Mats Lindh

After developing a feature branch for Way Too Long, we finally reached our milestone a couple of weeks ago. In the meantime a few patches had been ported back to trunk, but most work had been done in the branch. The easiest way to handle this dependency in Subversion seemed to be to simply switch trunk with the current feature branch, and so we did. It works something along the lines of:

• svn del trunk
• svn commit
• svn mv branches/Name trunk
• svn commit

A handly little recipe can be found at BigSmoke: Replacing SVN trunk with branch. Enjoy!

After reinstalling the server (see the previous post), mutt didn’t show the norwegian letters ÆØÅ properly any longer (.. and yes, I use mutt to read my E-mails. Nothing else comes close.) .. The issue was apparently related to the settings for the current locale, but a quick check showed things to be perfectly valid (.. although not UTF-8, but that’s another issue):

mats@computer:~$ locale
LANG=nb_NO.iso88591
LC_CTYPE="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_NUMERIC="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_TIME="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_COLLATE="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_MONETARY="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_MESSAGES="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_PAPER="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_NAME="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_ADDRESS="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_TELEPHONE="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_MEASUREMENT="nb_NO.iso88591"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="nb_NO.iso88591"

Why didn’t mutt show the proper letters then? Everything seems to be OK .. Instead, it just kept showing “?” where either of ÆØÅ should be.

Well, the settings are one thing, but if the locale itself isn’t available, things ain’t gonna be any better. So let’s fix that:

apt-get install locale-all

And .. well, at least we have the locale available now, but before we can use it, we need to generate the binary version. Find /etc/locale.gen and open the file in a suitable editor.

Find the line for the locale you’re using and uncomment it:

# nb_NO ISO-8859-1
# nb_NO.UTF-8 UTF-8

becomes:

nb_NO ISO-8859-1
nb_NO.UTF-8 UTF-8

Then run ‘locale-gen’ as root. Wait a few seconds and the locales will be generated. Run mutt. Be happy.

The blog (and everything else hosted on this server) was down for a total of 8 hours tonight. We started seeing disk read errors in the kernel log on friday, and spent the weekend backing up and saving configuration files that weren’t already in the off site backup. My host (NGZ) responded quickly and told me to just give them a hint when the server was ready for the disk change.

We decided to stop postfix from accepting email last sunday night, after which I ran a complete rsync and dumped the contents of MySQL and other services. We’ve just started up postfix again, and everything seems to be working as it should (.. after remembering to start spamd and install procmail again…).

Oh well. Back from the dead to haunt you yet again!

We’ll have a few minutes downtime in a couple of days when we remove the troubled disk again, but until then, stay happy!

If you’ve ever wondered exactly which buttons correspond to which pins on the internal layout of the Xbox 360 Guitar Hero World Tour Wireless Controller, look no further! If you ever see the insides of such a controller and are wondering exactly which buttons are designated to which pins or wires, this can save you the trouble of opening both the neck and the base:

Green (A): 1 + 8
Red (B): 2 + 7
Yellow (Y): 2 + 6
Blue (X): 2 + 3
Orange (LB): 4 + 5

Attach a multimeter to measure the resistance between the two pins for each button, and you’ll see the value drop towards zero each time you press the corresponding button. This is very useful for debugging an issue where one of the buttons seems broken.

Good luck!

Strange problem occurred today, one of the very rare occasions were the behaviour of jQuery differed between Internet Explorer and Firefox. I’ve been trying to create a minimal example that replicates the behaviour, but have failed so far.

The problem was that in IE a click event triggered several times, which led an element to be expanded and then contracted again. This did not happen in Firefox. I found out that the problem was that I had placed my jQuery segment further inside the loop than I meant to, leading to code being duplicated four or five times through the page. After removing the duplicated function names and binds to .click(), everything worked as it should.

If you get several events triggered in Internet Explorer, but not in Firefox, check that you’re not accidentally binding the same function several times (.. while creating a minimized example that does this, I got the expected behaviour in both browsers, so I’m not completely sure of the reason). It might be worth a try as a fix, tho.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, the day that we usually celebrate christmas on in Norway. I’ll spend the first four hours of the day at work selling Hi-Fi (as I’ve been doing the last ten days (each single one of them)) at my brother’s store, before visiting my family for the christmas dinner and exchanging of gifts.

I plan spending the rest of the time until returning for work on the 5th of january hacking on some old code for pwned.no and a few other relevant projects.

Anyways, just wanted to wish all readers stumbling across this page all the best for the year to come, and please, stop the holocaust! (on a side note, our christmas tree even got a name this year: Svein. Might not be a good idea when we’re supposed to throw it out, but it could turn out to be a new tradition..)

Don’t do slow shit often.

Following in the path of the previous Golden Rule of Frameworks, I give you the first rule of scalability.

Kristian obviously has way too little to do while in Newcastle, UK, so he got challenged by his girlfriend to write a list of four items on several key subjects. And he challenged me to do the same. Bastard.

1. Name 4 jobs I have had:
   • CTO at Derdubor
   • Owner of Lindh Utvikling
   • Research Assistant at HIOF
   • Orakel at NTNU
2. 4 movies I could watch again:
   • Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (possibly one of the most beautiful movies ever made)
   • Memento
   • The Dark Knight
   • Toy Story 2
3. Name 4 places I have lived:
   • Trondheim
   • Fredrikstad
   • .. and that’s that.
4. Name four tv shows I like:
   • West Wing
   • South Park
   • Numb3rs
   • Bones
5. Four places I have been on vacation:
   • Hartford, CT, USA
   • Orlando, FL, USA
   • Jylland, Denmark
   • London, UK
6. Four web sites I visit every day:
   • Google Reader
   • VG
   • Dagbladet
   • This blog

As I’m a cheerful fellow, I’m not going to challenge anyone. But I’ll leave a brief hint that it’s about time that Ole posts something in his blog again.

(Bonus point: The first time the category “Uncategorized” has been used with intention on this blog. This really is uncategorized.)

«Estimate» stumbled across this awesome page with different string metric algorithms earlier today. Here you’ll find descriptions and implementations of Hamming distance, Levenshtein distance, Needleman-Wunch distance, Smith-Waterman distance and dozens other. Invaluable if you’re ever going to need to compare strings against each other and need some way to measure their similiarity.

As the most observant people out there probably have noticed, I’ve given the site a little face lift to bring it into the next century (so bring it on, 2100!!!11). The illustration was done by the very talented Anette Heiberg – Children’s Book Illustrator – which also is the one single person that manages to live together with me. A neat little coincidence there!

Anyways, the new design is dark, but I’ve decided to use the inverse header for each post as it makes visually scanning the page with your eyes to find the items _very_ effective. I like it, so it stays.

Happy Happy Joy Joy!