laptop that can host most of my needs I have to say that I have not seen anything that can come close to enclosing such power and beauty in a box than the 17" MacBookPro. I have already started thinking about whether I need my desktop to be honest.

Mac vs PC

Now that's a much discussed subject that probably demands a special blog-post. As a programmer who has written millions of lines for Windows (and MS) operating systems over the years, I feel obliged to mention that I can't jump ship that easily. There's no need for animosity between Mac and PC users. Both are quite nice to work with. There are things that I like on both systems and I believe that they can co-exist with each other.

The only difference between the two is that I can run Windows VMs on my Mac, but I can't run Mac OS X on a VM that runs on windows. And from that point of view Mac "wins" not because of ability but because of licensing policy... :-\ And that's not very nice, is it?

Long absence

2009-03-01T11:30:00.002Z

One of my biggest projects to date is live and I'm starting to get back on my feet. I should start updating my website a bit. First things first, I have to do a mail server migration this weekend. :-[

Format external drive for the PS3 (FAT32)

2009-02-21T14:23:00.007Z

Was just looking for a quick way of formatting an external hard drive to use with my PS3. PS3 recognises only FAT32 drives, but if you are using Windows XP and try to format a drive larger than 32GB in FAT32 you will find it almost impossible. The only options you get are "NTFS"and that's about it.

There is however an alternative formatter (C source code available) that can be found here.

Works a treat! Just open a command-shell and type:


fat32format <drive letter>:

... and you are done!

Asus Eee PC 901

2008-08-16T12:52:00.003+01:00

I've been waiting for this little one for weeks now. Ebuyer got it in stock on Thursday and I was quick to order one and pay an extra £10 for a Saturday delivery :-)

It arrived this morning and it's happily sitting on my desk at the moment. I've got the Xandros (Debian based) Linux edition that comes with 20GB of SSD and a gig of RAM.

First impressions are OUTSTANDING! This is the Eee PC as it was supposed to be. A couple of words on its features:

Screen: fantastic, 1024x600 is all you need for a little web browser.
Keyboard: awkward, I managed to type 2s instead of 1s all the time. I'll get used to it. In any case this is not a machine to write your thesis on...
USB: plugged in my Logitech mouse, Western Digital 320Gb passport, Lexar USB stick no problem. 3 ports in total should are enough for most of us.
MMC/SD: inserted my 4Gb Sandisk Extreme III card, no problem.
WiFi: connected nicely to my Netgear router. After restarting though I had to re-enable the WiFi connection, I'm sure I'll find out why this happened.
LAN: connected to my LAN via ethernet cable, assigned static IP address, easy setup.
OS: Impressively nice. The home menu interface is really good for starters, your mum can use it immediatelly. I spent a lot of time using the terminal mode however (Alt-Ctrl-T) but I feel that Windows users will not have any problems at all.
Storage: the Eee PC comes with a system storage device of 4Gb that is mounted as "/" and it mostly occupied (86%). A solid state drive (SSD) of 20Gb is 98% empty and is mounted as "/home" where all your use files are.
Webcam: haven't used it, I think I might even put a sticker on it to stop the Internet spying on me :-P
Performance: not the fastest machine on earth but absolutely sufficient for its use. I can't really tell about the HD performance but I haven't really seen anything wrong with it. I've installed Tomcat 6.0.16 on it and the server started up in 2.044 seconds (!), not bad.
Programming Languages: Eee PC comes with java 1.5.0_10, Python 2.4.4 and Ruby 1.8.5 installed.

Windows
What Windows? I am not a Windows foe, I rather like Windows for what they are and what they do. However, I honestly don't see the point in spending license fees for a WinXP Eee PC when the Linux edition is so well polished and comes with an extra 8Gb of storage space. Novice users will never have a problem using the Linux edition, it might even be a good idea to get some "exposure" on a different OS. I seriously think that the Eee PC is a great gift for children.

I was actually thinking of buying the Eee PC to play with it for a bit, then install Windows 2000 on it (yes, really retro fashion) but I am now so completely converted to Linux that I won't. I'm now thinking of getting a second one to put Win2k on it, just for fun :-) LOL

Annoyances
Not many to be honest, just a few minor ones:

The default username is "user" and although it asks you for your name the userid remains "user". It automatically logs in as this user, but this is hardly any problem as this machine is intended to be very "personal". I would however have liked to be able to change the username (it might be possible btw, I haven't got the time to google it yet) so that when I ssh to it, it shows my normal desktop username. I hope I can fix this later.
The FileManager disappeared after the first restart(!). To fix it I found these instructions which fixed the problem quickly.

Overall
Overall, the Asus Eee PC is a little gem of a netbook. I'm really glad I've got one, it will go with me everywhere from now on.

Installing Samba on Debian

2008-08-16T12:05:00.005+01:00

Install Samba:


apt-get install samba

Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and change:


workgroup = your windows workgroup name
netbios name = xxx

Add shares:


[_downloads_user]
path=/home/user/_downloads
browsable=yes
writeable=yes
valid users = user
admin users = user

Restart Samba:


/etc/init.d/samba restart

Linux Prompts and Aliases

2008-08-16T11:09:00.005+01:00

I'm getting tired setting up my linux prompts every time I need to setup a new Linux machine (more on this later), so here's my cheat-sheet of linux settings for your .bashrc or .profile:

Root account (red theme):


export PS1='\n\[\033[1;31m\]\u\[\033[1;37m\]@\[\033[0;31m\]\h\n\[\033[0m\][\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\]] '
umask 077

Test machine (cyan theme):


export PS1="\n\[\033[1;36m\]\u\[\033[1;37m\]@\[\033[0;36m\]\h\n\[\033[0m\][\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\]] "

Local Cygwin (green theme):


export PS1="\n\[\033[1;32m\]\u\[\033[1;37m\]@\[\033[0;32m\]\h\n\[\033[0m\][\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\]] "

Aliases:


alias l="ls -lFa"
alias more="cat"

Terabyte

2008-06-12T00:14:00.004+01:00

I need to sit down and think about this, because for years after I got into computers a megabyte was something massive. And now, I've got almost 3 Terabytes hooked onto my computer:
Total: 2,970,532,491,264 bytes
I never thought I will have that much storage space. I can't even imagine how much storage we will be needing in another 25 years time.

Greek Conversions and Wikipedia

2008-05-16T22:48:00.002+01:00

I got an email the other day from a guy who told me that they couldn't find my Greek Conversions (GCNV) program on cylog.org.

I replied that I basically moved my servers and I haven't finished the migration yet but then I decided to add it to the "archive" section as I always planned to do.

Little I knew, that Greek Conversions is apparently featured in WikiPedia on an entry about greeklish! Oh, yes! Of all the software that i've written, this awful little utility from 1995 is the one that's linked from WikiPedia :-)

Nice :-)

www.cylog.co.uk

2008-04-11T23:07:00.002+01:00

Countless hours of concept work, PhotoShopping, CSS styling, HTML writing and a final push in the early hours the other day, and the migration of my cylog.org website to new servers has been finished.

I can now rest for a little while, knowing that after about 8 years, I did manage to move my website to a new platform (Linux/Apache/Tomcat) with a new web standards friendly design, better content and update program listings.

I can now focus on updating some of the software too :-)

The website will be running from now on on two web addresses: www.cylog.org and www.cylog.co.uk as a mirror. The DNS entries for the .org should be propagating through the internet as we speak and everything should be sorted by Monday.

Firefox Plugins

2008-04-01T22:05:00.003+01:00

Firefox wouldn't be what it is today if it weren't for the plug-in functionality. After years of use, here's what I ended up with as my absolute essentials:

CSS Viewer (1.0.2) (with a button on the main toolbar)
FAYT (2.0.1) - find as you type
Firebug (1.05)
Greasemonkey (0.7.20080121.0)
IE Tab (1.3.3.x)
User Agent Switcher (0.6.11) (so that you can pretend you are a PSP)
Web Developer (1.1.5)
Flashblock (1.5.5)

Some other plugins that somehow I installed but never really used them much:

FireFTP
Video Download

Objections? Suggestions?

Atopon

2008-03-23T22:22:00.005Z

Atopon, as we say "εις άτοπον απαγωγήν". Otherwise known as "Reductio ad absurdum", or "proof by contradiction".

Fascinated by it when I was a High School student, I decided to get the domain(s) for it.

Still haven't decided what to do with them, but they'll be hapilly parked at my new little VPS until (hopefully) all things mathematical find their way to their pages :-)

Accounts available upon request for bona-fide mathematical spirits out there... ;-)

Apophysis

2008-03-22T18:33:00.003Z

Apophysis v2.07 is out, and I picked it up again almost 18 months after I left it, in order to create the "coming soon" screens for www.atopon.org and www.atopon.com.

What a wonderful program. Once I got the source code compiling on my machine. Maybe I shall do it again.

What the Font?

2008-03-16T17:51:00.003Z

Further to my previous post, I was looking to find out what font I used more than 10 years ago when I wrote CyberMind. Unfortunatelly, for some reason, the PhotoShop .PSD files from that era did not have any text layers (did PhotoShop support text layers back then?) so I couldn't find out what font I've used.

Long hours going through my whole Corel 8 font CD and still I couldn't quite find what it was, until I (yet again, googled it) found "What the Font?" on the web.

What the Font? ... What a service! Unbelievable! I created a sample gif, uploaded it, identified the characters through a very intelligent interface and voila! ... my font was SquireD!

God, how were we able to breathe before the web? ...

The Fonts for Web 2.0

2008-03-16T16:39:00.003Z

Was wondering if the latest web 2.0 designs gave any preference for certain fonts, so a little bit of Googling revealed the following page:

The Logos of Web 2.0

Interestingly VAG Rounded (Rundschrift), the font I chose for my CyLog.org website back in 2000, is one of the most popular web 2.0 fonts. :-)

Frutiger, another one of my favourite fonts, seems to be also very popular with Web 2.0 startups.

Fonts always fascinated me since the very early days of my computing career, when back in the mid 80s I was designing pixel by pixel greek fonts for the Amstrad CPC 464... Sometimes, I just don't realise how old I am :-)

freetechbooks.com

2008-02-17T12:08:00.002Z

Discovered this website these days, some good stuff in there, like Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Python and Thinking in Java and lots of others.

Worth a visit for all the geeks out there :-)

Artwork

2008-01-16T22:37:00.000Z

Started to follow David Lanham's work from the Iconfactory, now I'm a regular visitor to his web-site. The artwork is awesome, style is unique, and his icons and wallpapers often decorate my desktop.

Don't miss it: http://www.dlanham.com/

Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition on Ubuntu

2008-01-06T21:32:00.003Z

This was a bit tricky... So here it goes, in case anybody else in the world would like to do it. Full installation instructions can be found here, however I hope that these steps will help:

0. Downlad the Debian pacakge (oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.0_i386.deb) from http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/xe/index.html.

0. First of all, you need to su as root, and unfortunatelly sudo is not enough! Oracle will not install properly unless you do that:


sudo -s

You might want to add 1GB of swap space space. Use these commands:


mkdir /swap
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap/swapfile_1gb bs=1024 count=1048576 
mkswap /swap/swapfile_1gb
swapon /swap/swapfile_1gb

To make the swap file stick add the following lines to /etc/fstab:


/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

To check that the swap file is used, type:


swapon -s
free

1. Install libaio1 if you don't have it:


apt-get install libaio1

2. Start the installation:


dpkg -i ./oracle-xe-universal_10.2.0.1-1.0_i386.deb

3. Configure your instance, remember to write down the password:


/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure

4. Add the Oracle environment shell script in your .bashrc. Edit the file with vi and add the following line at the bottom:


. /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/bin/oracle_env.sh

Oracle 10g XE is now installed and running on your Ubuntu system. In order to be able to use its graphical UI remotely, do the following:

5. Using sqlplus log in as SYSTEM. At the prompt, type:


exec DBMS_XDB.SetListenerLocalAccess(false);

That's it. To SQL*Plus from a remote system use this TNSNAMES.ORA entry:


UBUNTU_XE =
 (DESCRIPTION =
   (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = ubuntu)(PORT = 1521))
   (CONNECT_DATA =
     (SERVER = DEDICATED)
     (SERVICE_NAME = XE)
   )
 )

From any Oracle 10 client system, type:


tnsping ubuntu_xe

... to check it your Ubuntu-based XE is accessible. To connect to it use:


sqlplus system@ubuntu_xe

Hope this helps.

When things go wrong
I have had a few problems, which I have sorted by ensuring that:
- I had enough swap
- I had done everything as root
- I chose the right port numbers

Ubuntu here I come...

2008-01-06T20:53:00.000Z

Years of waiting are now over. I have succesfully configured an instance of the Ubuntu Server v6.06 (Dapper Drake) on a VMWare machine and I'm over the top with joy!

All these years, my linux experience has been somewhat "limited". I had installed all sorts of distros but never had a reason to drill down anymore. Played with the UI and a few apps and that was it, and even though I have been a using BSD and Solaris for quite sometime I never had to learn more than the basics (moving files around, writing scripts, making coffee (java), tailing logs, grepping, etc.).

This time though, I not only installed Apache, Tomcat and Java 5; I went to great lengths adding a second hard-disk, partitioning, extending my swap to the second disk, installing and uninstalling Oracle 10g XE etc. All sorts of "advanced" stuff ;-)

I have now a fully functioning virtual Ubuntu server on VMWare (love this stuff), with Apache, Tomcat and Oracle. I can ssh to them from my cygwin, I can Putty, WinSCP and scp to them. I can sqlplus to my Oracle instance and harness the full power of the best database in the world.

What to say about Ubuntu Server? Obviously its command-line interface is not as good-looking as the desktop edition :-), however, documentation is immaculate, start-up performance is unbelievable.

Well done Ubuntu. Highly recommended!

FSViewer32 and My Freeware Suite

2007-08-11T13:25:00.001+01:00

The next big thing I found today (see previous post) is called FastStone Image Viewer 3.2 and it's an image viewer. Fast, lightweight and nicely done, looks very promising and could possibly replace my ageing ACDSee Classic 32 I've been using for years!

I keep a folder on my disks with the most useful freeware programs I find on the web. I call it My Freeware Suite :-)

Here's the contents:

FileZilla
SyncBack, HashOnClick and other utilities from 2BrightSparks
CSS Tab Designer
AutoHotKey
WinAmp
SysInternals
AdAwareSE
7Zip
MediaPlayerClassic

...and others... :-)

ToolBox and AutoHotKey

2007-08-11T13:02:00.000+01:00

I've been getting quite a lot of emails regarding ToolBox my little application launcher which I've been developing since 1996. Most users are asking for a hot-key feature that will allow them to bring ToolBox to front with the press of a button.

I have looked at how to implement such a feature, years ago, and when I found out that I had to write a keyboard hook I decided to resist the temptation and keep ToolBox as "clean" and non-intrusive as possible. What is more, the portable nature of ToolBox (it can run from almost everywhere, doesn't need installation, etc.), requires some consideration on how far new features can go into the host's internals.

Having decided to provide some solution to those emails, I did a bit of investigation on third-party tools that could be used to bring an application to the front and I found a real Gem!:

AutoHotKey is an open-source utility that can do just that. With a simple script that looks like this:


#z::
IfWinExist ToolBox
       WinActivate
return

...you can bring ToolBox to the front by pressing Win+Z. Bliss!

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

2007-07-29T14:38:00.000+01:00

Not very often you come across a piece of software so complete, so full of nice surprises, so comprehensive in scope and functionality. I was a beta tester, I installed the trial, I decided to buy it and never looked back.

I'm not going to post a full review, I just wanted to say how fascinating it is using Lightroom. Every single day I learn a new thing, I dive more into the abyss of functions and features and every single time it puts a smile on my face.

I initially thought that Lightroom is just for RAW photography workflow (non-destructive exposure control, etc.). It turns out to be that on top of that, it gives you massive metadata, labelling and generally cataloging functionality which can be used on all sorts of images. What is more, you can clone pictures for editing and "stack" them with the originals. Moving on, you discover it's amazing usability in terms of sorting out pictures, comparing shots and selecting collections of pictures.

It has this "spray" tool with which you can "spray" your thumbnails with keywords, colored labels, flags, metadata and others. This can make sorting out or querying for pictures tremendously easier! How on earth did they come up with that idea! :-)

I have now put most of my pictures (30,000+) in its database and slowly I will be adding more and more metadata making it my definitive image source. And to make things even better, Lightroom is using internally a SQLite database, which makes it even easier to build your own tools around it. There's plenty of support for all kinds of languages.

For those of you who never experienced Lightroom, I urge you to go and download a copy and give it a shot. It has the most innovative and intuitive UI I have ever seen in a software application.

Running the Numbers

2007-07-23T21:41:00.000+01:00

For those who missed it: "Running the Numbers", an amazing gallery of prints by Chris Jordan.

News Update

2007-07-14T13:05:00.000+01:00

I know, I know. I have withdrawn myself, I have not been on Skype or Googlechat and people are wondering where I am... The truth is that I have been really very busy. And I still am. Things at work have not been great and my mind is constantly occupied by a million things. The least of my worries is to post a blog entry. :-(

I do however, feel very guilty about this so - yet again - I will make the promise to do my best at contributing to this blog.

I'm keeping this entry short expecting that I will be able to post a couple more today. Need to do some Photoshop-ing first... I've got news for you! :-)

Adobe CS3 New Icons

2007-04-21T23:42:00.000+01:00

There seems to be a huge debate on the net over the new Adobe icons introduced in Creative Suite 3. People's reaction to the new icons is like their reaction to Marmite. They either *love* them or *loathe* them. I've first seen the Lightroom icon which I thought that it was alright if not very simplistic. After seeing the PS icon however, I pleasanlty realised that the concept behind the new icons is the elements of the Periodic table. Despite my dislike of Marmite, I find the new icons really nice and they look quite neat on my Toolbox:

Searching a little bit on the web, I have discovered the beautiful "The Art of Adam Betts" and his alternative CS3 icons (for those of you who agree with him and disagree with me :-) ). Adam has created a nice picture of the evolution of the Photoshop icon, but what I love most is the Adobe's Wheel O'Icons.

Also, check out the amazing Adobe Icon Set in a rotating flash wheel.

I'm a Nerd God

2007-02-13T21:58:00.000Z

Only because I've built the computer I'm working on I think...

Check it out:

Vue 6 Esprit

2006-11-12T23:44:00.000Z

Amongst several other things that I find to occupy my (free) time, is computer generated imagery. Landscapes and worlds, plantation. Whatever. Ever since I wrote RFS (Random Fractal Surfaces), a DOS-based surface simulation in isometric 3D back in 1988 (!), I have been following the software scene steadilly. Vue d'Esprit was one of the first programs to make a difference and produce some really realistic renderings.

Went to Digital Blasphemy today to see the latest wallpapers there and I read the news that Vue d'Esprit 6 has been released. Just check the video on the web page. It speaks for itself.

I'm sure I will be downloading a trial version very soon, only to play a little bit with it and then just leave it over there, in the corner of my hard disk until the next version arrives :-)

Talking about that RFS, the history of it is quite funny - I've even found a Borland Pascal-based version of it that is supposed to run on Windows written in Nov '93. Crickey! That was 13 years ago!

1 1/3 Thousand Miles from home

2006-10-24T21:36:00.000+01:00

Glad to see vpapanik's post that Thessaloniki is now on high-resolution on Google Earth. Next thing I tried to do is to measure the exact distance from my parent's house to the place I live now.

To my amazement it measured exactly 1,333.33 miles!!! What an amazing number! :-) And, here's the proof:

Of course, if you measure it in kilometers is a rather uninteresting number... Ah, being a mathematician is no fun!

Flight Simulator X

2006-10-14T20:57:00.000+01:00

Downloaded the demo a couple of weeks ago and I wasn't impressed to be honest, however since I really like that occassional flight I decided I should go and get the latest version of FS especially since my computer can now afford this kind of "load".

I wasn't wrong. Despite a BSOD that I got when I tried to install it on Vista, FSX is a real treat on WinXP. Everything seems to be working ok, I haven't seen any problems with the two monitor setup or graphics that I have experienced with the demo. Good work beta testers! :-)

I remember the first Flight Simulator that I played in some awful 640x200 graphics probably 20-25 years ago (Check out the history of Flight Simulator here - wikipedia). Since then I probably tried a couple of more versions, never put much effort into it. When I came to England in 2000, MS FS 2000 was out featuring the Concorde! I bought a copy and I remember that I enjoyed it a lot. I also remember flying from Leros to Kos on a Cessna in the middle of the night! Such fun!

Hence, I decided to give Flight Simulator X a go. The graphics seemed amazing in the demo. What is more, FS it's always a good test for a new computer :-) Here I go then.

The installation required 15Gb on my hard disk! That is impressive for an operating system, let alone a game.

I have already landed a Piper in Leros and a Cessna in Thessaloniki. My Airbus A321 trip from SKG to Kuala Lumpur was interrupted by... dinner, so I'm now looking for shorter flights. ;-) Anyway, that's my second post today so I might as well stop here and go back to flying!

Windows Vista

2006-10-14T12:10:00.000+01:00

Here I am, having been waiting for weeks for the Windows Vista RC1 DVDs to arrive. The beta 2 arrived in July/August but my computer was not poweful enough at the time to install it.

When I lost Titania (see previous post "End of an Era") and upgraded, I've kept a primary partition on my new Hard Disk to install the RC1 later.

Installation
Last night I went through the installation procedure. I ran the installer from within XP and chose the empty partition (V:) to install Vista. So far so good. Soon after, the first BSOD appeared. Oh yes, I was hoping that Vista would have a different way of informing you of problems, but BSOD it is! Memory Management error it said... However, after the reboot the installation resumed and it seemed to be ok.

First boot
First boot, everything looks neat and in order. A few questions about regional settings, computer name and it's ready. The new interface needs a few moments to get used to but it looks nice. Minutes later, a new BSOD - memory management again. Reboot - again. Tried the Memory diagnostics on the second boot but they didn't show any problems. Weird.

When I went into Vista again, the error was reported to Microsoft and the feedback I got said that it has been solved in the Final version. Let's hope. Since then I only got one more BSOD after installing the NVidia drivers (mem management again) but now everything appears to be stable and fine. Until the next BSOD that is :-)

What I liked
There are a few things that are good about Vista:

Mainly, the fact that I installed them to my V: drive and they remained there. After the boot they didn't change any drive letters. All my stuff is in the same place. They appear to be happily using V: as the system drive and they know that my C: drive has XP on it. That was very good indeed, as I was afraid that they will name the boot drive C: and change the other drive letters accordingly but it didn't happen. Good stuff!
User Interface. Admittedly Vista looks more modern and more polished than its predecessors. Aero looks fresh with the transparent title bars and light-up buttons but to be honest with you, my own Toolbox application had window transparency and blurring years ago without the need for an ultra-fast and expensive graphics card. ;-)
The sidebar with all those gadgets is a nice feature that somehow seems neat, however you can't stop thinking that you've seen it on a Mac before.
Window Switching and taskbar window preview. The new Window Switching feature looks quite neat. Again something we've seen in Macs although with a somewhat different touch. The taskbar can show you a preview of the window while hovering over an item. Definitely nice looking, I question its day-to-day use though.
InkBall. The game - even though we first saw it on the Tablet PCs it's a nice little fun game to play.

What I didn't like
And now the list of the things I didn't like:

User Account Control. How annoying! I had to search the net immediatelly in order to find out how to disable. Basically, I launched a program that stores its settings in .ini files and every time it tried to write to its own private .ini files, Vista prompted me for confirmation that I would like to allow this to happen! Then it dims the screen and asks for another confirmation. How can they possibly judge the importance of write access to a file simply by looking at its extension? There you go, now all our programs will need to store settings in .txt or .xml files, until the next Windows version comes along which decides that they are important system files and need to be protected! Ridiculously pedantic this feature needs a lot of more work. Sorry.
Lots of standard Windows applications don't have the same look and feel as the newer tools, i.e. the GUI components don't look like Vista, they look like Win2000 on a Vista frame. I guess this is a "feature" of RC1 and lots of little things like that will be polished by the time the OS hits the shelves. I'm not gonna be that harsh on MS on this.

Problems

Well, the BSOD of course. I don't know what's wrong with my RAM. It's basically very expensive and brand new and it seems to be working fine with XP. So I tend to think that it's Vista's problem not a hardware problem. Let's see.
A few things didn't work very well with Aero, like for example when my second monitor start flickering and the windows contents where flashing etc., but I guess this is early days for both Aero and my graphics card's drivers.

Conclusion
The big question of course is: "Will I upgrade?"
To be perfectly honest I will. I will definitely upgrade, the real question is though "When?". I'm quite happy with the stability of XP, although I quite fancy the new interface.

ScreenShots
Here's a couple of screenshots of my desktop. Beware full size is 3200x1200 (!):

Switching Windows

Buena Vista

Art Rage 2

2006-10-08T13:54:00.000+01:00

Went looking for Kai again today. What I found this time is Art Rage. A free painting tool for Windows and Mac OS X with a fantastic Soap-like user interface. Downloaded and played with it a little bit. This piece of software is amazing! A true conveyor of Kai's user interface design ideas. Excellent work. Don't miss it.

For serious artists, the $19.95 price tag is basically nothing. Don't forget to check the gallery forums for some amazing examples of true digital art!

I like the moon

2006-09-30T23:24:00.000+01:00

The process of rebuilding your computer can be quite interesting sometimes. Here's what I dug out of my black hole storage today (earphones needed):

The Moon Song

Hill- arious!

End of an Era

2006-09-23T19:08:00.000+01:00

My wonderful Titania will be put down in a few minutes. Following the hard disk failure (see previous post), I removed the failed HD only to realise that Titania wouldn't start with the other HD on the on-board RAID controller. For a moment, I thought that this was a controller error and maybe my 160Gig drive was ok. But after many tests a) the HD has proved to be gone to meet its maker and b) my RAID IDE controller on my motherboard didn't seem to be very happy controlling disks.

Thus, I decided that four years (!!!) is enough for a Mobo.

[Mobo is a very colloquial term that modders are using to describe motherboards! I found out about this only yesterday and I felt like a modder again! For those of you who missed some episodes of my life, I used to upgrade or change my PC about 3 times a year. Just a couple of HD and one memory upgrade in the last four years don't give me justice. Anyway, I digress again... Time to close this bracket]

Did my market investigation, asked a few friends; the word has it that the Intel Core 2 Duo is the new kid on the block, so I went and bought one.

Oh my! PCs have changed so much since I last looked at them! WiFi on board, PCI Express, only one IDE slot (!), BIOS upgrades using USB sticks, SATA on the go, Gigabit LAN. New memory specs, VGAs with extra power (see Zaf's post here - I too didn't know about this and can't believe we found out about this on almost the same day - LOL).

I have now all the new components on my floor and am writing this before I set off taking Titania's components apart... I will certainly revive her in a new box, and I will probably put it next to my desk, but deep down I know that this is the end of Titania's days as my PC. I don't know what got me now, it seems stupid. But I do, yes, I do feel sad.

Here I am again

2006-09-23T18:17:00.000+01:00

Here I am again. No matter how much I want to write to my blog, something always happens and I either forget or just put it off. My friends are looking for me though, so here's my first post for September :-)

Life is getting back to normal... Furniture and bills arrive in the new flat (still no blinds though), things are getting out of the boxes (still a lot of boxes however) and my hard disks are dying an annoying death... See? No change.

Even though I'm probably one of the few people I know that take regular backups, this time I was unprepared. What I hate most, is not that I have lost a hard disk; it is that I don't know what I've lost. And I spend hours thinking what "else" did I have on that disk. Sigh.

What I lost this time was my "black hole" disk. Massive when I bought it, this 160Gb monster had all my mp3s, all the software I downloaded from the net (I don't care much about the contents, I care about the structure and organisation though) and all the software I have bought, in ISO images, zip files, licenses, etc.

I never thought of backing up that disk, although I know I could have just taken an export of the file list as I do with others...

I'm certain I'll be able to recover from this data loss, I have even started to think that it was for good; it's more tidy now :-)

Back Online

2006-08-06T20:44:00.000+01:00

It's been a little over two months without an internet connection at home and I must admit it was really hard. Moving house twice since mid-May was stressful, but not having the ability to check your email, do your banking, read your friends' blogs or even look at your favourite photography web-site was really tough.

Now, that's all in the past! I'm back! With a vengeance. I got my new telephone line installed last week and on Friday my ADSL started working, so I'm enjoying my first weekend after two months with a proper 8-Mbit ADSL connection :-)

Now, I'm off to read Zaf's blog. His first couple of stories, especially the retro game one, look very promising...

Flow

2006-05-22T00:16:00.000+01:00

One of the best flash games I've ever seen and played is Flow, a simple yet addictive ameoba-platform-adventure... Eat, Dive and Evolve. Brilliant!

Google SketchUp

2006-05-18T22:42:00.000+01:00

For those of you who haven't seen it, please take a look at the Google SketchUp. It is just incredible! Go through the tutorials, build your model, then make sure that you check the "Shadows" functionality along with the integration with Google Earth!

The interface is one of the most user-friendly and intuitive UIs I have ever seen in a 3D modeller. You can draw your dream home in minutes. Then put it on Google Earth, and play with the Sun's position in the sky based on Day of the Year and time. It is such a treat!

Now you can find out if your favourite english pub, will have the sun in the garden on a Sunday afternoon... If the Sun will come out of the clouds, that is...

Tera Firma

2006-01-20T20:18:00.000Z

When you run out of disk space, double your disks' capacity

This has been my belief for years and when the other day I got the "Disk Full" message, I immediatelly placed an order for two 300Gb Maxtors and an SATA controller. It took me a few days to sort it out - one of them was faulty and had to go back. At last the replacement arrived today and I happilly took the screwdriver and added the disk to the stack of Hard Disks in my computer's box. I now have 1 TeraByte of storage on my main PC alone!!! If you include the NAS, plus the capacity of the laptops then my total quota is over 1.3 Tera...

I took a breath to contemplate this milestone... One TeraByte. One trillion bytes. Eight trillion bits. This is equivalent to 403 million printed pages!

I remember when we used to have 320Kb floppies, or even tapes. The term "MegaByte" was just an amazing thought! Nobody had that! I remember my first hard disk was a 40Mb IDE - and I had waited for months to get that. It must have been 1988. Now 16 years later I have about 32,000 times that amount of disk space. That is 3.2*10^5 times! That is incredible. With this rate, in 2022, I should have a 32 PetaByte Hard Disk... Can you imagine?

To celebrate the 1 Tera milestone, I wrote clDisks. A command-line utility which lists the free space and total capacity if your hard disks and totals them up. Look at my stats... :-)


clDisks v1.01 ©2006 CyLog Software

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Drive:         Bytes Free        Bytes Total  MBytes Free MBytes Total
----------------------------------------------------------------------
C:         14,417,825,792     32,210,161,664       13,750       30,718
J:          8,977,276,928     10,733,957,120        8,561       10,237
M:          5,820,928,000     64,428,584,960        5,551       61,444
S:        194,475,880,448    300,082,524,160      185,467      286,181
T:        300,005,793,792    300,082,524,160      286,108      286,181
V:          1,170,669,568    123,518,996,480        1,116      117,797
X:         19,868,966,912    163,921,571,840       18,949      156,328
Z:         10,429,038,592     12,646,301,696        9,946       12,060
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Total:    555,166,380,032  1,007,624,622,080      529,448      960,946
----------------------------------------------------------------------

You can download clDisks here: clDisks v1.01

The neglected program, the chronic bug and the invaluable friend

2005-10-09T16:47:00.000+01:00

For years now I knew of a bug in this little utility I had written ages ago. "Akatanomasto" ("one that cannot be named" in Greek) was this little sticky-notes utility I wrote back in 1999. I think it was the summer of 1999 when I had this idea of floating notes on the desktop with the unusual twist of being able to send the little notes across the network, "stick them up" electronically on somebody else's desktop. Soon after, the little application developed a minor bug. You couldn't type a hyphen ("-"). You could paste a hyphen and you could type a hyphen using the minus key on the numeric keypad, but you couldn't type one using the Underscore/Hyphen key on a normal keyboard. An initial investigation did not shine any light to the bug and I didn't bother that much to be honest. Who would discover?

The spring of 2000 found me being very busy with a job change, a move to a different country etc. The little utility was abandoned even though it was put up on my website (www.cylog.org) available for download. By 2003 a couple of people had discovered the bug and I probably had another look. No fix found. It was about that time (2003) when I was legally obliged to rename the utility, which actually made me decide to remove it from my site all together since it has become a bit derelict (read about rotting software on "The Pragmatic Programmer"). The program had some critical bugs (like the one that made it read several megabytes from the disk whenever you launched or even activated it - I kept that one a secret), I had a long list of improvements I wanted to make and on top of that I couldn't compile the code anymore since it was written in Delphi 5 and my current version of Delphi was 7. I decided that I was going to withdraw it, forever concealing the hideous bugs that came with it!

Two days ago, I decided to rewrite "Akatanomasto". It was always in the back of my mind. How I should find a name for it, how I was going to implement all these new ideas. How, this time, will write it more carefully and will not hastilly add features like adding ornaments on a christmas tree. And so I started...

[I sincerely apologise to those of you who are not very interested in the way we programmers develop, you may stop reading this post now. For those of you who are however, here it goes...]

First of all, we start from scratch. One window with the old code, one window with the new code. We write on the new code window, occasionally copying and pasting from the old code - not full units or forms, just lines of codes here and there. Frequently we check the old code to see how we implemented a certain feature, then we chose to follow or not to follow the old example. With all this in mind, I was gradually coming to a point were the program could create new notes on the desktop.

In all my preparation and re-design process I was preoccupied with things like naming conventions for the .ini files, XML usage for configuration, how to upgrade from the previous version, graphics improvements, how to use the new multi-monitor support libraries I developed over the years etc. The program was gradually taking shape and it came to the point were the notes could be read from the disk, created as new, etc. And then I remembered of that nasty little bug. I checked the new version. It was still there!!!

How on earth? How could this have happened? I took such care not to copy any code. I only copied a few components from old forms to the new forms... And a few lines here and there. I was gutted. I sighed, then I decided not to bother. "Oh well", I said to myself, "that at least can make the app more popular amongst my friends... They'll have a laugh". And I carried on building... "The chronic bug. Who cares!"

When I started redeveloping "Akatanomasto", I was between calling it "K-Not" or "KNot". I opted for the latter. I now realise that most of you who read this, will take the piss about dropping the hyphen for the obvious reason that one couldn’t type it! But I will ignore you... :-)

I digress. Last night I was on the phone to my friend Zaf and I was proudly telling him how I finally came about rewriting "Akatanomasto" and I added this cool feature, the chameleon effect (notes can take the color of the desktop wallpaper area they cover [picture here]). I mentioned the chronic bug to him and he offered help. He was confident that he’ll find it and fix it and will have an embarrassing story about me to tell to future generations. I was sure that he wouldn't find it. Or if he would, that it wouldn’t be my fault. It’d be something like Delphi's fault, or Windows'...

I zipped the source code and sent it over to him. We tested that he had all he needed in terms of libraries etc. - he was able to compile it. And he could emulate the bug. Good stuff. Now he could focus on finding why the bloody hyphen was not even sending a key-notification event to my little notes!...

Half an hour later he had the answer. I cannot disclose the adjectives he used to describe me for obvious reasons – this is a respectful blog. Along with the very few things I copied from the old app I copied the main menu off the app's main form. Which apparently had a "hyphen" assigned shortcut key assigned to a separator line. That, was intercepting key strokes from the hyphen-key (that explains why the numeric keypad key was working). The best of all, is the fact that because of the way the menu separators are rendered in Windows a shortcut key, if assigned, is not shown. I couldn't believe it!

I promised Zaf I'll post a story to my blog. Thanks matey! You are trully amazing. And invaluable. And you have my source code!

You can find a public preview of KNot here.

3D Pictures

2005-06-14T23:03:00.000+01:00

Here's how to make a 3D picture viewable with red-blue glasses. For this example we will assume that the left eye has the red filter and the right eye has the blue filter.

Using your digital camera take two pictures from two different spots; place the camera at the same height (use of a tripod highly recommended) and take the first picture of your subject. Now move the camera one or two inches to the right, focus at your subject again and take the second picture. Imagine that you are taking two pictures from the viewpoint of each one of your eyes; the first picture is the left eye, the second picture is the right eye (see picture below).

Open the two pictures in Photoshop. Go to the first picture (the left eye one) open the channels window and click on the Red Channel (Ctrl-1). Select all (Ctrl-A) and copy to clipboard (Ctrl-C). Go to the second picture (right eye), select the red channel (Ctrl-1) and paste the copied image (Ctrl-V). Without changing the selected channel click on the visibility indicator of the RGB channel, so that you can view all channels at the same time while you align them...

Choose the Move Tool (V) and use the arrow keys to align the Red channel with the rest of the channels. Use a "vanishing" point for the alignment - in our example I have used the bottom-left vertex of the octahedron (see picture below). Crop the picture and enjoy!

Desk Side Story

2005-06-14T21:43:00.000+01:00

It took almost six weeks since I moved to my new flat, but my desk and chair have been finally delivered today. My life has a new meaning now... :-) No more lying or kneeling on the floor. I'm so happy I may actually publish my 3D picture making technique some time soon.

Make plans and take pictures

2005-04-19T21:44:00.000+01:00

I was visiting byteburg today, in anticipation of something new, a new post, a new story, a new link. I found this link to Kai's article for edge.org. As I read it I was gradually realising how right he is! The executive summary says it all:

"Make plans and take pictures"

Round Calendar

2005-02-24T23:30:00.000Z

Several years ago, on a sunny autumnal day, I found myself waiting for my plane in the lounge of "Ellinikon", the Athens' airport. I was flying to Leros where I was serving my military duty for the Greek Navy. And as every other sailor or soldier, I was counting my days until my discharge and the return to normal civilian life.

It must have been late October 1998 when I had this idea of writing a program that represents a calendar year in a circular fashion. You see, when I was really young, at primary school, we used to have in my classroom a big poster hanging up the wall that illustrated the months and the seasons of a year. As a circle. Along with vegetables, fruit, weather and whatever else you may think of. Grapes in August, snow in January, yellow leaves for October and strawberries for May... Every month, a perfect 30 degree circular sector.

I realised that I had always had that vision of the calendar months in a year going circular, clock-wise in a big big circle. As if it was imprinted on the back of my head. Do you ever get this feeling, do you ever visualise space or time in a similar way?

That very morning I decided to write a piece of software to do exactly that! Draw a calendar as a circular disk (http://www.cylog.org/graphics_1.asp). It came with a PhotoShop-like toolbar and used to save the calendars as *.bmp files or Adobe Illustrator (*.ai) vector graphics files. I remember I used to have the bitmap as a background as I was counting down my days in the Navy...

Very recently, I got an email from a guy asking me whether I was still maintaining it. I replied that I wasn't but would be interesting in picking it up again and he replied back to give me suggestions on enhancements. I remember a while ago I had another email from somobdy who was offering help in building an online-help system for RoundCal. Because of course, the original version never had any documentation :-). I also did a quick search on my email archives and I came across various comments from people who got interested in it and wanted to drop me a line or ask a question.

As I am writing these lines I have a feeling that I'll get back to it very soon. I just need to find the time to do it. I have already thought of how I am going to write it from scratch, how the calendar window is going to work and how the XML configuration will be utilised.

If you read this and would like to make any suggestions, please don't hesitate to contact me (http://www.cylog.org/contactus.asp). I'll do my best!

Two months later...

2005-02-24T23:03:00.000Z

Almost two months have passed since my last blog post. Two hectic months. Holidays over Christmas and new year, then a little bit of work, then a week's skiing holiday in the Alps, then a bit more work.

Decided that I can't bear the thought of living in the same flat for a sixth year and started looking for a new place. It took my almost a fortnight to find a place and I'm glad I did. I was a bit reluctant to start, but once you get to agents and look at a few you just can't go back... Here I am now, looking forward to move to my new flat and post some more stories to my blog.

And the next story is a very interesting one...

Bryce

2004-12-18T23:30:00.000Z

Anybody remember Bryce? That classic 3D modelling program with the extraordinary user interface, developed by Kai Krause's old company MetaCreations? Several years ago - I think it was 1999 - MetaCreations sold Bryce to Corel and then last June, Corel sold to a company called "Daz" specializing in 3D Content and software (http://www.daz3d.com/).

When I saw the full version of Bryce 4 being given away for free on the copy of a magazine I immediatelly bought a copy. This one was not to be missed! Check the new home of Bryce and the galleries.

And if you see it being offered on the cover of a magazine don't hesitate. Buy it!

“mwdao” goes Atom

2004-10-10T15:54:00.000+01:00

I have been looking at the “atom.xml” blog technology recently, a publishing standard for news web sites and weblogs. This blog is automatically Atom enabled (see Blogger help) which basically means that you can use a news reader such as the freeware FeedReader to subscribe and read the posts like in an NewsGroups program. I decided to get some hands-on experience on atoms, so I modified the program that creates my PhotoBlog (“My Wandering Days Are Over...”) to generate an atom.xml as well. The result is that you can now keep track of any new posts I create for “MWDAO” using your RSS Feed reader ;-)

My Wandering Days Are Over...

2004-10-04T21:50:00.001+01:00

From the moment I started my blog I have been thinking about a way to create a photo blog and post some of my favourite pictures. Last week, I managed to get some time off work and create my first photo-blog. While I was building it, I was listening to "Tigermilk" by "Belle and Sebastian" and decided to give it a title; "My Wandering Days Are Over" is now live, hope you like it...

For those of you curious about the technology I decided that nothing is better and quicker than plain HTML/XHTML and therefore I wrote a little win32 application to automatically generate photo blogs from a list of jpg files, thumbnails and templates. It's very simple but does the job ;-)

Frank Borland. The Myth, The Legend

2004-09-19T10:56:00.000+01:00

A long long time ago I was still a teenager quite keen in computer programming when a friend introduced me to the realm of Turbo Pascal. It was my first year at the uni, and I was still writing in Basic using my Amstrad CPC464, when I got my first CPC6128 which had a 3" floppy disk drive and an additional operating system (CP/M). I immediatelly fell in love with Turbo Pascal. To these days I believe that a language that can have a statement as readable as "repeat until KeyPressed;", which was indeed very useful in those days, is a superior language.

One day that friend of mine told me that actually nobody knows who wrote the Turbo Pascal compiler; the myth says that it was written by Frank Borland a guy who works alone and lives in a cabin high up the rocky mountains and only goes back to civilisation when he creates a new version... (!!!) Obviously this was a story hard to believe, it was however rather amusing and to be honest quite fascinating; I do not know of any real programmer who haven’t dreamed of moving to a place where they can focus solely on producing software without being distracted by other people.
Remember there was no Internet in those days, so the truth about Frank Borland could not possibly be confirmed or denied. For years I was telling the story of Frank to my students and never ever thought of finding out about him. What I did find out was that Philippe Kahn was the founder of Borland and that he didn’t have a business partner or a co-founder. :-( He was however Niclaus Wirth’s student and worked with him in the 1970s on Pascal, so at least I did have the outmost respect on him.

Still no Frank though. Until today. Don’t you love the internet? My first search did not yield any results. But then I tried again and voila! An article, a whole html page, even pictures of Frank Borland. Found at Borland’s Online Museum. It was true!

...And if btw you would like to know more about Philippe Kahn, the first non-musician celebrity I knew who could play the Sax, here's a link about his sailing achievements.

In search of a keyboard part #2

2004-09-16T21:18:00.000+01:00

My beautiful Cherry keyboard has arrived in the post today. I'm still struggling a little bit to get used to it, but I'm telling you what: This is the quality I was talking about in my previous post. Every single key has the same solid feeling when pressed, the feedback is excellent, the plastic material doesn't have the "cheap" feeling of the keyboards I was describing before and the layout is exactly how it should be without silly "innovations" just for the sake of making one. You know what I mean...

Firefox

2004-09-16T21:11:00.000+01:00

Unless you don't know what kind of program you are using right now while reading these lines, I suggest that you go and have a look at Mozilla's website and download the best browser around. Fast and lightweight does not have any of the security problems of some of its competitors... I have been using it for a while and am really glad that the pre-release version is now out. Go ahead, have a look!

In search of a hard disk

2004-09-14T23:40:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I bought two identical 80Gb IBM hard disks for my desktop PC and it's been also a while since one of them died quite dramatically. Fortunately IBM hard disks make all these choking noises before the go to sleep so I was lucky enough to save all my data. I have replaced that fallen one with two hard disks (120Gb and 160Gb) this time from different manufacturers just in case something is wrong with one batch (or generation if you like). About eight months ago the second IBM drive started making some noises. Not all the time but quite often, I would hear this tinkering sound and the computer will slow down until the hard disk would retry to read the data. The only problem is that this is still my system disk and it would be a burden to re-install absolutely everything again. There's no problem of losing data, I have now backups of almost everything on two different hard disks and on several DVDs.

Recently, I have installed a very neat little utility called ActiveSMART which can be found here and it was really very useful as it tells you not only the changes in the hard disk's attributes (e.g. temperature, read error rate) but it gives you an estimated time of failure. According to ActiveSMART my hard disk was going to die in July '05, then the failure was brought forward to Feb '05, then suddenly this Sunday it told me bluntly that my hard disk is going to meet its maker in October '04. I have decided that I've seen enough and that I was going to need a new one very soon. As I have plenty of storage I decided that I only need an 80Gig one, however it did make sense to go for a 120Gb just because it was only 10-15 quid more expensive that the other ones.

After a couple of reviews that I read and judging from my own experience I went for a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Plus (ST3120026A) which seemed to be the fastest, coolest and the one with the lowest noise level of the competition. I haven't received it yet but I will post a review when I install it. Fingers crossed. ;-)

After I placed my order for the new hard disk I started wondering how much storage space do I really have available on all of my PCs and laptops combined. And the anwer is a frightening half a Terrabyte! It is supposed that the magnetic media capacity doubles every two years. So let's do a simple calculation here:

In 1990 I had a 40Mb HD and 14 years later I have well over 500,000Mb not counting two dead hard disks lying on my bookcase selves worth another 100Gb :-) That is 12,500x more hard disk storage space than I had 14 years ago! The expected capacity growth is 2^7 in years, meaning that I should have had 40Mg * 2^7 = 5Gb of hard disk space in 2004. Who has a 5Gig hard disk these days and feels that they have space? Even mp3 players come with 40Gig drives built-in.

What we are experiencing therefore is a much faster growth than expected at least according to the experts. What we are experiencing is something near 2^14 growth in 14 years. What about the future then? According to the calculations above in 2018 I should have a personal computer with ... errr.... 0.5Terra * 12,500 = 6,250 Terrabytes = 6.2 Petabytes of HD space. I'd very much like to see that! :-)))

In search of a keyboard

2004-09-14T01:00:00.000+01:00

I was in the shops the other day looking for a new keyboard and was impressed by the lack of quality of keyboards made by major manufacturers. I am talking about quality of the raw plastic material, the feel of pressing a button, the actual key feedback etc. :-) They all looked and felt like my server's £5 keyboard which is never used. On my normal desktop I am still using my Microsoft Natural Keyboard that I bought possibly in 1995 or 1994; it's so long ago I don't even remember... and the only reason I am looking for a replacement is that I opened it a couple of months ago to clean it and I broke a little piece of chassis that now makes the whole left hand group of keys slide forwards and backwards. Which as a matter of fact does make it a little bit annoying but not unworkable if you know what I mean.

Anyway, the other annoying fact is that the new Microsoft keyboards have this elongated Delete button on top of the cursor keys and the Insert button somehow made it into the PrintScreen-ScrollLock-Pause group (didn't they know where to put it?). I still don't understand why the Microsoft guys have made that design decision. Maybe they want us to use Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V for copying and pasting... What happens if I want to use Shift-Ins and Shift-Del, which in fact I use very often? The funny thing is that the Logitech designers followed suit and they did exactly the same imho design mistake!

Perhaps it is the result of a new ergonomic study that made them decide in the exile of the Insert key. Didn't you guys include some real programmers or coders in your study? Or to be more specific did you include any people that actually use the keyboard or you just got internet browsing fans?

I am not therefore buying a new Microsoft or a new Logitech keyboard just because of the annoying design. I just hope that they realise their mistake and fix it in their next generation of keyboards. Exactly as Microsoft realised the mistake of re-arranging the cursor keys in that dreadful diamond-like combination in some of the previous models. Guys if you want to sell more keyboards please try not to be "inventive" and patronising in how keys are arranged and try to focus in build quality and nice little features like a solar panel for example.

Which brings me to my next point. Before my Microsoft Natural Keyboard I used to have a Cherry one. A keyboard that was stylish, had a fantastic feel and was bloody expensive if I remember well :-) Quite probably it still works, well in fact it never failed. The reason for its replacement was that it didn't have a PS/2 interface!

To cut the story short I visited cherry's website and had a look at their latest models. They do have a wireless keyboard with a solar panel. Now, that is not clever but it is useful I think. Not before long I placed my order for one of their corded keyboards which at least in the picture looks nice and well-built. I didn't opt for the wireless as it doesn't really make a big difference, there is still a wire. Besides, I am not going to put the keyboard in my lap sit on the sofa and type...

Anyway. I hope that it lives up to my expectation and that is a cracking keyboard! Watch this space for my review when it arrives later this week...

Best Year Of My Life

2004-09-05T13:55:00.000+01:00

I just discovered the "best year of my life". This trully amazing photoblog, is stylish and contains fantastic pictures. Do not miss it!

I am now addicted to it. Moments after I started my own web log, I now find myself in need of a photoblog too...

Genesis

2004-09-05T11:38:00.000+01:00

I've opened my first personal blog. Hope I'll find the time to update it regularly. :-)