Standardisation

I think information standards are more important technical standards. Technical standards are limited to describe how to exchange information, not how to interpret and understand the information.

You can compare this with people who communicate with each other. The language is the information standard and the phone is the technical standard to send and receive information.

So we need more information standards in the future.            

Object-C

Develop IOS and Mac OSX  applications with X-Code is not so bad as you think. Object-C and MVC pattern gives you new ideas and we could always fallback to C++ when needed.

Metro

Now I have installed Windows 8 on a computer at home to test the new operating system for my family. The response was the same as when I installed Ubuntu, Windows without start button is not Windows :)

Windows 8

A rumor says that Windows 8 will probably have a so-called UEFI function that locks the computer with Windows 8 for all time, so home users will no longer be able to install alternative operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD on certified Windows 8 computers.

Apple TV

Can an Apple TV in the living room be useful? Yes, it definitely fills a function when using XBMC or Plex as a media player for music, family pictures and movies.

Intel® SATA Solid-State Drive Firmware

Latest firmware released by Intel solves my problems when running Windows 7 on Intel SSD disks. After upgrading this firmware, I can set the default boot OS to Windows 7 with a successful boot!

Download Intel firmware here

MacBook Pro 2010 and Intel SSD disks

You cannot install Windows 7 on a MacBook Pro 7.1 with an Intel SSD disk. When you installing Windows 7, no disk is detected. The error is known by Intel and Apple, but apparently no one wants to fix the problem.

Apple - Support - Discussions - 2010 13 "MBP 2.4GHz. No support for 3rd...

Therefore you should NOT buy Intel SSD disks when you have a MacBook Pro 13" mid 2010 and must use an alternative operating system.

Web applications are dead

I hope Internet applications replaces traditionals web applications. Today we are developing to many applications composed by javascript and html in an immature technical environment called web browser.

Apple iPhone

Is the iPhone one success or a failure? I think Apple have in a elegant and surprising manner shown traditional mobile phone manufacturers how to produce a mobile phone.

Calculate checksum with Perl

Swedish personal and organization identity number consists of 10 digits and the tenth digit is the checksum. This Perl script calculates checksum for the identity number.

#!/usr/bin/perl

die "checksum.pl identity\n" unless @ARGV > 0 && length $ARGV[0] == 9;

sub checksum
{
  my @pnr = split(//, shift);
  my $n = 2;
  my $sum;

  foreach (@pnr) {
    my $tmp = $_ * $n;
    if($tmp > 9) { $sum += 1 + ($tmp % 10) }
    else { $sum += $tmp; }

    $n = ($n == 2) ? 1:2;
  }

  $tmp = substr($sum, length($sum) -1);
  return ($tmp == 0) ? 0 : (10-$tmp);
}

print $ARGV[0], checksum($ARGV[0]), "\n";

Search file contents on Unix computers

To search files by file content on a Unix computers, you can use a text search utility called grep. This sample searches in data directory and all subdirectories for text files containing keyword sample.

grep --reqursive --include "*.txt" sample /data

or

find /data -name "*.txt" | xargs grep sample

Windows 7

I have downloaded and installed Windows 7 RC 1 on a Samsung Net PC NC10. After three weeks I releized Windows 7 is much better operating system than Windows XP and Vista. Especially then you have a computer with limited resources like CPU and memory.

A world of music

Now! I have found a commercial music service on Internet I am really like. After you have downloaded the software and paid for an account, you can search and play music for hours. Spotify is perfect, they support Mac OS X, Growl and progressive rock music like Saga, Steve Hackett and Camel.

GeekTool for Apple Mac OS X

GeekTool is a excellent tool for Mac OS X to show text files or output from unix commands on your desktop without opening a Terminal window. I am using the tool to execute commands and perl scripts to monitor my computer status.

This command displays current network address for my computer.

netstat -n| awk '{print $4}' | grep -o "[0-9]*\.[0-9]*\.[0-9]*\.[0-9]*" | head -n 1

For more information click here.

Parallel Programming with Perl

Perl have a great support for parallel execution since version 5.6. Shared variables guarantees you to modify the state at the same time from different threads, without the internal state of the variable will become corrupted.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use threads;
use threads::shared;

$|=1; # autoflush on

my $running = 1;
share $running;

print "Press enter to stop\n";

my $job = async {
  while($running > 0) {
    print ".";
    sleep 1;
  }
};

my $enter= <STDIN>;
$running = 0;
$job->join();