Sound and Complete - the blog of nitro2k01

Blogger aint the spot for me!

2006-03-12T22:39:00.000-08:00

Lately I've started to feel that Blogger/Blogspot sucks a bit. Why? First of all Blogger has totally missed out the tag thing. Tags are the new black! And wordpress has a better editor, and it feels as if they give you more exposure to your blog. Wordpress has server errors too, but at least they can laugh about it. I also have a feeling that Blogspot is just filled with uninteresting blogs and canned ham. It feels as if Blogger has been standing on the same spot for at least a year now.
In all ways I can think of now, Wordpress beats Blogger. So I'm moving, if I can just import all stuff from this blog. See ya there!

Opera, how I love thee!

2006-03-10T07:40:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I deided to take Opera 9.0 TP 2 for a spin. As a regular Opera user 9.0 was long awaited, and the new TP sure feels pretty stable. One of the first things that striked me was that Ctrl+N didn't open a new tab but rather a new window. This annoyed me, but was easily fixed.
One thing that could not be fixed as it seems is that shift+enter in the google search field, right of the address bar, does not open a new window. Annoying if you ask me.

So this is how it looks. Not much has changed on the surface since 8.x, but a lot has happened under the hood. The whole browser core feels, if possible faster than it used to be.

SVG rendering too feels a bit slicker. The changelog also talks about partial SVG 1.1 support, but I have yet to check that out.

This is the brand new error console. The Javascript console was appearantly renamed to reflect that there's now a universal console for all errors, such CSS and connection errors. This makes Opera's error console a very useful tool for web designers for debugging code and markup. And error/warning messages are more extensive than mozilla, and out of bounds extensive compared to IE's script error box. The window caption is "Message console" which reflects that the console is not only for errors but also warnings and general message. We have yet to see what the final name will be.
I found out about some gmail fixes in the console. Oh yeah, did I mention? Gmail does no longer crashes Opera, which it occasionally did in 8.x.

It seems as if Opera is moving upon a HTML based configuration system, opera:config. I'm not sure whether this will be an alternative to or replacement for the regular settings dialog in the future. Only the future can tell.
There are also other html-based "opera:" internals which have gotten a new design for this version, like opera:history and opera:cache, which have gotten a face lift.

Another neat little feature that I discovered by accident is that if you hover an inactive tab you'll get nice little tool tip with a miniature of the page in the tab. It's one of those small sparks of creativity that makes just love Opera Software ASA.

But what I really like the most in this TP is something called widgets. When I first saw it in the Tools menu I thought, "Hmm, do they really mean widgets?".
And sure they did! A widget is a HTML document, with an XML metafile, which is shown in a chromeless window. And what's more the background is transparent, effectively letting the windows or desktop underneath recieve mouse events. There's already a pretty great number of widgets readily available, such as clocks, weather forecast widgets and games. Everything works pretty stable, including translucency, but there are other bugs. If I close a widget, I can't seem to be able to bring it back without re-installling it. It's a neat nonetheless, and this might be my opportunity to finally make that yellow notes application that I've planning for a while. That'd require some additional support for a few things.

Another great surprise is that Opera finally supports opacity, not only in png images, but also for arbitrary HTML elements. You simply add opacity: value in your CSS.

This is black text with 50% opacity. This text should also be semi-transparent in FF 1.5.

<div style="color: black; opacity: .5;">
This is black text with 50% opacity. 
This text should also be semi-transparent in FF 1.5.
</div>

Apart from that the BitTorrent client is once again functioning, and this time we've got bandwidth limiting! That's about time. Although there are better BT clients, I like the idea of having many things so integrated in one application. Which other browser is an XHTML browser, mail client, BT client and RSS reader in one integrated app?

Stealing links

2006-03-09T01:08:00.000-08:00

These are links that I just stole from the blog of Wolfgang Schmidetzki.

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/43457/ShowPost.aspx - A very redundant code for deciding whether an expression is true or false. I especially like this section:
// need to set the result if it hasn't been set yet, we'll randomly decide true or false
// because there should be no bias.

http://www.thetechzone.com/?m=show&id=469 - After scraping off the letters from my qwerty keyboard, and then writing new letters to the keyboard using the dvorak layout, and then adding diodes to backlight another keyboard, I found a new wet keyboard dream. This keyboard, although having less keys, actually seems to be something I could use efficiently. For example, one of the things that annoys me with the standard key layout is that I have to reach out for the arrow keys, no more doing that!

Speedblogging

2006-03-08T03:48:00.000-08:00

Speedblogging was just invented by "Atariboy", and I like the idea so much I decided to speedblog myself! Read about it here: http://atariboy.wordpress.com/2006/03/08/speed-blogging/

http://atariboy.wordpress.com - One of the top blogs of wordpress. I don't know why, but I can't stop visiting this blog.

Http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/evolution - A link just dropped off by omniHAL an IRC robot that analyzes what people in the channel are saying and make intelligent or less intelligent response to it. For reference I told him this: omniHAL: Get free pictures of teen slutz to your mail [billgates@microsoft.com ] [Submit]

http://www.mybigball.com/home.html - I don't know how I got to this page, but it has the catchy title of "The trua adventures of Chad, the guy who was so much into super monkey ball deluxe that he decided to live in a ball". Well, the title says it all, don't it?

http://nocash.emubase.de/2k6.htm - A secret link hidden on Martin Korths home page (Martin Korth is the guy behind the nocash emulator series.)

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/leetspeak.mspx - microsoft tries to explain 13375p34k.

http://www.mangeman.net/ - That animated gif sure looks a little cool when it's sized up like that...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=49IDp76kjPw - The Simpsons intro IRL!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?d...362959167995041 - Makes a perfect couple with teh system administrator song.

Stop!

Does the word stop has to be in bold? Hehe! Great concept, thank you Atariboy!

I look like Hitler, have a monkey face, and supported the 9/11 attacks...

2006-02-28T08:37:00.000-08:00

There are weirdos everywhere. First off I nearly got banned from an IRC server. The story goes like this, there was once some abusive user with a nick starting with nitro. So for that reason they had decided to dislike all users with nicks starting with nitro, to avoid confusion in the channels. Unfair if you ask me...
But the funny thing was that they also seemed to make a connection between my nick and the 9/11 attacks. I was like, what?!?! But to them it was abslutely clear that the name of an explosive and year could mean only one thing...

Next weird thing is guy named Leif Reinius who is a member of Jehova's Witnesses, but also bears clear signs of some sort psychic illness. He's been more or less harassing me to join JW for some time, so I decided to act the same to him and try to make him listen to some music I enjoy. He totally flipped out, and after that he has hardly said a single sane thing at all. He's been calling me names, and he has also told me that in his mind I look like Hitler. Another strange thing is that he asked me whether I had been getting a monkey face "Like Homer Simpson" lately, something he also saw in his mind...
Here's the full MSN log (Which I extend along with my discussion with him) It's in swedish though.

Btw, although I don't like JW, I don't blame them for what Leif is doing. I seriously believe this guy is mentally ill and needs help.

Voagra!

2006-02-10T13:22:00.000-08:00

Former rpesident Bill Klinton uses Voagra! Order voagra now!
Order now!

nitro2k01 to play live at Deadline seppukku!

2006-02-10T05:04:00.000-08:00

Yep, I'll be playing gameboy music live at this years edition of Deadline, Deadline Seppukku. Deadline is an annual Stockholm-based demo party, and this years edition takes place at Nymble KTH, (Stockholm, Sweden) 3-5 March 2006. My show will be 9-10 PM Saturday 4 March. Come and enjoy, will you!

Poem 2

2006-02-07T07:51:00.000-08:00

Let me out!
I'm trapped.
Trapped in the lucid dreams we call reality.
Captivated in the claws of the raven we call society.
Isolated between assumptions and prejudice.
As a faint light in the gloomy cave,
I search for serenity.

Truth exists not in this mindless universe!

Not only in China...

2006-02-03T04:15:00.000-08:00

Recently Google launched their search engine officially for the chinese audience. Not surprisingly, of course, the search results are being censored in accordance to chinese regulations. It can be argued whether or not Google did the right thing when agreeing to censor content. However, it's clear that they would not have been let in to the Chinese market without this agreement. To see the difference, compare this to this.
Even though I hate all kinds of censorship, I think somehow Google did the right the decision. Google is powerful enough to be able to influence the chinese government to let information free. Google also puts a notice at the bottom of the page, telling the user the page contents have been filtered according to local laws, something market-leading search engine Baidu doesn't do.

Reading the official Google blog post about the new china service, I saw something interesting: Google did actually block content before opening in China. The french, german and US Google sites blocked sites which contained xenophobic and rascist material, see the full list here. However there's a slight difference between the chinese and US/European censorship. The European censorship only affects google, and not the rest fo the web, making it effectively possible to reach the pages without the help of Google. Also the US/European censorship is just a list of blocked sites, and not a universal block. Compare that to the chinese censorship, which blocks all but a list of approved sites.
However, I definitely think it would do the wrong thing if they kept filtering content forever.

Martin Korth is alive!

2006-01-25T07:02:00.000-08:00

Yup, Martin Korth, aka nocash, is alive and still going strong! Just two days ago he released a new version no$gba, which is the first thing I had heard about him for about 8 months. () I was in fact wondering for some weak moments, I shouldn't really say this, if he might have commited suicide. Luckily enough, he hadn't. If he had done that, it would have been a great loss, since he is, at least to me, one of the greatest software geniuses around. Even in this 4,3 GHz CPU world, he keeps on doing software which is not bloated, runs fast and still manages to be functional.
I haven't yet tested the new version of no$gba, since I'm at work, and the work computer runs Windows XP. (Meaning I can't even escape to DOS without bringing a floppy) The new version contains partial DS emulation. As said, I haven't tested it yet, but it looks promising, except for a few things that are missing (3D graphics and WLan emulation) But this update is still massive! And so is the documentation update. It gives me ideas of things I'd like to program for the DS... Hmmm, but that will never happen, since I usually don't finish things that I've started. Most of the times I don't even bother starting... That's me!
Back to Martin however! I noticed a weird thing on his homepage he has two index files, index.html and index.htm. However, when you enter the domain name plain vanilla (http://nocash.emubase.de) you'll actually see the index.html file. But index.htm has a little "secret", it has a link to the no$2k6 Atari 2600 emulator. I don't know why he didn't include the link in the html file. Maybe it was just a human mistake, or maybe, if know Martin right, he wanted to let the Atari 2600 emu be a secret, to those who navigate their through the site (Most or all links pointing back to front page point to the htm file) or people who have a feeling they have to try stuff.

Anyway, Martin if you read this, please re-consider implementing those extra features that I asked for to no$gmb, or at least fix the bug...

P168 status

2006-01-24T16:20:00.000-08:00

Here's the current state of my Project 168 contribution! Listen, and please give me comments!

Btw, also check out my new gameboy music release at Gainlad!

Project 168

2006-01-20T02:57:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be in this year's Project168.

What the heck is that? The idea is pretty simple. You have 168 hours (In other words one week, from 12 PM sunday till 12 PM the next sunday) to finish an EP with at least two songs. The rest is up to you.

I like the idea of working under pressure for one week. I'm the kind of person who tends to let things wait and then just forget about them. The problem is I want to start now... I have all those great ideas now, and I suspect that when I finally sit down to compose music, all the ideas will be blown away. Starting to compose now is definitely against the rules, so I wont do that. Writing ideas down probably is too.

But I wonder how Darren thinks about ideas I've had before the starting date. If I scribble down a melody on Tuesday, and I know I've been thinking about the melody one week ago, is that against the rulea? And even worse, if I come up with a melody and I have been thinking about it anytime before, just that I've forgotten that I have... Does that mean I'm cheating? It's hard to prove I'm cheating if I can't even know myself.

For my own simplicity I choose to interpret the rules materially: As long as I get things out of my head within the 168 hours it's ok.

Anyways, this years P168 holds a new record in participants, so they wont accept newcomers after the project has begun. So if you want to join, you have until 12 PM this Sunday (20 January 2006) Check the counter at http://project168.co.uk/!

Poem 1

2006-01-16T09:28:00.000-08:00

I love you,
But I can't have you.
Afraid of the dark,
the black hole within.

Where our roads cross,
whenever our paths follow along,
The ecstacy is total,
and the ever-lasting joy is near.

But who am I to love you?
A faint shadow of your dreams,
only a fraction of your memories,
memories pale as the face of a dead.

I shouldn't love you!
Because I can't have you!

In this world of lies and mutual deception,
invisibility and false immortality,
Who am I to put your faith in?
It should be clear to you who I am...

I am free as the bird in the sky,
but adrift with the wind...
Lost in the maze of space and time,
when I look at your beautiful smile.

I can't release myself
from your blue eyes.
from the hypnotic glimpses of light
scourcing through the mist.

Listen closely, can you hear it?
Can you hear the whisper of the muses and the angels?
It is your voice speaking,
But I hear tales of beautiful fantasies...

It is also the voice of a mute.
You can't be speaking to me,
Oh so cruel, your words are like poison for my heart.
Shall I dear to ask you the ultimate question?

I am fast asleep in your warm embrace
But suddenly the winds of change wake me up,
The clarity of the biting frost is killing,
and the heat of the rays of the sun (are) burning through my skin...

I shouldn't love you...
...
I love you!
But I can't have you!

Proof of Concept of the Usefulness of Anonymous Javascript

2006-01-12T16:03:00.000-08:00

The code below is a PoC what anonymous javascript code is good for: Keeping code and data secret and unmodifiable from the outside, and ultimately creating a total "black box perspective".

The code below creates "black box" and stores the refernce to the function alert inside the box. Then it creates a new function to replace the native one. This way scripts running after the class has been instanciated can't access the native alert function directly. That way you can easily add a switch to disable alert boxes, perhaps useful for pages displaying an infinite number of alert boxes.

The script below has little practical usage, and only servers an example of what can be done. It could in fact be used as an alert blocker under Firefox or Opera, using GreaseMonkey or User Javascript technologies, respectively.

In a more sophisticated environment, this technique could be used to create protected memory areas, like the ones of a real operating system, so that tasks are running independently of each other and only can communicate with each other through pre-defined pipes.

Even though javascript likely isn't the environment to run critical tasks, this way of thinking is generally good to avoid unnecessary accesses between objects, which in the endn gives a product with less bugs.

<script type="text/javascript">
function AlertReplacer(){
 var showAlertBoxes=true;    // Whether or not to show alert boxes
 var alertRef=window.alert;  // Save the reference to the native alert function in a protected environment

 window.alert=function(){    // Replace alert function with an anonymous function declared as an instance variable in AlertReplacer
  if (showAlertBoxes)        // Show them?
   if (!confirm("Press cancel to disable alert boxes!\n\nAlert box message: "+arguments[0])){ // Use confirm to let the user press cancel
    showAlertBoxes=false;    // The user pressed cancel, disable alert boxes!
    alertRef("Further alert boxes will be disabled!"); // Proof that the native alert function still can be accessed from within the box
   }
 }
}

new AlertReplacer(); // Instanciate



alert("1");  // Give the user a few alert boxes to munch!
alert("2");
alert("3");
alert("4");
</script>

An alternative way, making the function 100% anonymous:

<script type="text/javascript">
(function(){
 var showAlertBoxes=true;    // Whether or not to show alert boxes
 var alertRef=window.alert;  // Save the reference to the native alert function in a protected environment

 window.alert=function(){    // Replace alert function with an anonymous function declared as an instance variable in AlertReplacer
  if (showAlertBoxes)        // Show them?
   if (!confirm("Press cancel to disable alert boxes!\n\nAlert box message: "+arguments[0])){ // Use confirm to let the user press cancel
    showAlertBoxes=false;    // The user pressed cancel, disable alert boxes!
    alertRef("Further alert boxes will be disabled!"); // Proof that the native alert function still can be accessed from within the box
   }
 }
})(); // Instanciate anonymous function



alert("1");  // Give the user a few alert boxes to munch!
alert("2");
alert("3");
alert("4");
</script>

New design to come!

2006-01-12T13:42:00.000-08:00

In case you don't know, the design of this blog is (Still when writing this as of 12 January 2006, but maybe not if you stumbled upon this page later) using a Blogger default template. The template is not working to well in some browsers. Especially since my code boxes are sometimes so wide that they force the right menu down to the bottom of the page. (Although it works perfectly even then, when using Firefox or Opera)

The new design is actually one recycled from an old project I was doing before, that was never finished. Here's a glimpse of it:

So if the page looks garbled, that's why, check back in a while and hopefully it'll be fixed!

Tip of the day: Don't take advice from a virgin in sex matters!

My world view, the quiz way

2006-01-05T14:51:00.000-08:00

QuizFarm.com :: What is Your World View? (updated)

One of all the silly quizes on the internets. I could've figured the results from the questions, but here we go anyway! I'm a materialist and to some degree an existentialist. That's me! As an analytic materialist I state the result is only the answer of a funtion depending on the input. I answered materialist answers, and the computer gave me back the result as defined by someone. it's as easy as that.

You scored as Materialist. Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements.

Materialist

100%

Existentialist

88%

Postmodernist

69%

Modernist

69%

Romanticist

56%

Cultural Creative

50%

Idealist

50%

Fundamentalist

31%

What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com

Word invention

2006-01-03T13:00:00.000-08:00

sniphph sniphph

Word invention, giwes easy trackback to some of the traces I have left on the internets and intarwebs.

Do you speak American?

2005-12-27T06:23:00.000-08:00

Do you speak American?

Great video blog with funny ad clips!

I am now a dvorakist!

2005-12-23T14:48:00.000-08:00

I have previously scraped off the characters from one of my keyboards, to learn to type faster. This was a success, so now I have re-used that keyboard and drawn dvorak characters on it.

My impression of dvorak so far is good! After just an hour of typing, i'm stil annoyed by the fact that I have a hard time finding the correct key positions. However, dvorak feels alot more natural than qwerty, and I'm training and waiting for the day when I master dvorak!

Ozzie and Gollum

2005-12-23T12:18:00.000-08:00

Since the newly elected pope Benedictus XVI is so much like some evil guy in Star Wars I decided to put a an old joke on display. (Please excuse me, although being geeky in areas such as computers and LOTR, I know nothing about Star Wars)

Gollum?

Ozzy?

The joke is about two years old or so, but I was reminded about it, so I decided to put on display once again!

Flip Out Like a Ninja

2005-12-20T14:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.7secondsoflove.com/ninja/

Don't know why I'm laughing, but I am. Is this really funny?

We get hits

2005-12-18T10:37:00.000-08:00

Google says "We get letters", and sure they do! I don't. But do I get hits, not many, but enough to make me want to carry on blogging.

I decided to keep track of all my visitors, and so I have done from the start. It's been interesting. A total of 17% found their way here through search engines, both on and off topic. I've decided to look at a few of the things people searched for and try to find solutions, as the helpful person I am.

Merv Grazinski, Stupid law suits
I wrote a blog post about this because this story is fake and got atually got into the biggest swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet. So once again, the story about Merv Grazinski is fake!
nitro2k01
Some people search for my nick, and that's fun! But it's also understandable, since I don't really have a homepage that I update regularly. Btw, I'm gonna release some music soon, keeps your eyes open!

Hapland Answers

I did write a walkthrough for Hapland 1, though in swedish. I may translate it to english if there's an interest in it. I have not written and I will not write a walkthrough for Hapland 2 or any later version of the game!

Here is the Hapland 1 walkthrough in swedish:

Walkthrough till spelet Hapland                           av nitro2k01
===============================                           ============

Var finns spelet?
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Spelet, som är gjort i Flash, finns bland annat på följande ställen:
http://www.deviantart.com/view/14864502/
http://www.foon.co.uk/farcade/hapland/
http://f-label.50megs.com/hapland.html

Hur går spelet till?
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Spelet går ut på att klicka på saker, som utlöser händelser, och på
så vis föra spelet vidare. Spelet liknar lite grann Lemmings.
Det slutgiltiga målet är att tända båda lyktorna, som finns vid valv-
portarna, och på så vis öppna teleporten. 

Denna walkthrough...
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Följ instruktionerna noga, och glöm inte något steg. Vid vissa steg är 
timingen avgörande. Alla saker som går att klicka på är skrivna med 
VERSALER. Detta betyder dock inte att du ska klicka på dem, just då 
eller alls.

Instruktioner
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Öppna LUCKAN. Klicka på PILEN, en GUBBE går och ställer sig vid KANONEN.
Skjut en sten neråt mot PINNEN. 
Öppna det VÄNSTRA FÖNSTRET. 
Rikta KANONEN uppåt. 
Skjut ett skott mot KLOCKAN. Precis när skottet faller, fäll upp
(*) PILGUNGBRÄDAN på ett sådant sätt att stenen studsar och utlöser MINAN.
--TIMING: Det är lättar att vända på PILGUNGBRÄDAN för tidigt än för sent.
Misslyckas du med det, bärja om från början, eller se den alternativa
lösningen nedan.
Rikta KANONEN neråt. Skjut en bomb. Rucka på PINNEN precis innan bomben
träffar den. Bomben kastas uppåt och sprängs i luften. Gör det samma med
den andra bomben.
(**)ALTERNATIVT: Skjut en eller båda bomberna upp mot klockan, den behövs inte
mer nu.
Rikta KANONEN neråt. Fyra av passerkortet. Passerkortet hamnar i grottan.
GUBBEN I GROTTAN plockar upp passerkortet och öppnar porten.
Rikta PILEN mot höger. 
(***)Klicka på DÖRREN för att släppa ut en gubbe. Han går och tänder ena lyktan.
Klicka på GUBBEN I GROTTAN.
En gubbe med sågklinga släpps ut ur lådan med varningstecken.
Öppna det HÖGRA FÖNSTRET i rätt tidpunkt. En gubbe kommer och stänger 
FÖNSTRET, samtidigt som STENBLOCKET faller ner och dödar gubben med 
sågklingan. 
--TIMING: Klicka på fönstret när gubben med sågklingan just har fallit ut ur
lådan.
Gubben i grottan kan nu gå och tända andra lyktan. 
Teleporten öppnas och spelet är avklarat! Texten THE END visas med vit text
mot svart bakgrund.

Alternativ lösning
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Den alternativa lösningen är aningen längre, men kräver lite mindre timing.
Följande punkter ska då göras annorlunda:
(*)PILGUNGBRÄDAN måste fällas upp så att stenen inte ligger ovanpå den,
men stenen måste dock inte studsa och utlösa minan.
(**)Med den alternativa lösningen kan du inte skjuta sönder klockan!
Innan steg (***) kan utföras måste följande göras:
Klicka på GUBBEN vid KANONEN. Trappan fälls upp och gubben tippas ner i kanonen.
Klicka på PILEN. En ny gubbe går upp och ställer sig vid KANONEN. Rikta KANONEN
uppåt. Skjut GUBBEN upp på berget. Klicka på GUBBEN PÅ BERGET. Han flyttar nu
på ställningen med KLOCKAN. Fäll ner PILGUNGBRÄDAN. Klicka tre gånger på KLOCKAN
som nu faller ner och får stenen att studsa och utlösa MINAN. Du kan nu fortsätta
enligt steg (***)

// Walkthrough © 11 februari 2005 nitro2k01, nitro2k01 at gmail dot com

Remon.sys/taskcntr.exe
Solution is here. It's written in a technical manner, so if you don't understand it, you probably need to install Ad-aware or some other malware removal tool.
emulate ie in firefox using greasemonkey
I don't have a solution for this, but Erik Arvidsson did do something like this. Check it out! It's not a greasemonkey script, but it could easily be converted to one, maybe even by only putting it in a greasemonkey formatted js file. However, I don't worry about this, since I'm an Opera user.
flex puzzle sample code
I don't know what flex puzzles are, but since this query was made by a japanese, I suspect it might be some new kind of puzzle like sudoku and kakuro. I'll google for it, and since I'm a computer science university student, I just might come up with source code for it. But we'll see ig I have the time.
what is googledesktopmail.exe
That is a part of Google Desktop made for indexing your gmail. (And outlook mail as well, ig you use that crap) You can turn mail indexing off in GDS preferences, although I think the process will remain. However, it's not at all dangerous, and you need not worry about it!

That's it, that's my blog "mailbox". Do leave a comment if you feel like!

Only in America...

2005-12-04T21:57:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I read an article in the crappy swedish "news"-"paper" (Much of the ocntent in this magazine is not particularly novel, so it would be wrong to say it's news, and it's to hard to wipe my ass with, so paper I think it's also wrong to call it a paper) Aftonbladet, about the 2005 Stella Awards winner, Merv Grazinski. (In fact Merv Grazinski is just a nominee so far, wrong Aftonbladet!) The Stella Awards ranks the most stupid American law suits of every year.

The awards are named from the 81-year old woman (In fact she was 79, wrong again, Aftonbladet...) Stella Liebeck, who sued McDonalds having burnt her skin from their coffee. She was awarded $640,000 in damages plus a secret settlement with McDonalds.

The 2005 award winner (Not yet! See the note above) is Merv Grazinski, who had bought a Winnebago motor home. She (In fact he, yet another error in Aftonbladet) set the cruise control to 110 km/h and went back to make some coffee. What he didn't realize was that cruise control is just a tool to help keep the velocity constant, not an auto-pilot. The vehicle crashed!

He sued the Winnebago motor company, and was awarded $1,750,000 plus a new motor home. In fact the Winnebago motor company have changed their car manuals to include a warning about the cruise control, for those who can't think.

I consider the American law suit culture to be a bit... silly. In some cases, such as some medical cases I think high damages are to be paid, but when iy comes down to people who are in fact stupid (Or possibly just ignorant) I think it's just ridiculous.

Which reminds me of a quote, found somewhere on the swedish bulletin board webForum:

The main problem with America today is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything, and let the problem solve itself?

Update: After even mote googling, I found out that this whole story is fake! Shame, Aftonbladet!

Trance music

2005-11-27T14:15:00.000-08:00

It's like an endless story, to which you long to hear the end. The songs are seamlessly merged together with infinite care. When you're finally think you're at it, something else grabs your attention and the mix continues until the sunrise.
Trance music is my religion. But I can see the difference between the purported reality and the lucid dreams shaping my trance state. I am happy, and although it's just an illusion, I'm fine with it! Join me on the journey, not only towards nirvana, but towards truth. Close your eyes and enjoy. Open your eyes anbd see yourself.

Google Desktop Search and Zone Alarm

2005-11-27T06:18:00.000-08:00

After a few weeks of despair, a day of googling, and a few more days of not getting any answers, (Though I got the chance to invite a person to GMail!) I got Google Desktop search to start indexing my GMail account. First off, this is an important feature of GDS, I want to be able to searcg my mail quickly from the quick search field. Secondly I can't stand things that should work but in fact does not!
My first attempt towards getting indexing rolling was to grant GoogleDesktopMail.exe all rights in the firewall, even to be a server, which didn't work. Next thing I checked the password twice and thrice, but that didn't work either. But suddenly I remembered a setting I had seen long ago, which I thought I had already tried turning, namely the "Allow uncommon protocols at high security" setting. After turning it on, indexing worked like a charm, and in a day or so all my mails will be indexed. I turned the setting off just to confirm that this was it, and as I suspected it stopped working immediately. Case closed. Here's a screenshot, in case it might help somebody else with the same problem.

The only thing with this story that confuses me is that when I tried telnetting the GMail server, obviously to the same port as GDS uses for indexing, it worked. But for some reason GDS wouldn't connect to the very same port with the uncommon protocol setting set to off. What's so special about GDS, does it use a lame way to connect? Or is the problem ZA-related? Does ZA treat GDS more strictly, alternatively treat telnet less strictly, because telnet should be able to connect to any port? These are questions I don't have the answer to, but hopefully I'll be avle to find out!

Gmail for the good and the bad browsers

2005-11-21T05:14:00.000-08:00

Gmail sometimes refuses to run with Opera. (A good browser) http://mail.google.com/mail/?nocheckbrowser is the answer!
But sometimes you want to use the basic HTML view even though you are using IE (A bad browser) Then this link is the answer: https://gmail.google.com/gmail?ui=html&zy=n This happened to me at a public computer with an intricately stupid firewall. This url also has the prefix https which bypasses the firewall at this place. (Might be handy to have the link at hand)

That Yesterday's Sushi Bliss

2005-11-09T22:29:00.000-08:00

I wake up and look around myself. Yesterday was a hell of a night. My eyelids feel heavy as I witness the mess around me. Suddenly I remember that I bought sushi yesterday. Sushi that has been lying in my room all night, and is probably full of bacteria and virii which will infect my gastric system and cause me to throw up.

My stomach tells me keep away from the sushi, to throw in the garbage and leave it there. My tired brain and body tell me to eat the sushi and regain strength inevitably lost because of a lack of sleep the previous nights.

I open a can of Coca Cola to wake my brain up and release myself from my ever-existing urge for caffeine. The dark poison flows down my throat and slowly but steadily removes the itch from my bloodshot eyes.

As I swallow the badly chewed rice cushion with salmon, and wash it down with a mouth or two of Coke, I get this special feeling. It's not the excpected illness. It's the hardly definable but oh so desirable feeling they call bliss. For a moment I feel as I couldn't care less. All of the itch in my muscles is vanished.

I wonder if it's just me, or if the wasabi really tastes less than it usually does, and if the nori really is so sharp in the textures, or if it's just an illusion. I wonder how a feeling can be so different from time to time. You think you have the answers, you think you know for sure, and oops there comes the surprise. It's the little things the make worth living at times.

As I chew the last piece of shrimp and get dressed for school, I realize who I am. The bliss was just a lie. A lucid sensation fooling my brain. As I leave my house, I decide to live my life in the reality. To accept my pain as it comes, and not try to pretend it's not there.

As they say, ignorance is bliss, and bliss is ignorance.

Opto-coupler knowledge!

2005-10-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

The result of my experiments is that the 6n139 can replace the 6n138, although it might not be optimal!
Just wanted to tell the world!

Manually deleting taskcntr.exe

2005-10-11T15:41:00.000-07:00

This day I turned my firewall off because it was leeching CPU power, only when the computer was offline of course! But then I forgot to turn it on again before I reconnected. After a few minutes I turned it on as quickly as I possibly could, and checked the task manager for the harvest. (Yes! I was using Windows XP!)

One malware process was slightly more annoying than the other. Killing it was no can do, since it re-appeared. It was called syscntr.exe. I searched the HD for that file but didn't find it. SO I decided to have a look at the services. So I started the prompt, and did sc query. And bingo, there it was! remon, that sounded suspicious... So I searched for remon.sys, when it popped up I did sc stop remon, and quickly deleted remon.sys. Then it was no match to kill taskcntr.exe as well! At that point I realized that taskcntr.exe had stopped flashing as it was doing before. The remon service probably kept taskcntr alive, or killed it and restarted it, therefor the flashing.

Mission accomplished! This was my first malware attack for a few years. I've now learnt my lesson, and I won't turn off my firewall again!

A word about the "next blog feature"

2005-10-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

I log the refetring links to my blog, (Via the excellent service Extreme Tracking) and it's somehow amusing to see. Most links come from places where I know I've placed a link, no big deal... But few of the links come from people clicking the "Next Blog" button up to the right of this page.

This link takes you to a blog which is chosen by some algorithm. At first I didn't pay much attention to it and just thought the link was completely random!

However it seems as if Google does some kind of matching between the page you're at and the next one.

The first time I thought about was when saw that a couple of my referrers were pages about song lyrics. I wasn't truly convinced until I noticed that pages with words conataining challenge (Challenger, challenged etc) was more frequent than others.

So in lack of other theories I think blogger uses word matching to redirect users to a "next blog". So what I ought to do is to compare the words in my blog to the words of my referrers.

One thing I find alomst strange is the fact that quite a few referrers where spanish. (Or possible portuguese, pardon my ignorance) I sire would like to know which word I happened to share woth those blogs!

Roadmap for sound

2005-10-06T16:24:00.000-07:00

Ok, here's a list of what I plan to build in the future, starting from the nearest future.

LSDjMC2 - This device was designed by firestARTer and allows Little SOund Dj, a music tracker for gameboy, to be synced to MIDI. I'm gonna do one as ordered by Tobi-wan, (Don't worry, it's coming :) ) and possibly a specialized one for myself.

Box: Plain black.
Two pole state variable filter - A pretty basic, yet useful active filter with LP, BP, HP, and phase shifting notch.

Box: Erm, probably none...
Customized paia vocoder - This vocoder is cheap DIY vocodder, which I'll modify a bit to make it sound better.

Box: Hopefully it'll be fitted into a old bakery utility, used for shaping cream (!)
x0xb0x - This is a DIY clone of the famous acid beast Roland TB-303. I'm planning to build a dist and a compressor into it. This is project is planned for the far future. :)

Box: It would be neat to fit this beast into a polished wooden shell, as opposed to most other builders of it, who have chosen plastic or metallic cases.
A mixer - I badly need a mixer, and what would be more fun than building your own modular mixer? (Except for the other project presented here, of course) This is also a project for the far future, but I'm hoping to be able to build a small mixer soon, maybe 3 channels, and then expand it as needed.

Box: Not yet planned

I'll post pictures when/if I finish the different items.

I know I KNOW!

2005-09-27T14:01:00.000-07:00

This template sucks. I gotta make my own. I gotta insert some links. I gotta write about interesting stuff like my super boring life. I gotta get a fucking DSC and photograph my surrounding world.

I just don't have the time and/or money and/or willpower right now.

Yes I know the menu is forced down behind all the posts. Guess what, I know you're using Internet Explorer if that happens to you. I'd recommend you to use Opera (Now free) or firefox!

Hapland 2 released!

2005-09-27T13:25:00.000-07:00

Hapland 2 has now been released. For those of you who don't know, Hapland is a small yet utterly tricky Flash game made by Robin Allen.

This one is even trickier than the first version. In the usual Hapland fashion, there are a few explosions and some blood splashing allover the place from stick guys.

The objective of the game is to click various things to make stuff happen, light some torches, and ultimately open the big portal. Hapland doesn't have that cheesy look that many Flash games have. Hapland is not like that!

In fact the two Hapland games which have have been released so far are surprisingly well made. That's what makes them so tricky; there are about infinitely many ways of doing stuff, of which many are wrong. Some parts of the puzzle also craves precise timing, making the game annoying. I sometimes find myself halfway through the game when I fail to click the right spot within the correct split of a second.

Overall Hapland 2 is a must visit page, I guarantee you'll be caught quickly.
I can also recommend you to play Hapland 1 to flex your problem solving muscles a bit and prepare yourself. Enjoy!

Screw Opera 8.50!

2005-09-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

So, you've probably heard alot in different blogs about Opera 8.50 going freeware. That's great, although those Google text ads never bothered me (In fact, I even clicked a few times, and found something interesting!)

No, instead I vouch for Opera 8.10 Technlogy Preview 2 which features a BitTorrent client! Opera still isn't the best BitTorrent client around, although this is a step in the right direction.

A more subtle change is that the deafult browser identification is changed from IE to Opera. Instead of pretendning to be IE, now Opera really looks like Opera when surfing the web. (In the eyes of web servers)

This means that Opera is ready for the world, and the world is ready for Opera, and that Opera ASA knows that.

Friday is my big night!

2005-09-19T03:36:00.000-07:00

So, this Friday it's happening! I'm gonna play gameboy music live at microdisko. I feel kinda nervous, but in some strange way I don't.
My biggest concern is that I'm not gonna be enough prepared to play. I got all these great songs, but I just can't come up with a good ending to any one of them. It'll sort out, I'm sure it will, but I still feel nervous about it...
But I still think I'm gonna be rocking the house hard!

Opera User Javascript

2005-09-11T18:59:00.000-07:00

From Opera 8.0 and up, there's a new feature called "User Javascript" that allows a user to insert code to every page that is being loaded, and fix problems with badly written, or browser-specific code, or just add her own customizations to a page.
Appearantly, Gecko engine-users have been able to do something like this for some time already, using greasemonkey scripts. I'm mainly an Opera guy, so I don't keep track of all the mozilla news.
This may be a breakpoint in the Opera history of being both IE-compatible and W3C compliant. They can both have and eat the cake, by letting tweak developement to those who have the guts and ideas, and focus on standards compliance.
There a few ideas that I think would be cool to try out with this technique, which has already been implemented natively in Opera. Such as document.all emulation (Implemented AGES ago) Andrew Gregory's XMLHttpRequest emulator (Supported natively since Opera 7.54 or so, enough to make gmail work)
Other things that would have wanted to do isong user JS are auto-downloading of links and logging different stuff. But there's a lack of file I/O support. This is of course not only bad, since I/O support could mean disaster if somehow control over it was given to a malicious page. But it also means some cool things can't be done.
Another interesting feature would be if User Javascripts could affect toolbars, so that I could make eg a gmail notifier for Opera. Cool, wouldn't it be?
Nevertheless, this is a major step forward for Opera as user-customizable browser. Two down (Opera and Gecko-engines) one to go... (IE)

Making it work

You need to enable this little bitch manually to make it work. Create a new folder and point to it here: Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content > JavaScript options.
Now create scripts as you please and put there, with the extension .js. Greasemonkey files can go there too, and should have the extension .user.js for compatibility.

Sample code

I find the lack of a status bar for javascript code annoying sometimes, since some badly coded pages put some information only there. I don't know why I don't see one, since there's an option in javascript settings to allow code to modify the status text.

So my sample code will add a faked status bar and update it when window.status get written to.

// Define and run a function, to allow private vars
(
 function(){
  // Define the getter and setter of status
  var theGetter=function (curVal) { return curVal; };
  var theSetter=function (newVal) {
   var newString = new String(newVal); // Convert to string
   if (newString.length){
    // Replace tags with entities to avoid bugs
    newString = newString.replace(/</g, "&" + "lt;");
    newString = newString.replace(/>/g, "&" + "gt;");

    // Show the content in fake status bar
    window.opera.defineMagicVariable.__fakestatusbar.innerHTML = "<b>Status test: </b>" + newString;
    window.opera.defineMagicVariable.__fakestatusbar.style.display = "block";
   }else{
    window.opera.defineMagicVariable.__fakestatusbar.style.display = "none";
    window.opera.defineMagicVariable.__fakestatusbar.innerHTML = "";
   }
  }

  // Attach the getter and setter
  window.opera.defineMagicVariable('status',theGetter,theSetter);

  // Add reference for later use. See discussion in the article about this.
  window.opera.defineMagicVariable.__fakestatusbar = document.createElement("DIV");
  // Add some styling
  with(window.opera.defineMagicVariable.__fakestatusbar.style){
   width = "100%";
   height = "17px";
   left = "0px";
   bottom = "0px";
   position = "fixed";
   background = "rgb(255,255,230)";
   borderLeft = "1px solid rgb(192,192,192)";
   borderTop = "1px solid rgb(192,192,192)";
   borderBottom = "1px solid rgb(64,64,64)";
   borderRight = "1px solid rgb(64,64,64)";
   display = "none";
   fontFamily = "Tahoma, arial";
   fontSize = "11px";
  }
  // Insert the element
  document.getElementsByTagName("HTML")[0].appendChild(window.opera.defineMagicVariable.__fakestatusbar);
 }
)();

Opera recommends the use of anonymois function as far as it's possible. One thing that I find annoying
is that there's no place to put user javascript variables. I would have wished for a variable called, maybe
window.opera.userJSHeap which would be an array where use JS could put shared variables, (window.opera.userJSHeap['__fakestatusbar']=...) preferably, this array would be invisible to regular code. There are ways around this, using object based code, but this code meant only as a sample of what User JS can do.

So my sample script instead puts the reference in a place where regular code likely wouldn't get it's paws near, see the code!

This example merely scratches the surface of the possibilites of Opera's User Javascript. To finish this post off I'll quote a discussion between Håkan Bilgin and Erik Arvidsson (Creators of the competing rich web UI's Challenger and Bindows)

Håkan: Why mimic a browser [Microsoft Internet Explorer] that you’re complaining about?
Erik Arvidsson: Why mimic a browser that you’re complaining about?” - because IE/JScript cannot support this kind of emulation. I would of course have preferred to fix the bugs in MSXML and IE and extend them to support DOM but that cannot be done.

It all comes down to IE not being extensive and Mozilla being powerful enough to emulate everything in IE and MSXML. It is better to have one interface than two.

Quoted from Erik's Blog

PHP Internet Connection Speed Benchmark

2005-09-08T20:39:00.000-07:00

I answered a question on webForum (A swedish forum which I like and visit regularly) about wether it is possible to redirect a user to different pages depending on their internet connection speed.
So I decided to make a PHP script to test this.

<?PHP
/**
 * Simple function to replicate PHP 5 behaviour
 * Taken from www.php.net/microtime
 */
function microtime_float()
{
   list($usec, $sec) = explode(" ", microtime());
   return ((float)$usec + (float)$sec);
}


$benchtime = 1; // Decimal number in seconds
$chunksize = 1022; // Number of bytes to be spit in every chunk

// String filled with 1022 spaces (Because echo will add \n of 2 bytes at end)
$onekbytestring = str_pad($chunksize, " ");

$starttime = microtime_float();
$bytespassed = 0;

// Wrap data in comment tags to prevent slowdowns by browser
echo "<!-- ";

// Wait a second
while(microtime_float() - $starttime < $benchtime){
// Spit 1 kbyte at a time to 
echo $onekbytestring;
// Keep track
$bytespassed += $chunksize +2;
// Flush buffer so we are actually measuring the speed of the connection
flush();
}

echo "-->";

// Print result
echo "Approx. speed: ";
echo (int)($bytespassed / (microtime_float() - $starttime) / 1024);
echo " kibytes/s (Note: 1 kibyte = 1024 bytes)";
?>

It's working indeed. It actualt shows a measurement of the speed. I've asked a few people to test it, and it generally seemed to return half the theoretical speed (Which is plausible for an http connection) In other words this script returns the actual speed by which the page was transferred, not the theoretical max speed.
However there are a few things to consider before using this script.

Inaccuries: This script inevitably inaccurate. There might be temporary online "hiccups" that might lower the score. The script may also give a too high score for dialup connections since they commonly use compression techniques. (The array of spaces that the script uses to measure the speed is easy to compress, while e.g. a Flash movie may not)

Also different browsers give different results.
Traffic: The script will generate loads of traffic. This is might be a problem on the client side since a bad browser may lock up during the second the test takes to complete. This also cause problems on the server side, since the server may become cluttered and slowed down, especially if several users visit the page at once. This can to same degree be healed by lowering the test time, at the cost of accuracy.

This script is free to use if you (i) inform me and get my allowance (ii) put a visible textual notice with a link back to this page.

Presentation

2005-09-08T01:40:00.000-07:00

Soo... This is my blog.
Requires a little presentation, right? I'm nitro2k01, and I consider myself a digital artist. I'll confess to your face right now: I start a lot of projects, and finish only some. What an understatement! I typically don't finish anything I start.
Having that said let's describe myself.
The blog title "Sound and Complete" has dual meanings. The first meaning is a term in logics. (As a part of mathematics) A logical system which is sound and complete has these two properties:
1) Anything proven in the logical system also holds in reality (Soundness)
2) Everything that can be proven, can be proven in that logical system. (Sompleteness)
Or something like that. Take an elementary course in logic at your local university or Google for it.
The second meaning has to do with my fascination for sound. When I'm in a tunnel I just can't stop myself from stepping a bit harder just to hear my steps echo back and forth, when I'm alone in a church I just have to sing so I wont waste the great acoustics. Even in my bedroom I was happy to find a flange sound that I hadn't heard noticed before.
This fascination also covers electronic music and sound creation, partly because a computer is a more versatile tool than building a custom echo chamber in wood.
The word complete comes from the fact that I have a knowhow attitude. I always want to know what's going on, and I want to be in control of it.
So I program. As I warned you in the top, I usually don't finish what I start, so there's really not much to see in terms of my software.
As for my music there's a little more to see. Check these places out: http://www.mp3death.us, http://www.futuredome.tk, http://www.mp3.com.au/nitro2k01gameboy
That's all I can care to write now. I'll be back later with a few technical articles about xhtml, javascript or maybe gameboy programming. Bye for now!