Lego Technic 8880

Intro

When I was a kid I wanted the biggest and most complex Legos. I only got small and cheap ones. The series I liked the most were the Technics.

Last winter I was dragged into a kids store. I saw a large box with "Lego Technic" on it. It was a crane with motors and everything. It was quite expensive.

When I got home I couldn't stop thinking about it. Google quickly returned all the results for "the best lego technic ever". Unanimously the answer was Technic 8880:

 

This was the most complex lego ever. It had a REAL gear box with four gears, independent suspension, 4x4 with three open differentials, V8 engine with cylinders and everything. 4-wheel turning. One could study car internals from this toy.

It was said to be the most complex to assemble, due to the scarce instructions. Even though the instructions were 51 pages. Here's a video:

The problem

was that this was a 1994 model and was discontinued. So I had to buy a second hand from ebay/amazon. Unopened boxes went as high as $1000.

After 3 months of searching and bidding I found a 14-year-old kid from Germany, that didn't speak a word English. After a lot of trouble with paypal (the kid didn't know how to use it) I finally got it.

Assembly

It took me 14 hours, even though it said 7 on the box. I had to wear knee pads so that my knees wouldn't hurt so much.

Pictures

Preparations
Preparations
The beginning, page 1
The beginning, page 1
The beginning
The beginning
The suspension
The suspension
The chassis
The chassis
The gearbox can be seen, 1 differential also, front cv joints
The gearbox can be seen, 1 differential also, front cv joints
The knee pads
The knee pads
Suspension attached to cv joints
Suspension attached to cv joints
Testing the tires
Testing the tires
The engine block
The engine block
The car is functional now
The car is functional now
After 14 hours, it's like 6 in the morning
After 14 hours, it's like 6 in the morning

Time machine is not perfect! A mobile backup solution for OS X

There's this rule that drives fail and stuff must be backed up.

My main operating system is Apple's OS X. OS X has a backup infrastructure called Time Machine. Time Machine is a way to do a version control on the whole file system. In layman's terms: if you delete a file, you will have a version saved. Or if you mess up a document, you can recover an old version from the Time Machine. This is how the interface looks:

Also if you mess up the OS by installing something stupid, you can recover the whole OS to a state that was for example 1 hour ago. A week ago I had to test this option, because by accident I destroyed some virtual network interfaces and was too lazy to try to fix them manually. This requires an installation cd and then the whole hdd is restored. 120 gb in 50 minutes. I thought it could figure out what to reverse and do it faster without an installation cd, but I guess this is how stuff works. It worked perfectly however.

I have a Time Machine router from Apple. It's a router with a hdd inside it. Backup/restore happens via wi-fi. It works perfectly.

Note: when restoring the whole hdd to an old state, you should link the laptop and the router with a cable. This cuts the restore time in half (10 mb/s on wi-fi, 20 mb/s with cable).

Drawbacks: when a drive fails, I need an installation cd, new hdd, screwdrivers to change the drive and a lot of time for the restore operation (1 hour in my case). This solution is not mobile. The router is big, so I can't take it with me on the road.

Why would I want to have a mobile backup solution?

Well, I have an SSD drive. They tend to fail quite often and without warning. What would happen if I have work abroad and need a laptop and drive that sould not fail, or at least have a backup option? Should I bring a spare hdd, screwdriver, installation cd and the bulky router?

The mobile backup solution

No, there's a better option. Use a drive-cloning software that clones the whole SSD to an external HDD via usb for example. If the SSD fails, I don't even have to change the drives. OS X can boot from the USB drive easily, so I don't need a screwdriver. No downtime, no 1 hour restoration. Just reboot and the new drive kicks in. Well, it's not going to be as fast as the SSD:

I have a 120gb SSD with a 750 gb HDD for a mobile backup. The backup is 120gb, 200gb if I want some history of the most changed files (yes, the software can even do versioning and incremental backup). What should I do with the rest? Split the drive and have some extra space. Now I have a mobile backup with enough space to bring a ton of music or TED hd lectures.

The two softwares I know that can do that are Carbon Copy Cloner (ccc) and SuperDuper! (yes, the exclamation mark is part of the name). CCC is free, that's what I use. Easy to setup. I did all in an hour. I even rebooted to see whether the backup drive would work. It worked like a charm. It copies with around ~30mb/s.

I have not tested SuperDuper!, but it has great reviews, especially the support, they say, is awesome.

Вещите от миналото

Днес измислих нещо.

Докато почиствах днес, се издразних на разни шкафове пълни с вещи. Разни стари лекции, стари инструменти, стари документи, разпръснати. Беше пълно и със стара техника.

Та реших да разчистя. Първо, старите визитки, оставих си по 2 от всяка за спомен, другите - на боклука. Разни стари монети, пак по две, другите на боклука. Изхвърлих стари инструменти. Изобщо, правилото беше следното - всяка вещ, до която се докопам, се замислям от колко отдавна не съм я ползвал, ако се окаже прекалено дълго - на боклука. Има изключения, но те са много малко.

После документите, доста от тях бяха вече безсмислени. Останалите подредени и доста ясно надписани в папка.

После старата техника - стара, но професионална лан карта, уи-фи карта, хдд, кабели, кабели, още кабели, клавиатура. Мислех да ги подарявам, но така и не намерих време, а тия вещи са доста безсмислени вече. На боклука.

Стари тетрадки, списания, дори една книга за Бойко Борисов замина (подарък от стария хазяйн).

Преди време успях от всички компютри, които имам, да събера всичко ценно и да го набутам на един лаптопРазкарах всички други машини. В друг момент се оказа, че мега големият портфейл, който нося, също не е нужен. Половината от съдържанието му не беше важно. Сега се движа със щипка за пари и лична карта. Документите за мотора са залепени от вътрешната страна на каската.

След 4 торби с боклуци се замислих за следното: голяма част от тия вещи дълго чакаха да им отдам дължимото внимание - да ги подредя, подаря, разглобя и т.н. Дори да си поиграя с тях. Тоест ми висяха като задачи.

Всъщност всички тия вещи ме разсейваха от важното, от основната цел. А основната цел не е свързана с тия вещи. Половината от тях бяха неща с някаква историческа стойност за мен. Голяма част от тях заминаха, каквото имам онлайн ще остане, другото тежи, влачи ме назад, безполезен багаж е. Не съм мобилен и гъвкав. Трябва да се съобразявам.

Сега съм по-лек. Смятам с всички други вещи да направя така. Каквото мога да го сложа онлайн и ако е ценно, то някой да го ползва, но да си държа разни неща заключени в шкаф - тотална безмислица. Усещането е като да се обръснеш нула номер - става ти изведнъж леко, усеща се всеки бриз, можеш да полетиш. Това, което те е притискало преди това, вече го няма.

Сега трябва да направя същото с другата стая - дрехи, обувки. Трябва да разкарам едно nintendo wii, пейнтбол пушка, сноуборд, голям монитор, авто тонколона. Ако не се наканя да ги продам в някой сайт, или ще ги подаря или просто ще ги изхвърля.

Представям си перфектния дом само с вещи, които употребям често - рутер, лаптоп, нескафе, микровълнова, китара (приближава се скоростно към неупотрябяваните вещи), малко, но хубави, дрехи и другите маловажни неща - пералня, легло, т.н.

Трябват ми още няколко дни да изтрещя като днес и доста други неща ще си заминат.

Review: codinghorror

Jeff Atwood, the author of the aforementioned blog is awesome. He's as good as Joel On Software (todo: link to the review page here). I found him quite late - I follow Joel for so many years now. Jeff is a must for everyone who calls himself developer. He's smart, he writes very well, he's practical. The last thing I read was a piece about keyboards. And he references old articles about keyboards - he's written on the subject like 5 times. Wow, that's kind of refreshing.

A must: Coding Horror.

Как да изберем най-добрият абонамент за мобилен оператор?

Не, това не е реклама.

Един приятел е седнал и е направил http://www.gsmbill.com/. На този сайт всеки може да ъплоудне подробна разпечатка от мобилния си оператор, на който е клиент. Тогава ще получи отговор кой план, на кой оператор е най-подходящ за него.

Помня преди време имаше доста по-базова услуга, с която си играеше. Сега е седнал и е направил цял сайт и е автоматизирал процеса.

Услугата е платена, 1.20 лв за смс.

RichFaces presentation

This is a lecture I presented that is part of the JavaEE course.

The presentation was prepared by Radoslav Ivanov.

Exercises: RichFacesJSF1.2 project for eclipse
Installation: eclipse -> import -> existing project into workspace -> archive -> finish

Richfaces installation instructions for Eclipse in the presentation (ppt).


Gmail's support for multiple accounts in a single interface

I have multiple gmail and google apps accounts and hate the idea that I have to go through each of them to check them out.

There was always the possibility that I can forward them all to one big merge account, but then I would have to reply to a mail sent to mihail1@gmail.com with a mail account of mihail.merge@gmail.com and the user that sent a mail to mihail1@gmail.com would receive a response from mihail.merge@gmail.com which is not consistent (emails are made up).

Google has a fast account switch in the upper right corner, but that is not consistent, and google apps that have not been upgraded cannot use this feature.

Today I found out that gmail has substantially upgraded their support for other accounts.

This feature is found here gmail -> mail settings -> accounts -> send mail as:

First, you can "own" other email accounts with your google account, which means that you confirm that you own that other email address. For example I can own mihail1@gmail.com from my mihail.merge@gmail.com. Then when I log in to mihail.merge@gmail.com I can send mail pretending to be from mihail1@gmail.com which is very cool. Long time ago gmail used to say that the mail may come from mihail1@gmail.com, but really it was from mihail.merge@gmail.com which made this feature useless. This is no longer the case. But for that to work gmail will use the smtp server of mihail1@gmail.com (one has to supply user/pass for gmail to be able to login). Now gmail leaves no trace (I checked the headers) of the account the mail was really sent from - I always add reply-to address when I own an email, haven't tested it without supplying.

Second, gmail automatically sets the from field when sending a message. This feature is really cool. If I login to gmail with mihail.merge@gmail.com and receive a message sent to mihail1@gmail.com and click reply, gmail will automatically set the from: field to mihail1@gmail.com even though I'm logged as mihail.merge@gmail.com. This makes this feature an awesome one. Thus the guy that is sending mail to mihail1@gmail.com would have no idea I'm logged to gmail as mihail.merge.

The last thing, how to get the mail from mihail1 to mihail.merge? I use the forward feature. It works fine. Gmail allows me to add a mail and check for incoming mail via pop or imap, but does that with a timer, which would mean mail would arrive more slowly. This might have changed since I last used it.

Adding filters to sort mail makes this feature complete.

Conclusion: it's now easy to use one gmail account that can receive and now send mail from multiple accounts. Great work, Google.

Disable session persistence in Tomcat

This a pretty common issue when running java web applications on Tomcat. One puts an object into session and after a restart one gets:

Caused by: java.io.NotSerializableException: java.lang.Object

It may not always be java.lang.Object, any class not implementing java.io.Serializable could be in this error.

This is due to Tomcat's default behavior of serializing all the sessions and after restart trying to deserialize them. (A good question is how does tomcat serialize them in the first place, but no time to research that).

The solution is pretty simple, find tomcat_dir/conf/context.xml and find a place where it says:

<!-- Uncomment this to disable session persistence across Tomcat restarts -->

This works for both Tomcat 6 and Tomcat 7. Tomcat guys did the effort to prepare everything so it's easy for us.

This solution deserves a blog post because every once in a while I get bugged by this problem and have forgotten the solution. Now I know where to search for one.

Howto start tomcat on port 80 without root privileges on linux

Opening ports below 1024 on a *nix machine requires root privileges. If the application opening the port is exploited, then the exploiter would have full access to the machine since the application was run with root. The way to avoid this is to run the application without root privileges. Then the application has to open a port above 1024. Then the real port (<1024) has to be forwarded to the local one (>1024).

This solution would work on a wide variety of *nix machines that route with iptables. This solution is adequate not only for tomcat but for all kinds of applications and ports >1024.

  1. Check unprivileged user has java in its path. Check with java -version
  2. Check JAVA_HOME is set properly in the env of the unprivileged user.
  3. change 80 to 8080 in server.xml. Check if tomcat works with startup.sh. 8080 may be changed to any other port > 1024.
  4. execute the following to forward the port: sudo iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080
  5. After restart, do step 4 again or make permanent (depends on the linux used).

The most valuable part of this howto is the iptables script in step 4. Everything else is a prerequisite.

Note: I have made this port short by design. There are many tutorials that are quite long and explain everything. This just worked with me. I read a lot to get it to work. All I wanted is a solution that works without much explanation.

Note: I'm not an administrator or a linux/unix specialist. I have found that this solution works and allows me to start tomcat without sudo. Use at your own risk.

Johny I hardy knew ye

I first heard this tune in Die Hard 3. After all I like Bruce Willis since third grade. It got stuck in my head. After a few days of out loud humming it was time to find it. It's called

Waltz of the Banker

After some time searching I found out that the original tune is actually a popular traditional Irish anti-war and anti-recruiting song. It is generally dated to the early 19th century. The original refers to the soldiers from Athy, County Kildare that fought in "Sulloon" (Ceylon - present day Sri Lanka) for the East India Company (in what history knows as the Kandyan Wars though the term was not familiar to the Irish). It has become a definitive anti-war song. It's called

Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye


Check out the refrain:
Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg, hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg, hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg
Ye're an armless, boneless, chickenless egg
Ye'll have to be put with a bowl out to beg
Oh Johnny I hardly knew ye.

There's one more version I found. It's a popular song of the American Civil War that expressed people's longing for the return of their friends and relatives who were fighting in the war. That's called

When Johnny Comes Marching Home

Review: Global Delight's Boom - boost mac's volume

Sometimes some youtube clips, movies or podcast have their audio recorded really low. My Macbooks' sound is not really strong, so when I listen to such a video I struggle to catch the speech - especially when I'm in the shower.

Global Delight has created Boom. It costs $4.99. A software solution to such a problem - it can boost the volume up to 400% and has a system-wide equalizer:

Here's an indian presenting it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiv-qHHeNw&feature=player_embedded#at=197.

Review: свеж блог за харченето на пари

Покрай станалия популярен текст за "хаковете на мтел" открих един супер свеж блог на адски откровено момиче, което разказва за неволите си като предприемач (ах, този Кийосаки) и мисли на глас за това как се харчат и изкарват пари.

Прекарах няколко часа четейки статия след статия. Това не се беше случвало от joelonsoftware.com насам. Авторът пише много увлекателно, но основната причина да е толкова завладяващ почти всеки текст е искреността, с която се описва наивното понякога мислене и самоиронията под формата на дописвания след време.

Силно препоръчително четиво: kadebg.com

Twitter is so addicting

I'm using twitter for almost 2 months now. It's so addicting. It prevents me from writing in the blog. Writing here takes sometime to think whether there's anything to write. Whether it's good and whether I though well enough what I want to write. While in Twitter one just shoots random thoughts. It's addicting. There's always something small that one want's to share. Twitter is perfect. I think I'm overdoing it, but the two people following me haven't left me yet. Thank you.

The past 2010

The past year for me was marked by serious health issues that were pretty scary for me and the absolute lack of energy. There was some planet or constellation alignment, I don't know, but throughout all the year I lacked power. Maybe I need RedBull or some other drug. Coffee I think lost its power to revitalize me in the morning.

Due to the scary stuff I had to endure, I think I value life more and maybe I know a little better what I want out of the near future. I'm taking steps to live healthier and I understand that the human body is incredibly strong but also easy to be broken if not taken care of. I eat better. If I figure out this energy problem I think 2011 would be a lot better year. So this is what I wish to myself. Also to be more focused.

Review: TED

TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is

a global set of conferences curated by the American private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading." (Wikipedia).

So actually TED are presentations in every field imaginable and most of them are really good. And some of them are inspiring. I use Miro player to download them and watch them when I have some free time.

Highly recommended.

Personal favourites:

 

Review: The daily show with Jon Stewart

I first watched The daily show while I was living abroad. I got only a few english speaking tv programmes and most of them were news related - CNN, NBC... The daily show was one of the three programs I liked - the other two were The tonight show with Jay Leno and The late night with Conan O'Brien.

The daily show is something I consider a time well spent. It can be watched for free on its site: http://www.thedailyshow.com/. It's paid in iTunes.

On the same site (Comedy Central) many other shows from the cable television may be watched for free. The most notable from them is South Park.

Ghostery

Few days ago I opened The Pirate Bay and was astonished to find it full of ads. Sometime later it happened with another site. Finally, I found the problem. AdBlock was stopped. AdBlock is the plugin that must come preinstalled with every browser. It kills (removes) almost all ads from sites. It's easy to use and to customize (add more sites or ads to the block list).

Georgi said he found something that could accessorize AdBlock even further. Ghostery

sees the invisible web - tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons. Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.

Since Firefox for Mac is awful. I'm using Chrome which is quite poor on the plugin front. But this one is available for Chrome and works pretty nice:

Mac OS X finally with a real Java

A quote from a newsletter from Oracle.

Oracle and Apple Announce OpenJDK Project for OSX; Java SE 7 and 8 JSRs Approved

Good news all around! Oracle and Apple announced the OpenJDK project for Mac OS X. Apple will contribute most of the key components, tools and technology required for a Java SE 7 implementation on Mac OS X, including a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries, a networking stack and the foundation for a new graphical client. OpenJDK will make Apple's Java technology available to open source developers so you can access and contribute to the effort.

Furthermore, the JCP Executive Committe has approved the JSR "quartet" for Java SE 7 and Java SE 8. With this ratification, the Java standard will progress through the JCP while the open source reference implementation will be delivered through the OpenJDK project. See you on OpenJDK!

-The Oracle Technology Network Team (See Team Blog)

This means Java SE 7 woud be available for Mac OS X too and that Apple users will receive Java as soon as other platforms dog. Also the four JSRs for Java SE 7, Java SE 8, Project Coin and Lambda Expressions.

WordPress, images and align="right"

Note to self: put this code in every theme's css if it doesn't have it.

img.centered {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
img.alignright {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 0 2px 7px;
display: inline;
}
img.alignleft {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}
.alignright {
float: right;
}
.alignleft {
float: left;
}

Supporting wikipedia cookie

I think wikipedia is a great thing. There are studies that it's and Britannica's articles are comparably good, which by itself is a great compliment. It's ads free, its interface rules. It's pretty neat and tidy. I always add 'wiki' at the end of a search if wikipedia is not in the first ten search result, which is rare. I'm not a committer, only fix some minor error occasionally.

These guys operate wikipedia only from donations. Last year they needed $10m to operate. This year I guess it's twice as much. So every year they start a campaign with a picture of Jimmy Wales's face. I don't think he's ugly, but the same face every year? This year they finally changed the face with a lady one. A lot better.

Everyone using wikipedia should support it and I generally dislike people saying that it's just another website. But one does donate something, wouldn't they at least give a browser cookie or devise some other mechanism that would hide the ugly banner on top of every page?

Как да гледаме iptv.bg на iPhone/iPad

Това е ръководство за гледане на телевизии и слушане на радиа от iptv.bg чрез iPhone/iPad. Ръководството е тествано на iPhone 4G, iOS 4.1.

Важно е да се обележи, че ако не можете да гледате iptv.bg от компютъра, няма да можете да го гледате и от телефона - трябва ви wi-fi свързаност от провайдер, който е клиент на iptv.bg (Мтел не е клиент на iptv.bg и дори и радио не може да се слуша).

Необходими програми

Необходимо е телефонът, с който ще се гледа телевизия, да е jailbrеaked (споко, законно е).

  • iFile (има я в Cydia, платена)
    - файлов мениджър
    - има вграден текстов редактор (за отваряне на asx файловете)
  • iPhone Safari Download Manager (има я в Cydia, платена)
    - позволява сваляне на файлове от Safari
  • OPlayer (платена, 2.39€)
    - видео плеър - да плейва WMV8 енкоднати ASF стриймове (iptv.bg ползва такива)

За съжаление и трите програми са платени. С изключение на първата, другите две вероятно могат да бъдат заменени с други, които имат подобна функционалност (FStream успешно беше използван за слушане на радио).

Необходими стъпки

  1. Отворете iptv.bg в Safari и се логнете (създайте си потребител ако нямате):
  2. Изберете си телевизия или радио и изберете разделителна способност (hi-res и lo-res). Гледането на телевизиявисоко качество дори и на iPhone 4G е с насичане, въпреки че разделителната способност се "събира" в екрана на 4G. Ниското качество работи гладко на същия телефон.
  3. Задръжте пръст на тази иконка,  за да се отвори контекстното меню и, след като то се отвори, натиснете "Download Target...", което е част от Safari Download Manager (показано по-долу). Без Safari Download Manager няма да имате червения бутон:
  4. Изберете си папка, в която да запазите asx файла (папката няма никакво значение):
  5. Отворете iFile и намерете папката, в която сте свалили asx файловете:
  6. Цъкнете на синята стрелка вдясно от файла и ще се отвори следното меню:
  7. Изберете "Open with..." и ще се отвори следното меню:
  8. Изберете "Text Viewer" и asx файлът ще бъде отворен с текстов редактор. Asx файловете са мета файлове и всъщност стриймът за гледане на телевизия е този, който е трябва да се копира.
  9. Копирайте избраният адрес:
  10. Отворете OPlayer и изберете "Open URL":
  11. Ще се отвори следната страница, цъкнете на адрес бара:
  12. Изберете пейст, за да копирате адреса от asx файла:
  13. Сега адресът за гледане е зареден и остава само да натиснем бутона Done, за да го заредим:
  14. Voila, вече гледаме телевизия. Това е високо качество и насича сериозно дори и при "избити" други приложения.
  15. Ето и други скрийншоти (ниско качество):
  16. Ръчното вадене на url-тата е адски досадно, но OPlayer помага като запазва последните използвани адреси, а линковете дори и след няколко дни все още са активни (не знам кога expire-ват):

    (Плейлисти не знам как се правят, накрая ме домързя)

Заключение

Качеството на гледаната телевизия е добро, няма насичане. Може да се слуша радио на фонов режим и да се работи с други програми. Аз започнах тази идилия, защото исках да слушам радио Витоша, а те стриймват само през iptv.bg и така стигнах до гореописаното решение.

Допълнителна информация: https://mihail.stoynov.com/2010/12/07/iptv-bg-on-iphone/.

Изпробвано и работи на iPhone 4G, iOS 4.1. Не съм тествал на iPad, защото нямам такъв под ръка, но смятам, че ще стане. Ако някой друг тества на друго устройство или с други програми, ще се радвам да сподели мнение в коментарите.

Вероятно същото решение може да се приложи и на Android телефони или Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry като се използва същото вадене на стрийма, но не съм пробвал. Всеки споделен опит е добре дошъл.

По-удобно би било ако iptv.bg предлагаха директен линк към asf стрийма. Не пречи да се пита.

iptv.bg on iPhone

(Ръководство на Български за гледане на телевизия от iptv.bg на iPhone/iPad)

iptv.bg is a streaming service for mostly Bulgarian tv and radio stations. The good thing about it is that it's integrated tightly with most ISPs (mine too) so the speed is impeccable. iptv.bg offers paid plans for even more stations.

I don't own a tv set and don't have a cable subscription, so usually don't watch tv. Rarely though, I want to watch a formula 1 race or a football game. Then I use iptv.bg.

iptv.bg offers the following options:

The first two expect browser plugins that allow watching inside a browser window. Since I use Mac OS X with Chrome both these options are not suitable. The third is an ASX file that could be opened with a suitable player.

VLC opens such files directly, but I prefer Mplayer. I personally thing Mplayer is the best player there is, because:

  • it can open everything. Very rarely will there be a file that Mplayer can open and something else can
  • it's the fastest and lightest player I've tried.
  • It has the best controls I've ever seen: arrows and pgup/pgdn can fast-forward/rewind with 10 sec., 1 min., 10 min. respectively.
  • It can open files that are still downloading and even index them (-i option) so that fast-forward and rewind are possible.
  • Can open URLs, user can specify buffer size.
  • Comes bundled with mencoder - an application that can encode/decode video.
  • Has multiple GUIs for different platforms - MPUI and native for Windows, Mplayer OSX for Mac.

The ASX files are meta files and look like this:

<ASX version = "3.0">
    <ENTRY>
        <TITLE>bTV - test live (368x294)</TITLE>
        <AUTHOR>bTV - test</AUTHOR>
        <COPYRIGHT>bTV - test</COPYRIGHT>
        <REF HREF = "http://medicom1.hdtvbg.com:8080/.../btv.asf" />
    </ENTRY>
</ASX>

(Medicom is my ISP)

The problem with Mplayer and iptv.bg is that Mplayer cannot open ASX files and in order to play it, the ASF url in the ASX must be manually extracted and opened in Mplayer which is very annoying.

iPhone and iptv.bg

Where does the iPhone come in the picture? Well, I tried to find whether Mplayer could run on iPhone and found an app (oplayer) that can open streaming asf files. Oplayer successfully opened asf urls from iptv.bg:

Some tips: even on iPhone4 the hi-res streaming is too processor-heavy to run smoothly. the lo-res streaming run very nice.

Oplayer too cannot open asx files directly so the url has to be manually extracted from the asx file which on an iPhone is even more cumbersome and annoying.

All streams that iptv.bg suppies are asf, so I guess any player that supports asf containers and can decode wmv streams can play iptv.bg.

So running iptv.bg on iPhone is possible, but can be made a lot more user-friendly.

I'm back!

After 7 months I'm finally back.

I've migrated dasBlog to wordpress. It's not trivial but did happen in only 2 days. I've lost one blog post and 2 comments. There was a lot of manual work with fixing links. Ironically the slowest thing was to wait for Windows 7 virtual machine (windows wanted to update which was a couple of hours of work and couldn't be avoided).

Windows 7 was required so that I could add some forwards from the old posts to the new ones (via powershell).

Update: The most important help I got was from http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/23/breaking-up-moving-blog-engines/ and from Mario. Thanks.

Review: Up in the Air

Long time no write. But no time for small talk.

Currently (unfortunately I’ll upload the article later) I'm watching "Up in the air". It's smart, funny, sad, moralistic. It's so good, it's deep, well made. So inspirational.

It's a real-life movie. Go watch it.

When I read what I wrote it sounds stupid. But the experience made me say it.

Wikipedia is there when you need it — now it needs you.

Wikipedia is the single most useful web site on the internet. I don't spend a single day without using it (the only other that applies is Google).

Wikimedia (the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia) lives on donations mostly. This year they would spend $9m and they may not be able to raise that much. Here’s the report for the last year:

wikimedia.finances

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/WMF_20072008_Annual_report._high_resolution.pdf

They want to keep Wikipedia ad-free so go help here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

Virtual machines and the HDD issue

There’s this common issue with virtual machines – the HDD deficiency (I may have coined a new term). You see contemporary processors are so fast and allow virtualization that they can easily handle the load. The harddrives in contrast cannot handle load coming from different entities, that is, harddrives are bad in multitasking. It’s just to expensive to switch between tasks.

Most modern operating systems have a mechanism called commonly paging. It refers to the process of moving data from the limited main memory (ram) to a special (most often) file on the disk. The main memory is gazillion  times faster than a harddrive, but limited, ergo the need for more virtual memory. Weirdly enough most contemporary OSes start using the page file way before they reach the limit of the physical memory (actual ram).

Contemporary machines can handle a lot of memory (2 or 4 gb for example). So why use a page file?

Switching the page file can be done like this:


then do that:

howto.switch.off.paging.in.xp.part2

This is the memory print of my vm:

idle:vm.memory.print with 3 browsers, outlook, word:
vm.memory.print.with.load

 

I think the handling of my machine (host os)  is better now. Let’s see if the impression persists…

10 items or less

MV5BMTY2NjY2NzQ0MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTEwNjI0MQ@@._V1._SX265_SY400_

Watching a movie has always made me want to share something and there’s always something obstructing me from doing so.

This time it’s different. It’s called 10 items or less. It has amazing music, it has an amazing chick, it has Morgan Freeman.

It’s a movie about how even the most mundane things can make one happy. It’s about enjoying life. This time I think I got it – it’s about enjoying life. IMDB says it’s about “how a positive attitude can change anything”, so I’m close.

There are some amazing moments, for example when Morgan Freeman follows this supermarket manager (an old Hispanic man) walking in small step a bit bent over.

Again a quote from IMDB – will “make you clutch your sides with laughter. It’s a rare masterpiece”. Go watch it.

Hacking the site of the cyber-crime fighters…

Ain’t that ironic:

cybercrime.bg 2009-11-11 at 15.54.39

http://cybercrime.bg is the web address of a special division that fights cyber crimes (da!). It is a division of the part of police that fights with organized crime.

Screenshot taken 2009-11-11 at 15.54.39

This could only happen in Bulgaria.

The site should look like this:

cybercrime.bg real 2009-11-11 at 16.04.53

Look at this zoomed part of the last screenshot:

Screen shot 2009-11-11 at 16.22.46

No comment

Update: the chief of cyber crime division denies the site being hacked.

Xmarks

Xmarks is the name of an old plug-in for Firefox called Foxmarks. Foxmarks is used to synchronize bookmarks to/from different browsers. When the guys made plug-ins for different browsers I guess they changed the name. Now it supports IE, Firefox, Safari, and soon Chrome.

Anyway it’s super useful, it’s free and it’s relatively stable. When you somehow override the new bookmarks with an old version (I happens a lot) it’s easy to restore from the browser (Firefox backs up bookmarks regularly).

I’m using one account for me and it’s ultra logical to create one for the office – now everyone has all the new links.

Also if someone is too paranoid, the plug-in allows to use a custom (own) server, which, if I remember correctly, was just a Web-DAV (or FTP) directory with some privileges, but when I tried it (a couple of years ago) it didn’t work that well.

Рубриката No comment: "Българският софтуер по световните стъпки на пловдивския джаз II"

2009/10/1 plovdiv.fair@orakgroup.eu

Здравейте Михаил Стойнов от […],

Имаме удоволствието да Ви поканим на джаз сешън под надслов "Българският софтуер по световните стъпки на пловдивския джаз II". Събитието е в чест на връчването на два златни медала за софтуерни продукти от иновативната бизнес платформа ОРАК R6 на провеждащото се в момента 65-то юбилейно издание на Международния технически панаир в Пловдив. Джаз сешънът ще се състои в нощта на музеите и галериите - 2.10.2009 /петък/ от 19.30 часа, в градината край басейна на хотел SPS,Пловдив /срещу магазин Метро/

За резервация и безплатен електронен ВИП куверт, моля направете онлайн регистрация на http://www.OrakGroup.com/GoldMedals или на национален телефон 0700 1 1234 /24 часа в денонощието/

Нека със световен джаз и чаша пловдивска бира отбележим поредния успех на българската софтуерна индустрия !

Поздрави от целия екип на ОРАК Инженеринг !
Очакваме Ви !

За ОРАК Инженеринг:
ОРАК Инженеринг е лидер на пазара за комплексни софтуерни бизнес продукти и решения за търговия, туризъм и производство, носител на златен медал от Пловдивския технически панаир за продукта ORAK R5 през 2004г., 2007г и на два златни медала за продукти от иновативната бизнес платформа ORAK R6 през 2009г . В България компанията е представена в градовете София, Варна, Бургас, Пловдив, Стара Загора, Слънчев бряг и Банско. Извън страната ОРАК Инженеринг има свои представителства в Македония, Сърбия, Румъния, Турция, Украйна, Русия, САЩ и Обединени арабски емирства. През последните 13 години екипите на ОРАК Инженеринг, в страната и чужбина, имат успешно внедрени над 5000 търговски обекти, ресторанти, заведения, магазини, складове на едро и дребно, разносна търговия, супермаркети, фитнес зали, бензиностанции, обменни бюра, фризьорски салони, хотелски комплекси, управление на собственост, СПА центрове, месо и млекопреработващи предприятия, управление на паркинги и др., които осигуриха многофункционална среда за работа и постигнаха висока ефективност и полезност.

Централна Кооперативна Банка

ЦКБ е банката, която работи.

Електронното банкиране на ЦКБ е едно от по-грозните - прилича на стария интерфейс на epay.bg. Но е стабилно и работи. И е достатъчно конформистко спрямо уеб стандарти, за да тръгне без никакви грижи на мобилния ми телефон. За целта от УЕП трябваше да мина на софтуерен сертификат на банката. Никакви грижи.

Едно от страхотните неща е, че мога да прехвърля сметки на друг титуляр на моето ел. банкиране и така да ги управлявам централизирано. Което ми се струваше невероятно.

Голям минус за ел. банкирането е, че няма email нотификация, но пък има SMS такава.

Обслужването в повечето случаи е добро, а понякога дори страхотно. При по-трудни казуси съм получавал адекватни отговори.

Таксите са ниски спрямо другите банки, които съм ползвал. Имам 6% лихва на разплащателна сметка с дебитна карта.

Та ЦКБ е работното муле при банките – не е най-лъскавата, но работи.

How traceroute saved the day

After a couple of days of struggling to understand why my laptop was the only one that couldn’t open a connection to a network resource. I finally found out that it was a mac address mix-up.

Sometime ago while testing I used my laptop to pretend that it was that resource. To do that the laptop had its physical address changed. Since then I have forgotten to change the mac address back.

Today I tried traceroute and got surprised. The resource is a couple of hops away, but traceroute said it’s right next to me. I should have noticed that since the machine was responding to a ping 10 times faster than before.

Thanks, traceroute.

Smart port forwarding

This is one of those it-just-works piece of software. It’s a port forwarder for windows. No installation. Easy to use. And it works.

Great.

UPDATE: first, the link to the software: http://www.brooksyounce.com/soft/spf.htm

UPDATE2: The site of this guy, Brooks, is interesting. Especially after reading about the software and then to see this guy’s pictures. The site: http://www.brooksyounce.com/

2nd birthday

The blog became 2 a month ago. Happy birthday.

It’s been a lot of fun writing here. I have no idea if expressing myself in English has gotten any better, but the whole thing is very exciting.

The best thing is that I haven’t stopped yet. There were periods when I haven’t written a lot but still – here I am.

I’ve been planning to write some tutorials for such a long time, so I wish to myself that I’ll do write them this year.

The laptop therapy

I’ve been told so many times by people who know me that I spend a lot of time on my laptop doing unnecessary things. I remember my mom trying to get me out of the house when I was ten, but I didn’t want to since I was playing Lethal Weapon, Dune, UFO, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom or watching manga.

I realized that that is true and I could be doing so many offline things. So I invented the laptop therapy.

My last desktop I sold to friend a couple of years ago. The last laptop I got (dell, mentioned so many times in this blog) went to my sister. Now I have a couple of machines with no monitor and a macbook.

So the laptop therapy states: “leave the laptop at work”. So when I’m home I have to do offline things. I’ve been doing the therapy for a couple of weeks now and it really works. The only minor problem is that my roommate has an idle desktop that is always on and always free so I get tempted to use it from time to time. Fortunately it’s so slow that I get annoyed after half an hour.

Macbook, the mac way of doing things.

After having a Dell Inspiron for a year (search ‘dell’ in the blog) and having issues with stability (battery died in less than a year, the power charger blew up, it started falling apart, heating up) I decided it’s time for a change. I wanted something very sturdy and then saw the new aluminum body Macbook. So I thought this was it.

I now have it for 6 months and I’m pretty happy with it. Battery takes up to 4 hours, usually 2.5h. The body is exceptionally strong. It' doesn’t heat as much although when Firefox goes berserk (100% processor time) it does heat up.

Switching to Mac OS took some time, but still a lot less than expected. There’s always a windows on a virtual machine, but I rarely use it. Mac OS is really nice to play with. And a lot faster than the vista I had on the dell (search vista in the blog).

I’m not an Apple fan for so many reasons, but they made a pretty stable and usable laptop. That’s my initial experience.

While in the states I saw the new one, with the only major difference being a battery they claim could support the laptop for 7 hours. I don’t believe it, but even 5 would be very nice. Especially for 9-hour over-Atlantic-ocean flights.

A new and more exiting way of going around (Honda CBR600 F3)

Last year I got category A which allows me to ride a motorcycle. A few months ago I finally bought 02042009014 one – Honda CBR600F3. It’s 600 cc, 100 hp, manual 6-speed transmission.

The motorcycle is a bit old, but it was in a pretty good condition. I managed to scratch it a bit, but as far as I know this is part of the deal.

Riding a motorcycle in Sofia is pretty dangerous – the traffic here is pretty bad and drivers are not at all disciplined. But it’s so much fun: it’s fast and very exciting.

Having a bike is pretty cumbersome. I had to rent a garage at work and one close to home. There are the clothes, the limited space for baggage (only a backpack in my case) and the outside conditions (rain, cold weather, …). There’s also the cleaning, the chain oiling and so on. Servicing it is as expensive as an used car if not a bit more.  So having a bike is very unpractical, even having in mind that the traffic jams are no longer an issue.

But it makes life so much more colorful.

Having mobile internet in a foreign country – one of the best things one can do

In a previous post I was complaining a bit of the speed of the internet bandwidth from T-Mobile which was something like 3-4 kb/s. Well is some areas it went up to 30 kb/s and stayed at 20 average. But that’s not the point.

Even at 3-4 kb/sec one could use the internet for so many things – the first one is Google Maps. Undoubtedly one of the most useful apps. Especially when you can search for your hotel just when typing “The Gershwin Hotel” and it finds it or just “Public transport –> airport”.

But that’s not all. We could check in online. I could work using skype (Skype for symbian is just too slow, so I use fring; Fring doesn’t support skype chats though which is kind of annoying). We could search for nearby restaurants. We even bought tickets online for Madison Square Garden. We wrote mails, send pictures to friends which we just made.

But that’s not all. The top of the cherry is another amazing story. So here it is. On my laptop I didn’t have Picasa, which I needed to upload the pictures to Picasa Web Albums. So I wanted to download it, but I didn’t want to stay in the hotel and wait for 20mb to be downloaded while the laptop was using the phone as a modem, so I opened the default browser on the phone and tried to download Picasa on the phone. The default browser couldn’t handle the javascript so I tried with Opera Mini. The latest versions of Opera Mini download files themselves, they don’t depend on the default browser for downloads. BTW Opera Mini operates by using a special proxy which “chews” the internet page to be more suitable for the Opera Mini browser. So with Opera Mini the downloads started and while I was enjoying Chicago in my pocket Picasa3 was downloading. I could still make calls, browse with the default browser or use Google Maps. I downloaded Picasa for Windows and for Mac, and I downloaded each twice to make sure that at least one of the downloads would work. So in one afternoon being in the pocket Opera Mini downloaded something like 60 megabytes using a connection that could sometimes drop down to 1 kb/sec.

Test blog post with Windows Live Writer

I’ve heard of Windows Live Writer but I’ve always thought that it only works for Blogger and Sharepoint. A comment to the blog (here) made me investigate whether dasBlog would support WLW. It does. This is the first blog post with WLW.

While installing WLW in my virtual Windows XP (I’ll write about that later if WLW works) I decided to update the blog. The update can now be installed with something called Web Platform Installer 2.0. It installs crap directly from the internet especially crap for IIS:

Web Platform Installer 2.0

(Wow, WLW can inline the image in the text. I’ve always missed that.)

So, let’s see how this blog post would look like.

Submit... (in this case “Publish”)

Update: this cannot be true. WLW has live preview that embeds the post in the blog, this is so f*cking cool. Look at it:

WLW live preview

Image thumbnails, resizing. Categories. Everything seems to work seamlessly. So let’s finally submit it and see what happens (I may start using this a lot).

How to set up networks and dhcp on vmware (on Mac and other OSs)

How to do networking with VMWare Workstation or VMWare Fusion?

For clarity, let's assume that the host (the machine running vmware fusion or vmware workstation) has the ip of 192.168.0.10.

On every virtual machine there are three options:
Bridged (VM becomes visible to other machines beside the host. It has an IP like 192.168.0.11).
Nat (VM is visible only to the host, there is internet).
Host only (VM is visible only to the host, but no internet).

Do ipconfig or ifconfig.
vmnet8 is for NAT.
vmnet1 is for host-only.
These are whole networks for virtual machines. If nat is chosen, then the VM would be supplied an IP from the vmnet8 pool.

DHCP.
If 'bridged' is chosen, then the administrator of 192.168.0.1 must assign an address to the VM.
if 'nat' or 'host-only' is chosen, then:
(I'll describe how to do this on a mac):

goto:

$cd /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion

stop vmware networking:

$sudo ./boot.sh --stop

Let's suppose vmnet8 is 172.16.57.1 and vmnet1 is 172.16.163.1.

I would like to change the network from 172.16.57.1 to 172.16.16.1 and I would like to specify a virtual machine with a specific IP.

We're still in /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion

Then:$ grep 172.16.57 *locations:answer VNET_8_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR 172.16.57.1

Then all files in the list must be changed.Then we go into /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/

Then the same: 

$ grep 172.16.57 *dhcpd.conf:subnet 172.16.57.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {dhcpd.conf:    range 172.16.57.128 172.16.57.254;dhcpd.conf:    option broadcast-address 172.16.57.255;dhcpd.conf:    option domain-name-servers 172.16.57.2;dhcpd.conf:    option netbios-name-servers 172.16.57.2;dhcpd.conf:    option routers 172.16.57.2;nat.conf:ip = 172.16.57.2nat.conf:# or ip = 172.16.57.2/24

All of them must be changed.

If a specific VM must have a specific IP we go to:/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf and we add the following:(get the mac from the VM (ipconfig, ifconfig eth0))

host myhost {    hardware ethernet 00:0C:29:B2:C9:69;    fixed-address 172.16.16.16;}

Then to renew the ip (ipconfig /release, ipconfig /renew for windows):sudo ifconfig vmnet downsudo ifconfig vmnet up

The last thing is to start the vmware networking:sudo ./boot.sh --start

Then to renew the ip inside the VM (ipconfig /release, ipconfig /renew for windows):sudo ifconfig vmnet downsudo ifconfig vmnet up

 

Nokia Maps 2.0 free navigation license for 1 week

While searching for updates I found out that Nokia gives 1-week free navigation licenses.
One can be obtained from here.

Instructions: a mobile phone has to be supplied and a serial key is sent as an sms that has to be inputted in Nokia Maps. Unfortunatelly +359 (Bulgaria's country code) is not supported (but Romania is) so I used a friend's phone.

Yesterday I tested the thing and it's amazing. The routes it calculates are better than Garmin's ones. Interacting with the software is so much better, especially browsing the map - awesome. There is voice guiding in Bulgarian.

The generally good thing with Nokia Maps is that it's free (the software). There are a lot of maps that are also free. Only the routing capability has to be purchased - it's not very cheap.

Unfortunately their maps are really poor. Bulgaria's map is only 4 megabytes. The Bolkans' map is like 40-50 if I recall correctly.

The blog as a knowledge base

Microsoft has a term "knowledge base article" which solves a particular problem or at least describes it better.
It comes out, there's a term http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_base

Today was the second time I use the blog as a knowledge base. I know I have stumbled upon a problem, I think I wrote about it, I search the blog - there it is, and it solves my problem again.
Great, another usage of the seemingly useless blog.