Nice videoclip combining Lego and chiptunes by Swedish ubergeeks Rymdreglage into something reminiscent of the demoscene. Found at waxy.org

If you want the above clock in your linux terminal then run this command:

watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet"

Source: http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2009/07/23/s02e09-the-dimensions-of-time/

I wrote this summary of the first Creative Commons tech summit in 2008 at the Googleplex, however somehow it ended up in being a draft in Wordpress for more than a year. I decided to add links and publish it although in the meantime two follow up conferences have already been held. Maybe it still holds some value. Enjoy my rather lengthy ’summary’.

Thanks to Creative Commons.org and The institute of Sound and Images I was able to join the first Creative Commons Tech Summit in San Francisco. Since the amount of participants was limited to 100 people I decided to write a summary for those not able to attend on this blog. There have been more people writing about the summit and the whole thing is made available on Youtube as well. I hope this summary will be of use to you. Feel free to comment. More after the jump.. (more…)

Just read this on Identi.ca (free software microblogging service a la Twitter):

Wow! So Ridley Scott of Bladerunner and Alien fame is working on a Bladerunner ‘inspired’ prequels available on the web under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. Can’t wait to see them!

See also the slightly longer announcement on CC.org.

At Ignite Boulder (using a Pecha Kucha derived format) Jonathan Kahan gave a talk about the samurai sword (katana). It’s an entertaining short presentation on the craftsmanship and highly technical methods used by the swordmakers in ancient Japan in creating these sophisticated weapons. As a Takeda-Ryu budoka I’m happy to know that if Tom Cruise looks cool (see 1:27 minutes into the talk) with a sword then there might be hope for me as well

The talk is published by O’Reilly under a Creative Commons BY-SA license

I use Virtualbox (version 1.5.6_OSE) on Ubuntu Hardy with Windows XP as one of the (guest) virtual machines. In order to access my webserver installed on the host (real physical system (Ubuntu Hardy) I need to use the ip-address 10.0.2.2 (I use NAT in Virtualbox’s network settings) from Windows XP (or any other guest operating system) and edit the hosts (c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) file with the Virtual Host names I use on the host. This allows me to access the Virtual Host based websites to be accessed from the Windows XP operating system.

An example hosts file on Windows XP:

# make sure there's at least one space between the ip-address and the virtual host name
127.0.0.1 localhost
10.0.2.2 SOME_VIRTUAL_HOST_NAME


Replace SOME_VIRTUAL_HOST_NAME with a real Virtual Host name. In my case I use the extension .dev to indicate a local project in development, so it could be something like burobjorn.dev

I was working on a website for a client when we discovered that sometimes the website was not accessible for Internet Explorer. Notice the word sometimes.

A word dreaded by every programmer including myself. In order to solve problems there needs to be a pattern. Something like: “press the red button and the screen goes blank”. Without the ability to reproduce a problem it is really hard to solve the problem or confirm that the actions you took to solve it were indeed the (right) solution and not some fluke.

In this case a user visited the website and got access to it, or the user visited the site and got an arcane error message:

“Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://<Web site>.com. Operation aborted.”

I never saw this message before and after some testing we could confirm it only happened with Microsoft Internet Explorer. There were no problems with any other browser, but somehow Internet Explorer sometimes spat out this utterly useless error message and prevented the user to visit the client’s website.Together with some engineers from the hosting company I sat out to find and solve this issue. So we started to have a look at the web server’s  log files.

At first the engineer from the hosting company suspected it might have something to do with some HTTP 500 error codes, missing images (so you would expect HTTP 404 errors) and some rewrite rules. According to his first thesis this combination might have caused a redirection loop and Internet Explorer could not cope with it. After quickly fixing the missing images (a typo in a path) we could dismiss this thesis and we continued our quest. Luckily a colleague of one of the engineers remembered a similar issue creeping up with a different client of them and pointed us in the right direction. A quick search (note to self don’t try to be smart, first search for the error message on the Net, then analyze logfiles) later gave use quite a lot of links pointing towards Microsoft.

Apparently Microsoft’s engineers think that its a good idea to confront a user of their browser with an arcane error message and prevent the user from accessing the website when the visited website in question does something less smart (maybe even stupid). While any other browser would at least try to let the user access the website and cope with the issue. I wonder where the Interaction Design people were during this decision.

No, I’m not making this up. Microsoft states in the knowledgebase article on this issue: “This behavior is by design.” What are the arguments for doing it this way? Interestingly in the same article they claim:

How do I fix this problem?
The easiest way for you to fix the problem is to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. This problem no longer occurs in Internet Explorer 8.

So the behavior is by design, yet they advice you to solve it by upgrading your browser. Interesting, to say the least.

Anyway, after reading the article and doing some more debugging (which is a lot more painful then it ever should be using Internet Explorer) I found the culprit to be a piece of JavaScript (swfobject.js in this case) trying to access an element before the parser was ready. A bug and certainly something we needed to fix, but Microsoft did you really have to abort loading the webpage and preven the user from accessing it? Why can all the other browsers cope with this and still allow the user to visit the website? Would it have hurt to show a less obtrusive error message in the status bar?

For those having similar issues please see these urls for more info:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927917/
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/04/23/what-happened-to-operation-aborted.aspx

When you use the commandline a lot like I do, you sometimes wonder about the amount of typing involved. Even if you use tabs like a maniac, you’ll probably end up typing certain paths a gazillions times a day. Not anymore…

I stumbled upon a great little time saver called bm (bookmark). It allows you to bookmark (as if you’re in a web browser) certain paths and create a cdbm command which allows you to quickly change directory to the bookmarked path.

1) To create a bookmark type:

bm -a /path/you/want/to/bookmark name_of_your_bookmark


2) To use a bookmark type:

cdbm name_of_your_bookmark


I highly recommend this nifty little timesaver. You only have to compile it (it’s really easy, just follow the two instructions in the README.txt) and I can confirm it works without a hitch on Ubuntu 8.04, but my guess is that it would probably could work on other POSIX systems as well (like OS X).

Thanks to Bart from Onderstekop.nl for creating it!

UPDATE
Download the bm_1.0-1_i386 package I created for Ubuntu. Tested on Ubuntu (9.04) Jaunty on 32-bit architecture and it works for me. Your mileage may vary!

I’ve had my share of bad luck the last week. Servers dying, Internet connections going down and all sort of annoying technical issues you rather not want to work on while having deadlines. During this I noticed that using Subversion as a tool for version control and in my case general asset management for projects kinda sucks. If you don’t have a connection or the server goes down, you cannot use the repository in a structured manner. So I’m going to leave the centralised server repository for version control behind and start using distributed version control. I’ll still use a central server for backup and easy access for clients and collaborators, but I will not be dependent on it anymore.

Since its kinda hard to know which of the myriad of distributed revision control systems (DVCS) complies with my demands I’ll start using some of the ones that looked most promising.  The features I’m looking for are:

• can handle binary files efficiently (I need images and other binary files in a repository as well)
• is cross-platform (I do not want to be tied to one platform, nor do I want to force other to use my preferred platform)
• ease of use (yep that’s a feature in my book)
• tools (it needs to be extensible preferable in a language I already know)
• documentation (also a feature in my opinion)
• off-line usage is just as good as on-line usage
• has community and support options available

I’ll be checking out Mercurial (I hope to contribute to this project for my Neuro OSD and learn a bit of Lua), Bazaar (also checking it out with a small project) and maybe I should have a look at Git.

Off course, the DVCS of my chosing needs to be FLOSS.

Any hints and tips are appreciated!

Last night I read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother from cover to cover. Its a page turner and highly recommend it to teach people about the importance of privacy and other cilvil liberties. I hope this book will be available in Dutch soon, so I can recommend to everyone.