I couldn’t find a good free online application for practicing reading kana. I wanted something where I could practice reading fast, not just flash cards but I couldn’t find anything useful; so I made one.

In deploying the application to heroku as usual I needed to push my local database of words to the heroku server but got this error:

[~/kod/kanarecog] heroku db:push
Taps 0.3 Load Error: no such file to load -- taps/operation
You may need to install or update the taps gem to use db commands.
On most systems this will be:
sudo gem install taps

Which was completely ungoogleable! I spent like an hour trying to figure out what the hell was the error. I had taps installed properly, I had the latest version of the heroku gem and everything. Turns out… you need to run “sudo heroku db:push” to make it work, not just heroku db:push. I don’t know why pushing a db required sudo access but.. well.. It works now.

You can find the app at http://kanarecog.heroku.com. The design sucks, but I don’t really care that much, it fills its function.

Slowly getting there

I am slowly making progress with my time-wasting application. I’m getting it to do some stuff, but I just wasted like 4 hours with random crashes and one hard reboot of my computer because apparently Xcode doesn’t catch infinite loops, but instead lets the simulator suck up all existing CPU power.

The worst thing was that the crashes gave no error message at all. Sometimes the crashes were because an array index out of bounds (which it reports with an error sometimes and sometimes not) and one time it crashed seemly randomly and it took me like an hour to figure out that I was accidentally “dividing by zero” when running this piece of code

arc4random() % (5-l)

Where l was a variable for the length of a word. This length can be 5, so sometimes i was trying to do modulus zero. Which apparently crashes the app without errors…

Anyhoooo! Tomorrow I’m going to study more, I swear.

I now have 3 invites to flattr.com, the thing that button to the left is all about.

If you want a flattr account and think that you’ll use it (it costs 2 euros a month, and you give that money away to someone (like me)), drop a comment here on this post and I’ll send you an invite!

Something I’m building instead of studying for my exams.

I got an invite to Voddler a while back (only open to Swedish people), it’s an application for watching streaming movies (and to some degree TV-shows). When I first tried out the application it crashed right out of the box, couldn’t get it running. So I gave up. Today I tried it again in an attempt to give it a fair review. And boy am I disappointed.

These guys don’t know what they’re doing. This is my instant feeling toward this application. It is so bad I hardly even know where to start. But I guess I’ll go in the order in which I discovered the problems.

First I might say a little disclaimer, the application is still in Alpha so it is very rough and instability is quite acceptable, a couple of problems are highly fixable but some are not.

Installation process

It is utterly clear that Voddler isn’t developed for the Mac, I don’t think any of them have ever used a Mac, they have no idea how applications are supposed to be installed and I suspect that they’re running a virtual machine to simulate a windows-like environment in which to run their application. Anyway, you have to download a .pkg and double click it to go through the classical “next, next, next, install” dialog install procedure that is typical to Windows. On a Mac, all you should have to do to install an application is drag the icon into the Applications folder. But that’s not the worst part, they require you to give the application your root password. This is just totally absurd, for any application that isn’t extremely tightly coupled to development and core modification you should never have to give your away your root password, it is just so unexplainably bad practice to require that. It is so bad that I wanted to say no and stop installing the crap right there, but I decided to give it a chance.

Interface

The installation-process stuff they could probably fix in the future when they put more resources and focus into the Mac market, this point however they can’t fix. The whole interface is completely wrong in every way. They could not have done this any worse. I’m not talking about design, that part is pretty good. What I can not accept is how the application completely takes over your entire computer, rendering it about as useful as a DVD player. It will not allow you to run in windowed mode and it will not allow you to use your mouse. Everything is keyboard-navigated and the whole interaction-process with the application is utterly unnatural and deeply confusing. I usually understand applications pretty quick but here I had to spend 5 minutes just figuring out how the fuck I should navigate a form to log in and then how to use the actual application. In every video-application in the world the space-bar means pause; not in Voddler though.

On top of this, the application doesn’t run full screen and you can’t change the resolution, this is because I run my screen at 1080p and the Voddler application is set to running 720p. If you run anything but 720p you can’t use the application because you can’t change the resolution. This is obviously a bug in some sort of auto-detection thingy so I can overlook it in an alpha release, but it makes the application unusable for now.

I can fully understand their choice to build the application this way if they were simultaneously developing some hardware box that ran Voddler that you could connect to your TV, so the hardware box and was their actual source of income. This would be a superb business-model but I’ve so far not seen anything about them doing so. If the people developing this are not completely retarded they will be releasing a hardware-box that you can connect to your TV, making the application somewhat useful.

Bad Practice

The Voddler application is riddled with bad practice application development. Things you simply should not do if you respect your customers. Besides the requiring root access, they install a background-process that they automatically add to your Startup Items so it’s guaranteed to be running all the time. This background-process seems to be handling all the network activity, sending and receiving video. If they plan to cut their streaming costs by some solution like Spotify (P2P’ing content between users) in the future, this means that they will be sucking my bandwidth whether I have the actual video-application running or not.

Conclusion

I did not buy a $2000 computer so I could use it as a DVD player. When I watch video I want to be able to go in and out of full-screen mode. I want to be able to switch between applications, use natural controls and interact with my mouse.

Using Voddler on a computer is utterly useless, it sucks, it blows. I can not express how disappointed I am with this product.

When Voddler releases a sleek sexy Apple TV-like box to come with the application however; I will recommend my dad to buy one, since I nor any other person with any technical interest uses a TV any more. I know of only one person my age that actually owns a TV.

If Voddler wants to have any chance at all at capturing a computer-based market, they need to make a computer application. Not some embedded crappy rootkit-ware that renders your computer completely useless for anything but watching rental-videos.

For the non-technically inclined people reading this you could read it just to gauge my emotions and get a glimpse of the future, but this post will probably not mean much.

Watch this first and read later, you can skip a bit of the start since he really doesn’t demo the new tech until after about half the video. The first half is an explanation of why the tech is needed.

For the first time in a long time I am really excited. I am giddy with expectation and I can’t stop thinking about how much I want to switch over to coding Cappuccino for all front-end purposes.

I don’t like coding HTML, CSS and Javascript. I don’t think a lot of people actually do like it, it’s just something we do because we love the web and that’s the only way to do stuff on the web (give or take).

Now I now what he talks about in the video has been done before, Google don’t spend ages coding HTML, CSS and JS, they use Google Web Toolkit. But I’ve attempted to try GWT but just can’t get it to work. It’s very un-mac like and I frankly can’t even be bothered to get into it.

These guys in the video on the other hand. This shit will rock. Not only does it provide a nice way to interface your app, it provides you with built-in code modularity. I can break up my different front-end functions into modules and have the UI builder automatically interact with the application code.

I have a lot of ideas. Most of them I don’t have time or knowledge to follow through on, but recently I’ve gotten two ideas I do really want to follow through on! I really think they could be good things and I really want to see if they will hold up to scrutiny.

280 Atlas makes me want to follow through on my ideas. I’m not a great front-end developer and not graphically inclined, but Atlas gives me a decent UI to work with from scratch and if the idea holds water I can hire a graphics guy to make it great.

Most my ideas are applications and I’ve always been fascinated by desktop application development, I’ve always thought of it as a much more scientific and “structurally sound” (if that makes sense to anyone else?) process than web development. The problem is you can’t get it out there. You need some sort of vendor to deliver the app through and all my ideas involves being completely computer and OS agnostic, I.E. you should be able to use the app from any computer with any operating system anywhere in the world – that’s how everything should work.

With Cappuccino and Atlas, it could work!

För första gången i mitt liv formaterade jag en Mac.

Anledningen till detta var inte virus eller att den blivit slö. Jag hade misskött terminal-installeringar väldigt kraftigt. Jag hade installerat mysql via något som heter MacPorts, som installerar saker på lite okonventionella platser. När jag uppgraderade till rails 2.3.2 så inkluderades inte mysql librarys längre och jag var tvungen att installera mysql gem’et. När jag skulle göra detta så avbröt jag installationen halvvägs för att fläktarna på datorn slutade snurra och jag var tvungen att lämna in den på garanti. Eftersom jag avbröt installationen halvvägs fanns det saker som inte installerades korrekt, vilket gjorde att de inte gick att ta bort korrekt heller.

I slutsats hade jag ett par version av mysql och ett par versioner av ruby installerat och de krockade så att saker inte ville ladda korrekt.

Det gick i alla fall smidigt att formatera om, jag skrev upp en lista med alla apps jag hade på den och installerade alla idag på drygt en timme eller två. Nu är jag up and running igen med en fräsch clean installation och allt fungerar som det ska.

Det är ungefär det här som krävs för att man ska få problem med en Mac, gör korkade saker på ett väldigt avancerat sätt och få den att gå sönder hårdvarumässigt samtidigt.

Jag har precis blivit ombedd av Sparbanken Finn att uppdatera mitt BankID.

För det första. Varför i fucking jävla helvete måste jag uppdatera mitt BankID? Jag tänker behålla samma lösenord, det är samma teknik som används. Varför? Varför? Fucking varför?!?!?!?!?! De tvingar mig att uppdatera det helt utan anledning. FUCK YOU BANKID!

Nummer två:
De kräver numera att man installerar ett “säkerhetsprogram”. Hela konceptet av ett säkerhetsprogram är helt jävla fucked up. Ett program mer gör bara ett program mer det kan finnas säkerhetsluckor i. De är så jävla vilse när det gäller säkerhet att det finns inte. Så fort jag måste installera någonting på datorn för att kunna göra någonting på Internet brukar jag skita i det rakt av. Det ska inte behövas. Nu är jag nästan illa tvungen. Jag installerade i alla fall programmet, och jag kan säga att jag inte har sett en större hög skit i hela mitt liv. Det är ett sånt typiskt program från början av 90-talet som finns på alla kommunala datorer. Ett exempel: När man skall ange “PIN-kod” säger den: “Ref 10025: The length of the PIN is invalid”. Jaha?! Så vafan är en valid length då? Kan du ge mig lite fucking information här? Förväntar du mig att slå upp vad Ref 10025 betyder för att få reda på vilken längd mitt lösenord skall vara? FUCK YOU!

Nummer tre:
SKITEN FUNKAR INTE!!!!
Jag går igenom hela deras process med programmet och allting, anger en valid PIN (samma lösenord som jag alltid har haft) två gånger på samma sida. Sedan ytterligare två gånger, båda gångerna är det samma ruta med samma meddelande, som är fruktansvärt intetsägande. Efter fjärde gången jag skrivit mitt PIN så rapporterar den till webbläsaren och då säger den “Ett fel inträffade” och loggar ut mig.

Jaha. Fan va trevligt, ett fel inträffade. NO FUCK SHIT!! DET SER JAG OCKSÅ!

Jag hittade en skitkul sida idag! Den länkades på reddit och har länkats lite överallt på internet i dagarna. Den är populär som fan och jag förstår varför. Man skapar sin egen font, man fyller i två papper med de tecknena man vill ha, sen genererar den en truetype font som man kan installera på alla operativsystem och använda i alla program man vill (word, photoshop osv.)

Här är min font Fredrik by Hand – Gör din egen på YourFonts.com

A vulnerability has been discovered in Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user’s system.

The vulnerability is caused due to a use-after-free error when composed HTML elements are bound to the same data source. This can be exploited to dereference freed memory via a specially crafted HTML document.

Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code.

NOTE: Reportedly, the vulnerability is currently being actively exploited.

The vulnerability is confirmed in Internet Explorer 7 on a fully patched Windows XP SP3 and in Internet Explorer 6 on a fully patched Windows XP SP2, and reported in Internet Explorer 5.01 SP4. Other versions may also be affected.

via Internet Explorer Data Binding Memory Corruption Vulnerability – Secunia Advisories – Vulnerability Intelligence – Secunia.com.

Sådär står det på secunia.com en sida som loggar virus och sånt.

Problemet snackades om på radio på P3 innan idag och jag lyckades höra det. Vad som händer är att man kan skapa en sida som utnyttjar buggen i Internet Explorer för att ta över din dator, och nu menar jag inte på något litet fånigt sätt som man brukar göra när man säger “ta över datorn” utan jag menar verkligen ta över datorn – de kan göra vad de vill.

Sidorna som utnyttjar buggen är enligt P3 främst asiatiska sidor, och de hade tagit in en representant från Microsoft för att prata om problemet. Han sade ungefär följande:

“Det är inte så många i Sverige som har stött på problem med det, så vi tror inte det är nödvändigt alls att byta webbläsare, om vi ser i framtiden att problemen börjar komma hit till Sverige så kommer vi såklart försöka få ut en fix så snabbt som möjligt.”

Varför, för allt som är heligt, släpper de inte en fix till det NU?!
Det är ju minst sagt ett ganska fucking kritiskt problem och de avvaktar för att se hur det går?
Om man kollar på Microsofts sida för en beskrivning om problemet här:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/961051.mspx

Så kan man inte heller se några som helst aningar att de ska släppa en fix, de rekommenderar användare att stänga av tjänster i datorn eller dra upp säkerheten i webbläsaren till “High”.
Hallå? Det där duger inte Microsoft!
“Ööhh ja, problemet finns ju såklart när man använder webbläsaren med standardinställningarna, men om du drar upp säkerheten till det högsta så att webbläsaren blockerar allting på Internet så borde du inte ha några problem.”

Jag återupprepar mig från tidigare inlägg i bloggen, om du inte redan har gjort det så BYT TILL FIREFOX NU!