| IEEE membership scam |
[20 Oct 2009|06:55pm] |
Update: This was not a scam and not spam after all (as you can see in the comments). However, I must say I'm not happy with the way IEEE has handled this.
Since my days as a PhD student, I've been a IEEE member. The membership has to be renewed every year, which is something I tend to do a bit late each time. This year is no different (I'll do it any time now!), so I was therefore surprised when I got a mail about my IEEE renewal:
From: IEEE@ieee.yourmailstop.com
To: simon.kagstrom@gmail.com
Subject: Your IEEE 2010 Renewal Notice
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:28:38 -0500
Reply-To: "''"
Within 24-72 hours you will receive a copy of your 2010 IEEE
membership renewal notice as a secure PDF via email. Your Password is
(my IEEE membership number) to access this document. Please save this
email to complete your renewal.
I wondered about this for a while until I understood it was spam (the From mail address makes it very obvious). The spammers are becoming better and better though - they know I'm a IEEE member and how to contact me. I'm sure the PDF will arrive now anytime soon, asking me for my credit card number most likely.
Well, it at least reminded me that it's time to renew the actual membership.
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| New internet connection (etc!) |
[22 Sep 2009|06:20pm] |
I'm finally back on the Internet after having moved: ComHems system for signing up on new subscriptions is somewhat broken. Not that the delay matters much: me and Linda has been too busy anyway to have time with browsing.
We've moved within Stockholm to a two-room apartment in Vasastan on Birkagatan (in the part called Birkastan). I've before only lived in rental apartments, but this time we bought the apartment - which is basically the only way of getting an apartment in central Stockholm. Quite expensive, but as long as the interest rates are low, it's actually cheaper than renting anyway.
The apartment is a charming and old, from 1905. It used two be two small apartments, but was combined into one. The disadvantage with this is that it has a long corridor between the bedroom and the kitchen and living room. The wooden floorboards makes it look kind of like a bowling court. The advantage is that we have the entire storey all to ourselves. We also live at the top floor and within the enclosed city block, so it's all very quiet despite being in a part of town with lots of restaurants and night life. Here are some pictures:
 
 
Oh, and we also have the remains of silurian life in the stair case.
I'm trying to get some time to fix a peculiar Cibyl bug (I've registered cibyl.org by the way). As before, Cibyl bugs often cause strange phenomenon. This time, I can't get past the age-check in Leisure Suit Larry 1 without compiling with the optimize-function-prologues-and-epilogues (the caller-saved registers can safely be skipped in Java). This is a regression which was introduced in last version (Cibyl 20), but I don't understand why it happens. Note that it occurs when the optimization is turned off.
Well, well. At least I've discovered that it goes away when compiling with this option, so some new Sarien/Cibyl improvements are imminent.
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| An illustrated guide to Mexico |
[23 Aug 2009|08:57pm] |
I came back last week from a three-week vacation in Mexico, which is why I haven't replied to emails in a while. I'll talk a bit about the experiences I made there. First this:
Yes, OpenBSD is dead.
The reason me and Linda went there was to attend a wedding between two of Lindas friends. The wedding took place in Tonatico, a village about 10 km from Mexico city. We came a few days before the wedding and spent the time in the nearby town of Ixtapan de la sal. Both Tonatico and Ixtapan de la sal are cozy places which (to me at least) look like typical mexican towns. We got our first fix of mexican food in Ixtapan de la sal, quite nice.
Since I haven't quite grown up yet, we also spent half a day at the local water park, which had a set of interesting rides.
  
The wedding was a traditional mexican fare, at least as far as I can tell. There was a big party all afternoon and evening complete with live music, fireworks and mariachis!
We also went to the Grutas de Cacahuamilpa, a huge system of caves close to Ixtapan de la sal. Apart from the impressive caves (some rooms are over 80 meters high!), the surroundings were also quite nice with lush forests and underground rivers. Our photos cannot show how impressive this place is.
   
After Ixtapan de la sal, we spent a couple of days in Mexico city. The anthropological museum was interesting, and we visited a set of nice restaurants, but big cities are perhaps not what I like best. The park bosque de la chapultepec was a very nice getaway from the crowded (but cheap!) subway.
  
After Mexico city we went on to something completely different (totally, completely different!): Baja California sur. From the metropolis to the desert. The first thing we noticed was that it was very warm, truly hot in fact. We started out in La Paz, where we rented a car and headed for the Ventana bay by the sea of cortez. We stayed in the town of La Ventana, at a very nice sea-side cabana-style hotel. Quite expensive though.
 
The car we rented was a smallish thing called Chevrolet Chevy, something I didn't know existed before. While many roads were pretty OK, we soon wanted to go to more secluded beaches, and this turned out to be a problem. Some roads were little more than some tracks in the desert with large rocks laying around and deep holes here and there. At this point we wished for a car with better ground clearance and 4WD. On the other hand, it contributed to a very interesting driving experience.
   
At the Ventana bay, we spent a lot of time snorkling, but also rented bikes to go around the town. Surprisingly enough there were proper bike- and pedestrian paths. During snorkling, I saw a snake and managed to scare Linda out of the water when telling her. I'm not quite sure what kind it was, but I think it's either a moray eel (i.e., not a snake), or a banded sea snake (a proper snake, very poisonous but kind to humans). The water was very clear, which is something quite different from Sweden.
 
The rest of the week in Baja California we spent in Todos Santos and La Paz. While Todos Santos was cozy, I really liked La Ventana better. The pacific ocean also had much more powerful waves, so swimming there wasn't quite as pleasant as in the sea of cortez. On the other hand, it was much more thrilling :-).
The very last day was spent in La Paz, and there I actually had to go to the hospital. All the swimming had given me ear problems. My left ear was totally blocked and I couldn't hear anything on that ear. Especially bad was that we were going to fly the next day, so I
went to the hospital to do something about it when returning to civilization in La Paz. Expecting that this simple flushing of the ear would be both expensive (relatively) and time-consuming, I was surprised that it all took less than 10 minutes from entering the
hospital and cost ... nothing! So I'm happy about mexican healthcare so far:
The last week was spent on Isla Mujeres off the coast outside Cancun. More snorkling, drinking beer in the sunset and reading books in the hammock. Also a very nice place, pretty calm despite being so close to cancun.
   
On Isla Mujeres, we also did some excercise: Running on the beach and around the town. Only three km each time, but since it's so increadibly warm, that's enough. We also rented bicycles and biked around the island. Fun to see, but the best places were still in the
town in the north.
So in general it was a great trip! The downside was just that when coming home, it turned out that I've lost quite a bit of training. I again ran Midnattsloppet, but this time at 47.48 - one minute slower than last year. I'm pretty sure I would have been better before the journey.
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| Behind the wheel on the Amiga |
[12 Jul 2009|09:52am] |
If you're like me, Mario Kart Wii is one of the Wii games you enjoy most (and also the only one you actually play from time to time!). You especially like controlling the game with the wheel and not a plain controller. But wasn't there better games in the past?
So yesterdays hack was a combination of these things: Using the Mario Kart wheel to control Stunt car racer:
(It's quite difficult to take a photo while driving as you can see!). The implementation was actually quite simple: I added wiimote pitch/roll/yaw orientation as analogue joystick axes to SDL. For UAE, it was then sufficient to add the new pitch axis as a horizontal joystick axis and things worked out of the box. I also added a menu option to turn this on/off, which was actually where most of the code went.
So how does it work? Well, it's maybe not quite the experience you get from Mario Kart just yet. I managed to win a race steering with the wheel though, so it's absolutely playable. One problem is obviously that the Amiga joysticks are digital, so you're either turning or not - you can't turn just a little.
If you'd like to try it, you'll need to update to the SVN trunks of both SDL and UAE-Wii and build the thing. You have the setting in the (new) input menu.
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| 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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