Lite skoj läsning. En ”artikel” som driver tesen att det är bra att en del stora programvaruprojekt havererar. Via http://twitter.com/barbiche.

Vi har haft så många äventyr tillsammans. Jag sörjer att du lämnar mig, men vi har vuxit ifrån varandra. Du har alltid stått troget vid min sida sedan år 2000. Jag har inte all den kärlek som du behöver just nu. Jag tackar för den tid som varit och hoppas att din nya kille tar väl hand om dig och ger dig det du behöver. För jag vet att du kan länge till. Fridens liljor.

Avhandlingsskrivning, sommar, flytt, pappaledig… De senaste månaderna har inte varit de mest intellektuellt stimulerande i mitt liv. Kanske är det därför som det kändes så underbart mentalt förfriskande att läsa lite essäer av Paul Graham. Gör det du oxå!

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

In relation to the previous post… There’s more impressive work. This is the limb from Touch Bionics in Scotland. BBC, do I need to say more… Unfortunatly the Youtube version is cut and I have not yet found the whole program on the internet. There are also some interesting user stories on Viddler.

Featured on BBC Breakfast:

This was really cool! Nice prosthetics overview. Impressive project. Control is the problem and they have come slightly further than mentioned on CBS.

Updated: More thourough investigations into power consumption shows that it is perhaps not quite as bad as it seems below. The meter used below seems to have quite a large error when there is a large difference in phase between voltage and current… So the figures below should probably be seen as wort case using a cos(phi) close to one, which is not always the case.

A friend of mine let me borrow his power meter under the condition that I posted the results here. So here we go. The meter does not have absolute accuracy, but I’d guess the values below are within a watt or so.

• Brodband Router (with phone connection) – Inteno (Bredbandsbolaget standard)
  On: ~5W
• NAS – WD MyBook World II 1TB
  Power adapter alone: 4W
  Turned off: 3+4=7W
  Sleeping: 8+4=12W
  Streaming music, network sharing: 12+4=16W
• Printer – Epson Stylus Photo R200
  Turned off: ~0 W
  On, no print job: 4W
• USB Hub 4 Ports – Deltaco UH-410 with separate power supply
  On: ~0W
• Wlan router – Apple Airport Extreme
  On: 14W
• Homeplug — Netgear HD Ethernet Adapter HDX101
  On: 7W (each)
• External har drive – old 2.5″ laptop drive connected to Airport
  Sleep: ~0W (power from USB hub)
• Computer – Apple Power Book 15 G4
  Sleep: ~5W
  Idle: ~25W
• Router/Music streamer – Apple Airport Express (APX)
  On, not streaming: ~2W
• Radio – Denon TU-225
  Off: ~0W
• Amplifier – Nad C350
  Off: ~0W
  On, not playing any music: ~31W
• DVD player – Pioneer DV-410V
  Off: ~2W
• ”Power Saving” switching outlet from Clas Ohlson
  Always: 7W (Seems this is not quite true, cos(fi)=0.1 or so and the meter does not get that)
• Phone – Siemens Gigaset 3010 Micro
  Base station, not charging: ~4W

That’s it. That means that if I keep my home network and NAS up 24/7, the power consumption is at 40W in standby, not including the custom broadband router used for my internet connection and telephone. That’s probably another 10-15W. Counting on 50W and assuming a power cost of SEK1/kWh, it adds up to more than SEK1 each day. Yikes.

The wickedest thing… When enabling desktop effects on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, Matlab Simulink has serious difficulties in perceiving the mouse clicks.

Symptoms:
1. A single quick mouse click has no effect
2. Double clicks must be REALLY slow to have the desired effect
3. Add to this significant delays and generally very unresponsive behaviour

The remedy is to turn off desktop effects in the ubuntu desktop (System->Preferences->Appearance). The sad thing is that I really enjoyed those visual effects.

Perhaps desktop effects can be turned of for certain applications only? Well, well, back to work…

It seems the system settings accessible through the kUbuntu GUI does not suffice to change the default system language, or at least it is not as intuitive as it should be. As this is the language used at the login screen and especially in the Konsole, it can be horribly annoying.

You can check your locale setting using

% locale

To fix it the hard way, just edit

/etc/default/locale

to you liking or use

update-locale

and reboot.

Suddenly I got a new error message and could not add any items to my keychain. The error message also mentions something on file access…

”An error has occurred. Unable to add an item to the current keychain.” or in swedish ”Ett fel inträffade. Kunde inte lägga till ett objekt till den aktuella nyckelringen.”

The solution was nowhere to be found, but using the terminal, it can be fixed easily by setting the right permissions for the keychain. Somehow, it seems the permissions are wrong. I doubt they have changed, so most likely Apple changed something in Keychain access. But am I just guessing here…

$ cd Library/Keychains/
$ ls -l
total 232
-rw-r--r--  1 root  staff    27K  8 Dec 20:30 yourKeychainName.keychain
-rw-r--r--  1 yourUser   staff    86K 16 Jan 19:38 login.keychain
$ sudo chown yourUser yourKeychainName.keychain
Password:
$ ls -l
total 232
-rw-r--r--  1 yourUser staff    27K  8 Dec 20:30 yourKeychainName.keychain
-rw-r--r--  1 yourUser staff    86K 16 Jan 19:38 login.keychain

Man ser vad man vill se och inget annat. Ibland.