elblogg

When I’m travelling, I often visit the kiosks at the airport, to see what they have of intresting magazines, specially Linux and Digital Photography magazines. I was visiting Trondheim last weekend, and on the way back, while I were waiting for my plane back to Bergen, I was looking on the shelves at Narvesen at Trondheim airport, Værnes. There were actually a quite good choice of Linux magazines, and one specially catched my eye. I had heard about the new Ubuntu User magazine at the Ubuntu UK podcast, which by the way is a pretty good podcast. But I didn’t expect to find it in a news-stand in Norway, I thought I had to order it from the UK.

So I bought it.

The magazine was priced to around £7, which would translate to about 74 norwegian kroner, or €8.20. But at when I got to the counter, I had to pay 210 NOK for it, which is about £19 or €23. In comparison, one years subscription to the magazine is €29.90 if you live in Europe outside the UK, which would include Norway. €29.90 is 269NOK or £25.5

This is a total rip-off. I understand that Narvesen needs a margin for magazines with a narrow group of readers, but this pricing is insane.

During the last week there has been a couple of great releases in the software I use every day.

First out was Python 3.1. It was released June 27th and features

• An ordered dictionary type
• Various optimizations to the int type
• New unittest features including test skipping and new assert methods.
• A much faster io module
• Tile support for Tkinter
• A pure Python reference implementation of the import statement
• New syntax for nested with statements

Next out was Mozilla Firefox 3.5, which was released earlier today (June 30th), most noteworty items from that release is the @font-face css-attribute, that allows web-designers to bundle custom fonts with their website designs, and use custom fonts in their design.  I have used that feature to change the header of my blog, you would se a grudge font if you use the new Firefox or Safari. They have also released a new javascript-engine, which they claim to be a lot faster than the old one. Also, support for the <video>-tag has been added.

Then last, but not least, the long awaited PHP 5.3.0 has been released, which provides namespaces and closures for PHP.

Jeg prøver å dra i gang en foredragsserie for BLUG (Bergen Linux User Group), “Linux som kreativ platform“, innenfor rammene av BLUGs foredragsserie Last Thursday, som avholdes siste torsdag hver måned i skole-året (jan-mai, aug-nov) i Auditorium Pi på matematisk institutt.
Jeg er på jakt etter folk som har erfaring med grafikk/lyd/video på linux, og som kunne tenke seg å holde foredrag om det.
Målet med foredragsserien er å vise at Linux kan brukes til videoproduksjon, billedbehandling, 3D-modellering etc.

Følgende temaer har blitt foreslått:

• Linux som platform for musikkproduksjon (Jokosher, Rosegarden, …)
• Linux som platform for billedbehandling (Gimp/F-spot/RAW-bildehåndtering…/…)
• Linux som platform for tegning (Inkscape/Sodipodi/OOo-draw/…)
• Linux som platform for 3d-grafikk (Blender/…)
• Linux som platform for videoredigering (Cinelerra/Kino/…)
• Linux som platform for desktop publishing (Scribus/…)
• Linux som platform for sanntids media (Pure Data/FreeJ/…)

Nylig har det også blitt foreslått et foredrag om lydteknikk, men som jeg føler ikke går inn under hverken “Linux”-paraplyen eller “kreativ platform”-paraplyen. Selv om det unektelig hadde vært interressant.

Det eneste feltet her der vi har et navn på blokken er musikkproduksjon, men forslag der også mottas med takk.

I morgen er det forresten foredrag om Kerberos

Forrige torsdag var det BLUG-foredrag om Open Street Map, et prosjekt jeg har synest har vært interressant lenge, men som jeg aldri har fått meg til å bidra til. Mest fordi jeg ikke har hatt godt utstyr, og ikke har visst hvordan en skulle gjøre det. Jeg er glad i å sykle, og ble svært glad for å høre at det fantes et sykkelkart-prosjekt, fordi det har det vært mangel på her til lands, både kommersiellt og fritt. Men som du kan se, er kartet foreløbig svært mangelfullt.

Jeg bestemte meg for å trace sykkelruten fra Bergen til Os, som er en del av rute 1 i Nasjonalt Sykkelveinett. Jeg hadde tenkt å gjøre dette på søndag, da det var fint vær og alt var fryd og gammen, men det ble ikke noe av. I stedet gjorde jeg det på mandag, i skikkelig sølevær. Jeg var ikke skikkelig kledd for anledningen, vel hadde jeg regntøy, men fottøyet mitt bestod av et par nike+ joggesko. De ble naturligvis søkk gjennomvåt. Jeg tenkte det ikke var så fryktelig farlig, fordi så lenge jeg holder meg fysisk aktiv ville jeg holde varmen. Og det gjorde jeg også.

Problemet oppsto da jeg kom til Os, da røk spilene i bakhjulet igjen. Syklingen i vår har vært en rekke problemer. I fjor høst før jeg parkerte sykkelen hadde spilene i bakhjulet røket. Jeg fikk meg ny felg i januar, og syklet glad avgårde til jobb fra midten av februar. Jeg skulle levere sykkelen inn til justering av ymse ting, deriblant stramme spilene etter et par uker. Det glemte jeg, og etter 6 uker røk spilene igjen, noen få dager etter at jeg hadde fått sykkelen i stand igjen etter forrige punktering. Dette skjedde midt i høysesongen for sykkelreperasjoner, så det tok en ukes tid å få spilene erstattet.

For en drøy uke siden punkterte jeg igjen, og jeg fikk lappet slangen på onsdag, men dekket hadde en flerre, og måtte også skiftes. Jeg kjøpte nytt dekk på torsdag, og skiftet det omgående. Som sagt hadde jeg fått erstattet de spilene som hadde røket, men når spiler ryker, strekkes spilene rundt, og de blir svakere. Så på mandag røk spilene igjen…

I går leverte jeg sykkelen inn hos Geng sykkelservice på Danmarks Plass, og skal etter planen hente den i ettermiddag med splitter nytt hjul.

Ok. It has been a while since my last post, and quite a few things have happened since then, some of which I will get back to in some later posts.

One of the things that have happened is that I attended the “Skolelinux developer summit” or Debian Edu developer summit here in Bergen, with the goal to do some real contribution to free software. I didn’t end up contributing any code at that event.

Cecilie had asked Knut Yrvin to do a talk about community based projects, which inspired some of the other attendees, Walter Bender, to talk about his organization, Sugarlabs. Sugarlabs organizes the development and promotion of Sugar, the user interface for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

from sugarlabs.org, click the image to show the whole series in context.

Sugar is an user interface aimed at kids and learning, rather than changing the learning process to use the computer and the web, it changes the user interface, so it is suited for a classroom environment. That being said, using sugar will probably revolutionize the way learning is done in the classroom, to a much more collaborative approach. Everything in sugar is made for sharing between the pupils and/or the teacher.

I had seen some screenshots of Sugar before, but I was totally blown away about the collaboration part of the system, and also how it changes the approach to computers, where we make the computer suitable for the classroom, rather than making the classroom suitable for the computer.

My contribution during the developer summit ended up beeing translating the Turtle Art activity into Norwegian, and helping Mr. Bender finding some bugs.

Since then I’ve translated the download pages on the Sugarlabs wiki into Norwegian. Sadly the current state of Sugar is that it’s quite buggy as “Sugar on a Stick”, completely broken in Ubuntu, and probably somewhat buggy in Fedora.

Also, listen to the Episode 66 of the FLOSS weekly podcast about the implementation of the OLPC in Nepal, which goes more into detail about Sugar.

Lets say you have two lists, one of them containing the values [1,2,3] and the other one containing the values [4,5,6], and you want to combine these two lists into one list, like this one: [1,2,3,4,5,6].

Let’s see how this can be done in different (high level) programming (or scripting or templating) languages.

Java

Java has multiple list implementations, lets start with the most basic one, the builtin array.

or with an ArrayList:

PHP

So, how is the same done in PHP?

Python

And at last, how does the Pythonistas do this?

Note: the rubyists use the same approach.