Schmid blog 2005 jul-dec

Schmid 22:14, 19 Jan 2006 (CET) The Final 2005 Update


Yes, I know it's not 2005 anymore, but I just had to log a bit of 2005-related stuff...

2005 saw the birth of the Secret COLlaborative ARt Society, scolars.dk, which, when I eventually finish coding a client for using it, will be an interesting possibility for exchanging ideas and reworking artworks in a group. The society already has a few members, but the collaborations haven't commenced yet, partly due to confusion on behalf of its members :). When I get the time and perhaps some assistance from some of the other guys, I will finish it, and it will be usable. I think it could be very interesting to use.

On a more heavy note: December 17th, Björnocatör played a koncert for a very enthusiastic crowd in Sønderborghus, Sønderborg. The crowd went totally nuts to all the classics, and there were stage divers and mosh pits like you wouldn't believe! Great fun.

December 29th, we played again at SkrÃ¥en, Aalborg. Immediately after, we went to Nabaz' place and played Magic. This went on for a few days, and I spent New Years Eve with Thomas Jauert, Nabaz, Anette, and their friends. 

Schmid 08:37, 27 Dec 2005 (CET) Evolving Psychic Powers?
OK, this is a bit spooky. I have been using the extremely cool music software Ableton Live for some time now. I bought it in October, but I had strange problems with random 'CPU spikes', resulting in the audio freezing for a second or so at arbitrary times during playback. I spent several days trying to localize the error, switching sound cards, drivers, reconfigured my Windows XP to use almost no services, etc. etc. The audio dropouts were not too annoying when using the software at home, but during a live performance, they are an absolute horror. I had a disasterous performance at 1000fryd, where the audio dropped out several times during a track. After that, I had to say no to live gigs due to this problem.

After doing some research at various forums, especially the Ableton forum, I found out that a number of people with different hardware setups were having the same problems as I. So I was satisfied that the problem was due to some bug in the software, probably incompatibility with some hardware that I and several other users have. The Ableton guys are slow in putting out new versions, probably because it's a relatively small company (and of course because it's closed source :), so there wasn't any hope of getting a new revision anytime soon.

And now for the spooky part; tonight I was asleep, dreaming that there was a solution to the audio dropout problem somewhere on the web, and that I could perform with Ableton Live soon... I woke up at 06.30 - which never happens except when using an alarm clock - and couldn't go back to sleep. I'm a bit superstitious this early in the morning, so I checked the Ableton forum and found this entry from 3 days ago. I downloaded the new bugfixed revision 5.0.3, installed it, and have played my tracks without dropouts for an hour now! How did I know?.

I have to go to sleep again, this is too weird... But what a nice christmas present! 

Schmid 15:42, 24 Dec 2005 (CET) Merry Christmas
Merry christmas everyone! 

Schmid 22:14, 11 Dec 2005 (CET) All Work And No Zombies Makes Jakob a Textmode Boy
So it's been a while, and various people have complained that I never write anything in my blog. This is sort of heartening, as I didn't realize that anyone actually read it! :) But I guess I have been busy, and nothing much has happened in my life. I have been working hard at End2End and used my little spare time for sleep or playing pool with Yngve.

Today I've been tampering a bit with Servitor, the gentle giant (it's slow like a giant anyway :) running this website and a few others, and I discovered a nice program that I would like to show you. Most of you will think it's profoundly stupid and redundant, but I think it is really cool. It's called Twin and it's a window environment running in textmode. That means that you can use windows over a terminal session like Putty. You can even detach and reattach a windowed session like with screen. Check out the screenshot.

More news from the nerdish front: I bought Resident Evil 4 for my PS2 and it absolutely ROCKS! It's really nothing like the old RE games, except for the constant stress of too many zombies and not enough ammo. It's a modern 3rd person shooter, the graphics is excellent, the game simulation is great, and it's just so much fun. Buy it, if you have a PS2 or a GameCube.

Schmid 12:22, 21 Oct 2005 (CEST) Funkstörung
Funkstörung is playing tonight at Studenterhuset in Aalborg! This is probably the greatest thing since sliced bread. No, scratch that, Funkstörung is actually better than sliced bread, if you could believe that! 

Schmid 11:34, 11 Oct 2005 (CEST) Pigified
I created a puzzle for Mik for his birthday, a message written in pigs. As he apparantly was too dim to figure it out, I have decided to put it here as a challenge for everyone. The message has been changed, as not to confuse english-speaking cryptographers with the additional code of the Danish language. If you crack the code, please e-mail me (see my address at the front page) the decrypted message, and you will receive a prize trout in the mail. * DISCLAIMER: You will not receive a prize trout in the mail!

Jauert was the first one to attempt finding the message. His suggestion was: "pig, pig, pig, pig, ....". Though he is correct in some fashion, there is also another message :). He will receive a special consolation prize - a smack on the head.

ltm cracked the pigification and found the hidden message first. Congratulations to him! He said that it was way too easy :). Who's gonna crack it next?

tlk has found the message. Good work, lads.

2 months later ... Mik has finally cracked the code! So he wasn't all that dim, just a bit slow.

2006-01-19: Mogens Beltoft cracked it.



Schmid 18:13, 5 Oct 2005 (CEST) Revenge of the Bots
The bots took a gruesome revenge on my poor server. A particularly clever one (or its owner) created an account and destroyed a large number of pages. I will not stand for it, and sadly I have had to restrict creation of new users to sysops (just me right now - anyone who wants to help is most welcome).

I just jumped a week back in time (restored a backup) for the wiki, and it's back to its usual high quality. No trace of the intrusion exist, not even the user created by the bot...

From now on, you have to contact me to create a new user. That's not how I wanted it, but the bots forced my hands.

Schmid 22:19, 2 Oct 2005 (CEST) PSP
A few weeks ago, I bought a PSP (PlayStation Portable) and the game Mercury. I played the game a bit but became a bit bored with it... My PSP had the uncool 1.52 firmware, which wasn't hacked at the time, but didn't have the cool web browser of the 2.0 firmware. When 2.0 was hacked (vulnerability in libtiff), I upgraded, and 4 days ago, it was possible to downgrade from 2.0 to 1.5.

This made it possible to run 'homebrew' software on the PSP, and I have had much fun playing 'The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening' on the Gameboy Color emulator 'RIN'.

Tonight, I installed a developer environment for linux on my server, and compiled and run my first own homebrew application... 

Schmid 11:24, 13 Sep 2005 (CEST) schmid.dk Security Update
I have had qualms about leaving port 3389 open for remote desktop connections on my server. I closed the port today, but wanted to make a note about how to connect to the machine anyway. If using Windows, do this: C:\>putty -L 1234:10.1.1.x:3389 user@host.dk C:\>mstsc /v:localhost:1234 If using Linux, do this: $ ssh -L 1234:10.1.1.x:3389 user@host.dk $ rdesktop localhost:1234 - see also SSH Tunneling.

Schmid 15:28, 6 Sep 2005 (CEST) World of Aarhus


I spent the weekend with Yngve and Thomas Jauert at Jauerts place in Aarhus. Jauert, or "Viper" as he is known as in certain circles, was eager to demonstrate his World of Warcraft-abilities. Yngve decided to buy a PSP (Playstation Portable), and I am severely tempted to get one myself, as it is an unreasonably cool piece of equipment. The screen is clear and has high resolution, it has WLAN, web-browser, movie viewer, MP3-player, etc. He got Metal Gear:Acid for it, and it looked pretty nice.

Anyways, we wandered around the city, and went to see Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in the evening. Great fun. 

Schmid 09:11, 26 Aug 2005 (CEST) Old Man Mountain and Jabberobot


At the 24. I passed my PP exam with flying colours, and celebrated by buying and watching movies (went to see 'Batman:Begins' again - so cool). Among others, I bought The Dark Crystal by Jim Henson and Frank Oz (the voice of Yoda and most of the muppets). I have seen a few excerpts from it, at it is indeed very beautiful, although the main character is a bit gay. But then again, he is an elf (or 'gelfling' as they are called), which makes it ok. ;)

...

I have played around with the The Gimp a lot lately. I wanted to see if I still have my skills as a pixel artist from 10 years ago. It seems they haven't gotten any worse since then, and The Gimp is a much better painting program than Deluxe Paint that I used back then - so the result is nice. There's a detail from my unfinished cheesy-80's-fantasy-pic as the blog picture. Of course, I'll put it on schmid.wiki when its completed.

...

There's also a few updates:


 * I have tampered with the power settings of my Dell Inspiron, and the info on the Hardware page should be interesting for all Dell laptop users.
 * I looked deeper into the manual of Screen and found a nice way to copy names in a column to the command line
 * I have added a navigation template (like on the blog) to the Movies page
 * Also check out pages about Utility Ruby with some useful example scripts and the collaboration between Ruby and Vim

I have made a discussion page about the future for the old 'Heste er Lavet af StÃ¥luld' page by myself and Mikael Bagger. I hope we can work something out, as there are so much useless information that just has to be online...

I have a new harddrive for Servitor (that's the guy running schmid.dk), and, when installed, it just about doubles my capacity to well above 200 GiB. Very nice.

...

Yesterday night, I made a chat robot in Ruby, Jabberobot. It's extremely annoying, and I put it online to talk to Jeppe Carlsen. Here's an excerpt from the conversation - see if you can find out who the robot is (:



Schmid 10:52, 20 Aug 2005 (CEST) Pictures


Today I have added pictures and a navigation template at the top and bottom to my blog. It looks much more inviting now and proves my point that the functionality of a blog is a subset of the functionality of a wiki. Granted, the image uploading requires a bit more work than in a standard blog, about 3 mouse clicks, a file selection, a copy-paste, and a few keypresses. I think that is tolerable.

...

I seems that Björnocatör will be playing in Vestbjerg without me tonight. I'm still regenerating from my injury (about 1 hit point / hour), and I'm not fit to play tonight. I'm not too happy about it - we probably won't get to play a concert in the near future. But that's life, I guess...

...

Hahaha, Mikko was a girl at a 1000fryd noise/punk event. Didn't recognize him at first... He looks real cute, though ;).



Schmid 14:23, 18 Aug 2005 (CEST) Nice Stunt, Mr. Schmid
Lately, I have been more and more of a daysleeper - I have gotten up around noon and gone to bed around 5 in the morning. I have not worked as much as I should, and I'm sick and tired of it. So I tried changing my habits and got up at 6 sharp today (after sleeping for 2 hours). It might have been a bad idea, as it turned out.

I went upstairs on my pretty steep flight of stairs. Then I went downstairs again. Only, this time I forgot to take the first step of the stairs, and crashed down, hurting my head and my back. I cursed indescriminately, and went to my bed. There, I convinced myself that 'it wasn't so bad', and I could get up and work again. So I did. Bad idea #2.

I found myself lying down, wondering why my bed was suddenly so hard. I might have had a concussion, because it would seem that I fainted and braced the impact with the concrete floor with my jaw. There was blood all over the floor, and I spat out a piece of a cracked tooth. Very nice stunt, mr. Schmid. Might want to work on your falling technique. I feel like I've gotten an uppercut by The Hulk, and my doctor seemed to have trouble sewing it all back together again (4 stitches).

I do have pictures of my sewn up jaw, but it's too disgusting to put in here... ;)

...

Please show us... you have made the warning/advertizing

--Sunep 23:15, 20 Aug 2005 (CEST)

...

I don't want to look at disgustingness every time I enter my blog, so no dice!

--Schmid 07:34, 21 Aug 2005 (CEST)

Schmid 11:39, 11 Aug 2005 (CEST) Aalborg by Night
I visited Aalborg the 29th-31th of July. I was at Disa's place (NOT her homepage :)) and later I met up with Nabaz at 7-11. I got a few pictures of them, as well as of the surroundings of my old apartment in Reberbansgade, and some random shots of Aalborg by night. I met a couple of strange looking girls and a pair of cool hobos, that had settled down by the frog fountain. 

Schmid 11:35, 11 Aug 2005 (CEST) Klostertorvet


The 31st I spent most of the day at Klostertorvet talking to Mikael Bagger.



Schmid 11:27, 11 Aug 2005 (CEST) Hobro Musikfestival


The 6th of August I played at Hobro Musikfestival with SuneP, Bo, and Jacob and his beautiful vocalist Josefine appearing as Phonosphinx. We appeared as a subset of the Søvnig Mandag collective. It was great fun - we played as loud as hell itself, and managed to scare off most of the crowd :). Bo demonstrated a few very neat tricks, especially a couple of tracks, which he sequenced live accompanying him playing his favourite instruments (toy saxophone and big bone). Sune played some slow and huge trancy tracks, and Phonosphinx did a bit of crazy IDM, very good stuff, actually. Very aggresive - I suspect he's got a violent temper beneath the calm exterior?

Anyways, the concert was a success: we were happy with our performances, and nobody in the crowd liked it. 

Schmid 11:12, 11 Aug 2005 (CEST) Stupid Bots
OK, now spam has become such a nuisance, that I have prohibited anonymous editing. I hope that most of the spam bots are too stupid to create an account.

- see MetaWiki for more information.

Schmid 15:02, 3 Aug 2005 (CEST) Repelling Balls


Encouraged by Yngve, I started looking at the Ruby programming language. It is indeed very nice, and I have created a page on my wiki about it. I managed to use OpenGL in Ruby and it looks very nice. I have created a simulation to test a hypothesis (informally stated):


 * That you can create the regular polyhedra from mutually repelling points on the surface of a sphere.

Indeed, the simulation seems to suggest that the hypothesis is false. The tetrahedron is indeed formed by the simulation, but the cube is not when using 8 points. The rotation and 'springy' behaviour of the balls in the executable is a biproduct of the simulation definition, and is not explicitly written in the code. This kind of emergent behaviour is one of the things that makes simulation programming so very satifying...

<p style="color:red">* NOTE: When running the program, you must end the simulation by pressing a key, and not by closing the window. There's a bug in the OpenGL for Ruby implementation, it doesn't handle closing of the window, and a 'rubyw.exe' process will keep running, eating all your processing power. Anyways, if you forget, you can always just kill rubyw with ctrl+shift+esc.



Schmid 15:07, 15 Jul 2005 (CEST) Nerdish Behaviour
It's been a while...

In the beginning of July, I had Thomas Jauert, Yngve (DJ Stonecases), and Nabaz as guests in my parents house in Fjerritslev. We went to the beach for a day. My father was in Sweden, following the footsteps of Carl von Linné, so we pretty much took over the house, playing Magic and Tekken 4 and watched silly movies. Yngve brought me a whole pile of B-movies as a present, including the extremely funny 'House'. Very nice of him, indeed!

Shortly after the departure of the three dudes, I went to Aarhus on Thomas' birthday. Nabaz and Anette was there, as well as Bjørn, Marie, and Jacob Horney. We ate a great (and insanely fattening) meal composed by the birthday boy himself, followed by a few games of the new Tekken 5 (more nerdish behaviour... :). The day after I met with Jacob Froberg and we later went to the beach in Aarhus, joining with Jakob Kappel. Later Thomas also showed up with some leftover lamb... I think he got a bit drunk, as he talked the whole night through without pause ;).

The last few days I have used helping my family in two very different capacities:

I have helped my father creating a informative web page for Fjerritslev Skole (the page cannot be seen from outside the internal network). I used the occasion to learn XHTML and follow the W3C strict XHTML and CSS standards. Very interesting, and the result is simple and effective. The reason for needing the page is the creation of a wireless network for Fjerritslev Skole, which was set up by Lars and Daniel. Pretty complicated stuff. I gave up understanding the setup, as I am kind of a novice when it comes to networking (at least when compared to those 2 guys).

I have also helped my brother demolishing most of the interior of his newly purchased house. I may not be able to handle a screwdriver, but I'm a regular Rembrandt with a crowbar! Show me a construction, and I'll have it down in pieces before you can say 'dexterity'. I spent another day wheelbarrowing bricks by the tonnes - exhausting and extremely boring labour compared to the more destructive activity mentioned earlier... But someone had to do it.

Today and yesterday, I have started a new geometric programming project. I have made classes for vectors and tetrahedra, as well as a few wrapper classes for OpenGL for displaying the results. I have documented the whole thing with the cool documentation tool Doxygen. It generates web pages and a PDF manual from specially formatted source code comments. At this point, I have finished the geometric documentation and the OpenGL code (I have a rotating triangle).