Moyo Go Free Forever

Frank de Groot, the developer of Moyo Go Studio, seem to have given up with the development of one of the most powerful go programs on the market. He is no longer selling the product but are instead giving it away for free.

He claim to have a lot of enemies in the go community and it seem to be caused by aggressive competition among the commercial go program developers on one side and on the other side the fact that he say that he is not sure that people ever was gassed or incinerated by the Nazis.

He seem to be a smart but odd person. Too bad the software and its customers have to suffer. When he have such controversial ideas of what happened during the second world war, he should keep it to himself. Especially if he have a commercial interest in selling his software. Also it might not have been smart to proclaim a war against those who opposed him, no matter who started the conflict.

If he intend to never develop or sell the product again, I hope that he will let it be open source so other developers can continue the work and maybe even port it to Linux. I have been very interested in the program since I first read about it on the Internet, but I was never able to try it out because I use Linux and it is a Windows only program.

Windows Installer for SRM 7.6

I am just about to upgrade our BMC Service Request Management 2.2 patch 4 to SRM 7.6 patch 1. It should be a straight forward upgrade. I will install everything on the D-drive and I've deleted stuff so I have at least 2 GB free space. On the C-drive we have only the Windows operating system and we are not allowed to install anything else on the C-drive.

I start the installation but it halts before the actual installation starts with a message that I need to free up space on the C-drive for temporary 1500 MB data and it is only 1376 MB space available.

WTF! I have nothing to free up on the C-drive. Can't I use some network drive for temporary storage during the installation? Or use the 8GB memory that is mostly unused at the moment? Quite often I wish we were using Unix/Linux instead of this toy-OS called Windows.

See you later... now I have to call some Windows-tech to help me expand the C-drive or whatever they do.

New BMC Home Page?

Yesterday I and a couple of AR System consultants were talking about the ugly Home Page we have in our ARS ITSM 7.0 environment.

We have the standard out of the box stuff with links to the left and a huge empty blue void on the right side. I want to build something useful on that empty space but so far there have not been enough of a business need for that.

Then one of the consultants mention that he saw this new cool Home Page in arslist. So I dug down and found it. Yes it is cool and you can see it in the picture here. But as I understand it, this is nothing that you will get out of the box, this is an example of what you can build with the technology that BMC will release in mid 2010.


It looks cool but then the question for me will be... Will my company find a business need for me to let me build something like this for them? Probably not, because we are aiming really hard at buying more and more applications out of the box and not customizing anything. Everything should be configurable.

This is both good and bad...

Bad because I will not be developing as much as before.
Good because it will force me to change career.  ;)

Future go program

Sometimes when you surf around on Sensei's Library you will find some interesting, odd or fun stuff. It is easy to spend a couple of hours reading about this and that.

I am interested in programming and am still searching for the perfect go software. So when I stumbled over this page I felt that it is something worth spreading. The name of the page is "Go Software For The Future" and there anyone can post their suggestions and requests for the perfect future go program for programmers to consider.

So please do! :)

Blog Statistics

I read somewhere that IE8 now is the most common web browser on the Internet. I got surprised by that news so I decided to check the statistics for my blog.

I could not find any support at all for the claim from IE8 to be the most common browser. Rather the opposite.

Ok, my small blog is no good benchmark for this but I got around 200 visitors each month so that gives something to go on.

About the visitors to my blog we can see that Firefox is the most popular browser. Good second place is IExploder. How common is version 8 among those? About 6% of all IExploders are of version 8. 52% is version 7 and 43% is still version 6.

Another interesting thing we can read from the graph is that Google Chrome is slowly gaining interest. It will maybe pass IExploder within a year among my readers. No? You don't think so? Hmm... we'll see...

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Released

Finally we have a new version 3.5 of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. As usual there are several new and improved features. The most talked about is the new "private browsing" porn mode. Other nice features are improvements to tabs, speed and the awesome "awesome bar".

There were three days ago that this Mozilla Firefox 3.5 arrived and the Mozilla Foundation have this cool live download statistics. As of this writing there are almost nine millions downloads. Quite impressive! :)

If you are new to Mozilla Firefox you can start with some nice Tips & Tricks. After that you should really take a look at all the nice
add-ons that exist for Firefox.

The first add-ons that I added was:

• AdBlock Plus
  
• Tiny Menu
• Googlepedia
• ColorfulTabs
• AutoPager
  

Have fun with your safe and fast Firefox web browser!

OneSwarm

I just read about a new file sharing tool named OneSwarm. It is based on BitTorrent but is more focused on sharing files between friends and their friends and their friends while you are only visible to your own friends.

This new tool might be the new way for file sharers after the regular BitTorrent trackers like The Pirate Bay gets pulled of the Internet.

There are clients to download for Mac, Win and Linux. There are even source code to download if you want to improve the product.

I haven't tried OneSwarm yet but some day I probably will. If I can find some friend that uses it. :)

New server on the way

My old Linux server died. First a fan stopped working so the computer froze now and then. After not so many days it refused to start at all again so something in the hardware is fried. I guess there is something on the motherboard that burned up. I really hope there is no real damage on the hard drive. That would be a small disaster because I have no fresh backup.... :P

So now I have ordered parts to build myself a new server. First time ever that I will get a new computer as server. Previous I have only taken some old computer that is ready to throw away and made it to my server. The one that just died was my fathers before I asked if I could take it when he bought a new one. He had even bought a new one after that switch. My dead server is probably over ten years old and deserves to rest in peace.

This is the specifications of my new server:

• Antec mATX Cube NSK1380 - (350w)
• Gigabyte Socket AM2+ mATX AMD 780G (GA-MA78GM-S2H)
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2.9GHz / 2x512kB Socket AM2 (65W)
• Corsair XMS2 Xtreme 2048MB DDR2 XMS2-6400 800MHz
• D-Link Nätverkskort DGE-530T 10/100/1000 (PCI)
• Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB (7200RPM / 32MB / SATA II / NCQ)
• Samsung SATA DVD±RW 22x - Svart (Dual Layer) (SH-S223F)

and a

• D-Link 5-Ports Switch DGS-1005D 10/100/1000

I didn't do so hard investigations about the hardware so I really hope I didn't make any bad/stupid choices. As long as it works well I don't care much about the performance. My previous server had 350Mhz CPU and 384Mb of memory and that worked very well except in the graphical X Window interface using KDE which was a bit flickery and slow but still usable. Maybe that pain was mostly because of the really bad graphics card.

I am not sure yet if I will use the hyped up Ubuntu or the old reliable Slackware that I have always used before. I have actually used Slackware since summer 1994 and am quite comfortable with that distribution. I have used Ubuntu on my dual boot workstation and think there are both good and bad things about it. Most things I feel that is bad is probably my lack of knowledge about Ubuntu so I should probably choose that one for my server so I learn everything I need to know. But it feels almost like betrayal to not use Slackware any more. Hmm.. so hard decisions... What should I do?

GNU Go 3.8

Finally after over three years of slow developments there has been a new release of GNU Go. As of this writing the homepage has not been updated with the new version but I sent them a reminder of it.

I found the information when I was reading the GNU Go mail archive where they have posted a "press release".

The new version is version 3.8 and as they write in their email the changes since last version is:

• many small improvements and tuning since 3.6
• experimental Monte Carlo mode (9x9 only)
• support for tiny boards
• GPL v3

Another thing what I understand is that they put some extra effort to make it easy to compile the source for windows. It used to be a bit tricky what I understand but now they should have all the needed files and a detailed description of how the process should be executed.

As usual it is very simple to compile the source under Linux.

So go ahead and download the new version to try it out!

Play Ogg!

I'm writing today to ask you to support the Play Ogg campaign.

Are you tired of constantly being prompted to download proprietary software and plugins to play the videos and listen to the music you want? Are you fed up with seeing new gadgets that only use incompatible and restrictive audio and video formats? Did you know that it's not a lack of technological know-how that causes this, but software patents and other legal restrictions?

Increasingly proprietary software companies like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe are pushing video and audio formats that restrict access and restrict software developers, but there is an alternative that can be played on all computers without restriction—Ogg.

Ogg provides professional grade multimedia formats. Ogg is used extensively by free software projects, artists and a growing number of music and video distributors.

Soon over a million children and their families will be receiving the One Laptop per Child XO computer designed to play and create Ogg files. By advocating now for Ogg we can help ensure that those children will gain access to, and not be unnecessarily restricted from thousands of educational resources and materials on the web.

Join us in advocating for Ogg right now by taking 4 Easy Steps: Install VLC multimedia player, sign-up for the PlayOgg advocate mailing list, find and share Ogg friendly sites, and put PlayOgg Buttons on your web site or blog. After all that, if you are still looking for more to do, consider encouraging others to do the same.

Start here: http://playogg.org/

AR-System 7.5 - What's new?

To increase the excitement in the project I want us to install the latest version of ARS in the server, mid tier, clients and why not exchange the whole ITSM with version 7.5! Yeeaahh! Here we go! :D


ARS developers x-mas:

• BMC Remedy Developer Studio. I haven't seen this yet but I have heard a little about what it can be and I want to say: Finally some improvements for us developers! I have also heard that it now can be possible to use Linux instead of this hated Windows for a development platform. I hope it is true. There is also a possibility to search for object, which is great when you have hundreds thousands to manage.

• Workflow debugger! Yeah! Finally!

• Version control. You can lock objects for others when you modify them and you can get a log of every change of an object.

• Application-Set-Filter-Phasing is a new run process command for delaying inserts of entries into a form so that they can be inserted in bulk for greater efficiency.

• Dynamic join of multiple forms on runtime using API call ARGetListEntryWithMultiSchemaFields. With this you can create recursive queries, value-set queries or joins with vendor form data in an external database.

• Run process command line can handle 4096 characters instead of 256.

• ARGetCacheEvent API call can be used to monitor if changes have been done in the workflow or not. Can be useful... we'll see...

• It is now possible to join external data sources with internal AR System forms.

• Possible to log to forms instead of to files and then put workflow to filter out what you are really interested in. This can be useful...

• A new log file for measuring mid-tier performance.

• 64 bit AR servers for UNIX and Linux using a 64 bit database.

• Image server object. This is "a place" where to store images in the AR Server. Then references to these images are used when building applications instead of a lot of copies of the same image. It is common to have images on buttons to give them a nicer look and a common feel throughout the application suite. It is a bit strange that they didn't implement this earlier.

• Remedy Import tool is dead, long live Remedy data import tool! The old tool needed an upgrade so we will see later how much better this all brand new tool is.

• arimportcmd is dead, long live "a Java data import command-line utility". Hmm.. why?

User impressions, or details that makes the ARS developer cool:

• Auto completion in fields that have a menu attached.

• Tooltips which is small messages that are shown when holding the mouse over some field or data. There is a HOVER event that can trigger active links. This sounds quite powerful and can be very useful to create user friendly interfaces.

• File system browser character field. A new display type for the character field. With this you can search for a file in the network and save the file name in a field but not save the file. I can see its use but it is very limited.

• Cell-based tables. Display the whole data row with several columns in one cell instead of several. Yes we can make more beautiful designs with this.

• Possibility to remove the (clear) value from drop-down lists. Our customer will be so happy!

• Panels! These sounds great... replaces the page holders and in many cases the trim box. These will probably make my life as a user interface designer much easier!

• The panels in the panel holder can have tabs like the old page holder, collapsible/stacked (not really sure what that is), splitter which lets you see all panels and drag to resize them, accordion which sounds a lot like the old tabs but but a bit cooler.

• The panels can have solid or gradient colours, background images, rounded corners.

• Possible to expand or collapse panels with workflow.

• Possible to trigger workflow on when a panel expand or collapse.

• Text formatting templates in HTML to be used by workflow with tooltips or viewfields.

• Buttons and URLs inside a table field.

• Possibility to use PNG or GIF images and use the transparency effect.

• Yahoo User Interlace Library, a collection of libraries in JavaScript™. With this library we get the possibility of animated highlight effects of fields using workflow.

• Quick reports in the browser, saved per server, per form and per user.

• Flashboards are using Adobe flash technology.

• There will be a countdown clock in the browser telling an inactive user how much time there is until his license is expired. Do we really need this? Can I turn it off?

• If you close the web browser or navigate away from the mid-tier, the license will be released after a configurable delay timer has expired. I hope this time can be set really really short, because we see this will be a problem today in earlier versions.

You can read more details here about BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.5.0.

BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.5.0

Here it is! In the middle of our project to implement version 7.1.0 of BMC Remedy AR-System and here version 7.5.0 is released. I can not believe that we will jump on the 7.5-wagon this late in the implementation project. But I wish we would... I really do... That would be exciting... in many interesting ways... :P

I will soon dig into the documentation and see what is new about this release. :)

Firemacs - Emacs bindings for Firefox

I was reading blogs and found this entry about Firemacs. It is a great thing for us used to Emacs control key bindings. Now we can use it in our favourite browser Firefox. I have just tried the plugin for a couple of days but I found some small issues about some behaviours that I am used to that does not work the same any more. It is quite easy to configure in the way you want so it might not be so much trouble but it might be something that should be fixed for future releases. Try it out and see what you think about it! :)