Månad: december 2003

Publicerat

Pet peeve of the day

Swedish DVD releases of english-language movies without english subtitles.
As my hearing is not as good as it should be, I like to watch movies (and TV series)
with subtitles so that I don’t miss anything, but I don’t want the swedish translations.
Sure, some translations are OK and some are even very good, but cultural references
and word jokes do not translate well, if at all.

Sandrew-Metronome and Nordisk Film are notoriously bad when it comes to this (Nordisk
Film even makes the subtitles mandatory — you can’t turn them off!), so I rarely
buy their releases, but order the UK or US releases instead. Just today, they missed
the chance to sell ”O, brother where
art thou” and ”Bowling for Columbine”
to me.

However, if the movie’s in French, Chinese or any other language that I don’t understand,
I’ll buy it on the theory that a French-English translator is just as likeable to
do a bad translation as a French-Swedish translation (Incidentally, this reminds me
of the time that a friend had seen ”Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and enthusistically quoted key lines — in english).

Publicerat

All music sites suck

These days, I get a lot of information through RSS feeds, and while this works well
for most of my computing-related information needs (because all computer geeks have
learned RSS by now), most music sites that I frequent still lack RSS feeds.

So, here’s a list of music news sites that I think rock, but since they don’t have
RSS feeds, I don’t read them nearly often enough (the first two are in swedish, the
rest in english).

So, what are some good music (alternative/punk/metal/angry/whatever)RSS feeds? This
one does so not count.

Dagensskiva.com actually was looking for a resident developer a while ago (on a voluntary
basis). I should have jumped on it.

Publicerat

Entombed + Turbonegro show impressions

Well, I went to the Close-Up Made Me Do It finale, but only got to the show just in
time for Entombed. Their set was as solid as could have been expected, even though
it wasn’t quite as amazing as their September show in Stockholm. I hadn’t seen Turbonegro
since just after the release of ”Ass Cobra”, when they played Kafé 44. The fan base
has grown quite a bit since then… It was a good show as well, although the sound
could have been better at times, particularly Hanks between-the-songs commentary.

Today and tomorrow I will NOT be attending the very special Moneybrother christmas
shows at Debaser, as I found out about them too late
(all tickets are sold out). Damn!

Publicerat

Nine cancels Stockholm gig this saturday

This really sucks.
I’ve been looking forward to the ”Close-Up
made us do it” tour finale in Stockholm because it had such an insanely good lineup
(Raised Fist, Disfear, Entombed and Turbonegro).
A while ago it was announced that Raised Fist would cancel the tour and Nine would
take their place. Since Raised Fist’s ”Dedication” was possibly the best record released
under 2002, and I had heard much about their insane live shows, I was not too pleased.
However, Nine has some decent songs and are a good live act as well, so it wasn’t
too bad.

Now, Nine cancels as well, due to a planning fuckup. What the hell?! RF canceled because
their singer got vocal cord inflammation (is that the proper english term? ”stämbandsinflammation”)
which I can sort of understand, but canceling due to bad planning? Come on!

Also, due to schedule conflicts I will most likely miss Disfear, so I’ll probably
end up just seeing Entombed and Turbonegro. However, as I’m getting older I find it
harder and harder to enjoy really long show. Maybe it’s all for the best, just two
intense shows with two really really good bands.

Publicerat

Wiki as a documentation tool

Recently we’ve been spending a lot of time writing the SDK documentation for the next
release of our product. As none of us is really that into techical documentation,
our first plan was to just write everything plain-text, in notepad (or Emacs in my
case) and hand off the text files to someone else who can do nice formatting, tabelization
(is that a word?), diagrams and such.

However, once the first draft of the actual text was finished, we wanted to see it
with at least a proportional font and proper headings, so we started thinking that
maybe if we used some special marker to signal headings, we could write a script that
would turn it into HTML (we didn’t want to write actual HTML by hand as it’s too much
tags everywhere, particularly <p> tags all over the place).

So, while thinking about what marker to use and how to write the script, it dawned
upon os that whatever we would do would end up very similar to a Wiki formatting engine.
As we use Openwiki for internal documentation
and ”knowledge capture”, I tried downloading it to see if we could make it to work
in a non-IIS context.

OpenWiki actually has an ”embedded” mode, but it’s made for embedding into other ASP
applications, and we wanted it to be used as a command-line vbs script. After some
heavy mangling I got it to work. The resulting WikiTranform.vbs is 274 kb large…
🙂 The end result looks so nice I’m thinking of suggesting that we ship the documentation
in HTML form (as opposed to FrameMaker-generated PDF).

Another option would have been to use Textile,
but since we’re already familiar with the (Open)Wiki style of formatting, this is
probably easiest.

I should pack it up and send to the openwiki guys, unfortunately the required mangling
was pretty rough, so it’s not that easy to fold the changes back into the mainline
source.