What I dislike about modern day movies is that there is so much continuous action, overloaded with special effects, a lot of talking and not that much to think about. Then A Space Oddysey is a big contrast with that. Not bad to have seen it now finally.

In the evening I sent a complaint to the police online. I could specify all details of my stolen bike. I knew that in Utrecht it is quite useless with so many bikes, but perhaps my complaint could be used in the statistics.

Today I got an e-mail where they said my case was not detailed enough to go any further. Although they understood that it can be a thorough experience. They offered me victim support for emotional support. I liked my stolen bike a lot, but there were also quite some problems with it. My new bike compensates everything for the stolen one, so thanks for the victim support, but no.

And what about the following robot woman called HRP-4C (see her in movement action here) which uses an advanced Yamaha voice chip to sing. We are getting close and closer to the uncanny valley moment.

Now comes the important thing, find your Mediatomb config.xml file. In my case it was located at /ffp/var/mediatomb/config.xml. To edit the file, open it with vi:

In the config file search for the variable named protocolInfo and change it from no to yes:

<protocolInfo extend=”yes”/><!– For PS3 support change to “yes” –>

Enable the custom-http-headers section by removing the <!– and –> tags and enter the following lines, which are essential for the Samsung television to recognize your media files:

<custom-http-headers>
<add header=”transferMode.dlna.org: Streaming”/>
<add header=”contentFeatures.dlna.org: DLNA.ORG_OP=01;DLNA.ORG_CI=0;DLNA.ORG_FLAGS=0170000000000000000
</custom-http-headers>

Change the mapping in the extensions section:

<map from=”avi” to=”video/mpeg”/>

Somehow the Samsung LED tv will only play files if they are mapped as .MPEG files, even though they can be divx/mpeg/whatever. Not sure why/how, but it seems to be the solution.

Restart Mediatomb, click here for information about daemons. Be sure to clear your Mediatomb database and reindex all media files, this can be done via the Mediatomb web interface which is by default accessible via the IP of your NAS-device, port 49152. When you’ve finished all the steps, your Samsung LED television should play most of your media files flawlessly from your CH3SNAS via DLNA.

We will do a construction check to inspect the house and to get to know the possible risks of the house. Furthermore we have to arrange our mortgage and setup some official documents, but that doesn’t seem to be a big problem. Anyway, we are happy that we finally found a house on a very nice location. In every way compared to what we now have it is an improvement. We know that there is a lot of work to be done in the house, but we take the time for that and we like to renovate it to our taste.

House front

House front view

Hamtoren

House back view

AutoPager

Yesterday I stumbled upon an interesting plugin for Firefox called AutoPager. Normally I don’t pay too much attention to all those plugins because I am happy with what I have – if you don’t know what you miss … – and the only plugins I used were blockers or webdevelopment-related ones.

But the AutoPager plugin is a really handy one. It automatically tries to detect when a site has multiple pages, like Google for example. Normally when you have reached the end of a page you click on a link to go to the next page, this goes on and on. With the AutoPager plugin you only have to scroll down to the bottom of your page and it automatically adds the next page below your current page. So the only thing you now have to do is just scroll down and the upcoming pages will all appear below each other. So less clicking.

Grails logo

Since June this year I started at work developing in the open source web application framework Grails . In the past I developed some websites in object oriented PHP in combination with templates in Smarty. Gained experience in handling quite common things like forms/JS, uploads, usermanagement, simple fancy stuff, user friendly URL’s via mod_rewrite et cetera. Actually in my last project (WTC) everything was very nice and clean, no more than 50 lines of code for handling a page, everything beneath was done by OO-classes interfacing with the database. But still it was not a real framework and I have never used one in PHP, although there are plenty of PHP frameworks out there. I think my expertise was more on the building of stand-alone applications with Java Swing/AWT.

But, everything has changed for now. I started building a new prototype of the data support platform for my work in Grails, which is a concatenation of Groovy on Rails. Groovy being a superset of Java – 100% compatible with normal Java, so easily integrate existing libraries – allowed me to pick up things quite fast. Furthermore what I mentioned about my personal PHP experience in the above paragraph, is already covered completely by the Grails framework. Everything works nicely via the Model-View-Controller concept. Beneath the hood Hibernate and Spring are doing their work for persistency/database stuff. The only thing you have to do is write your domain classes which describe your database tables, constraints, fields and relations. Then with a single command you can generate the whole application with CRUD-interface, which means the controllers and views for your domains are generated. To start your webapplication you only have to type ‘grails run-app’ and that’s it. One final thing to mention is that there are many plugins available to give your application a lot of nice features and that Netbeans has a plugin to support Grails.

Of course most effort is then going into customizing your views and controllers and testing. But I am quite convinced that for the upcoming time Grails has become my favorite webdevelopment environment. I am currently even busy to port all existing WTC code to Grails and within a short time it was already up and running. I’d recommend anyone to give it a look/try.

Music note

For quite a while there is musical software out there which helps you in generating music – no I am not talking about software like Reason or oldskool software like ScreamTracker or FastTracker. The software I am talking about works by displaying a matrix of blocks which you can press independently of each other. The whole matrix of blocks is usually being traversed horizontally from left to right by an imaginary reader. By pressing a block a tone is being generated when the reader passes the block. By combining multiple pressed blocks you can make spacy music.

I have seen several of these programs on the internet already and today I found another very simple and tiny online music generator, but this one has a nice 3D presentation. Go and try it yourself here.