Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

הנה כמה תמונות מהמצלמה הסלולארית – מה שאנחנו למדים שזה שאפילו מצלמות 3 מגה פיקסל של טלפונים הן לא תחליף למצלמה אמיתית (בעיקר בגלל שאין להן זום אופטי, אבל גם בגלל שהתמונות באיכות לא משהו למרות כמות הפיקסלים):

שק עם קקי:

(more…)

Up till very recently my main phone was a Nokia 6600 – which was getting very long in the tooth (I think it was introduced more then 3 years ago. My specific device is about 2.5 years old). I love the PDA features, the full network experience (the internal Nokia browser was shit but with Opera For Mobile and Mini Opera you can actually use the web properly), and of course – the ability to run Putty to get SSH access to all my favorite servers :-). Anyways, I was in a market for a new smart phone, unfortunately the offering in the market right now are very poor, mostly as everything is in a state of transition now – The Windows Mobile platform is moving from the horrendous version 5 to the quite usable version 6, Linux is poised to launch as a major smart phone platform with OpenMoko, Google’s Android, Palm’s Treo devices are aging and we hope to see them soon replaced with the Access Linux Platform (what was once Palm Source), and Nokia… well Nokia are still doing their thing but you can also see that they are thinking about new stuff – if you look at the Nokia internet tablet devices (N810 is the latest) and some exciting demos Nokia had shown.

But still – I need a new phone now and all these exciting new devices will come out – maybe – in middle of 2008. So I have to choose from what I have in front of me, which is not much. Eventually I settled on the Sony Ericsson P1i, which is a very interesting smart phone from Sony Ericsson and is currently their main business offering. I hated many Sony Ericsson phones I’ve used in the past, but I saw some new UIQ3 devices and they seemed very nice so I decided to give it a chance. It also helped that compared to the alternative – a Windows Mobile 6 device – it was about half the price. Then my boss decided that I also need a new phone and went and bought me a Nokia E90 (well – it was a very lengthy and heated discussion and eventually we settled on the Nokia), which is currently the top Nokia business phone. And so the shoot out begins…

(more…)

This is about phones of course – the difference is that with Apple, you have rumors then they announce that the rumors are true and there is a phone, but it won’t be available for 6 more months, then you get a closed box that you can’t even get more applications for, then 6 month later they announce that there will be an SDK, some time. With Google you have rumors then they announce that the rumors are false and there is no phone, but there is an SDK.

Yea, lame, I know. Well, sucks – this is the place that I write anything that comes to my mind 😉 .

I’ve been using VirtualBox 1.5 to run MS-Windows guest virtual machines under my Linux operating system (Fedora 8 and Ubuntu) for some QA and stuff like that. This post is a summary of my experience with this virtualization solution, mostly so I won’t forget the details, and as such is expected to be updated from time to time.

(more…)

From time to time I need to work with a Java program or library that requires some import which I’m not familiar with. Its often very easy to just copy the fully qualified class name and search for it on Google which usually helps identify the product that contains this class.

But if you know that you have this class on your system somewhere, and you are just not sure which jar file you need to add to your project for it to compile – this script will come in handy:

(more…)

I wrote similar versions of this script over the years to analyze all kinds of logs, but here’s one for posterity:

This script is useful if you have a log for which you want to analyze load over time – transactions per second or whatnot (the version below does this for Apache httpd logs, but it can be easily modified to analyze anything). For apache (and most other HTTP servers) there are many readily available log analysis software packages that do a much better job then what one can do in a simple script, but you might not have such software pre-configured or it can’t filter what you need or you just want to analyze something else – in which case this script will come in handy.

The script receives time stamped log events – each event on a line – and collects the temporal information for each line. Then it will dump a simple vertical graph (i.e. time is on the Y axis) of load over time in the resolution that you want. Its output looks something like this:

Oct 30 14:40:00 2007 |#############                                    | 3.8 x/sec
Oct 30 14:50:00 2007 |##########################################       | 6.3 x/sec
Oct 30 15:00:00 2007 |###########################################      | 6.5 x/sec
Oct 30 15:10:00 2007 |#############################################    | 6.6 x/sec
Oct 30 15:20:00 2007 |###############################                  | 5.4 x/sec

(more…)

The Fedora project is about to release a new version of the Fedora operating system – version 8 (its not called Fedora Core anymore, not since version 7, for all those who were living under a rock for the last year. Yes, I mean you Bryan and Chris). I’ve been running the last test release – test 3 – for about two weeks now, and I wanted to mention a few of the things I’ve noticed about Fedora 8. Which is mostly rants about stuff that doesn’t work as advertised, but aside from that Fedora 8 is a very solid release.

(more…)

In a vain effort to fuel my blog with some content ( 😉 ) I’ll try to get into the habit of posting some throw-away scripts I’m writing for my personal use (at work and at home). Hopefully some people would find them interesting, or maybe – god forbid – useful.

Today we have a script that will help you pick out a nice thumbnail for a movie file – this is useful when setting up movie galleries and stuff. Of course it can be done automatically (most gallery software that support video files has automatic thumbnail extraction) but they rarely choose the best shot. The script here below would extract 100 frames from the first 30 seconds of a movie file and display them using an image browser. The script would also open a file browser window – the user will then pick the desired thumbnail image and drop it into the file browser, and then close the image browser. The script would then complete the process by naming the selected thumbnail image to be the same name as the original movie (with a different extension of course).

(more…)

אני מניח שזה ממש לא חדשות, אבל פתאום גיליתי עוד חנות מוזיקה חוקית באינטרנט – imusic.

כמו songs.co.il של NMC גם imusic נותנים להוריד קבצי MP3 בלי DRM ושטויות (איזה מזל שאקו”ם לא מספיק מתוחכמים כדי לדרוש את זה) וכמו Songs.co.il, גם ב-imusic המבחר רחוק מלספק – רק ש-imusic לא מפחדים להתהדר בכותרת “כל השירים שבאינטרנט”.

זה לא שאי אפשר לקנות שירים בעברית באינטרנט – רק אי אפשר את מה שאני רוצה.

נ.ב. – כשמורידים שירים ב-imusic הם יורדים כקובץ ששמו השם הפרטי של האומן, ובלי סיומת – מה הקטע ?

ארוע חשוב, אולי, אבל בד”כ דבר כזה לא יקבל פוקוס בבלוג שלי, לולא רשימת התכונות החדשות¹ ב-Mac OS X 10.5, מערכת ההפעלה החדשה של אפל.

מי שיסתכל בעיון בעמוד (אין קישור ישיר, אני מצטער – תלחצו על הקישור שלמעלה) ימצא לקראת הסוף את קטגוריית “UNIX”, תחתיה יש כל מיני דברים חדשים בלאופרד -חלקם לא ממש קשורים ישירות ל-UNIX, אבל לא נורא – אבל הפריט הראשון בקטגוריה מאוד מעניין, ואני מצטט:

UNIX® Certification

Mac OS X is now a fully certified UNIX operating system, conforming to both the Single UNIX Specification (SUSv3) and POSIX 1003.1. Deploy Leopard in environments that demand full UNIX conformance and enjoy expanded support for open standards popular in the UNIX community such as the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) or ECMA’s Office XML

מעבר לעובדה שאפשר לפתוח דיון לא קצר בנושא האם סתם “UNIX Certification” מספיקה למערכת הפעלה שרוצה להשתלב בסביבת יוניקס ארגונית מלאה (וראה ערך פרוייקט פרוייקט אינדיאנה של סאן שמטרתו לגרום לסולאריס להרגיש כמו לינוקס כדי לפנות לפלח השוק הכי גדול היום של התקנות UNIX: לינוקס² ), יש לשים לב להערה הקטנה שמסתתרת לה בסוף הפסקה:

אליבע דה-אפל, Microsoft “Open” Office XML הוא תקן פתוח – ומוזר עוד יותר – תקן UNIX פתוח…

1. מעל 300! אם להאמין לרשימה של אפל. לא ספרתי [↩]
2. ולהזכירכם, למקרה ששכחנו, לינוקס אינה סוג של UNIX [↩]