Month: May 2008

Writing in English or Norwegian?

Tobias has a post about wether he should choose one language and stick to that at his blog, or if he should keep mixing norwegian and english like he does now. I’ve given this issue quite a bit of thought as I’m currently writing my blog in English, but I write professionally (for Gamer.no) using Norwegian and I’ve written several starter articles and documentation tidbits in Norwegian (most of this material is also already extensivly covered in English).

The reasoning behind writing my blog in English is that most articles I write is meant to serve as a resource for both myself and other people who are experiencing the same issues and searches for help through search engines like Google and Yahoo!. I feel that by writing my blog in English, I make the information available to as many people that I’m able to reach. I’ve several times stumbled across help on non-english blogs, and although translation tools are available, they tend to make things a bit more confusing. Using English as my primary language on my blog also enables me to participate in discussions and writing posts that are aimed at the general user groups of my fields of expertise.

Although I’ve decided to keep my blog English, I will post the occasional article in Norwegian. I’ll keep these to a category by itself on the blog, and I’ll keep them away from the front page (but I may write a short summary in English and keep link to the Norwegian post). This way I’ll keep the blog as a useful resource both to those who come here from a search engine and to those who subscribe to my RSS feed. If you read an English post and then got Norwegian articles in your RSS feed, you’d probably be confused and start wondering about how you could unsubscribe. The signal/noise ratio for this blog would exceed what you’d find acceptable.

So Tobias, my suggestion: stick to one language on the front page, but provide a category for posts in the other language. Provide an RSS feed for each language and one that merges both languages (for those of us that are bilingual) if you decide to write in two different languages. And never mix languages in the same post (<pun>except for programming languages</pun>).

Wether that language should be English or Norwegian will have to depend on your goal for the blog and who you’re writing for.

Video Browsing By Direct Manipulation

Just got pasted a link about this very neat way to navigate through videos and their playback, Video Browsing By Direct Manipulation. Haven’t read the paper yet (it’s linked on the same page) but it seems that they’re recognizing objects through several frames, and then allow a user to navigate through the video by following those movements. The video says it all.

The First Presentations From php|tek Online

php|tek is taking place halfway around half of the world for me, but the first presentations from the conference is beginning to appear online now. The first three presentations are from Brian DeShong and Maggie Nelson:

While Brians two presentations were mostly familiar stuff for me, Maggie’s presentation touched something that has troubled me time over and again, and that Christer and me has been looking for a good solution to. We’re currently experiencing the problems described, and I’ve been searching several times for a good tool to generate sqldiffs (and not for the _values_ of most of the tables). I’m waiting eagerly for the first release, and as soon as things are up and running, I’ll look into if there’s anything I can contribute.

123-meming with Christer

Christer (thanks a lot, fscker) included me as his 123-meme nemesis. Crap.

But hey, I’m all for propagating stupid internet memes, so I’m in. To quote from Christer’s page:

1. Pick up the book closest to you
2. Open page 123
3. Find the 5th sentence…
4. …and publish the next three sentences
5. Link to 5 other bloggers and tell who linked you

Well, the closest book as I were reading quietly along on my RSS-reader was “Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions” by Gary Klein. We’re heading over to page 123 right now! Searching for the fifth sentence (hey, the chapter is called “Nonlinear Aspects of Problem Solving! I like where this is going!):

Constructing a course of action is the component most people think of as the output of problem solving: generating a plan for achieving a goal. Regardless of how the option is generated, it will need to be evaluated, often using mental stimulation. The evaluation process can lead to adoption of the option, result in selecting between options, or identify new barriers and opportunities, thereby triggering additional problem solving.

So there you have it (in fact, it was a complete paragraph. Yey for that!).

I’ll hand the meme over to Kristian, Ole, Jan-Petter and Thomas (see Christer, I even have more people to hand it over too. I pwnz0rz.).

Memcache Stats

Harun Yayli has a post up about a PHP application for retrieving and presenting memcache stats from several servers. The interface is built on the familiar apc.php which is included with APC (Alternative PHP Cache, a PHP bytecode / shared memory storage cache), and should be easy to navigate for anyone who have used apc.php. The stats shown in the application includes total space available, memcache usage, hits, misses, uptime and other interesting information.

Penny Arcade Adventures Episode 1

Although Christer may be in Chicago for php|tek, at least I’ve gotten a head start at Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. You’ll never catch me now! BWHAHAHAH! I’m playing the Xbox Live version, and so far it’s been quite fun. It’s a battle/encounter-based JRPG, with the bells and whistles that involves. The combat system is a based in real-time, and it gets quite hectic at times. I’m going to track down the real culprit here!

Discovering innotop

Stumbled across a post by Sunny Walia (.. I tried finding your name, but it’s not on your about page, in your title or on the top of your page, so I had to dig through my feedreader) about installing innotop under RedHat. I’ve never heard about innotop before, but after a bit of using the almighty Google (or you could just follow the link in the last part of the linked article), I found the man page for innotop. It’s a tool with an user interface similiar to the regular unix tool top, but for supervising the current state of your innodb tables instead. Several examples of output are given in the man page.

Anyone Going Geohashing?

The xkcd strip of the day features the concept of geohashing. It works by taking the square of your lat/lon coordinates (lat, lon, lat+1, lon+1) and then deciding the decimal part by hashing a date concatenated with the opening at the DOW index. The calculated location is the meeting point for that day. As the calculation of the points depend on the DOW index for that particular day, it’s impossible to guess the location the day before the meeting is happening. Read more on the xkcd wiki!

Anyone in Fredrikstad/Sarpsborg/Halden up for this?

Even More Programming Challenges

Estimate (one of the two conspirators in “The Rule of Estimate and Dibon”) directed me to The Sphere Online Judge today. If you’ve grown tired of the challenges over at Project Euler or just want something different for a change, head on over. The challenges ranges from quite simple to very complex, and this time you’ll have to provide the program that solves the problem. This means that there is a time factor present and you can’t solve the problem using parallell processing.

For those who have attended NWERC or another version of ACMs programming contests, this is the same stuff (“NM i Programmering” for the norwegian people out there). Go go go!