SCHULZ:DK

Open new files in existing Gvim

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:52:14 +0200

If you use the Linux/Gnome file manager Nautilus for file navigation, and often open files in gvim, then this trick is for you.
With a few simple tricks you can easily change files to be opened in an existing Gvim window if it already exists.

First step is to copy your existing Gvim shortcut so you have an alternative to the normal one.
This is done by the following:

cd ~/.local/share/applications
cp gvim.desktop gvim-existing.desktop

Next open the file and make sure the contents looks like this:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=GVim Text Editor (Existing)
Comment=Edit text files in existing vim
Exec=gvim --remote-silent %F
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/vim.svg
Categories=Application;Utility;TextEditor;
StartupNotify=true
MimeType=text/plain;
NoDisplay=true

Finally you open nautilus and find one of the file you would normally edit in Gvim.
Right-click the file and select "Open with" ->"Other application". In the list of files you simply select the one called "GVim Text Editor (Existing)" and make sure to put a checkmark in the "Remember this application for ...."

Now whenever you open a file of that type, it will look for a running gvim and open the file in that one. If no gvim is running, then it will just start in a new instance as normal.

My second Vim book have been released

Mon, 03 May 2010 10:23:32 +0200

Back in 2007 I released my first book about the Vim editor
Today I can announce that my second vim book have been released. You can find it at the publishers site here

The second book is an update to the previous book. It now covers the latest version of Vim (v.7.2) and contains even more tricks on how to boost your productivity when using the Vim editor.
You can buy the book in both paperback and e-book edition from the publishers homepage.

Book info:
Language : English
Paperback : 244 pages [ 235mm x 191mm ]
Release Date : April 2010
ISBN : 1849510504
ISBN 13 : 978-1-849510-50-9
Author(s) : Kim Schulz

Android DevPhone1 available - but not for all developers

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:26:03 +0100

Last weekend Google finally announced that they have made their first public Android development phone available to everyone registered as an Android developer. Even though it is basically an unlocked version of the HTC G1 (not exactly a beauty) I still decided to order one. But apprantly that is not possible!

It turn out that Google only ships the phone to a very limited list of countrys - Denmark not included. This is not something I have seen mentioned on any of the announcements coming from Google and I find this choice quite strange (especially as we have quite a few Android developers in Denmark).
Fortunately my company have an office in the UK and I could order the phone to the office there instead.
The phone itself is quite cheep ($399) but what a chock I got when I saw the shipping bill - freaking $171 in order to ship 1(ONE!!) phone from the US to the UK. This was the only shipping option available and it was some UPS with tracking option.
I am seriously considering to cancel my order as I find this shipping price close to ridiculous.
It this just Googles way of saying "hey we only want large companies to work on Android apps?, Screw all you small developers out there"?
By the way! only one phoe can be ordered at a time

GScroll - why the HTC Touch Diamond is still superior

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:06:24 +0100

touchpad and app-launcher using the button area of the HTC diamond....Brilliant

So what is up with Google FriendConnect and Facebook Connect?

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:59:48 +0100

Last Thursday Facebook (re) announced their new Single-Sign-On (SSO) called Facebook Connect (it was previously announced to developers back in May).
Google have had a similar service called Google FriendConnect in beta for quite a while and of cause they could not resist the temptation and go release their service to the public just hours after the Facebook Connect service was announced.
But what is actually the difference between the two services?

Facebook Connect
Facebook connect is meant to be a service where private and commercial sites can let its visitors login with their facebook credentials instead of creating a new user on the page (e.g. a for a forum). Info and activities the user have on the website can be shared with the persons facebook friends and they can be invited to join as well.
As with all Facebook related development, it involves a mixture of PHP and Javascript and hence the webmaster must know how to use these in order to integrate Facebook Connect with their site. A good example page including source code is however available to make it easier for the webmaster.

Google FriendConnect
Google connect builds on top of the basic concepts from OpenSocial and Google Gadgets. Its functionality is currently still limited to a few "gadgets" like :

a "members gadget - let people "join" your site, see what other members the page have, read their info and become friends with them as well. Friends from all OpenSocial supporting services(e.g. AIM, Plaxo, Orkut, Google, etc) can be invited to be friends (and their credentials can be used to login).
a "Rating gadget" where the visitors can rate and comment on whatever the gadget is bound to (site, blog post, image, video etc).
a "Wall gadget" where visitors can write comments, have simple "chats" etc.
A "custom Gadget" where the webmaster simply gives a link to an OpenSocial gadget (xml file) or a Google Gadget from iGoogle and then this will be shown on the page.

I am sure that many more will be developed in the near future (As will all other "Google").
As with the Google Gadgets, it has been made very simple for the developer to integrate the Gadgets into a webpage. A few clicks and selection of the FriendConnect page and a snippet of javascript/html is generated. This code is simply pasted into the place on the site where the webmaster wants it to be. And that's it! Now the page visistors can enjoy the Gadget on the page.

I will take a more thorough look at the two services in the upcoming weeks. Until then, please feel free to add a comment and join my google FriendConnet service on my frontpage.

Pacman, Site design and Google FriendConnect

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:28:29 +0100

It has been awhile since I last wrote here on the blog. A lot has happened and I will try to summarize some of it here.

Pacman
A lot of people have complained about pacman being down all the time. I have been working hard to keep it up but it is simply so popular that even the dedicated server that hosts it now cannot keep it up all the time. I am working on getting some redundant server setup for this, but keep in mind that it is not free to have servers like this running for a free online game.
You can support me by donating through Paypal (button below) or by buying my Vim book

New Site Design
I have had the same boring design on this page for years now and it was about time to find a new one. The new design is one I have adapted from a mix of several different free templates on the web (yes I haven't had time to do an entire design myself). I still need to translate some of the pages and I also have tons of new stuff laying around that I need to add to the page.
Most of the basic stuff like Blog and games are back online.

Google FriendConnect
Google have added a new feature to their portfolio called FriendConnect. I have been playing around with it for a bit on my frontpage and plan to use it even more if I can find appropriate places for it.
So far I have added a "friend list" and a comment box. I would encourage you to sign up and take it for a spin. It looks like it has a lot of nice features and more are coming soon. Feel free to add a comment to my frontpage or add yourself as a friend.

Pacman Game down

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:02:39 +0200

I am currently having some hardware problems with the server that hosts the Pacman game. This means that the Game is down right now (have been for some days now) and probably wont be able to get back up until next weekend.
Sorry for this, but I will do my best to get it back up as soon as possible!

GottaBeMobile.com giving away a ton og gadgets

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:49:15 +0200

HO HO HO It's Christmas time at GottaBeMobile.com

The good guys over at gottaBeMobile.com are giving away a lot of gadgets and swag to users that are active on their blog comments, forum or by promoting their site.
read more about the contest here: http://www.gottabemobile.com/Ho+Ho+Ho+It+Is+Christmas+Time+At+GottaBeMobilecom.aspx

Guitar Hero 3 as a gadget - rock your world!

Thu, 01 May 2008 09:35:40 +0200

I looooove the Guitar hero games. Not because of the fantastic game play or graphichs, but simply because it it funny, entertaining and a great party-starter. Oh and the music is quite cool too.

Now you can play Guitar Hero 3 online in a small widget. It is really fun when you get the hang of the controls: use 1-5 to control the strings and enter-key to use the pick (press it to do any actual playing while holding down the correct string). Backspace is the vibrato.
Here it is. Enjoy!

Hope to have it ready as a iGoogle gadget later next week.

Why is pacman so slow - here's why!

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:09:25 +0100

In the past few weeks the popular pacman google gadget has gone from slow to down to slow to now being back to near normal. I have received thousands of mails from people that wanted to know what happend to the game. Today I decided to tell why.
Since 1997 I have had my domain www.schulz.dk hosted at the same company. From the start I have paid for the "big package" with free disk space and free trafic. Since then the original (and really great) company, Image Scandinavia, has changed owners several times and over time the support and QoS has become worse and worse. First i became World Online, then Tiscali, then Tele2.
Tele2 is actually an ISP and their hosting is taken care of by the company uni2. Usually Uni2 have been known as one of the most reliable hosting sites in Denmark, but in my experience that isn't really correct. Over time my site was really slow and database access could sometimes give timeouts.
Recently Uni2 was aquired by TDC Hosting which is the hosting company of the largest tele and internet provider in Denmark.
Now things started breaking down since their admins apperently did not like the fact that my site was so popular.
One evening they suddenly changed the read-access bit on my pacman files without any prior warning.
I noticed that and thought it was a glitch in their system so I changed it back to normal. A few hours later, all my files were locked down by the evil "root".
I contacted their support and a guy there told me something along the lines of "sorry we cannot hos your file anymore, they are too demanding. We have to other customers to think of too".
How the h... can the largest hosting company in Denmark not handle my site. It's not that popular and we are only talking 75-100Million hits/month giving around 800gb-1tb/md traffic.
I would think that this kind of hosting would be a minor thing to them.

The solution
In the end, I could not persuade them to host the pacman game - however the rest of the site could stay if it "behaved well".
Fortunately I own my own small hosting company where I decided to place the pacman game on a separate server.
I started by setting it to be ready for extreme high load, but in the end I realized that the caching system, reversed proxy etc used up more system resources than the actual webserver load.
So in the end I moved the game to a small virtual server that runs as a 2ghz machine with 2gb ram. The avg load is around 1.2 (unix load) and less than half of the ram is in use.
Now I ask myself even more why the large hosting company could not handle this kind of load. Seems to me like somebody in their admin team should take a look at their setup.
Final Note
I would like to thank everyone that have supported me by sending friendly mails and game ideas. Also a big thanks to everyone that plays this game and makes it one of the most popular games on Google ever.

Songza, The next big thing - or is it?

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 13:16:33 +0100

A little more than a week ago, Aza Raskin announced his new brainchild Songza. A brand new search engine for music. The users can easily find and listen to the music, but they cant download it - or can they?

Geat userinterface
The songza userinterface is great and simple (KISS consept at its best). You search for a song, select the song in the result list and click it. Then a nice little navigations box shows up where you can select to play, share, rate or add to playlist. Simple and easy. After selecting play, the music starts playing.
Here are a bit of screenshots.

The idea is briliant and you can find pretty much any song you like (I did some weird searches and got results).
This made me think! where do they get their songs from? In many cases the songs sounded like live recordings or just plain bad recordings so I was sure that it wasnt top-quality music they have gotten from the music industry
I couldnt find much info about this, so I decided to do a bit of digging into how it worked.

The music is not downloadable - yeah Right!
I fired up firefox and started the firebug extension to see what actually happened when I started playing a song. The "net" tab is quite nice to show what actually gets transfered over to my computer.
One thing caught my eye right away. Between the gets of images, flash and js files I suddently saw a couple of links to youtube. Could it be that simple? Did a couple of more searched and now also saw a couple of links to google-video.

Aha! I looked at what I had gotten from youtube ant noticed that it was the usual "get_video" request that the youtube player uses to get the flv file containing the video.
so thats where they got their music from. It is actually just the video it plays without showing the image. This also explains why the sound was often so bad or like live recordings (there s quite a few live recordings around on youtube).
I copied the link from the youtube "get_video" link from firebug and into another firefox window. I was then asked whether I wanted to download the file or play it with my media player (Gnome Totem). I selected the last option and this is what I saw:

The music video of dire straits that I just listened to on Songza.
Nice and easy. The best thing is that the Songza interface is a lot easier to find music with than the one in youtube and google-video.
In other words, this might not be such a bad idea after all - even though it still just brings us what youtube and friends does.
I am pretty sure though that within a couple of weeks, firefox extensions like downloadhelper will provide support for downloading music (well videos) from songza.

New Google Game Gadget: Rainbow Web

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 22:28:39 +0200

Today I can proudly present a new Google Game gadget I have created together with the guys from Gamezebo.

The game is called Rainbow web and is an addicting puzzle game. You have to solve the color and letter puzzles before the time runs out, so hurry up!
You can add the game to your iGoogle page here
Happy gaming!

Pacman - Now in multiple languages

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 22:21:25 +0200

In a joint effort with the flash developer Paul Neave I have now made it possible to play the good old pacman game in not one, not two, but five different languages.
This means that you can now enjoy the pacman game in French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and Danish.
You simply select the language you want to use in the gadget preferences. You find it in the little arrow in the top-right corner of the gadget.

OOXML is NOT an open ISO standard

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:30:01 +0200

A ballot on whether to publish the draft standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, as an International Standard by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has not achieved the required number of votes for approval.

Today is a great day for Information freedom. The ballot on whether Microsofts Closed document format OOXML could gain Open ISO standard certification resulted in a NO!
This means that ODF is still the only real open ISO Office document format out there (which is what I have meant all the time.

Nice work to all of you that helped informing the world about why OOXML should actually be called COXML and why the world would only need one ISO standarized Office document format.

Read the full press release from ISO here:
http://www.iso.org/iso/newsandmedia/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1070

Unfortunately MS can still try to get ISO to vote yes, if it changes the things wrong with the format .

Updated Fish Tycoon Gadget

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 22:41:10 +0200

Just a short update. Some users has complained that it was annoying that the Fish Tycoon game played music when started (actually even before the game has started). This is now changed in the came so from now on the game is muted as a default. Let me know if this is not ok.

Reading a book - not writing it.

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 21:27:46 +0200

After I have been spending most of my time writing my book, it is now time for me to sit back and relax with a bit of reading instead.
For that purpose, I have gotten a bunch of books from my Publisher. I have already read the first one which I hope to do a short review of later on. The next book I am planning to read is Building Telephony Systems With Asterisk which I have been wanting to read more about for awhile. But look out for the reviews very soon.

In other news:
I have started a new photo blog called Colors of Black. It will contain some of all the pictures I will take (or have taken already) - some good, some bad and some really ugly ones :-) Take a look for yourself.

New Google gadget game

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 22:30:49 +0200

Get your own aquarium fish store and show everyone how good your are at breeding fishes

I have recently started working together with the game company Gamezebo on creating new and exciting iGoogle gadgets. The first game I have created with them is called Fish Tycoon and is kinda like a simulator game. You as the player will own you own aquarium fish store where you have to grow beautiful fishes, feed them and keep them healthy. When they are big enough you can sell the fishes from your store.
So whats so great about this game you say? Well you have to try it to see how addictive it is. The best part is that you can play the same game for several days and come back to feed your fishes whenever you go to your Google page. The games runs in a near-realtime speed so you will have to take care of your fishes at least a couple of times every day in order to keep them alive.

I will encourage you to try it out.
Find it here

Buy my book and support Children in Uganda

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 16:17:37 +0200

Support Children in Uganda - Buy my book

Bram Moolenaar, the author of the famous Vim editor is also know as the person in charge of the International Child Care Fond (ICCF) Holland. This is an organization that helps children without parents in Uganda - many of which are children of AIDS victims. A very good cause if you as me!
When I told Bram Mollenaar that parts of the royalties from my Vim Book, is going to be paid to the opensource project "Vim", then he prompte replied that he would forward the money to ICCF Holland. This means that for every book sold, a percentage is donated directly to this very good cause.
You can read more about it in this article on my publishers site.

So thats what my book looks like

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:00:30 +0200

Yesterday I finally received a copy of my own book. It was a fantastic feeling, finally to have the end-result.

So now I have five copies of my book - well actually I dont have more than one left because the family and friends were all very keen on getting a copy. The rest of them I sent to the shop to buy a copy instead :-)

You haven't heard it from me, but if you would like to review my book on your webpage, you can contact my publisher and then arrange with them to ship you a copy for free.

Google maps with streetview - US only sofar.

Tue, 29 May 2007 20:39:50 +0200

It not a new idea, but it is kind of a briliant idea anyways. Adding street views to Google maps makes a perfect combo for tourists and GPS users.
only one problem! it is for US residents only (so far)!

I came across a rumor a couple of weeks ago that told that Google was buying up domains with the word "streetview" in it. That made me thing that they were cooking up something new for google maps.
I was right. Today when looking for new Google map features discovered a new button when I was zoomed entirely in on one of the larger US cities (those with semi-3D view etc). The button said Street view and when pressed, a small yellow man was now shown on the map. An info window said that I should drag and drop the man onto a point inside the outlined streets. I did this and then a new window came up showing exactly how the street look at that point. the image could be panned and zoomed - you can even move along the street.
Here is a screenshot of a street in New York:

Whenever I look for new Google features I usually use an open proxy placed in USA. This is because they normally do not open up for the new features to the entire world right away and since they are from the US, they normally ad the feature there first.
If you dont live in the US. you might have to do the same.
Test here

My Book is finally out

Tue, 15 May 2007 22:42:12 +0200

After many hours of hard work and long nights I can finally add a new title to my resum� - I am a book author.

Nearly a year ago a set off on a journey to get one of my wished here in life fulfilled. I wanted to write a book, and it turned out that at about the same time there was a publisher who wanted me to write a book.
It has been a lot of very hard work and many nights where I did not get much sleep. If you ask my girlfriend, it was probably waaaay to much work - but I liked it.
So finally today the great day came where my book was announced to be in pre-order.
The book is called "Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to get the most out of the latest Vim editor." and is all about getting the most out of my editor of choice, Vim.
I hope that those of you who buy the book will get at much out of reading it as I did writing it (yes that's a lot).
Read more about the book here

A little thing for all you pac'ers

Mon, 07 May 2007 21:21:36 +0200

It is stupid to say that computer games influence kids. If so, kids who played PACMAN in the eighties would today run around in dark rooms, eating white tiny pills and listen to Monotone music.

All players of the google gadget pacman game. Your prayers have been heard. From version 2.4 of the pacman game, it should now, not only work in IE again, but it also makes it possible to pop-out the game, such that you can play it in near fullscreen size. This also makes it possible to get rid of the reload bug which the iGoogle (I really dont like that new name) page has.

So happy gaming. Hope you enjoy the game even more now.

My next little gadget - I hope

Mon, 07 May 2007 15:53:08 +0200

Hello My name is Kim and I'm a gadget freak!

Today while going though some of the blogs I follow, I came across a new little gadget I would love to add to my collection. The gadget is a nice little linux pc with a formfactor small enough to bring it along when moving around. It is the company Zonbu who has created this Gentoo-linux based box and they are going to sell it for $250 each or for $99 if you sign up for an online storage/software update subscription (which is $12.5/month).
From the screenshots it looks nice and I hope the hardware specs makes it usable as a media player box - if this is the case, then I will sure by one as soon as it is possible.

Vim 7.1Beta released

Sat, 05 May 2007 19:53:55 +0200

It has been almost a year since my favorite editor Vim came out in version 7.0. Today Braam Announced that version 7.1beta was released and available on the ftp site.

The beta is quite stable which is also should be because it primarily contains patches which many of us has been using and testing for awhile now.
The easies way to find out what exactly has changed is by actually installing the beta and then use the command
:help version-7.1
This shows a changelog between version 7.0 and 7.1beta.

It been a while...

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 21:16:31 +0200

...but now I am back. There has been a lot to do at work, in my company, with my book, and my other projects. I did however have time to make a new Google gadget - PacXon.

The new game is a mix of the good old games pacman and the Xon. You have to move your pacman around in order for it to take land from the ghost. When you have 80% of the land or more you have won. You will still be able to get gems throughout the game (like the cherries in Pacman) and that way get more points.
Unfortunately there is no highscore in this game yet.

you can add the game by pressing here.

Fundanemt 2.2 released

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 15:08:31 +0100

After more than a year of development, we are now proud to present the latest version of Fundanemt CMS to you.

The new version 2.2 of Fundanemt CMS came out this weekend and it has tons of bugfixes and new features.
A couple of new modules like Forum and Auction have also been added to the long list of available modules.
Fundanemt is still one of the most userfriendly and flexible Content management systems out there and I will encourage everyone to try it out.

You can find the official announcement here
The long changelog is here
You can download the software here

Thanks for the support

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:10:34 +0100

Every month more and more people visits this page. This has resulted in an average of 1.025.245 hits every day - thats nearly 12 hits/sec during the entire day and night.

Of cause it is the Pacman Game that gets the most hits, but this blog is also getting quite a few.
I will let the graph speak for itself, and end this post by saying another thanks to everyone that supports this site by visiting it.

Updated Pacman Google Gadget

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 23:38:26 +0100

PAC-Man - Still number one Google gadget!

One of the good API guys over at Google HQ contacted me about a possible bug when using my Pacman Google Widget in Internet Explorer. A problem I would never have discovered myself, since I wouldn't waste more than 5 sec tops in IE before hating it too much to be able to use it.
I think the problem is fixed now and also the the problem some has reported, where game is not being shown in the correct size.
The version number has been bumped up to 2.1, so if you still see Pacman 2.0 in the header, then you still use the old version.
Happy gaming folks.

And the winner is....

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 22:13:02 +0100

Before the weekend I invited everyone to share their best Joost slogan or feature and in exchange get the possibility to win a Joost invitation.

So today I have promised to announce who the winners are and....drummroll..... all of you! that is all of you who were clever enough to join the competition and write both your name AND email address.
My fellow Dane, Mads Toftum and I decided to join forces, and with our invite pools combined, there was enough for all of you.

Congratulation to all of you. Now I sure hope that you will enjoy your betatester status, and that you use to to report bugs, propose features etc. etc.

Good luck.

So you want to get Invited to Joost do you?

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 19:43:00 +0100

Get ready to be Joosed! Free Joost invitations to the lucky ones. It could be you!

Today The good guys over at Joost decided to allow me to give away a number of Invitations to become beta tester of their system.
I do however not want to give the out to just anyone, so I have come up with something you have to do in order to get an invitation.
You basically have to do one of the following things and post it as a comment to this post along with your name and email address.

Find a good slogan for Joost
Find a good feature your would like to see in a system like joost.
Give a very good reason to why you should have one of the invitations.

And that is! Should be quite simple to do at least one of the tasks mentioned and every buddy has a chance.

I will decide who wins on Monday evening (CET) at contact the winners directly.
Good luck

Joost signs deal with Viacom (UPDATED)

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:14:10 +0100

This just in from the Rumor bank: Joost signs deal with viacom which means potential access to shows and movies from Paramount, CBS, MTV, and Comedy Central.

Today several news sites have announced that Joost has signed a deal with Viacom about Viacom providing both Archived and new shows to the Joost platform. This is great news since Viasat controls many great contents producers.

Here is a couple of links for news about the deal:

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-viacom-and-joost-sign-licensing-agreement/
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/85566 (in German).
UPDATE:
Now there is an official Press release:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070220/nytu066.html?.v=82
f you look at the Viacom stock, you will notice that it raised quite a bit after this was announced.

Joost eastereggs - who can find it

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 17:51:11 +0100

Software Eastereggs is the grafitti of the developers world.

Today when playing around with the Joost client, I discovered a hidden easteregg. For those who don't know that an easter egg is, it is a kind of hidden feature that the developers have hidden in the system. Mostly it shows off the developers talents (like a 3D flight simulater in one of the MS Office tools) or just some other thing to promote the developers.

So where it the easteregg in the Joost client you say? I wont tell, but I can give you some hints:

It involves using the search box
It has something to do with developer credits

That should get you started on how to play the "find the easteregg" game.

Happy hunting!

I will tell how to find it in some days for those of you that cannot find it.

New Joost client v 0.8.0 released - Now also a beta for Mac

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 00:15:32 +0100

Tonight the cool Joost guys released a new version of the Joost client to their beta testers. Besides the usual Windows client, there is now also a version available for Intel-Mac's. This is the beta version of the alpha version they released for a small group of Mac users last week.
Among the new features in the windows version you will find:

better and more visual duration marker which now uses words (like "1 hour and 30 minutes left") instead of just numbers.
better Channel catalog which now includes all the shows available to the viewers location.
Trivia tracker for certain shows.
better and improved advert with interactive overlay
new codec (from CoreCodec) which improved performance quite a bit.

Since the Mac version is the first public (to beta testers) version, this mainly contains a fix for an annoying crash on exit, but it has also been more polished and the fonts have been improved.
There are still a small list of known issues in the Mac version, so if you plan to test it, you should read the release note before you start - but hey this is betatesting so there is supposed to be some issues :-)

Cheap mobile calling to other contries

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:58:59 +0100

Last week, a friend of mine went to the states for 6 month, and I have therefore been looking for ways to get in touch with him while he is there. A cheap solution would be use use Skype, but since he will be on the road most of the time, I cant be sure when to call him (since he need to be online). He has bought a mobile phone (well actually just a simcard for his old phone) over there, so I can get in touch with him that way. I could of cause then use skypeout, but skype on my mobile still isn't that great to use and I dont have a mic for my computer right now.

Then I stumbled upon Globe Dialer which is a small application (java Midlet) for your mobile device which makes it possible to make calls to foreign countries for the prize of a local call plus a small fee.
To use it you simply have to sign up on their page (free of charge). You then insert some money on your account (e.g. credit card) and then you are all set.
Now you simply dial the number via the application on your mobile phone and you make cheap calls (e.g. I can call my friend for local rate + $0.03/min). I have tested it a bit and it works very nicely and sound quality is good.

If you don't have a mobile that supports the application they have another solution. Globe Dialer offers dial in numbers which makes it possible to use their service without having to install the application.

You simply call one of their dial-in numbers (available in Denmark, USA and Canada) and then when you hear the ready tone, you simply dial (country code)(area code)(phone number)(#). After the # the number is dialed immediately.
I haven't tested this solution just yet, but guess that his is a very nice way to use their service.

Update: I just noticed on their page that if you use my email address ( kim (at) schulz.dk) as referer, then we both get $5 on our accounts (that more than 150 minutes of call time for me to the US).

Joost'ed up Macs

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 21:45:38 +0100

Mac Fanboys look out! Joost is coming your way next week

The guys over at Joost has been working hard to make their fantastic p2p TV on demand [insert tech buzz here] application available on other platforms than MS Windows.
So a couple of days ago they announced that they would open up for 100 alpha-testers for their new alpha-release of Joost for Mac (Intel-powered only). They gave out 100 invitations for that and within a very short times, all of them were gone. Another 100 was then allowed to download the alpha-client and within hours this download quota was also used.
But no worries! if you are a Mac fanboy and want to try it out,
Joost will open up the beta-test of their client at some point during the next week. I am not sure whether you have to be a beta tester already or if you will be able to get a beta account if you use Mac.

001en 127x100black.jpg" alt="Joost™"/>

For the rest of us, I can tell you that a new version of the Joost Client for MS windows. The new client has been optimized such that it handles firewalls and virus scanners better and the UI has also gotten a nice facelift. So Beta-tester: go check it out

Unfortunately the Joost guys haven't given me any invitations to hand out just yet, but I will announce it as soon as I have some available.

Happy Birthday FON - Thank you for the free router

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 21:59:17 +0100

Happy Birthday FON. Nice to see how well it is going here just one year after you started out your adventure to rule the Wifi world.

FON is now 1 year old and it seem to go very well for them. Here in Denmark they are now the largest hotspot provider which is quite awesome when you thing of how old and conservative the internet industry is here. I am pretty sure that the same is the case in Sweden (where they however aren't that conservative).

Well best of all about them having birthday, THEY ARE GIVING AWAY EVEN MORE FREE FON ROUTERS!. Yes that is right! 10.000 free routers so you have to be fast!
Unfortunately this is currently only available for residents in US, UK or Canada, so if this is where you live, you should go to http://www.fon.com/1yearold/ and get a free router.

Google webmaster tools - Links in, Links out! - Links back in again

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 18:08:51 +0100

Today 2367 pages are linking to a site on www.schulz.dk - most of them to the frontpage or blog.

This morning I noticed a new tab in the Google webmasters tool called Links. It gave me access to a page where I could see an entire list of internal and external sites that are linking to some page of my site. This was really a nice and useful feature in GWMT.
But what is this? tonight when I came home and wanted to play around with it some more and explore the pages that links to me, IT WAS GONE! yep thats right! no more link tab, no more contents on the sites that it linked to (I had a cached reference to one of the pages).

So this is to you Google! PLEASE bring back this nice feature as it is probably the best tool you have had in your Webmasters Toolkit so far!

UPDATE: my wishes have been heard. An hour after this post first time appeared, the Links was back again in the google webmaster tools. Go check it out if you haven't already played around with it.

Joost in time for the right TV show

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:27:02 +0100

Ok just days after I have been officially given access as a beta tester on the Venice Project, it suddenly changes name to it real brand-name Joost. Not sure if I like the name, but it has that catchy feeling over it like Google - wonder why I don't feel the same about the name Yahoo.

So what is new besides the name, you ask? Well the website has gotten a graphical liftup (the previous site was all ascii - remember!), and the interface of the program itself has also gotten some graphical enhancements. Unfortunately the still mostly have rather lame contents like music videos and interviews with a stupid blond (aka one hotel owners daughter). There is however rumors that says that more tech related channels will come later.
You cannot signup to become a beta tester anymore (well actually since back in December) but instead they are now using an invites-only concept like the one Google used for Gmail. This means that those who are already beta-testers will get some invitations they can hand out to friends, family or whatever and that way give them access too.
........and NO I do not have any spare invitations right now......

There still isn't a Linux client available so I have to use a spare Windows box for using the client. I have however not had a single problem with the client so far which is more than I can say about the OS it is running on.

So one of the biggest questions right now is: Will this be the next biggest thing on the internet? will it make all traditional TV providers an extinct race?
I am not an expert in such things and sure wouldn't be the right one to ask. I can however answer for myself about whether it would change my TV viewing routines or not. The answer is: It depends!
If the contents they provide is worth watching, I would love to have this kind of tv-on-demand instead of my plain old TV channels. I would not mind having commercials between my shows as long as it isn't as many and as often as on American TV channels - that is just plain annoying.
I love the user interface and the idea about having a community around some tv-channel intriques me. I love talking with my collegues about the latest episode of Heroes and taking this chat with other viewers around the world would make it even more interesting. Imagine sitting and watching a show somewhere in the future and while the viewers discuss the contents of the show, it evolves around their decisions - e.g. the viewers decide that the main actor in the show is boring and suddenly he is sent off to another country while a new person takes over as the new main person in the show. Of cause this is imaginary and something we have to wait for for many many years (if it will ever be available). But it could also just be a simple thing like a talk-show where the viewers can chat and ask questions live with the persons in the show while it is shown.
There are plenty of ideas of how it could be used, but again it all comes down to the quality of the contents Joost provides. No interesting contents - no future!

Other things I would like to see is

Linux client such that not only the windows users will get access to this service.
PocketPC client such that I can watch the shows on my new phone (HTC Trinity * more about this one later) while I am on the move. via Wifi or CDMA/3G network.
A news channel with relevant news from both local area and the world.
Support for subtitles

I have tons of other ideas but I will probably get into these later.
Now I will go watch some TV shows on Joost!

Im in the project....The Venice Project that is!

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:14:51 +0100

The Venice project combines the best things about television with the social power of the internet - a project that gives viewers, advertisers and content owners more choice, control and creativity than ever before.

- TVP homepage

Yesterday I got a mail stating that I was now selected to be a betatester of the "secret" project called The Venice Project. The guys behind it is the same as the ones behind Skype, and this should be then next biggest thing that combines TV, internet, communities and the rest of the buzz. I love to follow projects like this but I am always skeptic when it comes to the outcome of them - this was also the case when I logged into my beta account to check it out.
Their homepage looks like my old all-ascii homepage (except that they have a logo) and it all seemed very simple and basic. The same was the case for the actual program - a single 9.5mb exe file including the entire system.
Since I'm a linux guy myself, I had to borrow a Windows box in order to test the system (they promise to have a linux and Mac version ready soon). The installation is as easy as 1-2-3 and afterwards the applications starts up automatically. All in all it resembles the ease of installation we had with Skype back in the days where installing that kind of applications was a pain.
I opens up in fullscreen and an ugly (text outside the borders) shows up. I logged in nd then it happened....I was actually a bit amazed by what I saw. A nice and quite intuitive interface (flickr has tons of shots here, which showed exactly what I needed and nothing more.
Now the OSX guys will probably say...hey they stole our good looking design while the MS dudes say...hey they stole our media center. but no no no. This is neither, but is a nice new idea based on the ideas from the last decade of media player evolution combined with the biggest thing from web 2.0, namely the community collaboration concept.

The quality of the video is shows was more than enough for a laptop screen as the one I was testing on.
I cant really say much more right now since I am still investigating, but I will promise you that much more will come when I get around to test it some more (especially when a client for may fav OS comes out ).

XglSnow - Better video

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 17:12:46 +0100

For those of you who are interested in the Beryl XglSnow plugin, here's a better video showing how it looks:

looks like this plugin will make it into the main plugin package of beryl and several distributions already include it.

Tina Dickow - both beautiful and smart

Sat, 09 Dec 2006 21:16:20 +0100

You can find my new livealbum at thepiratebay.org
- Tina Dickow, December 2006

Yesterday was the 6 year anneversary for me and my Girlfriend being together and we decided to celebrate it by going to a Concert. Fortunately the Danish Singasong writer and singer Tina Dickow was in town as part of her tour and so thats where we went.
The concert was fantastic and we had a wonderful evening and it got even more fantastic about half way through the concert where Dickow talked to my nerdy heart. She has just released a new live album which also contained a couple of b-side singles. Most of the songs are the same as those on her previous album which is ofcause ok since the new ones are live. Dickow did however not think that is was necesseary to buy both albums and instead said (translated from Danish):
"I am sorry that those of you who has already bought the album has to buy the same songs again in order to get the b-side songs" and she continued: " I have spoken with my big brother and he has promised me that before this tour is over, you will be able to find this album on thepiratebay.org...that was the..pirate...bay..dot..org". She even told that it was perfectly ok with her if we downloaded the album! How cool is that! I just love that girl beauty and brain! Line and I bought her live album right away. An artist like that should be supported as much as possible.

XglSnow in action

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 20:35:01 +0100

Looks like someone beat me regaring getting a screencast of XglSnow in action out. You can see a video of the snow falling in this video (unfortunately quite bad quality):

Looks ok, but looks like he has some problems with rendering the snowflake image - it just shows up as white squares. It does however give a quite good idea of what the plugin does.
Cant wait to see which features they implement next. Go guys GO!

Xsnow - the 3d way!

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 09:43:45 +0100

christmas time means snow falling from the sky.....I'm loving it (TM Mc Donalds...sorry guys)

A couple of my friends from my days at the university has decided to redo the good old xshow linux application as a plugin for the window/compiz manager beryl. This means 3D style snow spread across the desktop. Currently they only have the falling snow part ready, but I know that plans mention drifts of snow on top of windows, realistic wind (maybe with realtime input from online weather reports from the local area),possibility to push the snow around. Unfortunately it currently needs the svn version of Beryl in order to compile, and I am using latest "stable" version, but I will upgrade this weekend and see if I can make a screencast of it in action.
Until then! go check it out :XglSnow

On the first day of christmas, the ajax site was here!

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 18:22:52 +0100

Last year Drew McLellan started the christmas calendar called 24 Ways. It gave a nice intro to a webdesign subject (primarily Ajax/CSS) each day and this way got all us web developers in the right christmas spirit.
Guess what! it's back again this year. The first article is about the Tasty Text Trimmer which is a nice way to shrink the contents of you site by the simple slider. It uses the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) for the slider which gives a nice effect on the site.

Go visit the site og add their feed to your favorite reader.

Comprehensive list of Opensource CMS

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 18:52:50 +0100

R9Studios has collected a quite comprehensive list of opensource CMS' from around the world.
I am happy to see that my faworite Fundanemt CMS is also on the list - which it sof cause also should be :-)
Unfortunately the list says it links to a demo of fundanemt when it actually just links to the screenshot site. If you want to try a real demo of fundanemt, then let me know and I can setup a temp demo for you.

The scary part about this list, is that I throughout the last couple of years, have tried nearly half of the CMS' on the site and still found Fundanemt to be the one that suited my needs the most - enough to start a Fundanemt support and hosting firm.

Get a FON Wifi router for FREE

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 10:44:01 +0100

Today the founder of FON, Martin Varsavsky announced(press release in Danish) that they will give away their nice little Wifi router called La Fonera for FREE. Yes that's right! for FREE!. It is however only in some of the Nordic countries like Denmark, Sweden and Finland that you will be able to get it at this fine price.
This nice gesture from FON is to spread the word about them in the Nordic countries where the still isn't that many Foneros (im one of them). Earlier Fon has done the same in Germany and South Korea where they have given away more than 10.000 routers each place (nearly 15k in Germany).
I sure am ordering an extra one - I can always find use for it somewhere.

The Danish FON shop can be found here:
https://shop.fon.com/FonShop/shop/DK/ShopController

(the rest of the world still has to pay 29.95Euro for it)
UPDATE:
Apparently you dont even have to pay for shipping when getting the FON router - in other words, it is completely free! WEHA. I am excited to when the entire town is one big FON network. Wonder how the ISPs will respond though. I know that most of them dont allow open networks/access to network for people outside the hose at all. Oh Well! we'll see how they react on this.

AllofMP3 - Now even fewer Danes can see it

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 18:57:57 +0100

Let the internet be free and make it up to the user to decide where he wants to follow the laws or not.

Recently I wrote about how Tele2 in Denmark was ordered to block all access to AllofMP3.com. Tele2 started by obeying the ruling, then denied to follow it and then a couple of days ago they finally decided to obey the ruling permanently. Not a good choice if you ask me!

By that is not the worst. Now most of the largest ISPs in Denmark (Cybercity, TDC, Telia) has started to obey IFPI's ruling against Tele 2 too. This means that (my estimation) 80% of the Danish internet users cant see allofmp3.com anymore.

Or can they? It turns out that all of them just blocks the site by returning wrong IP's when using their DNS servers. This is probably the easiest blocking to get around and here is how:

Simply add the following to your hosts file:



87.242.93.250 allofmp3.com

87.242.93.250 www.allofmp3.com

83.222.8.230 ssl.allofmp3.com

83.222.8.222 img.allofmp3.com

83.222.8.222 css.allofmp3.com

83.222.8.231 account.allofmp3.com

83.222.8.229 music.allofmp3.com

83.222.8.221 covers.allofmp3.com

87.242.93.254 blogs.allofmp3.com

In linux you find your hosts file in
/etc/hosts
and in Windows you find it in
c:windows system32driversetchosts
(replace c:windows with the path of your windows).

So now you have full access to All of MP3 again. Whether the site is legal or not is up to you to decide - I simply dont like the fact that Denmark has begun to have internet cencurs like in China. Personally I do think that the page is illigal - especially after recent changes to the copyright laws in Russia that says that online music also is bound by copyright laws - which it wasnt before. This means that the argument about the online shop being legal in its home-country does not work anymore.
But as I said! this isn't really about whether allofmp3.com is illegal or not - its about whether we allow the lawinforcers to cencur us or not!
Here's a bit of links for the danish Audience of this blog:
IFPI: The fight against allofmp3.com continues
Tele2 blocks allofmp3.com permanently
IFPI: other ISPs are the next target
Cybercity to block Allofmp3.com
TDC to block Allofmp3

I Am now officially a Fonero

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 18:15:47 +0100

FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. Our members share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi wherever they find another Fonero�s Access Point.
-- from en.fon.com

A couple of weeks ago I came by fon.com which is a large WiFi community on the net. I found the ideaology behind their community very appealing and immedialy ordered a La Fonera (their sweet little wireless router). Back then the price for such one was merely 5euro+shipping (total around 15euro) which is dirt-cheap for a router like this.
Found out that the day after I ordered it, they raised the price to 29euro+shipping.

Well today the router arrived with TNT and I was like a small child opening the first christmas gift. The design is very wife friendly (yep, just tested it on her) and with dimensions like 9x2.5x7cm it fits in everywhere.
The router comes with two SIDs such that you can split the network into two parts - a personal for you and your family, and a public for all the other Foneros. You can control more or less everything via a webinterface and you can even monitor who's using it directly via the Fon homepage.

So what is the idea with this community? Boiled down to one sentence it could be:
+"iIf you share you internet connection with me, I share mine with you." -i
You can share your Wifi on two levels.

fully open for others - then you are a Linus.
people need to pay for using your internet - then you are a Bill.

(I love those names :-) )
If you are a Linus, then you will have full access to all fonero's Wifi for free all over the world which is nice if you travel a lot and dont want to waste money on internet cafe's. If you on the other hand want to earn some fast money and dont think that you will use internet in other places, then you should be a Bill. A Bill has to pay for internet access when using other Fonero's Wifi, but you will then also earn something (hopefully) by letting others use your net.

I will probably start out by being a Linus since I dont mind sharing and would love to have the free internet when on the road. If it, on the other hand, takes too much of my internet connection, then I will probably turn into an evil Bill and make some money of it. But we'll see.

You can see a map of where you can find Foneros in the world here maps.fon.com.

Gmail on you PDA

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 21:54:54 +0100

A couple of days ago I wrote about how to get gmail as a stand-alone application on your mobile phone. This was a great way to get to you gmail account when you are on the road.
In my case however, I have an old mobile which is not supported by the gmail client and most of the time I use my PDA and not the mobile anyways.
So I was very happy when I today discovered that the good guys over at Download Squad has investigated in how to get the client to work on a pda running windows Pocket PC 2003 or newer.
You can find the entire description here and yes! it is not that easy due to the stupid registration IBM has.
When it is installed, then it works like a charm though! Good luck.

Gmail for the Mobile phone

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 18:56:30 +0100

Today I noticed that Google has added a new piece of software to their mobile google service. This time is is a gmail stand-alone client for mobile phone.
Looks like a really nice piece of software with many features I miss when using gmail via the browser on the phone.
Among the features are:

fast inbox browsing
See mails as conversations
add stars to mails
see mainy attachment types (images, pdf and even word docs)
easy access to mail archive

The application is made with java and is available for a large list of popular mobile devices.
You can download the gmail client directly onto your mobile device by pointing its browser to http://gmail.com/app.

Who wants to buy a blog anyways?

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:46:10 +0100

Today I came across this page where you can calculate how much your blog is worth using Technorati. Apperently My blog is worth $4,516.32 - but who buys a blog anyways?

My blog is worth $4,516.32.
How much is your blog worth?

How much is yours worth?

Getting around Tele2's AllOfMP3.com block

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 15:47:10 +0100

Not many hours after Tele2 activated their block of AllofMP3.com, a fix has been released such that Tele2 customers can download music from the site again.
There isn't much that Tele2 can (or will) do about it, since they have done everything the court demanded from them. And no matter what they do to block the site, there will always be a way around it (everybody except IFPIs "experts" agree on this).

You can download the fix (Windows only) here:
http://mangler.info/Allofmp3_tele2_dk_FIX.exe

Don't worry about it being an Exe file - it just changes some values in your host file.

Deny all access to AllOfMp3.com - it's a court ruling

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 15:33:58 +0200

IFPI in Denmark has won a case in the enforcement court today against one of the biggest ISPs in Denmark - Tele2. The ruling says that Tele2 has to deny all of their customers access to the russian music store All of MP3. The reason for this should be that All of MP3 does not pay the artists anything when they sell their music online as mp3.
Is it just me who find this ruling tremendously stupid?
To me this seems like saying that it is the car manufacturers fault that people are speeding - or maybe it is the fault of the state since they own the roads?

How should this at all be possible for Tele2? I got some ideas, but I know for a fact that if a site is online, then it is accessible. here's just a couple of the ideas:

change DNS for AllofMp3.com to point to 127.0.0.1
ban all traffic to Russia.
filter all traffic and find contents that resembles that of allofmp3.com

In most cases this can be bypassed with a simple proxy on another network.

IFPI argue that this is what everyone wants since it locks out the criminal pages on the net and this way it will make it a better place for everyone. But what about freedom? I value that more than not hitting any illegal sites on the net. Don't you?
Another problem is, that the court decision is based on EU-law which could very well mean that IFPI will try to force ISP in other countries in the EU to block access to the site.

More info on about the case here(sorry it is in Danish) : Reference

Update:
Apprently Tele2 has rejected the ruling which is exactly what I hoped for (Danish reference)

If you understand Danish, then you can read the entire ruling here tele2_ke.pdf
It is quite interesting to read since it contains statements by some "network experts" - interestingly enough the say DSN instead of DNS in most of the text. Tells me that they know nothing about what they are talking about.

Update2:
Here's a reference for the german readers: German reference

Update3:
An finally here's an English reference about this: English Reference

How many US Citizens has the same name as you?

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:23:09 +0200

In the entire US there is only 22 persons with the exact same name as me - Kim Schulz. My guess is that, unlike me, more than 90% of them are females.

Today I stumbled upon a funny page where you can search the name register of the US. It is interesting to see how many persons who actually has the exact name as yourself.
In my case the are 308,968 with the first name Kim, 20,998 with the last name Schulz, but only 22 with the exact match "Kim Schulz". Apperently there is no one in the states that has the same first name as my girlfriend - Line (pronounced like Li-n�). can this really be true? In Denmark this is a quite common name.

The page says that they will have some statistics up at some point, and I guess that it could be interesting to see which names that are most popular and which ones there is exactly one person who has.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are:
22
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Adobe Flash 9 Beta for Linux released

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:44:27 +0200

Linux has for awhile suffered with only having access to a quite old version of the Adobe Flash Player. For windows there was an entire Version 8 branch with new nice features that us linux users could not try.
But today is a happy day for flash+linux users since the Adobe linux developer team has anounced the release of the first public beta of the linux flash player version 9. You can read more about it on their blog.

For those of you playing the google gadget games I have on the page, this should give you a speed boost while using less cpu.
enjoy!

Internet Explorer 7 is out

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:02:17 +0200

Internet Explorer and its quirks mode is the reason for 90% of all the broken webpages out there (the rest of them is because of Frontpage :-) )
-- Kim Schulz Oct. 2006

So today the final version of Internet Explorer 7 was released to MS customers. For the rest of us it should be available around November 1. via windows update. Some of the customers has however already released it on the net.

I am all for Firefox Mozilla (not Iceweasel which I think is a stupid move by the debian guys) and pretty much hate Internet Explorer. If you however is an IE user, I will urge you download IE 7 since it at least fixes some of the broken parts of IE6.
So without any further introduction. Go download it HERE

Happy downloading.

To Logo or not to Logo

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 21:22:48 +0200

All the designs this page has had through nearly a decade has had some sort of logo - except this one.
In the beginning I thought that the large schulz:dk in the background was logo enough. Recently I have however changed my mind and found that this page is kind of image-less and really needs I logo.
I have been playing around in in Gimp to make one of those shiney web2.0 (yikes buzzword alert) logos with a neat reflection, but my gfx skills are kinda limited.
So if anyone has the time and skills to create a logo for me, then I will be very thankful. It just need to contain SCHULZ:DK as the main text and then the rest is up to you.
You will of cause get full credits on this page.

Search the web like a real vi user

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 15:13:51 +0200

If you, like I, use the editor Vi (or the better alternative Vim), then you might find my latest web finding amusing. Someone has created a search page that emulates a lot of the functionality of the editor Vi. You move around the page by pressing j (move down) and k (move up). You can go into insert move by pressing i and then you can add comments to the search results (:w to save the changes). You can search for a term on the page with /term, and move to next math with n and N. There is ofcause a help system which you can get to by pressing :help (in normal mode of cause). You can even change the layout colors by setting the appropiate settings:
:set bg=white
(unfortunately only black or white).

So where is this very cool search page you ask. Well where else than http://www.visearch.com.

Unfortunately this text-based page does not work in....tada...text-based browsers (Links, Lynx etc). Well they can't get everything right the first time.

Google Gadget embedding - now without scrollbars

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 12:48:50 +0200

Hurray for the Google Folks. The scrollbars are no more!

The good people over at the Google Gadget API office just mailed me with good news. They have located and fixed the problem that caused scrollbars the be shown around my Google gadgets when embedded into some pages.
Apperently there was a problem with how the CSS was bound to the gadget.
Thumbs up guys! I know this has been a big problem for many of the pac-man addicts out there :-)

Just to prove that it actually works, her's the latest Game I have Gadgetfied:

Happy gaming folks!

An intersting discussion about webdesign

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:11:03 +0200

AJAX is not to be used everywhere. Some places are better left without it.

Today I had a really interesting discussion with one of the visitors of this site, Eric, about everything from the Webdesign, over Ajax and to the Digg effect.
I guess that could just as well post some of the highlights here, since they could be interesting for others as well.

First stop: Webdesign and Ajax.
The design on this site is kinda different which Eric pointed out to me. He liked the idea of me having the small [x] for going back to the frontpage - kinda like a generic back button.
I guess this idea is not new, but to me this was kind of an obvious solution for getting out of a sub page and back to the frontpage. This mainly due to the fact that I in the beginning did not have the "Index" link in front of the page title (above here). This was added later.
Besides the back button I also have the smal / button which takes you to the top. This one actually gave me a bit of problems, since firefox (yep for once this great browser had a problem) cannot handle scrolling a scrollable div to an "a name" tag. Since this is the way I would normally do this, and this actually worked in IE, I had to find a way to do this in Firefox. The solution was a simple javascript hack that looks like:
[code lang=javascript nl=fancy]
document.getElementById('content').scrollTop=0
[/code]
Basically take the content div and scroll it to the top.
Eric wondered why I did not use AJAX (Asyncronious Javascript And XML for newcomers) for this side.
So lets break it down to the places where this could actually be used (reasticly):

Page contents:

Pros:
- Site would load without flickering and would feel more responsive.
Cons:
- The browser back button would not work (could be mad possible)
- it is harder to make real permanent links to subpages.
- Browsers wont cache the contents
- there is really no need for it.

Blog items:

Pros:
- Would be cool to have live updated blog-posts
- would make it possible for the visitor to set how many posts to see
Cons:
- I dont post enough to have live blog updates.
- there is really no need for it.

Blog comments:

Pros:
- comments could be updated live
- posts could be send without reloading page.
Cons:
- people without javascript enabled could have problems posting and seeing my comments (this is less than 1% of the visitors).

As you can see, there is not really anywhere except fo the blog comments, where AJAX would be suitable and needed. I will actually consider adding this at some point later when I can find the time.
Now I know that people will probably start telling me that there is workarounds for all of the cons I have mentioned above - I know, I know - but have you considered that "workaround" is actually a synonym for "hack". In other words: it is not a streight forward implementation, hence probably not the smartest way to do it.

Finally we talked about the "digg effect". Does any actually know how much traffic/hits/etc a normal site hit by the digg effect gets? I wonder if this server can take it. Currently this page is getting an avg. of 19.000 hits/hour (not visits! hits), most of which is for the more traffic-heavy swf files used in the google widgets.

Time mangement - and other news

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 21:38:46 +0200

Today one of my friends pointed out that I I should probably read a book on Time management. Guess he knows how bad I am for planning my day and now much I really need 4-5 extra hours per day.
He recommended a book to me so if anyone feel petty with me, the they're welcome to buy me the following book from amazon: Time Management from O'reilly

In other news:
After several requests from blog readers, I have added permanet links to all my blog post (find it in the end of this post). I have also added the feed to feedburner such that those of you that like getting the feed that way have that posibility.

Google Code Search

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 10:53:09 +0200

Today I stumbled upon the Google Code Search site which is awsome for a programmer like me.
It searches through almost everything from simple source files online, to packed up projects (zip, tar.gz etc) and even CVS/svn repositories.
You can select which license the code you search for should have, which programming language it is created in and so on.
Best of all: you can use regular expressions in your search.

I am sure I will get to use this site A LOT in the my work from now on together with krugleand the O'reilly code search - because why waste time inventing something that someone else has already done for you.

My 5mins of fame

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 21:02:02 +0200

One of my friends just pointed me to a page[1] at one of the online Danish Tech news sites. It was a short news story about the new google-widget-in-own-page which I mentioned yesterday.
But then in the end of the text I saw not only my Pacman game, but also my name mentioned. Not bad :-) I am just a bit imbarased that they mention me because of something as simple as this widget - they could at least have mentioned one of those with some code in.

[1] the page is in Danish

Mandriva 2007 Released for download

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 09:51:26 +0200

Mandriva (previously Mandrake) Linux has been my favorite desktop distirbution for years. I have actually been using it on a daily basis since version 5.3 or so.
Today I am happy to announce the newest release of the distribution - version 2007.
So why am I announcing this now? it was announced by the folks over at Mandriva about a week ago? Whats special is that now you are actually able to download the distribution for free from their homepage which is you can find at: http://www.mandriva.com/en/download.

So whats new?

Easy setup of 3D desktop with AIGLX or Xgl
A beautiful new theme called Ia Ora
Better multimedia optimizations
Easier installation and uninstallation with urpmi, rpmdake and Smart.
Gnome 2.16 (I love this one).
Tons of optimizations under the hood.

All in all a great new version that might not offer the greatest new additions, but simply offers the best of usability and stability in the same distrubution.
So go fetch and enjoy.

google gadget on you own website

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 22:48:37 +0200

Today Google has made it possible to add the google gadgets to your own page. It is quite simple to do, just go to http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open and find the gadget you want to add. The press the "add to website" button underneath it. You will now be able to change the settings for the gadget, change the color of the border of the gadget and set the title and size.
It is really neat. It then generates a piece of code you will need to insert where the widget should be. My pacman game can for instance be inserted with the following code:

New Google widget in the works

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 23:53:32 +0200

Today I started planning the developent of my next Google widget. It is going to be quite a bit more code-heavy, but also more fun to develop.
This time I will be working on a Jabber client widget which can (hopefully) connect to gtalk (among others).
I have not yet decided on the backend for the system, but have been looking on a few:

Yafumato - http://yafumato.sf.net/
- nice looking, but unfortunately in Java = heavy on the load side.
JWChat - http://www.jwchat.org
- quite advanced an ok looking - needs a http-poll proxy
Laffer - http://laffer.sf.net
- Quite ugly and the code is messy as he..

Besides this I have been looking at what to consider when constructing this applet.
Questions like:
what is better: dhtml window embedded in page or popup window.

Personally I think that a popup would be better, sinde I often use my google page for searching and hence the widget will be removed and the client will be disconnected.

What should it connect to?
I personally dont want to run a jabber server, if this widget gets popular. On the other hand, would it be nice to have full control over the entire setup.
Besides this it would be cool with gtalk support and preferebly transports for ICQ (and Messenger for the less fortunate).

But sofar the plan is to let the widget handle the settings part with credentials, popup or dhtml-win, server to use, and maybe status.

Let me know if you have any ideas for this project.

New page added

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 23:00:47 +0200

Just a short note to let you know that I have added a small page containing the google widgets I have created lately.
You can find the page here:
http://www.schulz.dk/en/projects/googlewidgets/.
Enjoy!

Adding another Google Widget to the list

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 21:28:31 +0200

Trow Poop as any normal monkey would do - it might save your life some day!

Today I found another great flash game that I can use for free, and decided to make a google widget out of it too.
The new game is called Super Monkey Poop Fight and is a great mashup of the styles from several different classic games (like Donkey Kong, Bubble boble, etc).
You control a small monkey that needs to fight of the other monkeys while finding bananas. This is done as in the real world with poop trowing (yes you read correctly).
At some point you are not only fighting the monkeys, but the evil zoo keeper will also try to catch you to get you to his lab.

You control the monkey with the left right arrow keys. By pressing A you trow a poop, or if you are walking while pressing the key, then you start running.
If you press S you jump, and if you press the up-key while jumping, then you can grap on to the branches and vines.

The Game is developed by 8 Bit Entertainment which also has developed some other fun games.

to add the gadget to your google personalized homepage, go here

Hope You enjoy it.

Test the Nation - but not for Linux users

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 20:52:22 +0200

Tonight one of the national tv channels in Denmark, TV2, is showing a show called "test the Nation". It is the second time they show the program and last time was nearly a year ago.
Most of the show is built aournd the fact that the viewers should take an IQ test online and this way be part of the stats showing stuff like - are blonds more stupid than redhaired.
This online test is a flash thingie shows a question and 5 possible answers + a timer that counts down. Nothing special, but the developer has insisted on that I as a user, needs to have a flashplayer version 8 or more to be able to take the test.
So basically what this means is that all Linux users can't take the test, since the latest version for linux is 7.0.63.
I took the test last year where they did not have this flash version limitation, and I am pretty sure that nothing has changed in the test that needs this extra stepup in version.

Well too bad, I guess I just have leave my IQ out of the test results this year.

A small Fundanemt Image filter

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 23:30:33 +0200

Today I got tired of not being able to having more than one image in my blog (it used the fundaNews module as backend), so I decided to create a small filter to fix this.

As with most filters, it consist of tow files (i have them placed in /fundanemt/modules/imageFilter/):

index.php
config.php

So lets get to the code:

My config.php looks like this:
[code lang=php nl=normal]
$filter_function = "image_filter";
$filter_file = "index.php";
$filter_active = true;
[/code]

and the index.php is even simpler:
[code lang=PHP nl=normal]
function image_filter($str)
)
$str = preg_replace("
[/code]

So what you have now is simply a way of adding an image whereever you want an image by simply writing:
[ image PARAMS]IMAGEURL"([^ /> (extra space added infront of first "image" to prevent filter activation).
the PARAMS are all the parameters you want to have on your img html tag (e.g., alt="", align="right" border=0 etc.) and IMAGEURL is the full or relative url to the image your want to insert.
An example could be:
[ image alt="my House" width="100"]/some/image/myhouse.jpg[/image] which will turn into

It is simple but works nicely.

Final stats for August

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 15:49:35 +0200

Even though I know how some webpages can generate alot of traffic, I still find it quite interesting to see how a simple pacman game can boost my traffic usage and page visit number by a magnitude.

So here's the final facts for August month:

Total Hits : 9.931.262
Total Traffic: 59.1Gb (whereof the 57gb is the pacman swf)
Unique refereres : 821 (last month this was 211)
Countries visiting : 151 (.net/.com is 61% total)

Not bad at all. Same month last year, the page has less than 200mb traffic and around 1000 hits.

graph from my webstats

A day in my life

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:52:19 +0200

Young men in Denmark tend to be always-on for their job - either by mobile phone or via the internet
-- recent research results Aug. 2006

During the last couple of days, there has been alot of talking about now young men in Denmark gets stressed out because they try to be available for their employer all the time. Some can always be reached by mobile phone while others have an office at home where they work after closing hours - even when not required.

This made me think of how my day goes. So heres the naugthy details about a day in my life:

6.30 AM : I get up, take a bath, turn on the laptop and check my mails and server logs from the Devteam servers.
7.15 AM : I check the newsgroups from CSR to see if any interesting posts has been added (and talk to my girlfriend if she is awake).
7.45 AM : I take my bike (or bus if it rains) to work at CSR.
8.00 AM : I start my day at CSR, checking mails, bug database etc. Getting up-to-date with todays tasks.
11.30 AM : I go to the cantina to get todays lunch.
11.50 AM : I'm back at the office checking my Devteam Mail, check server status, communicate with the devteam supporters if needed, check the latest news online etc.
12.01 PM : I'm back doing my tasks at CSR.
16.00/16.30 PM : I take the bike back home - maybe with a short stop at the supermarket to buy whatever we need for tonights dinner.
16.45 PM : I'm home, relaxing a bit with todays newspaper, letters etc.
17.00 PM : Laptop is back on, and I am doing updates to the devteam servers, checking my personal mail, say hello to the guys and readning news.
17.30 PM : I start preparing the dinner.
18.15 PM : We eat dinner and talk about the day.
19.00 PM : I turn on the TV and watch the news, while I start looking for inspiration for my Vim book.
20.00 PM : I start writing on the book or working on our house repairs.
22:30 PM : I check the server logs for the evening.
23:00 PM : Emails are checked, I talk a bit with my girlfriend and watch a bit of tv.
23:30 PM : a bit more book is written.
00:30 AM : I go to sleep (if I am done writing on the book for tonight).

So that's it. As you can see, I am probably one of the always-on guys they talk about in the research results.
Looking at this time schedule also makes me realize how lucky I am that my girlfriend can bare living togther with me when I am so extreamly much unavailable for her.
I sure hope she can live with it until january when the book will be done and I hopefully have doezens of time to spend with her.

Book updates

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 22:04:06 +0200

if you can code a feature, then it is almost certain that Vim can provide the feature too.
-- Kim Schulz 2006

Today I started working on the third chapter of my Vim book. It is fun to see how a book like this evolves from being just a few pages of notes to somthing interesting, structured and informative like a book. I can't wait to see the final result (should be less that 6 month now). If everything goes as planned, the book will contain around 100 tips for using Vim in more productive ways. This includes how to personalize Vim, how to script in Vim and many many other things.

If you have any ideas for what I should have in the book, please let me know by adding a comment here og sending me a mail.

A bit more statistics

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 21:01:39 +0200

With your unix webhotel you normally get 600mb/week traffic.
-- UNI2

Today it is has been 20 days since I started following the downloads stats for my google widgets to see how many hits and how much traffic it could actually make.

So here is a bit of stats for august month sofar:

Hits on the Pacman game: 5.534.305
New subscribers to the pacman game: 19.918 (approx: 1000/day)
Traffic used on game hosting : 33.991.466kb (Yes that's almost 34gb).

Notice that my webhotel only allows me to have 600mb/week of traffic (which is a ridiculous low amount).
I hope that they wont notice (yeah right) and don't send me any extra bills for this.

My blog has also changed from getting around 5-10hits/day to have having 800-1000hits/day. Not bad at all :-) I will try to make this blog a bit more interesting in the future and maybe even tell a bit more about my other top-secret google-widget project.

Google widget update

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 21:49:42 +0200

The highscore feature in my google pacman widget is now available and I can see that the users already love it. Since the update (around August 1.) the pacman game has been downloaded almost 1milion times (thats in 4 days!). I am currently having 2gb traffic a day which is more than I normally had on a whole month.
Besides the pacman game I decided to make another of my favorite games into a google widget. So now you can also get a Mario brothers Google Widget from my site. Hope you like it, even though it cannot show you your scores.

As a side note I can tell that the honor site at googles is apperently different from country to country so my rank is varying from #1 to #5. e.g.,
www.google.dk/ig/authors
www.google.co.uk/ig/authors
www.google.de/ig/authors
www.google.com/ig/authors

Honored by google

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 22:22:05 +0200

Meet the most popular gadget developers from around the globe. These talented individuals are leading the charge in making your Google homepage a better place, and we think they deserve a standing ovation!
-- Google Web API team

Today I got an email from a Google Employee telling me that I apprently has created one of the most used google widgets around - my pacman game widget. To thank me for my work with this I have been added to an Honour page (currently as the only one). You can find the honour page here http://www.google.com/ig/authors

I guess this is nice, even though the widget pretty much just wraps around a flash pacman game (which I am not the original author of - thanks Paul Neave)
Now I just have to get my del.icio.us widget popular too :-)

To thank every user of the pacman widget I have started working on getting the hi-score feature to work. This should be working within a couple of days

Oh yeah! I'm an Software engineer now

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 12:17:03 +0200

I almost forgot to write that I am now officially finished studying Software engineering at the university. Got my diploma like a week ago and ended up with a grade average of 10.2 (danish 13 scale). I got a 10 for my master thesis project which was ok, but I believe that we could have gotten more if the supervisor had just read the actual thesis before examining us :-) oh well... 10 is not bad at al.

Most of my time currently is spend on installing our new kitchen in the house Line and I bought recently. It is almost finished and the result is really nice (pictures will follow later). Next room we will work on is the living room where we need to paint and fix the ceiling+floor.

I have also started on another project besides my normal work. I am writing on a book about the fantastic editor vim. It is going to be a cookbook-style book for the more advanced user.
If everything goes as planned, then the book will go into print early next year. I am very excited about this and hope that I can handle the challange of actually writing a book like this.

Project stats

Mon, 15 May 2006 22:16:22 +0200

Here less than a month before deadline of my Master Thesis project, I thought that it would be fun with some stats for what we have been working on the latest semester.

so without further introduction, here are the pure numbers:

Developer count: 3
svn commits: 3786
lines of java code: 40106
Lines of php code: 2249
Lines of javascript: 1422
Lines of XML/JDO: 1076

Looks pretty neat doesn't it :-) Remember that this is the work of only 3 guys and that this is not spagetti code but extreamly neat and optimized code.

So now we just need to write the thesis, and then we're done.

Vim 7.0 finally out

Sun, 07 May 2006 21:10:03 +0200

There can be only one! in the editor world that is Vim.
-- Kim Schulz

Today the first official stable release of Vim v7.0 is released to the ftp mirrors . This is absolutely great news for all vim lovers out there an I sure for one wont wait many seconds before I install it on all my computers.

The new v7.0 comes with some long awaited enhancements whereof I especially like the omnicomplete features. This is a set of completely new functions that makes it possible to add even better auto-completion support to vim. The best thing is that now it can popup in a small window/context menu right next to the text you are writing insted of in a new buffer/vim window.
Completion with omnicomplete has allready been added for a long list of programming languages and more are coming every day.

Other nice features to mention are:

Tabs - old idea but new in vim. one tab can containg several vim windows
vimgrep - grep in external files without using an external grep tool. Especially great for windows vim users.
Full built-in spellchecking support (50languages supported)
undo branches
browsing of remote files - even zip and tar archives
better printing support

and much much more.

Thumbs up to all the vim developers out there for once again showing the world what a superior editor vim is.

New adition to the Fundanemt team

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 21:21:20 +0200

This morning the guy behind Fundanemt, Christian and his wife Anja gave birth to their first child. A healthy little girl called Ayla.

A big congratulation from here.

Now with a new house...

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 23:33:01 +0200

Today I got the answer from my Advocate that Line and I could buy the house we have been looking at. This is soooo nice since we really want to have our own house insted of the appartment we are living in now. Hurray!

It's been a while...

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:00:09 +0200

Long time - no blogging!

So my spare time duriing the day has started to disappear into some secret black hole. My Master Thesis needs more time, my company needs more time, my sparetime projects and my private life needs more time.
And what do I not have - time!
Thats pretty much why I havent blogged for awhile. Much has happened sincs last post. I have been offered a full-time job at CSR which I have accepted. Line and I are planning to by a new house and last but not least - I have sent Line of to Thailand and China for a month.
One should think that being alone at home at not have a girlfriend to "entertain" whould give you more time, but the fact is that you think you have more time, hence use more time = no time at all!.
On the fundanemt front we went to Linuxforum 2006 to meet the other users. It was a big success and we had a great time there.
The development of Fundanemt Generation 3 has started. This time we want everything planned and documented so the ammount of work in Lines of Code (LOC) is actually 0.
We have some new guys in the core developer team which is great. Nice to get new ideas and new energy.

My master Thesis is coming along very well. There has been some bumps in the road but now we seem to be on a streight course towards the finish line (June 21.).
We have been implementing alot of stuff sofar. Just to mention a few, here is a short list:

MGRID index structure
JDO based middleware on top of some RDBMS
A Query Processor and optimizer for the middleware
A Query Server to get queries from external sources
A gui mp3 player that supports our special ISound DataSource.
A WebPlayer that supports our special ISound Datasource (you can do Range and kNN queries on a song to expand your playlist)
loads of other stuff.

Besides this we have written 2.5 articles, and started working on the actial contents of the Thesis (it will however also contain the articles as appendices).

So that pretty much what I have done until now.

Linux forum 2006 and IPod Nano competition

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 19:13:53 +0100

Linuxforum is the anual get together event for alot of the Fundanemt users and this year it is 3-4. march - Where I ofcause will be there.

Every year the fundanemt usergroup has a booth on the conference where we show off some of the new things in Fundanemt and talk to old and new users.
To make it even more exciting this year, we have desided to have a competition with the grand price is a 4gb IPod Nano. Thats right! the really cool and really small IPod from Apple, and all you have to do is to answer one question and give us your name+address.
So swing by our booth on saturday and see if you will be the lucky winner - and ofcause see the fantastic fundanemt.

See you there!

Busy with Master Thesis

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 19:44:19 +0100

Happy Newyear to all of you. I'm back to tell a bit about what I have been up to lately.

It has been awhile since my last blogpost. This is mainly due to the fact that I have been extremly busy with finishing the article for the first part of my Master Thesis (it consist of two seperate semesters and tree exams).
This first part of the Thesis is to be handed in on monday so it is nearly done. It is created in colaboration with my buddies Kobi and Per, and is a purely theoretical work about how to create an Algebra for Multimedia databases which can support similarity queries. As I probably have mentioned before, is it part of the Intelligent Sound Project which is a joint project between serval universities and companies.
We have formally describe a new algebra which is based partly on traditional Relational Algebra plus some of the nesting ideas from Non-First-Normal-Form Algebras. It has been a tough job to get it all smooth and precise but the final result is really nice (I will publish the article here after the exam). Quite understandable that it was nice to get away on a skiing trip to sweden between christmas and newyears to relax and see somthing else than formulas, algebras and technical reports.
Now I'm looking forward to the exams and even more to the next part of the project where we are going to implement the algebra on top of a normal RDBMS to prove that it works and is optimized well.
I have allready construced an mp3 player in Java so we have a client that can query our database for music information while it is playing. Always nice to have your own code for such things so you easily can change it to fit your needs. In the end it won't be an mp3 player but rather an mp7 player - yes mp7 is the sound layer from mpeg7 which is a upcoming MPEG standard supporting feature extraction and embedding.

Well enough said about the project for now. It's time to relax for some hours before I have to continue with the final ajustments of the article.

Personalized Google Module

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 01:05:29 +0100

Personalized Google API is now released. A great opportunity to play around with google.
So what could be more fun that adding a Yahoo owned link page (Del.icio.us) to Google.

The API is pretty streightforward and a simple walkthrough on their page is more than enough to make a simple module.
Mine was a nice little linkroll module that shows my del.icio.us links (or anyone elses) in a nice list on my personalized google page.
It even shows favicon for the links if such one exists.
Ofcause it makes heavy use of the javascript API from del.icio.us but hey! thats what it's there for.

My contribution is submitted and can also be found here: delicious.xml

Hope someone can use it for inspiration and fun!

Control your versions

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 22:13:40 +0100

The ideal Version Control system optimizes productions and does not block it.
-- Kim Schulz 2005

Throughout the last decade I have used serval version control system for my development projects. Some of them with more luck than others. I have been through RCS, CVS, Bitkeeper, Perforce, Sourcesafe, Codekeeper, GNU arch and lately Subversion.
Common for them all is that they all do the job quite well and fullfills most of their tasks. Some have bugs, others lacks a couple of features bit in generel they all work.

When looking at which system to choose, there is a few feature I think that you should look at:

Diff: it is important that you can get a diff of two revisions and thereby get a patch.
Branch: When working at large projects it is important that some of the developers can make a branch and work undisturbed in that.
Branch Merge: After a branch has been worked at, it is very important that you can merge the development branch into the main branch without having to move the code manually. Not all systems has this well-implemented.
Code Merge: if two developers has been working on the same file, then it is important that the system can figure out how to merge the differences together. If there is a conflict, then this should be announced clearly and it should be easy to select which parts of the code to keep.
Revisions: some systems (like cvs) has revisions for each file and some (like svn) has it for sets of changes. It is important that you know how you system does this and what that means.
Move files: Alot of systems dont have a feature for moving/renaming files and still keep the revision history for it. This is in my opinion a very important feature that a version control system should have.
Good Changelog: A good changelog makes it easy to discover what has been going on in the system. Even though this seems like a minor thing, I have discovered that this is actually very usefull when working serval people on a project.

As said I have lately been using Subversion (svn) and I am very happy with how it works. It really fullfills all my needs and seems like a very well-programmed system. Actually there was only one of the above features it lacked - It does not have a good ChangeLog.

So what do I do about that.. I desided to make my own script for this and this afternoon I god it ready for a testrun.
It is basically a bunch of perl code lines hacked togther really fast (cleanup needed) but "it works (tm)".
It takes its input as stdin and outputs html code to stdout. The input is the log output from svn so a normal usage would be a commandline like this:

svn log -v |perl SVNChangelog.pl > changelog.html

The -v option is important if you want info about which files was changed in each revision.

You can find a version 0.000001 :-) of the script here and a stylesheet for it here.
An example output (generated via cron every 10 minutes) can be seen here:
here.

Why svn does not have a good changelog format is still a mystery to me, but now I have my own solution for it.

Petition for not removing the group exams in Denmark

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 14:48:54 +0100

Group exams is probably the smartest move ever made by any university - dont kill them.
-- Kim Schulz Dec 2005

The Danish government has shown some serious signs of braindamage these last days.

Their latest move in relation to education is that they want to remove all group exams from elementary school, "highschool" (Gymnasium, HTX etc) and Universities.

Working in a group and being evaluated as the same group is a very important part for some of the universities in Denmark (Including Aalborg University where I study). And for a very good reason. Studies have shown that the Industry in Denmark prefer students with a group-minded education, simply because they fit better into the exsisting teams. So to just give 4 reasons why to not remove the group exams:

In the real world we work in teams and often a team gets evaluated all together.
By working in a group and get evaluated in a group you learn to argument you case - a property alot of post-uni persons lack.
If you work in a group you agree on everything, so why split up the evaluated between the groupmembers so each of them does not get evaluated for everything.
The good students lift up the less good students - yes it can be mis-used but normally the good students know when to kick the parasite-student.

So all in all. This is a freaking stupid idea and the government should try to get a more realistic picture of what happens around the contry and on the universities.

Everyone that understand the importance of why this shouldn't be changed should sign the petition agains it:
http://www.bevargruppeeksamen.dk
More than 3000 has allready signed the petition in just a couple of hours so this is a clear sign that this is a change that has a large impact on many. So go sign NOW!

The daily christmas crack by TGG

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 17:24:41 +0100

--> BigFan (xxx@xxx) has joined #tgg @ undernet
julen vil blive uendelig meget bedre hvis www.bikerjens.dk kunne blive defacet

Every day this christmas (so far) the cracker team called Team Gilmore Girls do a "no mercy" crack of some celebrity or gamer homepage.
The last couple of days it has been

unknown for me
BikerJens.dk
azkaban.dk
sf.dk

Looks pretty much like random hacks and the message on the defaced pages is pretty lame.
What I'm most interesting in, is how they got into sf.dk and whether it was through a hole in typo3 or not.

Christmas Party and Hangovers

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 19:28:22 +0100

J�germeister and lime is a slow killer
-- Kim Schulz (Saturday Morning)

Last night my University group and I had a christmas party at my place. Lots of good food (Duck et al, and ris ala mande) and lots of fun.
After we finished eating we got into a bit of drinking + a nice game of "Tegn og G�t" (Draw and Guess). It turns out that this game can be really funny after you have gotten a bit to drink.....in our case this means loads and loads of J�germeister and Lime + Ice (A cold Hunter)+ beer.
Around 4AM the last couple left and I could get to bet.
Unfortunately Line had to go to Copenhagen really early (7.30) so I didn't get that much sleep (even though she was very gentle and didn't get too noisy).
Rest of the day has been a mixture of preparing my presentation for Monday and hangning around doing noting or watched movies.
Saw "the 40 year old Virgin" which is actually a quite funny movie (at least when you have hangovers).

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is out

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:39:05 +0100

After a couple of pretty stable release candidates, the 1.5 version of Mozilla Firefox is out. It is not officially announced yet but it is being distributed to the mirrors as we speak.
I have been looking forward to this release because it has some really nice new features like:

better plugin API (means better plugins)
support for movable tabs
javascript 1.6 support
Full SVG support
better popup blocking
automatic updating of plugins AND browser.

Can't wait until Mandriva updates the rpm package with the 1.5 version.

New Job

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 21:33:18 +0100

The time where I'm finalizing my studies at the university is getting closer (only 7month now) and it is about times I get a more Engineering related job. Thats why I decided to apply for a job offering at CSR about 3 weeks ago.
Ten days ago I went to the Interview and yesterday I went there to sign the Contract - yes I got the job.
Tomorrow is my first day at work and I'm extremly excited. My first task is supposently to upgrade some bluetooth systems and after that I'm moving on to more software development related tasks.
I've already been informed that the tasks for the next period includes implementing a cross-platform realtime log analyzer for the special logs from their bluetooth test equipment. Besides that I'm going to create an automation system for their documentation and move it to Docbook insted of MS Word.
It is nice to get down and dirty with tasks like that and hopefully they don't regret hiring me.

Where have you been?

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 11:49:52 +0100

To Travel the world is to live.

In my life I have been to quite a few european countries, but unfortunately not in that many countries in the rest of the world.
This image shows marks the countries I have been in sofar.
It is generated with a script from this page.
Pretty cool!

Google firefox referral program - but not for Europeans

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 19:20:40 +0100

The other day I came by ExplorerDestroyer where I saw that I could actually earn a bit of money by advocating for a better world without MS IE.
I signed up for an Google AdSence account and logged in to find the firefox referral program. It was nowhere inthere. I searched the web for info, mailed a friend at google and finally got the answer: "Sorry but the Firefox referral program is only available for US citizens".
Tough luck! no help from me in the war against IE then (except when I make W3C compliant webpages that IE can's show correctly.

Hosting done my way!

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 21:06:57 +0100

Getting good hosting is often a troublesome task - I hated that so DevTeam became a reality!
-- Kim Schulz March 2005

Earlier this year I got too tired of finding acceptable hosting for my customers Fundanemt sites.
Therefore I decided to start my own hosting company that specializes in Fundanemt hosting.
Soon DevTeam Denmark (contraction of the words Development And Team) became a reallity. The main focus is to provide stable and featureful hosting for Fundanemt users but also do all sorts of developement and webdesign.
I didn't do much fuss about the start of the company, but anyhow customers soon started to come.
Now less than a year after startup I have twice the amount of customers I had hoped for the serverfarm has trippled.
I now both have normal webhotels, FundaHosting, Hightraffic hosting, Vservers and dedicated servers. The development part is not that big a part of the work currently but that will hopefully change in the new year.
All in all I am very pleased that I started this company and hope that the customers are happy with what I offer.

Site changes and new language

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 16:25:56 +0100

So finally after serval years I have now gotten around to change the design of this site again.
This time it is a darker design inspired by one of the designs of the late www.oswd.org.
It also gave me the time to update to latest fundanemt and change the primary language to english.