Mats Lindh – Page 29 – Where desperate is just another word for a regular day.

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!

Auto Slalom With The Norwegian Porsche Club

Today was the second round in the auto slalom championship of the norwegian porsche club. Marius and I went as usual, and as this session took place just a four minute drive from home, we were on our home turf. My part of the deal was as usual to take pictures while he did all the driving (and well, he didn’t defend his 7th place from last time, but he’ll bounce back for the fourth round!). Here are a few of the best shots from the day, the rest of them are available on my flickr page.

Using MySQL Proxy to Update Memcached

Jan Kneschke has a very interesting post about how you could use replication and MySQL Proxy to mark entries as dirty in memcached. This way you’re able to expire the data from memcached when it actually is updated on the database level, without having to add another level of abstraction in your application. A very novel approach and it’ll be nice to see how this plays out in practice with 5.1.

Changing Styles in Adobe Flex

Just a simple note for anyone trying to change the style properties of an element in Adobe Flex: use the .setStyle method on the element you want to change:

progress.setStyle("paddingRight", (event.bytesLoaded / event.bytesTotal) * 300);

And on the same track: If you want to place the items in a box close together, simply use the horizontalGap and verticalGap attributes on the mx:Box element to remove any spacing between the UI elements.

Exploring Adobe Flex For The First Time

Adobe Flex is an SDK from Adobe for creating Flash applications based on XML and ActionScript. No need for Flash MX or Flash CS3, just markup, markup, markup and some ECMA-script thrown in for making it all come together. While I’m no fan of flash content on sites, this adventure has it’s purpose: making an open source multifile upload application. Every now and then I run into the need for allowing people to upload several files at once (think 20 – 100 files), and selecting each by itself would be really tiresome. The only good solution I’ve come across so far is the flash based uploaders, so well, here we go. The plan is to release the result under a MIT-based license.

Flex has been quite good to me so far. The UI of the application is built as a XML file, and the code is simply added as ActionScript in a CDATA-section in the XML-file. Simple. You then run the XML-file (MXML) through a compiler (mxmlc) and get a ready-to-run .swf file out. Works like a charm.

Trackday at Rudskogen with Von Braun Sports Cars

I went for a visit when the guys from the Track, Sea & Party gathered at Rudskogen Motor Speedway today, an event held by Von Braun Sports Cars. As usual when I attend a track event it rained, so the photos are a bit dark. Marius drove the GT2, so I tagged along with him. When we were leaving for Fredrikstad, he complained that the GT2 didn’t notice that he removed the key any more. A bit of checking on the intarwebs when we got home revealed that this was a common problem, and after a bit of checking around, the incredible guys over at Autozentrum in Oslo got him the part, late at friday’s night, the evening before the national day. That’s simply an awesome customer service, so if you ask where you’re going to buy your next Porsche, you know who you should call (give the guys at Autotuning Råde a call too, tho).

Anyways, here are a few selected shots from today. Get all the shots of the Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera, the LP640, the Porsches and the Ferraris at my flickr page.

Norwegian PHP TestFest

The Norwegian PHP User Group, PHPNorge, is hosting a Norwegian PHP TestFest in two weeks time, at the 29th of May. Haven’t mentioned it to Christer yet as he’s leaving for New York tomorrow morning (and then connecting to Chicago for php|tek). I’m going to the TestFest at the 29th unless something special shows up, and I ask anyone available in the area to join in to make a contribution. See you there!

Adding a Book List

I’ve just added a list of the books I’m currently – or have just finished – reading. Kristian suggested that I added a list earlier today, so there it is. I’ll try to keep it updated as new books arrive and I make my way through them. If anything in particular stands out, I’ll make a regular post about it as earlier anyways.

The list is available in the right column on all the pages.

Describing the Optimus Maximus 17 Years Early

Many people looked in awe when the first saw Art. Lebedev Studio’s Optimus Maximus keyboard – a keyboard with small OLED screens attached to each button. This allows the currently active program on your computer to switch your keys with whatever keyboard layout or shortcut layout you are currently using, and suit the visual appearance of the keyboard to what each button actually does. I’m not going to discuss the apparent problems with this and the Other Attempts at LCD Based Keyboards, but I’m going to quote a few sentences from “The Design (Psychology) of Everyday Things” which I happened to come across the other day:

Someday key labeling will be done by electronic displays on each key, so changing the labels will also become trivial. So computer technology may liberate users from forced standardization.

I guess Donald A. Norman were going “Yeah, I know.” when Art. Lebedev Studio released their first concept shots.

Gangstagrass

An usual post for me, but I’ve really enjoyed a mashup album by the very talented RENCH lately. The album is called “Gangstagras” and is an ingenious mix between bluegrass and hip-hop. The album is available for free over at gangstagrass.com, but I’d suggest downloading it through the Gangstagrass torrent instead, both to save bandwidth and help share an amazing compilation.

And if you enjoy the album, buy some of the other albums available.