Daily Archives: November 19, 2007

Rockbox

A Google T-Shirt

What doesn’t a man do when there’s a free t-shirt involved?

Google Summer of Code 2007 shirt

I was Google Summer of Code admin for project Rockbox, and it did result in some cool new code. As newbies this year we of course did a bunch of mistakes that we hope to get a chance to correct if we’re allowed to participate again…

I also volunteered as a mentor, but we had something like nine or ten guys stepping forward, we got a lot of students applying for various projects but in the end we were given four slots by Google so I ended up not having to mentor anyone this time.

Apparently, this involvement was good enough for me to be given a shirt, and it arrived in my mailbox today and I took a few crummy shots with my lousy camera in my phone and I thought I’d share them with you!

Google Summer of Code 2007 front print

Google Summer of Code 2007 back figure

On the backside there’s this weird face with a monster-like guy (much appreciated by my daughter!) with binary numbers in its mouth. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the binary does mean something if we translate it to ascii… for a second or two I was about to investigate it, but then I lost my motivation and bah, why bother?!

Did anyone else check yet?

cURL and libcurl

URL Encode POST Data

Several months ago I did a job down south in Sweden – it was a three hour train ride (one way, and I went down and back the same day…) with the fastest train we have in this country. It gave me some time on the train to tinker with things and I didn’t feel like bothering with the “Internet On Train” thing they so fancifully offer these days. I’m not saying that’s a bad idea, I just felt that perhaps me and my Linux laptop would have to spend too much time fighting it to get it up to really enjoy it. Instead I wrote up a patch for curl for a feature we discussed ages ago: send POST data with the command line client that gets URL encoded automatically!cURL

The idea is of course that when you write a simple shell script of some sorts and want to automate POSTs to a web site, it is somewhat complicated to url encode the strings before you pass them on to curl. curl could instead get an option that does it for you.

Fast forward to current time and now I’ve dug up the old patch again, I had a discussion on the mailing list about it and what do you know! Today I’ve posted a patch that introduces –data-urlencode, and I’m very interested in feedback or suggestions on how to polish it further and then to commit it.

Technology

Better Photos From An Angle!

Stockholm from above at a 45 degrees angleWe’ve been spoiled by nice photos from above from services like Google Maps, but here in Sweden that service never really even got close to match what Hitta.se and Eniro have offered. Google’s service is and always have been too US-centric for us Swedes.

I’ve considered Hitta to be the Swedish leader in this race, with their street level photos of buildings for addresses you search for etc, but now it seems Eniro has taken this one step further up the ladder as now they no longer only provide very detailed photos taken from above, they now also offer very cool photos taken from a 45 degrees angle!

Also, it seems the new “utsikt” photos (which translates to “view” in English) are taken closer to the ground as I can view my own house and neighborhood even closer using this service. The only downside with this service is that it is painfully slow. I can see that I get very slow transfers and my computer is idling so it can’t be much else than underpowered servers in their end!