| Community mapping |
[09 Jul 2009|06:45pm] |
In the age of the Internet, loosely coupled communities of unpaid individuals can sometimes perform wonders. Linux is an obvious example of this, but there are also other kinds of productive communities. One of those is Openstreetmap.org which is, well, mapping the entire world.
I've recently contributed a bit to Openstreetmap by mapping a few of the bicycle roads near to where I live. I've also added stores, postboxes and restaurants in the area and marked all vegetarian restaurants I've been to in Stockholm. Simple idea, really - everyone maps their own small part of the world and the end result will be a marvellous world map. Looking at the maps, it's also obvious that some areas have more enthusiasts than others. Take this part of Stockholm for example:
As you can see, every single house on Kungsholmen has been put on the map, while Birkastan is a largely white spot apart from the streets. The map of Kungsholmen is truly impressive, basically better than what you'll get with google maps.
And while we're on the subject, I'll be moving in september. Linda is moving here, so we've bought an apartment in ... Birkastan:
it's facing the inside of the block of flats, so it's not visible on this image. It's located behind the white house on the left side of the street though. So mapping to be done this fall!
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| Memory, UAE-Wii version 3 |
[04 Jul 2009|08:02pm] |
I bought 2GB RAM for my laptop today. What a difference compared to 1GB! Now firefox, eclipse and mytourbook (267 km since may 27!) are actually possible to run together. Good investment and something I'd recommend anyone with a slightly old laptop.
I've also released version 3 of UAE-Wii today. It really only contains two things: a fix for a bug which prevented dialogue windows from showing and support for Cloanto Amiga forever kickstart ROMs out of the box.
You can also see it as an answer to the (frequent) question "where do I get a kickstart ROM for UAE?". Easy - just buy the Amiga forever CD and copy them from there. It's good value for money since it's quite cheap and contains a set of games/demos as well.
Cloanto was nice enough to send me a copy of the Amiga forever CD for free - it was even the deluxe edition which packs two DVDs with Amiga-related videos. I've so far only watched Dave Haynies documentary about the collapse of commodore. While the subject is interesting, the documentary is filmed with a (shaky) handheld camera by Haynies himself, so I can't really recommend it to anyone but the real enthusiasts or the truly drunk.
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| Pulp fiction |
[04 Jul 2009|02:23pm] |
Many of the books I read are second-hand, often giveaways. I like this because it saves money, and I also give away most of the books in turn (saving shelf-space!). It's also good because you get to read books you wouldn't typically read otherwise. I like science fiction, so I try to get SF books when I can. And this tends to be of the pulp science fiction type.
What's interesting about pulp SF is that the quality varies immensly. I've read some truly excellent books, for example Childhood's end by Arthur C Clarke. I've also two books of what must surely be the worst science fiction ever written in swedish (in fact, it's so bad it becomes good). A book I've had for a long time without reading is Phoenix by Richard Cowper written in 1967:
I actually enjoyed this book. The plot is basically "a man enters suspended animation to sleep for three years, society crumbles, and man wakes up again 1500 years later in a middle age-like society". A problem with much science fiction is that there are too many references back to the day the book was written. Cowper seems to try to carefully avoid this, but you can still easily recognise some of the 1960s in the book - the eve of destruction, atomic-power-everywhere etc. I've read other books when this tendency is much worse and much more explicit though.
Another fun thing is the "AND DO NOT MISS!" section on the back cover:
Yes, there's Matrix by Douglas R. Mason, subtitled "Their lives were controlled by the mother-computer-complex". Now where have I seen that again?
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| New job, UAE v2 |
[31 May 2009|09:14pm] |
Friday was my last day at Ericsson, and on monday I'll start my new job at Net Insight. I've been at Ericsson for 2.5 years at two different sections. All in all, I really enjoyed my time there - especially the last years at IS. Yesterday I went to a party with the Ericsson employees at Ekerö, which was a really good opportunity to say goodbye to everyone (although this was not the original plan for the party!). I'll miss you all!
In less important news, I've also released version 2 of UAE-wii. The changes compared to the first version is mainly usage related - most of the important configuration options are now accessible from the menu, including binding keyboard keys to wiimote buttons.
Usage instructions are at the wiibrew wiki page.
Also less important: I've my new Garmin Forerunner 305 frequently this week, together with the mytourbook application. When I bought the watch, my main motivation was to use it for running, but in fact I've only done that once - all other times have been for bicycling.
Thanks to the ericsson party, I've done a lot of bicycling this week - 94km in mytourbook the last two days. I've spent much of the afternoon today looking at apartments in Stockholm, so today I cycled another 34km (but without the GPS). I'm pretty tired now though!
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| New toy |
[27 May 2009|10:04pm] |
As readers of this blog might have guessed, I enjoy running. So to improve on my training (and because I like toys), I bought a GPS-based running watch today, a Garmin Forerunner 305. After having run my tour around Årstaviken, I must say that I'm impressed. Even in the fairly dense tree-cover on the Årsta side, it did not loose tracking!
But even more impressive is the tour management software. Not garmins (which I haven't tested), but MyTourbook by Wolfgang Schramm:
I just needed to connect the USB cradle to the computer and press import (yes, you can also charge it via the USB port). And the application is really full of features! It shows the track on a map where you can plot altitude, pulse, gradient etc. You also get monthly statistics etc so that you can see how your training evolves. Interestingly enough, this piece of software is based on the eclipse platform, which shows how flexible that is.
Very much recommended! Now I can't wait for the next race :-)
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| Half a marathon |
[22 May 2009|05:52pm] |
As I noted in last post, I ran the Göteborgsvarvet last weekend together with Linda and 41000 other people. Some pictures from the picture-selling company:
  
(Me in green, Linda in red). My result was OK, 1.44.50, although it's around 30 seconds more than my last half marathon. What's worse though is that Linda finished in 1.42.55, so I'm now almost 2 minutes behind!
Göteborgsvarvet is apparently the largest half-marathon in the world in terms of participants. That's a mixed blessing. Since me and Linda ran göteborgsvarvet for the first time, we started very late in the race (almost two hours after the first runners!), and it was all very crowded. So for this reason, I would actually prefer a race with maybe half the number of participants, much like the Stockholm half marathon. Which is also closer to home and therefore easier to get to.
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| Photographic tricks |
[19 May 2009|07:22pm] |
I'm every now and then looking at apartments in Stockholm. They are all very expensive and look great on the photos. The funny thing is that they always seem quite spacious, even if they are only around 55 square meters large. Like this one for example.
However, it's just a clever trick. Look at these two pictures:
Hey, that's a wide-screen TV!
But wait! The TV is now narrow-screen instead, but look at the blue wide-seat chair.
If you look carefully at the first image, you'll see that not only the TV, but also the DVD under it is very wide. Good camera lenses make wonders, and in most cases I wouldn't even have noticed it until visiting the apartment.
In other news, I ran Göteborgsvarvet this weekend. I'll get back about that when I have some picture to link to.
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| First version of UAE |
[14 May 2009|08:41pm] |
In large parts of the world, UAE is known as an abbreviation for the United Arab Emirates. In some subcultures though, it's instead known as an amiga emulator. As you can imagine, this whole situation is quite unsatisfactory for googling. Anyway, today I'm releasing the first version of the Amiga emulator UAE for the Nintendo Wii.
Exciting race between aa and Jumpin' Jack!
Hey the Wii can do 3D!
This is literally a first version as in "you'll have a bumpy ride in front of you" (much like in Stunt car racer). This version features the all-important joystick input, so games are actually playable and the first wiimote acts as both mouse (point at the screen and press the A key for the button) and joystick (the directional buttons plus 2). The first wiimote is also configured to generate 'a' when you press + and return when you press -, just to show what can be done with the UAE configuration file. Home is for the menu.
I must say I'm impressed with UAE (OK, the country also features some impressive features so this goes for both). I thought I would have to spend a lot of time on the wiimote input handling, but it turns out that nearly everything is possible to setup using the configuration file. The only source code modification I had to make was to add handling of the joystick "hat", which is the wiimote directional buttons. Beautiful!
Download from uae-wii.googlecode.com but only after you have read the instructions on Wiibrew. Thereafter, join the project as a developer and improve on it!
Update: "Gouky" has released the source code to his version now, you can get that here. Better late than never!
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| UAE for the wii |
[10 May 2009|05:13pm] |
As has been discussed in comments before, I've started a googlecode project for a Nintendo Wii port of UAE, the Universal Amiga Emulator. It's based on the latest and greatest E-UAE sources and is built for SDL all the way.
Those that are familiar with the Wii homebrew "scene" will know that there is another port of UAE by someone called "Gouky". However, he never released sources for this even after repeated inquiries of it - which makes it a clear GPL violation. Clearly bad behavior, and this is the main reason I started this.
Today I have some progress to show:
That's a screenshot from an old Amiga demo. As you can see, graphics is a bit misaligned. Sound is also pretty wrecked and input does not work at all. It also crashes a lot, but it's progress at least. I'd like to invite other Wii developers to join in on this port, I will not be able to do it all by myself.
Update: Sound now works excellent, and I've found the cause of the crash. I'm able to play shufflepuck cafe as SDL has mouse emulation. It's very difficult though.
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| From the department of silly names |
[09 May 2009|08:45pm] |
For some reason, swedish running competitions are always organized by people that can't spell. Well-known examples are "Vår ruset" and "Tjur ruset". Today, I participated in yet another race of this kind, "SpringCross" (although it makes sense if you read it as pure english). This is a 12KM mostly cross-country race on norra djurgården in Stockholm.
I got caught on a photo from the race (by Martin Ekequist):
I'm the third guy from left in green. The result of the race was mixed though. My goal was to finish the race in less than one hour, which I just managed with a small margin (58:58). Everyone finishing in less than one hour got a slightly nicer medal in "gold", as opposed to "silver" if you were slower than that. However, I became really tired during the race and in fact almost threw up during the last rise before the finish.
Next weekend is "GöteborgsVarvet", the biggest half-marathon in Sweden (and just as misspelled as the other races). I'm hoping to do better then.
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| Where is my food SJ? |
[30 Apr 2009|12:36pm] |
I'm a frequent traveller with the swedish railway company SJ. In fact I'm on the train right now. It's lunchtime, so I'm obviously hungry. Luckily there is a bistro on the train, so that's usually not a problem. However today:
The vegetarian food is gone less than one hour after the train left the station!
So I'm left with eating sandwitches, fruit and yoghurt. I learned today that SJ has recently removed the vegetarian lasagna, leaving only a single type of heated vegetarian food: the "pizzini" (which is more or less a sandwitch as well). I've filed an angry complaint to SJ.
What I think they should do is to simply make all dishes vegetarian or vegan. Compatibility only goes one way, namely, and even meat-eaters will survive one meal without meat.
In Wii news, I've spent some time hacking on Tantrics SDL port to get 8-bit color depth working with the new "GX" video backend. It's right now just showing a zoomed upper half of the screen, but that should be possible to resolve. With GX, graphics should be a bit faster (well, a lot) so with some luck, Uridium should be much more smooth-scrolling soon.
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| Frodo version 10 |
[26 Apr 2009|01:45pm] |
Having got a good sun burn after spending all afternoon outside yesterday, I'll be cautious with the sun today. So instead, I've been staying indoors and finishing up the last changes for version 11 of Frodo/Wii and baking bread this morning.
The bread features walnuts, lingon berries and apricots, but most readers of this blog are probably more interested in the new Frodo features. There are a couple of those:
- You can now send messages over the network to the other player if you have a USB keyboard (or are running frodo on your computer). Useful for taunting your peer.
- Holger Eilts has redesigned the menus from scratch, and the result is (in my view) a lot more intuitive and friendly than before.
- You can now select which D64 file to load from the menus
- Apricots
- The file browser supports subdirectories
- I've built it against Daryl Borths revived SDL port, which means that sound is again crisp and clear.
I'll release at least one version more (I got a bug report shortly after uploading v10), but in most aspects I now feel I'm done with the Frodo port to the Wii.
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| New job! |
[22 Apr 2009|08:09pm] |
So it's done! I've quit Ericsson and signed the contract for Net Insight instead. I'll start there in june and I'll be working with somewhat similar things as today at Ericsson.
I don't regret the time at Ericsson the least though. I've been lucky to get to work with very generic Linux things, both kernel and userspace things - and a lot of these things are also open source. What I like most about this work is that it's very useful knowledge in all sorts of settings, and very few Ericsson-specific things. I've worked on an IDE driver, an interrupt controller driver, PowerPC device trees and lots of other nice things.
I'll try to get a new Frodo/Wii release out this weekend. I'm starting to grow tired of this project though, so it's time to start looking for other fun things to do.
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| Critical mass in network gaming |
[13 Apr 2009|06:13pm] |
Having run the Frodo-Wii network for around two weeks, I can now make some observations of the usage.
- The pre-release saw more use than I had intended and is probably still in us. This is a slight problem since the pre-release and the final v9 are not compatible network-wise and the pre-release won't work any longer (but fails silently)
- Most people connect as clients and few seem willing to host games. Before I thought most people would agree over IRC (or something) with a friend and connect together, but it seems like most people prefer connecting to games by chance
- The statistics show that around 8 people per day connect (although the daily count varies a lot)
The last two issues together create a bit of a problem: Frodo/Wii networking still simply doesn't have enough users to allow browsing for active game hosts. It's not quite as popular as Mario kart yet.
So how should I make it more popular? One improvement I've implemented for the next version is the ability to send text messages to the other peer when Scroll Lock is pressed on the keyboard - the obvious application is taunting the other player. Another thing I'm considering is to start creating builds for other targets than the Wii - after all I'm mostly using it from Linux myself and it should still be portable to most other operating systems. The only issue there is where to announce that? I only know about Freshmeat.net, but I doubt that would generate much interest for something like this.
Well, well. I've been enjoying the nice weather together with Linda, eating out, doing sports and taking a long bicycle ride to Saltsjöbaden. Nice!
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| Fine dining |
[11 Apr 2009|02:47pm] |
Me and Linda recently visited Mathias Dahlgren's restaurant matbaren here in Stockholm. This is one of only 14 restaurants in Sweden which has earned stars in the Guide Michelin. Matbaren has one star and is the cheaper of the two restaurants Mathias Dahlgren runs (the other one, Matsalen, has two stars).
So here is a little something for all of you to swoon over:
That's around 180 Euros for a dinner for two. So was it excellent? Sure, but in all honesty I'll admit that I'm probably not capable of really appreciating this kind of restaurant. For visitors to Stockholm which are like me, I'd instead recommend Hermans vegetarian restaurant on Södermalm. You'll get excellent food at a very good price and also enjoy a truly great view of the old town and city center from the garden.
For those that care about other things than food, I'm working on transferring sound over the network in Frodo/Wii. It's technically working, but it currently creates too much network traffic so I'll need to look that over. More to come.
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| Frodo v9 |
[04 Apr 2009|06:02pm] |
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I've released the "real" version 9 of Frodo/Wii. As I said a few days ago, this one has working network support. So go ahead now and play some international karate!
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| Reaping the benefits of the big city |
[03 Apr 2009|07:14pm] |
Why do people want to live in in big cities? Why put up with noise, smelly cars and long distances? There are many answers, with work perhaps being the most important. One thing which does attract people is the great cultural and shopping diversity the big city offers.
Thus, while every town over 30,000 inhabitants will have a dedicated chocolate store, only big cities will sport a dedicated licorice store. Stockholm has such a store on Östermalm. I therefore visited "Lakritsroten" yesterday and bought various finnish, dutch and swedish salmiakki and licorice sweets. Good stuff! I'll be visiting regularly to get my fix.
In other news, I've also sent my zero-emission vehicle in for service to change from the winter tyres to summer dittos. I'll have one gray and one black tyre, so the zero-emission vehicle will look like something put together by an amateur, but it's starting to get pretty worn already so I don't particularly care.
Some Frodo-Wii news as well: I'll release a new version in a couple of days. I'd just like to add protocol versioning support to the broker and the server/client to avoid problems when migrating to new releases. I also made the broker generate connection statistics in HTML format when someone connects, which you can see here (thanks Nils for hosting the broker). I'd say network play works pretty well at reasonable geographic distances.
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[31 Mar 2009|08:39pm] |
I'm reading the article on the "National Ignition Facility" on wikipedia, a fusion research plant. Interesting stuff, but one detail caught my eye. From the article:
Because the precise alignment of NIF's laser beams is extremely important for successful operation, the requirements for vibrational, thermal and seismic stability are unusually demanding
So where is this site located? In Livermore, California:
Doesn't look like a place where you can expect a lot of seismic stability, but then what do I know? I'm sure they thought about that when they built the site.
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| VNC and profit |
[30 Mar 2009|05:35pm] |
As I said yesterday, I'm sick and therefore stayed at home today. That sucks for obvious reasons, but not as much as you might think. Staying at home doing nothing is just boring, but thanks to VNC, I've still been able to work today (with a little help from a BDI 2000 to restart the board when needed).
VNC is a piece of software which I think really generates large profits from companies simply by making the work easier to perform. Thank you, VNC!
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| More Frodo/Wii networking news |
[29 Mar 2009|03:51pm] |
I've had a cold this weekend and basically stayed at home not doing much. That generally sucks, but thankfully the sky has been uniformly gray apart from occasional snow and rain. Anyway, it fortunately leaves some time over for hacking. So I've been finishing up and testing the Frodo/Wii networking support. To get everything working well, I've done a number of changes:
- Package drops are a problem and are typically seen as graphics glitches. I've therefore implemented a refresh which constantly sweeps from bottom right to top left and redraws blocks. To avoid congestion, this is only done when bandwidth allows (simply pauses if there is too much traffic).
- To detect when peers disconnect, I now periodically ping peers from the broker. If they don't reply, they are removed from the connection lists
- poll is now used instead of select on the wii
- I've registered the c64-network.game-host.org domain at dyndns and started a broker there
- Plus a lot of small fixes here and there
I've also verified that the UDP hole punching process actually work - through playing Bubble Bobble with Linda in Karlskrona. I've also tested connections with people in north america, but the latency is really too high for good gameplay at those distances (and it also seems like input packets are dropped, which makes things difficult).
This should come as good news anyhow, and for daring people that want to test, I've built a "release candidate" binary here.
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