bkil vs. programming

My web host is changing their terms of service and have sent me notice that on the 28th of November, they will stop hosting my service. They say that they have already informed my on the 26th of July about this issue, though I don't recall having read that. I'm still searching for alternatives. As a backup plan, I'm in the process of activating Google Apps services on the domain until a solution is found. Unfortunately, I'm not sure naked domain redirection would work in this phase. Also, my domain registrar has no online control panel, so I have to take the longer, manual route of adjustments.

My project has reached high activity status this weekend. I must thank all committers. Keep up the good work! ;-) Note that a major portion of my sources is still not up. Fortunately, gradual progress is easy and effortless. A central repository is a comfortable sharing method. It keeps the work synchronized on all 4 computers I regularly use.

In recent months, I've been developing Python (Geany, Netbeans), BASH (gedit, Geany) and a bit of HTML/Javascript (Netbeans, Geany) for work, Java (Eclipse) for coursework, Erlang (Emacs, sometimes Geany) and a bit of Emacs LISP (Geany) for labwork, and Haskell (Geany) for my own needs. I have also refreshed my Logo (Geany) skills recently to refactor two of my homeworks. I will move to C++/Qt/FFmpeg/SQLite (Qt Creator) again in the upcoming days for some time. I have dug into Gnome's Genie (and Vala) and will write a short overview of the language soon. That's 8-10 languages at my fingertips, but a few more aren't deep down below either, like C (you never forget the horror), Ada (hard to forget the beauty), Pascal (need to find a way to convert to Ada), Eiffel (have seen it, but no professional coding done in it yet). Sadly, I'm not allowed to share my Python code, and some of my more interesting BASH scripts. You also can't enjoy some unpublished parts of Refa...

I plan to share my sources via a software project management suite. From now on, you could even contribute if you wish! You could also follow project updates (commits, documentation pages, releases, etc.) in your feed reader. I don't have a problem with using Google's products for open source development, but do tell me if you think otherwise. Kosi had recommended GitHub, but it doesn't offer all features I need, and I'm hesitant to spread over many service providers. For more information, visit the bkil's personally developed and used tools project summary page.

I have replaced my portable bicycle with a small kick scooter a few months ago. Testing is still underway. Average commuting speed is in excess of 10km/h for longer intra-city trips. Riding comfort is fair on sidewalks not made of bricks. Bicycle lanes with bricks are a bit rough, but still doable. I agree that the device does give you a better workout than a bicycle. At around the same time, I'm beginning to use one of my mountain bikes in the city.

I have input more than 1 million characters of notes, coursework, ideas, plans and doodling on the device. I've programmed some simple calculations on it to aid my purchases. Sadly, I never got around to develop in Java for the device. I've finished all 50 Sokoban levels on it for the delight of my good old mathematician roommate many years ago. :-) All in all, it was worth it. However, I've retired it in favour of my netbook last year. Though, I still carry it around in my backback as a backup solution to this day. I also accompany it with an extra set of rechargeable batteries.

I've purchased a new Asus Eee PC 2g (700x) portable "netbook" computer last year. It cost the equivalent of about 128 Euros in a local shop nearby, though prices were very close citywide back then. At least I found good use for my aging 4 GiB USB flash drive. I'd been considering this exact purchase since the manufacturer has announced this line. Though for business reasons, it took them some time to market the smallest model. I've loaded Pupee Linux on it, installed Google Chrome, disabled a few background processes, developed a few simple scripts for it and made some other small customizations. I may share my exact customizations later on. Battery life varies greatly with usage. If you disable all onboard devices and turn down the backlight to about 10-20%, you can study from PDF or HTML documents for 3:07 (187 minutes). The biggest consumers are the processor and the wireless radio, so heavily browsing the web on a wireless network reduces this to a bit over tw...

A new poll is available for you to vote on. ;-)

I'll be back online in the upcoming days, stay tuned! :-)

Yesterday's "party" prompted me to do some drills of typing in order to improve my accuracy. :-) Results are the following on a random acceptable, but not new keyboard in our lab: A simple single sentence test without much caps: 70 A large paragraph (about one minute) of well-balanced text: 62(2), 66(1), 70(0), 66(1) Crazy phrases (two sentences each): 61(0), 67(0), 66(0), 69(0), 74(0), 70(0), 62(0), 63(0), 77(0), 65(1), 63(0), 79(0), 114(0), 56(0), 76(0), 61(0), 61(0), 70(0), 65(0), 57(0), 73(0), 87(0), 79(0), 77(0), 62(0), , 72(0), 72(0) Random letters (59 characters): 38(0), 39(0), 49(0), 45(0), 40(0), 39(0), 39(0), 36(0) Random letters, numbers and punctuation (59 characters): 35(0), 37(1), 36(0), 35(0) One minute of well-balanced text: 72(0), 69(0), 72(0), 74(0), 72(0), 71(0), 75(0), 80(0), 76(0), 72(0)

edit: tiny formatting correction I usually browse the web with many instances of the graphic links2 (my own patched version) and Epiphany concurrently, depending on the complexity of the site in question. When I was on Firefox, I used flashblock to lighten the load on my rusty old processor. I did hack it up for Epiphany around the time I made the switch, but gave up on it sometime later, as the exact blocking scheme looked pretty inefficient. I.e., I could sometimes observe an embedded object loading and taking up a lot of CPU time until the blocker has hidden it from sight. I never cared to come up with Java blocking similar to NoScript on this browser. As I rarely used it anyway, I simply removed the Java plugin package from my system, and extracted the Flash plugin to a subfolder of my profile directory. A hackish script of mine deleted or recreated a symbolic link to the plugins on demand, which was basically the only course-grained way I have been controlling this up until today....

You may have noticed that I mostly use <code> tags instead of the more conventional <pre> to signal source code. Although the <code> tag was invented to show HTML markup, and mostly one-liners of those too, I find them more convenient for two good reasons. One is that I usually publish source code instead of prose, so using <code> is the semantically more appropriate one of the two. The second is a practical one: by definition, preformatted text does not support reflowing by the end user. Although that does make sense in most cases, especially for layout-based languages like Haskell, however, introducing scroll-bars in small windows or on embedded devices is a major nuisance. Your layout is toast even if you only have one or two lines that are too wide in the source. Though, I do try to prevent the former case as much as possible. This question is a usability issue, as in my opinion, it's much better to fiddle a bit with deciphering the one or two lines ...

This is one of the assembly programs I could be kind of proud of. It's composed of a heap load of macros and is built up in an almost completely neat, high-level hierarchical structure. I could post some snippets if anyone is interested. After making it build, it needed very few compile and test cycles despite the fact that I haven't programmed such a platform in years. I can recall one real, non-trivial defect that needed a second thought. It took some time of analyzing the (soundcard-based!) scope data to arrive at the conclusion that the embedded table contained inverted data (or something similar). Thus, actually the shell script was in (logical) error that generated the data table. After this correction, all three outputs of the device were verified to generate perfectly shaped (unfiltered) sine waves. This was a nice feat, as the generation of the three outputs were implemented in an unintuitively tangled way in order to maximize output resolution.

The backlight is out, what am I going to do now?! Nah, actually I would only be in trouble if it wasn't a sunlight readable, electroluminescent transflective FSTN LCD! :-) You see, my current usage pattern involved less than 1% of backlight use, and in almost all cases it was more of a convenience than a necessity. It is, however, a sign of deterioration of the flexible cable, so I am getting a bit worried. I am prepared for all possibilities.

Let's get back to work. Before you lose all hope, I'll cheer you up with the fact that I'm not at all out of ideas. There are dozens of articles of mine in the works, actually in excess of fifty, which you could enjoy soon! Most stand pretty good, many of which are almost complete. Others need to get decomposed, refactored, supplemented with additional references, illustration or corrections. I've taken your expressed wishes into consideration, so there are many hardware related among them now.

I've uploaded a preliminary version of my interests to the Wikipedia user page of bkil . I'll keep you posted if I find something else interesting, but you could also follow the logs. Your suggestions are welcome!

Edit: typo fixes Yesterday, I needed to get a monochromatic ID picture printed to photographic paper and while at it, I also needed to print a page of text. I've visited a nearby mall in the morning for this reason. To my surprise, they had decent automated kiosks just for this purpose at the photo specialty store. Naturally, none of them could read my flash key drive, even after asking for assistance from the pretty lady at the counter. She said this does happen sometimes. Thankfully everything went fine after manually selecting the image at her computer, as the drive was read in a second there. Probably too many files on the drive for the bogous software to cope with. Anyway, the whole process about five to ten minutes. After that, I went to the normal printing booth for my other task. The guy was busy on the phone for about five minutes while he was acting as if he was refilling paper. After hanging up, he asked for the place where he could find the items to print. I quickly pro...