New RIFERS blogs entries from Geert Bevin in category computing

Programming while lying on my back (lumbar disc hernia)

Geert Bevin — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:03:43 +0100

After several months of constant pain in my back, I finally decided to get scans made of my spine. Turns out I have a double lumbar disc hernia (L4-L5 left and L5-S1 right). Luckily they are minor, so there not even talk of needing an operation.

For the hernias to go away, I need to rest. I'm supposed to lie flat on my back all the time with my legs folded in an angle. This should reduce the tension in my back and allow it to cure by itself. This position makes it however very difficult - almost impossible - to program while holding a laptop. I searched the web for appropriate laptop stands and stumbled into 'The Lappyvator', a build-it-yourself project that is easy to execute. The only downside seems to me that your arms are in a vertical position and don't rest on anything at all, which is bound to be very tiring. Luckily, I use the AlphaGrip as my keyboard, so I don't need to touch the laptop, eliminating this problem.

Now I'm able to work regular hours and totally rest my back. I haven't tried it yet, but it also seems like an awesome approach to watch movies or series in bed with the laptop.

Below are the pictures of my own lappyvator. I've built it so that I can easily remove the horizontal feet and take it with my in a suitcase when I travel: at last comfortable computing in hotel rooms!

Help me and the world get an even cooler keyboard

Geert Bevin — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 08:09:09 +0200

Some of you might know through IRC discussions that I use a weird gamepad-like keyboard: the AlphaGrip. While it took me a while to learn, this device took away most of my RSI and shoulder pains, and it allows me to type while standing.

The company that created the AlphaGrip was chosen by Yahoo! and Ivanka Trump as one of five finalists (out of over 9,000 entries) in the Yahoo! Ultimate Connection Contest. If they win this, they'll have a good amount of more funds to improve the current keyboard and make it wireless and even better for touch typing by possibly rearranging a couple of keys and creating different sizes of the device so that it fits better in larger or smaller hands.

So, if you have a couple of seconds, please vote on Mike Wilner, entry 5, here:
http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/ultimateconnection/index.php?...

If you're really motivated, vote each day until the 25th, that will help a lot.

Thanks for lending a hand!

Voice recognition to the rescue!

Geert Bevin — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 15:20:09 +0200

For quite a long time I have been suffering from some form of RSI and have tried out different keyboards to try to alleviate the pain. The past three years I have been able to get by thanks to the TouchStream keyboard from FingerWorks. However, this company doesn't exist anymore and I've heard an increasing amount of reports about TouchStream keyboards that are failing. I know that mine will not last forever either and I'm starting to suffer from the fact that it's still a traditional keyboard with horizontally twisted hands. This is not a natural position and the strain it puts on my wrists is forcing me to take frequent breaks again.

I started looking for a new keyboard and found the AlphaGrips. It combines most of the things that I find important: no need to reach out for the mouse, vertically positioned hands, limited finger movements, and the ability to type while standing up. I've had it for almost three weeks now, and my typing speed is slowly becoming acceptable. Sadly, it's still a keyboard and I still need to move my fingers and position my hands in a certain way. I can already feel another kind of stress building up.

Last week I showed my AlphaGrips to Jonas Bonér at TSSJS Europe, and he told me that he also had serious problems with RSI. Recently he started using voice recognition and told me that it worked extremely well. This sounded very interesting, because when I played with voice recognition a few years ago, it really wasn't very useful at all.

When I came home from the conference, I ordered myself a copy of iListen and started training it with the Logitech headset that I've been using for Skype. While it sort of worked, the recognition rate was not good enough for it to be useful. It seems that for voice recognition software to be really precise, you need to have a specialized headset that's optimized for the task. I thus ordered one of the supported headsets, the Plantronics .Audio 85, and it arrived today.

Holy Moses! As soon as I started using this headset, the recognition rate really increased up to at least 95 percent! I'm going to try to use voice recognition now for as many tasks as possible. It's great that technology allows geeks to continue to spend an obscene amount of time in front of the computer!

Acer trumps Apple : MacBook Pro is a no-no

Geert Bevin — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 09:49:36 +0100

A lot of notebook manufacturers are jumping onto the new Intel Core Duo processor. Apple's announcement of the MacBook Pro is no exception and many people seem to have rushed towards the Apple Store to buy one.

I admit it, I almost felt bad considering that I just bought a new Acer Ferrari 4005. However, I had no choice since I had to book in some expenses last year.

I did weep a moment when I stumbled into the announcement of the Acer Travelmate 8200. This is one seriously amazing machine that beats the new Apple at almost everything ... for the same price (or a lot cheaper in Europe).

People that were considering to get the new Intel Apple laptop for multi-boot with Windows should also reconsider. I turns out that it doesn't use the standard PC BIOS, but EFI instead. Only Windows Vista will support EFFI, so your current Windows XP copies are useless. As far as Linux support goes, the Airport Extreme card doesn't work which makes it pretty useless in many settings considering that you can't even dial-up if you don't get an external modem!

I'm also much more confident that OpenSolaris will run soon on it since the Acer Ferrari 4005 seems to have been widely adopted inside Sun and the Travelmate 8200 is a logical follow-up. The chassis is even almost the same.

Maybe a next revision of the MacBook Pro might tempt me, but currently it's again underpowered (this seems to be a trend in Apple notebooks) and doesn't support anything but MacOSX and only a couple of applications correctly.

	Acer Travelmate 8200	Apple MacBook Pro (1.83GHz version)
CPU	Intel Core Duo 2.0GHz	Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz
Memory	2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM	1GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Screen	15.4" 1680 x 1050	15.4" 1440 x 900
Video	ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 256MB
Video out	VGA, DVI and S-video TV-out	DVI
Hard drive	120GB SATA 5400 rpm	100GB SATA 5400 rpm
CD/DVD	DVD+R dual-layer, DVD-R, CD-RW	DVD+R, DVD-R, CD-RW
Modem	Built-in	Optional USB external
Ports	4x USB2, 1x Firewire 400, FIR (fast infrared), docking station connector	2x USB2, 1x Firewire 400, FIR (fast infrared)
Networking	Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g 54Mbps, Gigabit ethernet, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
Audio	Integrated microphone, stereo speakers, combined optical digital input/audio line in, combined optical digital output/headphone out
Conferencing	Voice and video over IP with integrated 1.3 megapixel CMOS camera, with 225-degree swivel, and Bluetooth VoIP phone	Integrated fixed iSight camera
Battery life	3.5 hours with main nine-cell + 2 hours with secondary six-cell	not specified
Card slots	ExpressCard/34 slot, Type II PC card, 5-in-1 card reader, Smart card	ExpressCard/34 slot
Remote	none	Apple Remote
Size	14.3" (364.0mm) W 10.7" (271.0mm) D 1.0" (26.3mm) H	14.1" (357.0mm) W 9.6" (243.0mm) D 0.96" (24.3mm) H
Weight	6.6 pounds (3 kg)	5.6 pounds (2.54 kg)
Price	$2499 - €2230	$2499 - €2729

At last, free certified SSL certificates for open-source projects

Geert Bevin — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 21:25:29 +0200

RIFE has been hosting its source repository with Subversion through WebDAV and https.

Since RIFE is an open-source project, we have always worked with a self-signed SSL certificate. This however brought up a warning dialogue when people accessed our repository. Many times we got remarks about this and finally decided to look around for a cheap way to procure ourselves a legitimate SSL certificate.

After some searching, it turns out that GoDaddy.com is providing free certified SSL certificates to qualifying open-source projects! We got ours in a couple of hours.

This is really cool and I'm sure it will benefit many projects. We will now also look into providing signed jars of the RIFE distribution to make it easier to fine-tune a security policy for the framework without having to lower security throughout an entire application server.

Act TODAY against European software patents

Geert Bevin — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 13:15:25 +0100

Another chapter in the software patents story of Europe is being written. On Monday, the next threat will happen and if people don't take action, it's possible that software patents will appear even after all the previous protest and vetos. It's very important that you fax a personal letter to the following Belgian and Dutch ministers.

While it's possible to send an email or to sign online petitions, these actions are too easy and are rarely taken seriously. Please take the time to write a personal letter today. You might find some inspiration on our forum, or post your own.

More information can be found on:
Dutch summary: http://www.ffii.be/landbouwraad
Dutch newsitem: http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/20597.phtml
Dutch analysis: http://www.softwarepatenten.be/raadtekst
English summary: http://demo.ffii.org/cons0501/

English analysis: http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/europarl0309/cons0401/

Belgium
Minister van Energie en Economie Marc Verwilghen
Fax: 02-213.09.22
Tel: 02-213.09.11

marc.verwilghen@vldwest.be

Minister Sabine Laruelle
Ministerie van Middenstand en Landbouw
Fax: 02-219.09.14
Tel: 02-250.03.03

info@cma-ml.fed.be

Netherlands
Minister Cees Veerman
Ministerie van Landbouw, Natuur en Voedselkwaliteit
Fax. 070-3786100
Tel. 070-3786868
Mail through this form
You can also fax by mailing to remote-printer.Minister_Veerman@31703786100.iddd.tpc.int

30 inches of bliss

Geert Bevin — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 08:37:38 +0200

Finally my dual G5 2,5 Ghz 2GB with the 30" screen arrived. It just took a few hours to get all my apps installed, all my data transferred and my environment to be configured to my liking. Initially I feared that the screen would be too big or that the quality would be somehow sub-par. None of this however, the screen nicely spans my sharp visibility range and you can still see most things without having to shift focus too much. The quality is breathtaking. It's really great to code on this screen. The characters on screen almost feel 'solid' and you can put your IDE and browser right next to each other without having to switch desktops. The PowerMac also rocks, the speed increase over my 1Ghz G4 Powerbook and 2Ghz PIV Workstation is present in everything I do. Just for fun I tried setting Unreal Tournament 2004 to 1920x1200 with all details cranked up to the highest level and the game just flies along as if it was the most normal of things. This NVidia card really seems to rock, can't wait for Doom3 and World of Warcraft to come out for Mac.
This is one of the investments I'm most happy with ever, it's been a long time since I sat in front of a new computer and feel really excited about the upgrade.

The irony of warranty

Geert Bevin — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 14:10:39 +0200

Yesterday, my Maxtor D740X 40GB hard drive starts giving errors and making weird sounds. I go to the Maxtor website and look for the warranty conditions. After having provided the serial number into a form, the website tells me that it's still under warranty until February 2005 and that when I send them the drive, it'll be replaced or repaired.

However, I first have to download, install and run PowerMax which will check my hard drive thoroughly and display an error message number. This is needed, otherwise they wont give out an RMA number. Now, PowerMax is a floppy image that only extracts under windows, so I have to reboot to Windows and search a floppy. Half an hour later I find one tucked way in a box. Then I notice that I even failed to connect the cables for the floppy drive when I installed the PC, so I shut it down, open it, fix the damn thing and boot again. Now I write the image to the floppy and reboot my computer. It launches the disc analysis and half an hour later I know that 6a676678 identifies my personal private hard drive failure.

Now I go through the whole online RMA wizard, since otherwise they wont accept me sending the drive. At the end it's clearly detailed that I have to send them the drive into proper packaging (got knows where I can find what they want) and that it should be sent through a tracable courier like DHL, Chronopost, Fedex, ... and that is all at my expense.

Wooow! Hang on for a minute how much do these drives cost nowadays, let's see Diamondmax Plus8 of 40GB .. dumdiedum ... 53 euro. Now, let's give a call to Chronopost how much it costs to send from Belgium to Ireland ... dumdiedum again ... 63,21 euro!!!

Holy cow, aren't I glad that I have a 2 year warranty on this drive! I can throw it away with the garbage and it's still under warranty!
What a fun way to spend a day.

MySQL and Blobs

Geert Bevin — Fri, 03 Sep 2004 09:29:32 +0200

I've been developing a content management framework for RIFE that is able to store text, image and raw data transparently in a large collection of database backends. MySQL is one of them and when getting everything working correctly, I stumbled into another idiosyncrancy of the database that is really starting to disgrace the RDBMS label.

Think about what a Blob is, it's a Binary LARGE Object. Now, guess what, MySQL's standard BLOB type limits the size at 65535 bytes! You have to explicitely use a MEDIUMBLOB or a LARGEBLOB if you want more ... and behold, if your LARGE object is actually SMALL, you can even use TINYBLOB. Isn't that great?

What do you gain from this wonderful data type optimisation? A whopping maximum of 3 bytes!! That's right, you're storing LARGE data and they make things more complex to gain a few bytes when you're storing magnitudes more.

Good design decision, MySQL devs!

The fallout of opensource

Geert Bevin — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 11:12:46 +0200

After some private emails with a small commercial product company about opensourcing a tiny part of their code, I began to understand their refusal and their arguments made me think about the current state of affairs.

Opensource used to be a great opportunity for small companies to get anchored in a community and have contributions and testing from other developers and users without having to spend an initial huge investment on creating a fully finished product or having to spend tons on marketing.

Sadly, since the big players jumped onto the opensource bandwagon, small companies are thrown back to square one again since all of a sudden the standard of opensource projects has been raised tremendously. Users and developers nowadays expect the same level of development that has been done after a lot of corporate investment and this makes it impossible for a small company to create attractive opensource projects (besides the trivial utility niche). The costly initial development is required again and on top of that people start to expect that everything is given away for free. Since the initial expectation is that high, small companies are having an even harder time to develop something worthwhile and after that it would even be more difficult to raise an income from consulting, support and services. It's starting to feel like we did one step forwards and got thrown two steps back :-/

I'm now hugely saddened though and really wonder where the software market will be heading next. I'm afraid the upcoming tides will be very disappointing.

Can viruses cause physical aggressivity?

Geert Bevin — Fri, 14 May 2004 08:17:39 +0200

Tonight someone called me at 02h30 on my cell phone and left a voice mail. I just listened it and was quite baffled. A women's voice says that it's disgusting that I'm sending viruses to people and threatens to come over to kick my arse if I continue.

Clearly some virus spoofed its 'from' address or some other trick to make it appear as if it came from one of my own email addresses. That women then set out to find who I was and to threaten me.

Even though I don't run any windows operating system, take all possible virus countermeasures (since they clutter my inbox), filter them out at the mailserver etc etc etc, I could still be harmed by it ... but not on the computer. Imagine what will happen if this plague continues and people continue to misinterprete what they see. If you can get aggressed because you offended someone with a few words on the street ... I would not be surprised if people were tracked down and beaten up if someone's computer has been wiped and infected again for the 100rd time.

It's a sad world :-(

Released RelativeLayers 0.9.7

Geert Bevin — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 00:02:52 +0100

Oh my, it's been almost two years since I've updated RelativeLayers. This release just adds support for Safari and to my surprise, this neat newcomer supports everything that's needed to run all features of RelativeLayers without any problems. Apple really did a great job on this browser.

Anyway, get the new release here or gather more information at the project's homepage.

Have fun!

Limit and offset in Oracle

Geert Bevin — Sun, 25 Jan 2004 12:42:31 +0100

For quite a while I've been frustrated with Oracle's lack of doing limit and offset in an easy single query. This always made it tedious to display paged results from a database query in a web page. Today, after looking on the web for the xth time, I stumbled into a query that seems to solve this.

So without further ado, here it is for those that have been searching for it also:

SELECT * FROM (
    SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY column1) LINENUM, column1, column2
    FROM MyTable
    ORDER BY column1
)
WHERE LINENUM BETWEEN 100 AND 200;

Releasing a new open-source project ... be scared, be very very scared

Geert Bevin — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 10:09:55 +0100

Yesterday, a new open-source web application framework has been announced on The Server Side and it has been literally been blown to pieces by the remarks. When I first read the announcement and went to the project's site to get some more information, I was struck by the amount of marketing crap that I read and quite quickly dismissed digging deeper into the project. After following the discussion on TSS I posted a comment too, indicating that after the author's statements and bold comparisons against existing project, he should have expected such a reaction.

When I woke up this morning, I couldn't help asking myself the question if these reactions are really all that justified. It seems clear to me that the author is quite passionate about his work, maybe too passionate. Probably, while trying to achieve the best possible results, his gaze got stuck on the neat things that he created and he lost perspective a little bit. So what? A few polite remarks and corrections from offended people should have sufficed, but I really don't think there's a need for personal attacks like this. Sheesh, this software is given away for free and the author simply believes that what he does is better the rest out there. Maybe it's true and he fails to explain it correctly or to defend himself appropriately, or maybe it isn't as good as he says. So what, there's no need to give people blows like that. I'm sure many reactions hurt him a lot.

I have released quite a number of open-source projects in the past and regrettably I have had to go through similar experiences. I remember vividly that when I announced RelativeLayers on Freshmeat a few years ago, the source code was torn apart on IRC and a bunch of IE-lovers had the time of their life making fun of some bad javascript habits I had back then. The project was eventually put in the channel's topic with some pointers to code locations as the laughing stock of the day. Now that really hurt!

If open-source is about community, shouldn't the established gurus politely help newcomers instead of ripping their heads off? Remember when you had that first project that gave you the rush, how passionate you were about it and how much time and energy you spent on it. Maybe you got somewhere now and you are part of a successful project, but that simply should make you more tolerant, not vindicative!

Steven discovered a very intricate Google spam

Geert Bevin — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 20:02:33 +0200

Google has quite an intelligent algorithm do rank websites. Other than using keywords it takes the internet linking structure into account to determine which sites are more relevent. This always seemed quite sensible since sites that are referred to a lot obviously interest more people.

However, since the web is becoming more and more collaborative through wikis, blogs and forums, people have found intricate ways to link to their site. Deep into their sites that seem interesting at first, they link further through to porn sites. Obviously, this is their intent since their porn sites become more relevant to Google through this mechanism.

Take notice of this and prevent such spam from polluting the community! You can read more in Steven's post.