This is an attempt to format the subversion log of a one-month period in the following way:

• Beautiful HTML output.
• Compact representation of lots of information
• Usable with a not-so color rich beamer.
• Fully automatic.

Usage

1. Install Ruby (both 1.8 or 1.9 should work).
2. Download svn-shortlog.rb.
3. Open svn-shortlog.rb with your favourite text editor, and configure the config section according to your needs.
4. Doubleclick svn-shortlog.rb
5. Open the generated changelog_....html file with your favourite browser.

Sample Output

Here is a sample output of one month of boost commits into trunk, taken from the public repository. The output is quite information dense, a quick description is in the screenshot:

Issues

Ideas, suggestions, problems? Please post them as a comment here, at the bug tracker.

Credits

This tool is based on the idea from my colleague Christoph Heindl and inspired by Linus’ Kernel shortlog and Gmail.

iRob Feeder is a solution for equipping of industry facilities. We can recognize the 3D position of different pices, grasp it, put it wherever you want them, and all of this quickly. Actually, the whole thing is a bit more than that, since it is possible to reuse components from it. We have a nice demonstrator for very fast object recognition moving along on a conveyer belt.

Here you can see it in action:

I am mostly involved in the algorithm development on the object recognition side. We have put quite some effort into making it fast: depending on the kind of object, we can have a reliable recognition in as low as 0.1 second on a standard desktop PC.

Hopefully Profactor will post some more videos about this in the near future.

PS: The article here are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the position of my employee.

Thats why I have created The Online Password Encrypter. Here users can enter their desired username and password, and the encrypted key is automatically generated online, without transmitting anything to any server.

Here is an iframe of the file. Click here for full screen.

The Online Password Encrypter is just one single HTML page, it does not depend on any other files. So it is easy to download it, modify and send it around. Feel free do whatever you want with it.

Have fun,
Martin

The enormous study “Green Tea Consumption and Mortality Due to Cardiovascular Disease, Cancer, and All Causes in Japan” took 11 years with over 40.000 participants, and got the following result:

Green Tea Benefits in Woman

• 23% lower risk of dying from any cause
• 31% lower risk of dying from CVD
• 62% lower risk of dying from stroke

Green Tea Benefits in Men

• 12% lower risk of dying from any cause
• 22% lower risk of dying from CVD
• 42% lower risk of dying from stroke

On my quest for the perfect cup of tea, I have looked for scientific analysis and have found the enlightening paper “Factors Affecting the Caffeine and Polyphenol Contents of Black and Green Tea Infusions“. Here are the most important findings of it:

How to get the most out of a tea bag. The more extracted solids / catechins, the better.

Brewing

• doubling the bags doubles the extracted solids (which is good!)
• Increasing brewing time from 1 minute to 2 minutes doubles the catechins. 5 minutes tripple the catechins.

Teabags vs. loose leafes

• Loose leafes are better than teabags.
• When teabags are left floating, the flow resistance of the material blocks almost everything! this is very bad.
• Continuously dunk a tea bag and the extraction is 4 times better!
• Loose leafes are still about 20% better than dunked teabags, and after about 2 minutes the water is saturated (no need to wait any further)

Leafe size / packing

• loose leafes? extraction is faster with smaller leafes. No need for dunking.
• teabag with small leafes / tightly packed? Continuously dunk it
• teabag with large leafes / loosely packed? Leafe it static (the flows are driven by convection)

CONCLUSION

• loose leafes are the best. Brew for 2 minutes and you have everything they got.
• If you have to use teabags, dunking the bag gets you 4 times the catechins!

public class EachMethodTest {

    /**
     * Simple test object.
     */
    public static class Fu {
        @Callable
        public int fu() {
            return 1;
        }

        @Callable
        public int bar() {
            return 2;
        }
    }

    /**
     * Call all methods that have the @Callable annotation.
     * The MethodsToProc works for ANY type of object, not just Fu.
     */
    @Test
    public void eachMethodTest() {
        final Fu fu = new Fu();

        int sum = 0;
        for (final Proc<integer> c : new MethodsToProc<integer>(fu)) {
            sum += c.call();
        }

        Assert.assertEquals(3, sum);
    }
}

Basically what I want to do is be able to automatically create wrappers for some object, so that each method with the @Callable can be called with a single common wrapper interface call(). It should be possible to specify the return type via Generics, and the ctor of MethodsToProc should be able to take any type of object.

See if you can do a general solution without cheating! The simpler, the better. You can post code snippets e.g. at snipit or gist. Have fun!

Thanks to Johan Kivinemi I have just found out how to bring back the excellent legacy subpixel hinting engine. This has a much more crisp hinting, and uses subpixels only where it really is an improvement:

Just open these files in your home directory, and copy the content into them:

~/.fonts.conf

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
    <edit name="hinting" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
    <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign">
      <const>hintfull</const>
    </edit>
    <edit name="lcdfilter" mode="assign">
      <const>lcdlegacy</const>
    </edit>
    <edit name="rgba" mode="assign">
      <const>rgb</const>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

~/.Xresources

Xft.antialias:  true
Xft.hinting:    true
Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull
Xft.lcdfilter:  lcdlegacy
Xft.rgba:       rgb

This should work in Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, and 9.04 too, and makes all fonts much more crisp. Of course, your mileage may vary.

UPDATE: Comparison Screenshots

As promised on reddit, I got back from an awesome snowboard trip so I am able to put up extensive comparison screenshots of the two subpixel hinting engines. Move your mouse over the following images to see the differences. Watch especially out for letters like “m” where the spacing between the lines is very small. You might have to wait a bit for the image to load.

I have used all of the most important fonts that I usually use, and just for fun I have added “Dijkstra”, which just looks cool.

Sans Fonts

Mouse to see the same fonts with the legacy hinter.

Mono Fonts

Mouse to see the same fonts with the legacy hinter.

Zoomed Comparison Screenhots

Here is an excerpt with 400% magnifications. Mouse over the pictures to see the legacy hinter.

Zoomed Sans

Zoomed Mono

The Zune Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line November 14, 2006.
Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Zune begins to learn
at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 12:00 Eastern Standard Time,
December 31st. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

That is all. Happy new year!

Update: In related news, Here is how to fix this problem.

10. Top 10 Eclipse Hotkeys

Ironically, this list starts with another top 10 list, namely Top 10 Eclipse Hotkeys. This article from 2006 has just made it onto this top list. With 3,302 pageviews it seems that these keys are still relevant.

9. Human Compact Themes for Ubuntu 8.10

Number 9 is a modification of the Ubuntu’s default theme that is optimized for small screens. With the recent rise of netbooks this becomes more and more wanted.

8. Logical Volume Manager Cheatsheet

sudo pvcreate /dev/sdg1
sudo vgcreate ext_vg /dev/sdg1
sudo lvcreate -L 450G -n ext ext_vg
sudo mkfs.ext3 -m 0 /dev/ext_vg/ext

A compact little cheat sheet that explains how to easily combine two harddisks into one large volume. I have used this to combine two 500GB disks into one large 1TB filesystem.

7. Comprehensive Linux Terminal Performance Comparison

In this highly controversial article I have compared how long several different terminals (xterm, gnome-terminal, etc.) take when displaying one large textfile. I still believe this is relevant, especially when compiling stuff and text flies by. You don’t want your terminal be the limiting factor for your compile speed! I would perform the test yourself, as this seems to be highly dependent on the graphics card driver.

6. Howto Create MANIFEST.MF Classpath from Ant

<!-- name of the output .jar file -->
<property name="jar.name" value="ourjarfile.jar" />

This HOWTO describes a simple way to create the classpath in a MANIFEST.MF file automatically from the libraries available on the harddisk. I have been using this since 2005, and it has never failed me.

5. Human Compact Gnome Theme (for Ubuntu 8.04)

Another Compact theme has made it on the list, this time for 8.04. I have used this theme for quite a while, even on a large 1680×1050 monitor because it really saves a lot of screen space. For everybody still using Ubuntu 8.04, this is the best choice to use a compact layout while still having the default Human look.

4. Optimized pow() approximation for Java, C / C++, and C#

public static double pow(final double a, final double b) {
    final int x = (int) (Double.doubleToLongBits(a) >> 32);
    final int y = (int) (b * (x - 1072632447) + 1072632447);
    return Double.longBitsToDouble(((long) y) << 32);
}

Through some funny floating point representation tricks it is possible to create an approximative calculation of the pow() operator, that is a hell of a lot faster than the standard calculation which has to be extremely precise. This might be useful for games, Artificial Intelligence applications, and everywhere else where performance is an issue and not precision.

3. Ajax Dojo Comet Tutorial

One of the most often seen article contains 3 buzzwords at once: Ajax, Dojo, Comet. This page was linked several times, and it is getting quite a bit of attention. The article was written by an intern at my workplace and he allowed me to put it up here.

2. Clearlooks Compact Gnome Theme

Yet another theme! This startet it all. The Clearlooks Compact Theme was the first compact theme I have created. It is just a modification of the original Clearlooks theme, with tighter spacing. This has been linked quite a lot of time and I get a continuous stream of visitors who are in the need for a compact theme.

1. How to get Enough Sleep Despite StumbleUpon With Ubuntu

This post about me struggling with getting enough sleep despite StumbleUpon was by far the most viewed article on the blog, it has received more than 4 times as much visits as the second best. I guess I hit some nerve with it in the large Linux using StumbleUpon crowd. The article is almost a year old, and I still get lots of visitors each and every day. Happy stumbling!

Thank you everybody for coming to this site and posting your thoughts. I appreciate each and every feedback. Happy christmas and happy new year!

I have now two versions of the theme: one with normal icon sizes, and one with the smaller 16×16 icons for even more compactness. Here is a comparison animation of the standard Human theme vs. the compact theme:

You can download the themes here:

• HumanCompact-8.10.tar.bz2
• HumanCompactSmallIcons-8.10.tar.bz2

Download and Installation

1. Save the theme to your computer.
2. Open the gnome’s appearence dialog with System > Preferences > Appearance.
3. Drag and drop the downloaded file into the Theme tab of the appearance dialog. If you get an error message “Can’t move directory over directory”, you have already installed a theme with the same name. To be able to reinstall it, remove the directory ~/.themes/Human Compact or ~/.themes/Human Compact Small Icons.
4. Choose “Apply new theme” in the popup dialog.

Most changes will occur immediately, but for e.g. the icon sizes it is best to log out and log in again. When you change the theme, you can get the Human Compact theme back by clicking on Customize, and then selecting Human Compact.

Any question, praise or flames? please post them!

Install for root (e.g. Synaptic)

Some readers asked how to get this to work for applications that run as root (e.g. synaptic), so here it is: simply copy the copy the theme file into the root’s home directory, like this (exchange username with your own name):

sudo cp /home/username/.themes/Human\ Compact/gtk-2.0/gtkrc /root/.gtkrc-2.0

Afterwards synaptic uses the human compact theme.

Older Themes

Here is some information about the original compact themes I have created:

• How to Make a Human Compact Theme
• Human Compact Theme (for Ubuntu 8.04)
• Clearlooks Compact Theme (for Ubuntu 8.04)

Clearlooks Compact is a Gnome theme that tries to make use of the wasted screen space as much as possible. It is especially useful for small screens like on the Eee PC, or with intense applications like Eclipse.

This theme is picking up some steam lately:

• It is recommended from the EeeUser Installation manual (also available in many other languages, see translations to the top right).
• Somebody wrote an idea into Ubuntu’s Brainstorm, and it got 86 votes already
• I have written a bug report in Ubuntu’s launchpad a while ago, and somebody wrote an Eee PC blueprint
• There is an entry in Gnome-Look and Xfce-Look.
• And of course there are several blog postings.

I am using it on my 22″ monitor and like it here too.