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Random notes from yet another Finnish nerd. This blog reflects mostly my life with computers and stuff, rather than my real life.

August 29, 2005

European countries I've visited so far



create your personalized map of europe
or check out our Barcelona travel guide

April 06, 2005


Greetings from Rome.

March 08, 2005

Sad Day For Democracy In Europe 

Today European Council totally un-democratically moved on legalising software patents, despite European Parlament, general public and the whole software industry strongly resisted the act. This directive is about to destroy a whole industry, making small software business and non-commercial development impossible.

Seriously, this case of software patentability has proved democracy in European Union is a joke. Large multinational corporations rule both EU and USA.

March 07, 2005

TightVNC & SSH 

Tried ssh tunneled TightVNC session from Win32 to Debian Linux server today. Getting it up and running was straight-forward:

I figured out some of these details after reading this article.
I also installed Debian package icewm and patched ~/.vnc/xstartup to start icewm. Desktop size can be forced by entering a $geometry entry in /etc/vnc.conf.


Biggest benefits of TightVNC over remove X sessions seem to be lower bandwith requirements and the ability to disconnect session.

January 19, 2005


test Posted by Hello

November 27, 2004

Sun JDK 1.5.0 on Debian

Now that Java2 5.0 is final, I decided to upgrade my Debian hosts to use it. The correct way of installing Sun Java on Debian is something like this:

# apt-get install java-common equivs
# ./jdk-1_5_0-linux-i586.bin
# mv jdk1.5.0 /usr/local/lib
# ln -s /usr/local/lib/jdk1.5.0 /usr/local/lib/jdk
# mkdir pkg
# cd pkg
# cp /usr/share/doc/java-common/dummy-packages/*.control .
# equivs-build java1-runtime-dummy.control
# equivs-build java-compiler-dummy.control
# equivs-build java2-compiler-dummy.control
# equivs-build java2-runtime-dummy.control
# equivs-build java-virtual-machine-dummy.control
# dpkg -i *.deb
# update-alternatives --verbose --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/local/lib/jdk/bin/java 500 --slave /usr/share/man/man1/java.1 java.1 /usr/local/lib/jdk/man/man1/java.1
# ln -s /usr/local/lib/jdk/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so
# java -version



The output of the last command should be something like
java version "1.5.0"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0-b64)

November 04, 2004

Slashdot on Photoblogging

Photoblogging was discussed on Slashdot. Most people didn't seem to be too excited about this concept. However, some great links were posted:

and also some photoblogs:

September 25, 2004

Trying DirectX 9 SDK (Summer 2004) on Visual Studio 2005 Beta1



I decided to give the latest beta of Visual Studio 2005 a try. I even updated the toolset with Visual C++ 2005 Tools Refresh. After installing DirectX 9 SDK (Summer 2004) I tried to compile the samples. Visual Studio 2005 succesfully converted Visual Studio 2003 project files. In addition I had to do this to make 'em compile:

July 17, 2004


A Scene from Suomenlinna fortress island Posted by Hello

Setting sun in Finnish summer night Posted by Hello

June 05, 2004

After some web browsing, I concluded the following list on choosing a toolkit for cross platform desktop applications:

June 01, 2004


A nice park in downtown Helsinki. Posted by Hello

So. Besides Photoshop, photography is all science has ever contributed to art. Here's my first experiment in moblogging with a cell phone digital camera. Posted by Hello

That's me. Posted by Hello

May 29, 2004

Did a bit of Perl hacking today. Encrypting/decrypting a file with Blowfish cipher goes like this:

use Crypt::CBC;
use Crypt::Blowfish;
open(IN, "secret.txt") or die "Unable to open for reading, $!\n";
open(OUT, ">message.txt") or die "Unable to open for writing, $!\n";
binmode IN; # for win32
binmode OUT;
my $cipher = Crypt::CBC->new($key, 'Blowfish');
$cipher->start('decrypting');
my $buff;
while (read(IN, $buff, 1024)) {
my $block = $cipher->crypt($buff);
print OUT $block;
}
close IN;
close OUT;
$cipher->finish();

May 25, 2004

gtk2-perl for win32


Decided to try gtk2-perl on win32 today. There were some rough edges but it went something like this:



Blogger software on Slashdot


There was another story on on MovableType 3 licensing changes. Seems like a lot of the open source folk are gonna move on to open source blogger software, such as WordPress, Blosxom, Drupal and LiveJournal.

May 18, 2004

Today I checked GhostScript out of CVS and compiled from source on win32, using Visual Studio .Net 2003. It went like this:

May 14, 2004

In seek of the ultimate archiving system for my digital photos I went through a bunch of image viewer/archiving software.
Many of these applications provided support for email and online printing / album hosting services, such as ShutterFly. While I don't find these features interesting, they might be of great value for some users.

May 13, 2004

Did some more fooling around with Suse 9.1 and my K7N420 nforce based mother board. The network interface aws automagically detected and configured using the forcedeth driver. However, there was no way I could make the onboard sound work with ALSA drivers (snd_intel8x0). NForce audio was properly detected, modules loaded and mixer set up, but there was simply no sound from the speakers (and no, the mixer wasn't muted). This seems to be a known problem with Suse 9.1.

May 10, 2004

Today I dowloaded and tried Suse 9.1 Live CD. Some highlights of its contents are kernel 2.6.4, KDE 3.2.1, OpenOffice.org 1.1.1, Gimp 2.0, Java 1.4.2_03, Acrobat Reader 5.0, xmms, Kaffeine (Xine based player). All and all, it really feels the most polished and consistent KDE Linux setup I've tied (at least when comparing to Knoppix 3.4).

When testing on VMWAre 4.5, the system hung during boot (something PCMCIA related) unless I selected verbose mode from the boot options. Go figure....

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