blog.dlade.net

Hackmeetup is dead, long live Forskningsavdelningen

Since last time I wrote anything here, Hackmeetup has both died and been reborn as something new. On the 25th of August, we got access to our very own little space in the house called Utkanten. Since then, we’ve been cleaning it up to make it usable for our purposes. In this process, Hackmeetup has also transformed into something slightly bigger and different. Instead of being a few geeks sitting in a meeting room and experimenting with software, it’s now going to be slightly more geeks in their own space experimenting with electronics, food and anything else we can think of that sounds like fun. It has also changed name to Forskningsavdelningen (the Research Department.)

There’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of setting the place up, but we just couldn’t wait any longer, so yesterday we started on the first project. This project is to build some kind of radio controlled sound system. The exact details of what it should become seem to be changing slightly as we progress, but that’s part of the fun.

The other part that I’ve always found to be fun (just ask my mother) is to take electronic equipment apart and seeing what it looks like on the inside. Yesterday was most satisfying, as we busted open a whole heap of speakers and then also disassembled my old DVD-player/stereo. The twist this time is that we’ll actually be putting it together again, and hopefully into something that actually works.

Other fun activities included burning up a volume control from one of the active speakers while testing if we could connect it again and playing blip blop music (of course including the Bubble Bobble theme tune) on a pre-existing home built sound system and a toy synth.

Hackmeetup, bigger and bolder

Yesterday’s hackmeetup was definitely a success. As Olle has already written, we had a new record in the number of people showing up. It was also the second time we had a theme, this time around hardware and electronics. I didn’t personally bring any project, but I had a lot of fun with Olle’s arduino kit.

The real theme for the evening for me, however, was derailment. Like how Olle’s and my project to get the arduino to play music got derailed when we obsessed around getting the correct notes for the Bubble Bobble theme tune and started googling for the correct frequency for a b (or h) below the standard c, and then tried to figure out how to convert that into a number we could use to send to the arduino. (It turned out that the conversion was really simple if you just knew how.)

Or when I was just going to quickly show off what Processing looked like and loaded a silly little project that I built out of boredom last week when I was ill. It’s a version of pong that takes the built in webcamera on my MacBook as input and bounces the ball against anything dark in the picture. Luckily the wall behind us was light enough to be a playing field and we ended up in a long deathmatch between my (currently a bit too big) hair and mickeprag’s sweater.

So for me the evening included a whole lot of silliness and not a lot of usefulness. Just the way it’s supposed to be.

Tweaked hackmeetup poster

Olle posted a hackmeetup poster over on his blog and ended the post saying that something about it is crap. I wouldn’t go so far as to use the word crap, but I agree that there was something a bit uncomfortable about the way the text was aligned. Since I had some time off from work to do whatever I felt like, I opened up the poster and started tweaking the text a little.

Now, I’m in no way saying that my version is perfect, but I think it’s a little improved from the one Olle posted, so therefore I’m making my version of the poster available here.

Thoughts on yesterday’s hackmeetup

We had 33% more people than last time, but the same amount of computers. This turned the meet into a more chatty one than last time. At the start, this annoyed me because I wanted to get started with my coding, but over the course of the night I got used to it and actually prefer it that way. There’s a reason why we’re meeting up instead of just sitting at home, after all.

I tried to work on a Firefox extension, and even though I have actually written an extension before, I started out from scratch because I couldn’t actually remember anything from that time. That period one year ago was fairly hectic and my memories from it are generally quite vague.

General hints on extension writing would be to make sure you get your install.rdf and chrome.manifest files right, since not doing so can both make your extension load without doing anything at all, and load and break all of the built-in chrome in the browser. Neither of these are very pleasant. And related to that last point, make sure you follow the advice on creating a separate profile for development. I didn’t, but it would really have helped.

In the end, I created an extension that really did nothing, because I couldn’t get the nsIWebProgressListener interface to do what I wanted. I haven’t given up, though. I might just have been grabbing what I was trying to listen to at the wrong time.

On the other hand, Olle and Ola sort of got done what they wanted, with a lot of experimenting along the way, a nice big pink border and a huge magnifying glass. So all in all, it was a good night.

Web hacking or something

I spent a very enjoyable evening yesterday in the company of Olle and Fredrik (who blogged it while we were there, but whose link I never got). It was supposedly web hacking, but the closest anyone got to the web was Olle, who tried to build a PHP extension. (So it’s suitable that it’s now changed name to hackmeetup.) Me, I bashed my head against Python for Series 60, building a simple script that would beep once every five minutes if I have any unread SMS messages in my inbox. The actual script that I wanted to write took me approximately an hour, after already having installed PyS60 on my phone but never actually having tried writing anything for it before. The remaining four hours, I spent on trying to build it into a standalone application that could run in the background.

I must have been really tired at the end, though, because when I tried it again this evening all I had to do was to fix one syntax error in my script and then everything worked.

The bizarre Residence Kristinelund

I was going to leave it at a few tweets, but this hotel just upgraded itself to a full blog post. Staying at Residence Kristinelund in Oslo has really been a bizarre experience from the start. When I arrived, the front door was locked, and I discovered after some looking around that there is no door bell to ring. So I tried knocking. There was no answer. After going around the house to see that there was no other door that might be the entrance, I discovered a small piece of paper with a phone number on the door. So I called it, and was told that they were very busy at that moment and that I was put in a queue. I looked around once more to see if there was anyone else trying to get in who might have called before me and caused the business. I eventually got through to someone and found out that I was supposed to have received a code for the door. I hadn’t, but now I had the means to go inside and find the reception.

It turned out that there was no one at the reception, despite the fact that it was not yet past the time when the sign said that the reception would close. Instead, there was a note on the door with my name on it saying that the key to my room was inside the room and that they hoped I would enjoy my stay. In any hotel room, the first thing I do is to look around and see where everything is. This time was no different. When I opened what I thought was the door to my bathroom, I entered a room that looked very much like the one I had come from. It turned out that room 103 and room 104 were connected, and there was no way to lock that door. However, the key to room 104 was hanging on a hook in that room, and the only other note at the reception door was for someone staying in room 106, so I decided to lock the door to room 104 from the inside and treat it as if it too was mine. I went on to look through all the drawers of that room too, and discovered that while there were DVDs and an instruction book for a DVD player in my room, but no actual player, there was a DVD player and a remote control for the TV in that room, and no DVDs. There was also a trouser press in that room, but otherwise they were very similar.

Since the door to the bathroom didn’t lead to a bathroom, the conclusion had to be that there is no bathroom connected to the room. And there isn’t. But there was a bathroom in the next corridor, so I could manage. The important word, though, being “was”. When I went to brush my teeth tonight, all the tiles on the floor and walls of that bathroom had been taken off and replaced with a thick layer of dirt.

Luckily, both the bed and the wifi are still where they are supposed to be.

Update: At 00:32, room 104 got two guests who were equally as interested in the door between the rooms as I.

Update 2: On the evening of my third day in the hotel, the corridor that used to lead to the backup bathroom I had found on the second floor was locked (not the door to the bathroom itself, but the whole corridor), so I had to find yet another bathroom that is even further away from my room.

Busy week

Next week is going to be a very busy one for me compared to what’s become normal here in Copenhagen. First off, I’m going to be going to Norway for work between Monday and Friday, coming back to Copenhagen some time in the afternoon. Then at five, it’s on to BarCamp Copenhagen. During the same week, I’ve somehow managed to set things up so that I will have deliveries coming with a MacBook (a plain old thing, because I’m not willing to beta-test the Air for my own money) and my new phone as mentioned in the previous post. I ended up ordering a Nokia E70 which, although it’s now a reasonably old phone, seems to cover a whole lot of what I would like to have in a phone, including being able to play with Python for Series 60 (even if I don’t particularly have a project that I want to build yet) and a qwerty keyboard that can still fit in my pocket. So for the parts of the weekend that won’t be filled with getting used to new behaviours from my dog and my wife, I’ll have plenty of new things to play with.

Getting a new phone

Despite having worked with developing services for mobile phones for almost six years, I’ve never been very interested in getting any high spec phones for myself, and I’ve been completely satisfied with my Nokia 6100 for a long time. A former colleague has accused me of being into retro computing because I hold on to old pieces of technology, but the reality is simply that the 1st generation iPod that I used until last year (when the accusation was made) and my now four years old phone have simply done a very good job at the things that I want to use them for.

Now, however, I’m starting to think that it might be time to replace my old phone. Approximately six months ago, it started to sometimes hang up on people when I pressed the button to answer, and since yesterday it no longer rings when I get a call or a message, it only vibrates. So with very little indication that someone is calling me, and an approximate 25% chance that I hang up instead of answering when I notice a call, I’m thinking that it maybe doesn’t do its job so well anymore.

My problem now is that I’m torn between the irrational geek in me who wants a new toy to play with, and the rational part of me who (with a lot of help from my wife) reminds me that I make and receive approximately four calls each week and send maybe ten messages. I also don’t tend to spend much in areas where I don’t have access to computers, so the functions that aren’t call or message related wouldn’t necessarily get much use either. On the other hand, I do have a Wikipedia addiction that does require instantaneous feeding regularly. And the geek does need new toys.

Mutant time

There’s an ad close to where I live for a watch by the company REM REM with the title Mutant Time. The model showing the watch is himself a mutant. Now, I don’t particularly have anything against mutants. In fact, I’ve spent a lot of time reading comic books and watching films, and daydreaming that I myself was a mutant. But I would never really dream of being this kind of mutant. And I don’t think the comic books or films would have been a big hit with the kids. At least not when I grew up. I don’t really know what the kids of today think, but it would surprise me if they dream of having fish heads.

What would a suitable super power be?

Danish and Swedish, same same but different

Ever since moving to Copenhagen, I’ve been mentally collecting a list of words that are the same in Swedish and Danish but actually have different meanings. One of them came up in conversation today at lunch, which reminded me that it’s time to take the list out of my head to make room for other things.

[1] - All my relatives (from the south of Sweden) use the word “grina” in the Danish meaning, but it seems the general Swedish view is that it means “to cry”.