Recent blog entries for ole

I volunteered to rig up (and down) the stages by Frognerbadet in Oslo for the Norwegian Wood music festival, and am looking forward to hear some great live music this weekend.

Progress.

I am currently listening to Coldplay - X&Y, amazing album with great lyrics and music.

I met the previous manager of Microsoft Canada last week. Interesting person.

CA is the acronym for Certification Authority. Microsoft CA was the main CA in the world before CRYPTOCard entered the market. Not surprisingly, CRYPTOCard is the previous manager's new business.

I co-authored a paper on building a Validation Authority for Apache solely based on Free Software (mod_ssl, and OpenSSL) available on IBM.

On Sunday I was accepted as a speaker at the UKUUG Linux 2005 conference in August.

Yesterday I went to the statistics class in the Electrical Engineering Department at Oslo University College. I got ideas for 3D optimizations using the Wronsky determinant. More on this later.

Today I went to the "Don't Panic" security conference at Grand Hotel, but I found it boring¸ so instead of eating lunch I ran off and captured some moving pictures (3GP video) of the Royal Family driving in a limousin(e) past the Abel statue in the Royal Garden in Oslo.

Later I met author Erlend Loe in a book shop and gave him my card to another, competing book shop on the University Street, my childhood TV programmer Eli Rygg, and the HR manager at Norwegian Computing Centre at Aaker Brygge.

At last I got a free Granny Smith apple in the Apple Store in Dronning Maud's Street and finished a blue print of a new floor in Aaker Brygge.

Sure, Apple iPhoto looks very nice, but F-Spot and GPhoto will win Mac fans over to Free Software - when we have released Triangle.

Triangle is going to replace isync.

There ought to be written a GarageBand replacement too.

About a week ago we put online the web page for Gitarverksted (a new guitar builder and repair shop in Oslo). I found it on a bulletin board in Oslo. In exchange, the guitar repairman Espen (who also builds guitars and can be reached at +4748231661) fixed the neck of my electroacoustic VE660TSB guitar. Yet another example of how a service economy works.

This is an invitation to join the GNU Triangle project, the 3rd generation of the GNU system launched by Richard M. Stallman in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for "GNU's Not Unix"), and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small.

Today there lacks free software for downloading, editing and archiving moving imaging created on movie capturing devices such as cell phones.

About 5 years ago Daniel Veillard told me that future cell phones would be shipped with a digital CCD. Immediately I found it hard to believe.

Since 2003 I have been capturing still images using a cell phone, but the quality was bad compared to digital still photography devices with megapixel CCDs inside.

Last week I found a new phone featuring a digital video camera that not only captures still images, but also captures moving images in 176x144 or 128x96 resolution!

The device is also able to create a 1.2 megapixel image. Allthough the image quality is not really on par with a true megapixel camera, I must admit that the quality does surpass what I am able to achieve using a bicubic resize function and a normal 640x480 image - so some sort of voodoo must be at work there.

Contact me for details on this effort or if you are aware of similar or parallel efforts.

I have been testing various IDS tools and today I came across Tiger.

Tiger is a tool that can be use both as audit and intrusion detection systems. It supports multiple platforms and it is free and provided under the GNU GPL license.

Unlike other tools, Tiger depends only on POSIX tools and is written entirely in shell language.

Today we put the web pages of the alternative record label Cursor Records online.

Valgrind and GNU Emacs lovers

This patch (applied on subversions.gnu.org 2002/07/12) lets you easily debug code line-by-line on x86-linux using Justin Seward's excellent Valgrind memory debugger inside GNU Emacs.

1. If you run Emacs 21.2, apply the patch to /usr/share/emacs/21.2/lisp/progmodes/compile.el or an optional location.
2. You probably want to byte-compile it (M-x byte-compile-file RET)
3. Now M-x compile RET
4. Either put
   • this after Compile command: in the mini-buffer:
     valgrind -v --leak-check=yes --show-reachable=yes myprog
   • or this inside the source file:

     /*
      * Local variables:
      *  compile-command: "make -k; valgrind -v --leak-check=yes --show-reachable=yes myprog"
      * End:
      */
     

5. Finally, step forward and back in source files from the *compilation* buffer (of Valgrind error messages), using
   M-n (compilation-next-error) RET and M-p (compilation-previous-error) RET.

Enjoy.