I chose to have a blog because I wanted to try something different than I usually do. I’m a web developer, I usually create the infra structure / code of websites, not the content. With this blog Google delivers the infrastructure and I deliver the content (are you bored yet?) .

Anyway, I figure I’m going to talk about what interests me, which is the web in general and web development in particular, but also about music, books and most importantly the movies and TV series I watch. It will likely not interest anyone, but maybe my written English will improve and perhaps I will have had some fun, ranting about random things on my mind.

I liked both previous Bourne movies (“The Bourne Identity” and “The Bourne Supremacy”) and actually also liked the old version of “The Bourne Identity” with Richard Chamberlain. I was therefore very excited about this new (final?) movie in the Bourne series.

This movie is directed by the same director as the second Bourne movie, Paul Greengrass, and is shot in the same style. That means the camera movements are often shaky and things are a bit blurry to make it seem as if the viewer is seeing the world through Jason Bourne’s eyes. This works very well especially during action sequences, and makes them very intense, just like The Bourne Supremacy. All the action sequences are very well done especially the one in Tangier. The acting is good, especially from Matt Damon, who is very believable as Jason Bourne.

What sets this movie apart from the other two movies in the (new) Bourne series is that we finally get to know how it started. We get David Webb’s motivation and his superiors motivation and we get to know the full scope of what they are prepared to do to protect their interests and “do the job”. This broadens the movies scope/perspective which in my opinion makes it a better movie than the two previous ones.

Now, don’t watch this movie expecting a big intellectual treatise on the abuse of power, it is first and foremost an action movie after all. But it’s not “just” an action movie. I like it very much. I’m probably going to watch it again in the cinema and I’m going to buy the DVD.

Blog features - no markup

They all allow you to enter text and to add an image. Some also allow links, tags and smilies. But none of them support basic text markup like bold or italics! I currently use BlogPress and this app also has this shortcoming.

Crucial?

Obviously this is not crucial and certainly not enough to prevent the use of these blogging apps. It is strange though and I certainly would like to be able to mark text. If there was a blogging app with this feature I would buy it.

Maybe the coming Squarespace app or the MacJournal Touch app will support this when they arrive. One can hope.

Import / Export

That import function and the corresponding export function are very nice and make switching to Squarespace (and from) much easier. Although I probably would have survived having to add those two entries myself.

iPhone App

So far I am very satisfied with Squarespace. I do miss the promised iPhone app. It would be very useful to be able to change my Squarespace with a dedicated app. Using the Squarespace website with Mobile Safari for that task is a bit cumbersome.

Not because I dislike the language (seems quite nice indeed) but simply because I think the time spend learning the intricacies of Objective C would be more productive, if I spend it programming in a language I already know. That means C#, Ada or some BASIC dialect.

MonoTouch

This is where MonoTouch comes in. Mono is a open source reimplementation of .NET which runs on many platforms including Mac OS. With MonoTouch it is supposedly possible to develop applications for the iPhone OS in C#. Even in a way that is acceptable by Apple, which means no dynamic code.

C# experience

This route would by far be the easiest way for me. I program using C# daily at work and have done so for 3 years. Unfortunately MonoTouch is not released yet and I don’t seem to have made the cut for the beta testing team :-/

I guess I have to wait for the official release.

Source code available

During those RISC OS days I created a bunch of software, most in Ada, some in BASIC and even some in ARM assembler. Most of those programs are still available on my ArcSite.de page, some also on Sourceforge. In order to streamline things a bit I have created a sub page on my SquareSpace site with all those programs. I hope this will be of use to someone.

No further development

I will not continue development of this software, but most of them are supplied with source code and under a very liberal license (LGPL). It should therefore be possible for any coder to develop them further, should they wish to do so.

Great GUI - no special features

Featurewise it is very much like many other blogging apps. It supports editing of new and existing blog posts and supports images and tagging. It does not offer any support for markup of text. Where the Squarespace app is different is the GUI and statistics. The GUI is very smooth and intuitive and the statistics are very nice, although also very depressing regarding my site.

I hope more features will be added soon, it is the nicest blogging application I have tried yet and it’s what I have used to write this post.

While hurrying through the Haven campaign I stumbled across the following peculiar site. I have never noticed that particular kind of unit before, I wonder which faction it belongs to…

Limiting profiles

There are a few exceptions though. I like the idea of having a public profile on which I present myself and my qualifications. But I would like to limit the number of profiles so that’s it easier to keep them up to date.

LinkedIn and others

I have chosen LinkedIn as my main public profile but I have also a Facebook page as the seems to be no way to avoid it. I also have profiles on Savannah and Sourceforge since I have projects registered there.

I have now updated those 4 pages and hope to keep them updated from now on. I have placed links to my profile pages in the right column. More will inevitably follow.

Crowded page

The cause for the crowdedness was obvious: All those buttons on the right side of the page. They were links to various Web sites and were meant to make it easy for readers to cite content on my site. They took a lot of space, in fact they filled almost the entire column and were the prime reason for choosing a three column layout instead of a two column layout. I chose to remove them and switch to a two column layout.

Visual interest

In order to add visual interest I inserted a picture into the top section, it made a huge difference. The picture itself is a photo of the column supporting the roof of the Sony center next to Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. No fancy effects have been used, it has simply been rotated and cropped.

I hope it helps!

It works!

Surprisingly it seems to work very well. The game runs without a hitch, except for the music which sometimes does skip a bit or two.

Note: I have lowered the graphics setting and I have not played the game much. Perhaps later and more complex parts of the game, have greater requirements.

Waiting for Red Alert 4

This is actually the first time I’m playing a game in the original Command & Conquer series. I have however played both Red Alert 2, Red Alert 3 and Command & Conquer: Generals. I like playing it, but I would prefer playing Red Alert 4, which hopefully is on its way!

DNS redirection and SquareSpace Pro

Well, now I have upgraded my Squarespace to ‘Pro’ which supports DNS redirection. With the help of the free DNS service gratisdns.dk and a few changed settings in the Squarespace setup, I performed the redirect. Now bracke.dk and www.bracke.dk both point to bbracke.squarespace.com.

I then, just for fun, asked it for walking directions. This function is still in beta and Google writes that the calculated routes “may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths”. They sure do!

Helpfully the new CSS3 has the box-shadow feature which is just what I need. Obviously things aren’t that simple, since the browser support for box-shadow is limited. Instead I have used the following concoction:

img {
 box-shadow: 3px 3px 3px #666;
 -moz-box-shadow: 3px 3px 3px #666;
 -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 3px #666;
 filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropShadow(color=#666, offX=3, offY=3, positive=true);
}

This should make sure all pictures will get a shadow no matter what browser is used to display them.

But on the web it has seen very little attention. On most webpages choosing between two web safe fonts is the height of typography.

Much-needed Focus on Typography

I think a renewed focus on typography is very much-needed. I have myself never really given it much thought and this webpage has very much been a victim of that. I will therefore use bracke.dk as my platform for experimenting with typography.

Basic Things

For now I have changed a few basic things and I will check these changes over next few weeks and possibly tweak them further.

• Serif font “Georgia”
• Indented first line (css: text-indent:50px;)
• Large first letter (css: p:first-letter { font-size: 1.8em; })
• Quoted text in small caps (css: quote { font-variant: small-caps; })

Vision

Imagine being able to move between your work PC, your computer at home and a PC at a client/customer and always having you favorite tools ready to be used. Imagine being ready to create new ASP.NET page on a new PC without first having to install IIS, Visual Studio and whatever other applications you need. That is what I tried to realise lately.

Easy solution

The “easy” solution is to grab installation files of all the needed programs and dump them on a usb flash drive or maybe even your phone. This way you will have everything at hand and just need to install the program instead of first having to find and download all install files. But installation still takes time and if its only a temporary work pc you will eventually have to remove all those applications again.

Portable - for real

The real solution is to install your applications directly onto the flash drive and run them from the flash drive instead of from the PC. This way your apps are ready immediately and they never “touch” the PC and thus, don’t ever need to be uninstalled. Many applications won’t install that way. They insist on modifying things on the PC. But some work just fine without such an installation and many others have special portable versions which can handle these restrictions. These portable applications are usually also a bit smaller than the normal versions of these apps. They can be found all over the web, but a nice collection is at portableapps.com.

Portable developer apps

I have gathered portable versions of my favorite developer apps:

• Notepad++
• WinMerge
• TotalCommander (USB copy tool)
• Git
• Cassini

Portable non-developer apps

I have also added a few non-developer apps:

• OpenOffice
• ClamAV

All these apps combined only take 500MB of space, of which OpenOffice takes 250MB. The Cassini version is (.3202) from Dmitry Robsman is available and compiles just fine in Visual Studio 2010. There is another version available with a slightly different GUI, but I have had some problems with it so I defaulted back to .3202.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} MSIE\ ([5678])\.
  RewriteRule .* http://www.browser-update.org/update.html [R=302,L]
</IfModule>

It will make your life better and the world a better place! Visit bracke.dk with an old IE version to get a demo.

• The sites folder is at "/Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/".
• The server configuration is at "/Library/Server/Config/apache2/".
• Set "AllowOverride All" in the "/Library/Server/Config/apache2/sites/*.conf" files.
• Remove "SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown" from "/Library/Server/Config/apache2/http_server_app.conf" as it is obsolete.
• Restart the server using "sudo apachectl restart".

It is however very different from what I'm used to, which is the main reason I'm interested in it! The following is a list of resources that helped me in my quest to learn Node.

• NodeJS - NodeJS itself.
• ExpressJS - A web application framework for NodeJS.
• Introduction to NodeJS. - Video with Ryan Dahl giving an introduction to NodeJS.
• History of NodeJS. - Video with Ryan Dahl talking about the history of NodeJS.
• Useful NodeJS Tools, Tutorials And Resources - A list Useful NodeJS Tools, Tutorials And Resources.
• More resources - A list of further Node resources.

The Process

The site is still created as a series of static pages by jekyll, a static site generator. I use a slightly modified version of Jekyll and a bunch of extensions.

The following assumes that you have registered on GitHub and created a repository for your site. Clone this repository using GIT or the GitHub app.

• Open a command line and make the local site directory the current directory.
• Run the jekyll instruction which creates the static site.
• Copy the resulting files into the cloned repository.
• Commit the changes and push/sync them to the gh-pages branch using GIT or the GitHub app.

I have pointed my DNS to the GitHub ip address and added a CNAME file to the website root, which contains a single line: "bracke.dk" (my domain). The website is pushed to the gh-pages branch of repository and that branch is set as the default branch (look at the "Admin" section of your site on GitHub).

The above was not obvious to me and I found the documentation on GitHub quite confusing on this matter.

I have also tried newer versions but they somehow don't seem as good. Although HoMM3 and HoMM5 were ok.

My main computer is now a MacBookPro and I decided to try to make HoMM2 run on that machine. Amazingly I got it going and it was surprisingly simpel. The following is a recipe for getting HoMM2 running on your OSX machine.

Prerequisites

• The HoMM2 disc or a copy of it. I copied the disc using DiscUtility and simply mount the ISO file every time I want to play.
• Wineskin - This utility is used to create a wrapper around the HoMM2 Windows program to make it run on your Mac. You can get it here.

Creating the HoMM2 wrapper

The following recipe will create a HoMM2 wrapper application which will run HoMM2 using the Wine Windows "emulator".

• Run the WineSKin Winery app, You will be prompted to select an engine and a wrapper version - simply select the newest ones.
• Click on "Create new blank wrapper", this creates a new app in a Wineskin subfolder of your application folder.
• Run the app you have just created - this opens a small window with 4 buttons.
• Click on the "Install software" button and choose the setup.exe on the HoMM2 CD and start the install. The install will work like it would on a PC
• Now click on the second button ("Set Screen Options") and select "Override" instead of "Automatic" and "Rootless (windowed)" instead of "Fullscreen" and click "Done".
• Click the third button to get to the advanced options section. Make sure the path to the HoMM2 exe file is correct and is on your harddisc and not on the CD.
• Select the tools tab and click on the "Config utility" button.
• Select the "Applications" tab and set the "Windows Version" to "Windows 98" and click on "OK".

Now you should have a working version of HoMM2! Click on "Test Run" in the "Advanced"tab to confirm it.

The Problem

When I push changes to a project on the Bonobo Git server, it fails with the following message:

protocol error: bad line length character: <!DO

It only happens with large commits.

The Solution

The problem is the resulting size of the request. There is a max size and when that is reached it results in apartial request.

The solution is to increase the max request size in the Bonobos web.config:

<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="2147483647" />