Category Archives: Off-topic

Stuff not directly related to the main topics of this blog.

A Few Electrons too Many

2013 May 9 22:16 / 2 Comments /

Adding electronics to systems that used to be mechanical has been the great wave of innovation for a quite a while now. Modern transportation just would not work without all the electronics and computers inside (someone once quipped that a modern fighter is just a plastic airplane full of software), and so much convenience has been provided by automation and smarts driven by electronics. However, this also introduces brand new ways that things can break, and sometimes I wonder if we really are not setting ourselves up for major problems when the electrons stop flowing.

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Posted in: embedded systeme, trains, transportation

Everything in the Cloud?

2013 March 30 21:12 / 6 Comments /

Cloud… I tend to dislike hype and I am honestly quite sick of all the talk about cloud computing and “anything as a service”. Still, it is an intriguing area. Last week, I attended Produktledardagen, a very inspiring product management and product leadership seminar, innovation lab, and social event for the profession of product management.  A significant part of the discussion was about the Cloud, and how to think about it from a product perspective.  Suddenly, with this perspective, it actually got quite interesting. In particular, trying to define to myself just what a cloud service is.

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Posted in: business issues, off-topic / Tagged: , , , ,

Off-Topic: Moving Bad Piggies Save Games

2013 March 15 23:00 / 1 Comment /

I am really a great fan of the Rovio games from Angry Birds and on. One of these games is the tricky puzzler Bad Piggies, which I have spent a great deal of time playing to unlock new levels (and as an illustration of deterministic simulation). Playing on my Nexus 7 I have solved level after level… and then I got myself a new Xperia phone. Not that playing on the go is that big an attraction, but if I happened to want to do that, starting over just felt wrong.

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Posted in: computer games / Tagged: , , , , , ,

Simulation vs Reality in Schlock Mercenary

2013 January 7 11:25 / Leave a Comment /

Schlock Mercenary is a very funny web (and print) comic that I discovered earlier this year via a list at ArsTechnica. In reading up on back issues and back stories, I came across a nice little gem about simulation.

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Posted in: computer simulation technology, funny

Wind River Blog: Simics and Flying Piggies

2012 November 28 11:59 / Leave a Comment /

I just added a new blog post at the Wind River blog, about determinism and illustrating Simics-style determinism is by looking at the game Bad Piggies. Games and simulators have quite a lot in common, actually.

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Posted in: computer games, off-topic, virtual machines, Wind River Blog / Tagged: , , , ,

Buying High Technology

2012 August 8 02:19 / 1 Comment /

Selling and marketing high technology is what I do for a living. My counterpart is the customer or buyer, and I help design, build, explain, an market these products.  In this role, I am most usually the expert on the domain, helping potential customers understand what we sell and why it will help them.  Both at the high-level value proposition and the details behind it.  Some people focus most of the their energy on the high-level value proposition, but I feel that youoften need a bit detail backing that as well.

I recently had the enlightening experience of being on the buying side instead, experiencing the transition from high-level value proposition to low-level details.  It struck me as being quite similar to what the customers for our virtual platforms would experience when coming in new to the field.

I bought a camera.

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Posted in: business issues, gadgets / Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Off-topic: Society without God

2012 July 2 22:06 / 1 Comment /

I just finished reading Society without God, by American sociologist Phil Zuckerman. The book came out back in 2008, but I heard about it recently on a skeptic podcast and I felt I just had to buy it. Phil Zuckerman spent a year in Denmark in 2006, and also visited Sweden during that time to perform interviews with a wide sample of what seems to me to be typical Swedes and Danes, trying to understand their attitude towards god and religion. His conclusion is that the Nordic countries today are a special little area of deep secularism in a world that is mostly religious and apparently growing more religious recently. Even in fairly secularized Western Europe, the Nordic countries stand out (or at least Denmark and Sweden does, in his research). So what? For a Swede like myself this is pretty obvious… but when you combine this with the fact that the standard of living and overall feeling of security and quality of life in Denmark and Sweden is very high, Zuckerman finds a great argument against a certain argument brought forth by Christian conservatives in the US…

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Posted in: books, off-topic, Politics, popular culture / Tagged: , , ,

Building a Spy-Proof OS?

2012 June 16 09:16 / 2 Comments /

I am not in the computer security business really, but I find the topic very interesting. The recent wide coverage and analysis of the Flame malware has been fascinating to follow. It is incredibly scary to see a “well-resourced (probably Western) nation-state” develop this kind of spyware, following on the confirmation that Stuxnet was made in the US (and Israel).

In any case, regardless of the resources behind the creation of such malware, one wonders if it could not be a bit more contained with a different way to structure our operating systems. In particular, Flame’s use of microphones, webcams, bluetooth, and screenshots to spy on users should be containable. Basically, wouldn’t cell-phone style sandboxing and capabilities settings make sense for a desktop OS too?

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Posted in: desktop software, programming, security / Tagged: , , , , ,

Off-Topic: Analyzing Outlook Mailbox Size

2012 June 2 16:35 / 2 Comments /

Where I work, we use Exchange as our email server and Outlook as the primary client (at least I do). We also have an email quota that I keep bumping into, since I have a tendency to attract many emails with large attachments like image-happy PowerPoint files or binary code modules to patch things. I am also an extreme user of email folders. My main Outlook account contains some 650 folders, and my offline archive of all my old emails reaches towards 1300, with many 100s of thousands of emails for a total of almost 20 GB. So, pretty extreme.

My problem is: what do I do when the email system tells me (and it is serious, I can attest) that I am close to hitting my quota and that soon email will neither be received nor sent? I want to find the folders that are very large and candidates for some archiving. The answer has eluded me for a long time, until I stumbled upon a 2010 Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3skJOd4GIak, from “tech-informer.com” (which now looks pretty dead). With some modifications, this solved my problem.

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Posted in: desktop software / Tagged: , , , , , ,

Off-Topic: Angry Birds Space (Good Game, Bad Price)

2012 April 29 21:03 / 1 Comment /

Once upon a time, I was young man in high school where our little computer club got a new PC with a color screen and a floating-point coprocessor. One fun little program I wrote was a simple gravity simulator, where a number of point-size assigned various mass flew around interacting with each other. We used that program and tried to set up initial setting for sizes, speeds, and directions of bodies that would result in some kind of stable system. More often that not, all we managed to create were comets that came in, took a sharp corner around a “star” and disappeared out into the void again. Still, it was great fun. And when I discovered Angry Birds Space it felt like a chance to try that again. Overall, “space” as my son calls it is a great spin on the Angry Birds idea. However, the way it is sold does not make me too happy.

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Posted in: business issues, computer games, off-topic / Tagged: , , ,

Off-Topic: Ticket-to-Ride Pocket is Broken

2012 January 29 21:45 / Leave a Comment /

Ticket to Ride is a nice real-world board game that is generally considered one of the best family and gateway games (and a decent game even for experienced gamers). We recently got it for our iPod Touches, and the weakness of the computer players quickly turned it from “I wonder if I can win this game” into “let’s shoot for the highest score possible”.

Chasing high scores is fairly typical for computer games – playing against human beings you are motivated to win, even if you win by scoring a measly 75 points… while against the computer it becomes about beating your own old scores. Unfortunately, this also turns repetitive after a while, due to some small design flaws that really should be easy to fix.

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Posted in: board games / Tagged: ,

Touch the Screen vs Press a Button

2011 December 26 11:02 / Leave a Comment /

Is the touchscreen the end-all of user interfaces for mobile devices? There were rumors in early 2011 that the iPad2 would lose all physical buttons (which did not come true, obviously).  To me, that sounds like a really good and bad idea. Good, in the sense that a device that is all a big screen certainly looks nice. Bad, since it would be much less user-friendly than a device with some real physical buttons to press.

I have been thinking about this subject lately, after using a BlackBerry Torch 9800 as my work phone for a few months.  I like the device a lot, but there are certainly some rough edges and some places where there is a UI conflict between touching the screen and pressing the buttons. At the same time, I am using both an iPod Nano 3G, and a couple of iPod Touches. I used to have SonyEricsson Symbian-based P900, P990i, and G900 smart phones which also were combined touch/press devices with a stylus.

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Posted in: gadgets / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

DV* 30 Years

2011 November 13 22:32 / Leave a Comment /

On the very binary date of 11-11-11, my alma mater, the computer science (DV, for datavetenskap) education at Uppsala University celebrated its thirty years’ anniversary. It was a great classic student party in the evening with a nice mix of old alumni and fresh-faced students. Lots of singing and some nice skits on stage. Great fun, and my voice has still not recovered. It also got me thinking about it is that we really do as computer scientists.

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Posted in: history of computing, off-topic, programming / Tagged: , ,

Off-Topic: Sälen in the Summer (Vacation)

2011 July 14 21:10 / Leave a Comment /

This Summer, our travel-away-from-home vacation was spent in Sälen, Sweden. Sälen is normally considered a winter destination, one of the biggest ski resorts in Sweden – but they are working on making it more of a year-round attraction. To be more precise, we went to Lindvallen, which is one of the seven or so separate “villages” that form the “Sälen” area. It was a nice and relaxed place, with little stress from having too many things to do, but enough to keep the kids happy. Seeing the mountains in the Summer was nice.

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Posted in: biking, off-topic, travel / Tagged: , , ,

Off-topic: Windows tip: Hide Desktop Icons

2011 June 7 14:39 / 3 Comments /

I often have to create screenshots and screen recordings as part of my job, and to make that look good I don’t want any part of my Windows desktop or task bar to show in the results. Until now, I have done this the hard way by using very few desktop icons and putting them around the edges of the screen.

There is a better way.

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Posted in: desktop software / Tagged: , ,

msys git – error could not allocate cygwin heap

2011 May 4 13:12 / 6 Comments /

I am using TortoiseGit on Windows for a while now, and it works OK. However, today, it just stopped working. The error I got persistently was:

0 [main] us 0 init_cheap: VirtualAlloc pointer is null, 
Win32 error 487 AllocationBase 0x0, BaseAddress 0x68540000, 
RegionSize 0x480000, State 0x10000 
c:\msysgit\bin\sh.exe: 
*** Couldn't reserve space for cygwin's heap, Win32 error 0

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Posted in: desktop software, off-topic, programming / Tagged: , , ,

Cubase64 – Impressive Impossible Retro

2011 April 22 22:14 / 1 Comment /

I recently read the “Cubase64 White Paper” by Pex Tufvesson. It is a fantastic piece of retro computing, where he makes a Commodore 64 do real-time audio effects on a sampled piece of music. There is a Youtube movie showing the demo in action. Considering how hard we worked in the early 1980s to make a computer make any kind of useful noise at all, this is an amazing feat. It is also a feat that I think would have been impossible at the time.

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Posted in: desktop software, history of computing / Tagged: , , ,

Off-Topic: Set Own Number on BlackBerry

2010 December 29 12:00 / Leave a Comment /

Ever since I got my BlackBerry smartphone, I was annoyed that the display said “My Number: Unknown number” in a number of places. I assumed that this would be automatic, just like everything else information-related on this device. However, I finally worked out how to “fix” the problem by manually setting my phone number.

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Posted in: gadgets, off-topic / Tagged: ,

Product Holes: Microsoft Office vs Internet Explorer

2010 October 22 11:05 / Leave a Comment /

There seems to be no shortage of bugs that “should have been obvious” and subject to the “how can you not check that your own products work together” phenomenon. Just the other day, I stumbled on another one. This time, it was the Microsoft set of applications and operating systems that do not quite work together the way you would expect them to.

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Posted in: desktop software, programming, testing / Tagged: , ,

Product Holes: Greatest Hits break iPod Cover Flow

2010 July 18 20:20 / 3 Comments /

Following on my previous posts about broken phone browsers, phones, and cars, here is another case of “why didn’t they catch this in testing?”

We recently got ourselves an iPod Touch, to entertain our oldest child on long trips. It is a brilliant device in many ways, I can understand why people love their iPhones (even though I am very happy with the very different style of the Blackberry phone that I was given by my employer). However, I have found one weird behavior in the music player that leaves me wondering how it got through into the shipping product.

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Posted in: gadgets, programming, testing / Tagged: , , , , ,

Product Holes: Tesla Roadster & iPhone 4

2010 July 17 12:57 / Leave a Comment /

Continuing on the thread from my previous post about the testing of products that fail to find problems that become obvious to (some) users after a very short time, I just read an article (in Swedish) about how the famed Tesla roadster cars behaved when they were confronted with Scandinavian winters.

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Posted in: gadgets, programming, testing, transportation / Tagged: , , , , ,

Off-Topic: Voxel Graphics at Legoland

2010 July 7 20:47 / 1 Comment /

Legoland is full of cool and interesting Lego models, built from millions and millions of Lego bricks. The creations don’t have too much in common with the standard Lego kits sold in stores. Rather, they are advanced uses of Lego bricks that look like something from the real world — especially at a distance. Up close, they are very blocky and not as smooth and polished as regular Lego models.

Essentially, they are voxel graphic representations that must be very hard to plan and execute.  The standard single-stud 1×1 Lego brick is their smallest unit, or maybe its 1/3 height flat version. Here are some examples that I photographed in Legoland during my visit this Summer.

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Posted in: off-topic / Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Off-Topic: Lalandia Billund (Vacation)

2010 July 6 20:40 / 1 Comment /

Another Summer vacation has come around, and as usual that causes a blog post or two on Summer tips and comments on places where I have been. This year, we went down to Denmark to visit the city of Billund, home to Legoland and Lalandia. Lalandia is an interesting mix of indoors activity center and camping village. We rented a house there for our vacation, and are overall very pleased with the place.

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Posted in: off-topic, travel, uncategorized / Tagged: , , ,

Eyjafjallajökull is Showing us Something

2010 April 18 20:06 / 1 Comment /

Wow. The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland and the resulting ashcloud has had an effect that I would never ever have expected. A near-total closing down of the European airspace is such a drastic thing to happen to nobody seems to have expected. It has certainly not been included in the list of worst-case scenarios to plan for in company and government contingency plans. Where does this leave us? In a very interesting situation indeed. Worst-case, we will have to do without air travel for months.

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Posted in: business issues, history, off-topic, transportation, travel / Tagged: , ,

Eclipse: Changing the Java Heap Size

2010 January 13 17:46 / Leave a Comment /

eclipseiconI just won a battle against Eclipse, managing to finally rid myself of a string of strange out-of-heap warnings. It is a long story, involving lots of web searching and fiddling with the eclipse.ini file options for the JVM. It just never seemed to work as I wanted it to, despite changing the -Xmx VM argument to 256, then 512, and finally 1024m.

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Posted in: desktop software, programming / Tagged: ,

Off-Topic: Old and New Lego

2010 January 8 19:09 / Leave a Comment /

During the Christmas holidays, I got the chance to compare my oldest child’s brand new Lego set with some from the mid-1980s. It is quite striking how much larger the things in the sets have become, and how much more affordable (in relative terms) Lego has become since then.

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Posted in: gadgets, general history, history, off-topic / Tagged:

Google is some kind of Glasses

2009 December 30 21:21 / Leave a Comment /

We bought some ski goggles for our kids… and look who have infiltrated that business:

junior google

Posted in: funny / Tagged: ,

SAAB no more

2009 December 19 20:15 / 1 Comment /

saabIt is the end of the road for SAAB. As a Swede, it feels sad (and a bit scary) to see a part of our industrial heritage go down and end. It lasted a bit more than 60 years, but now the  manufacturing of cars called SAAB has ended for good. But to be quite honest, it is hard to see how things could have gone differently. The closing of SAAB cars must have been considered inevitable for the past ten years or more. There will be lots of finger-pointing in the coming weeks, with the opposition parties trying to smear this on the government. However, I don’t see what the government could have done other than possibly postpone the inevitable.

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Posted in: off-topic / Tagged: , ,

Power Architecture Rip Van Winkle

2009 December 6 21:07 / Leave a Comment /

For some reason (I guess it is the job…) I was browsing through the Power ISA version 2.06 specification last week and hit the following gem of an instruction: “rvwinkle“. It is named after a short story I had never heard about, but which apparently is sufficiently well-known in the US literary canon to warrant a sleep mode being named after it.
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Posted in: computer architecture, funny / Tagged: , ,

Off-Topic: Another Troubled Train

2009 November 15 22:36 / 2 Comments /

sj-logo_largeAlmost exactly a year ago, I wrote a blog post about an adventure with delayed trains getting from Uppsala to Stockholm. As I said then, I am a train fanboy, preferring trains to most alternatives for most travel. Trains do have one big disadvantage though: when something goes wrong, you are unusually powerless and stuck. That happened to me last Friday. I spent some five ours in a dark train in a dark winter evening in the middle of the forest south of Laxå. Here is the story of that journey, and an observation about the impact of technology on our lives.

It was on a Friday the 13th, by the way. Not that I believe in that bad luck happens more on certain days, this certainly was an unlucky Friday (and very early Saturday).

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Posted in: trains, transportation, travel / Tagged: , , , ,