Norwinter Studios

Trade organizations RIAA and MPAA are used to getting what they want politically. In Sweden they have had good success too, most recently getting the right judge for the job at the Pirate Bay trial. But is their political maneuvering backfiring in Sweden? The raid on the Pirate Bay lead to public demonstrations by upset Swedes. And now it appears the Pirate Bay trial has fed the opposition: the Swedish Pirate Party has doubled in size in less than a week.

Using this member count history tool at the Pirate Party’s homepage I sampled the member count at 18:00 for each day for the last month.

Pirate Party Growth between 2009-03-23 and 2009-04-24.

The day before the guilty verdict for The Pirate Bay the party grew by only 68 members. Then on the day, the 17th of April, 2824 new members joined up. At the time of this writing the party has grown by 150%, now eclipsing several smaller Swedish parties in member count, as seen in the following chart from the Pirate Party’s website:

Pirate Party Member Count Compared to other Swedish Parties

We’ll see soon if these members are bringing real votes with them. First up is the election for EU parliament on the 7th of June. RIAA and MPAA may find they won a pyrrhus victory if awareness of their heavy handed behavior has started to spread.

Raw CSV data

I’ve been busily reposting the old content. Today’s news include Gnaw and Bouncy Hunters.

I also snuck in a link to Konkret Dice Roller in the sidebar. That guy is getting close to half a million uses! 492382 rolls at the time of this writing.

Oops. Some weird people with even stranger political views hacked the e107 installation we had been running for ages. No surprise there – e107 was never that good to begin with and besides I hadn’t updated it for years.

Oh well, thanks to Pingdom I got an alert when it happened. It was easier to just get rid of e107 and put up a straight forward WordPress install so that’s what I did. I’ll try to repost all the old material here in the near future.

We now have a faster server. Hopefully page loads will feel quicker.

Also, Path to Prestige has finally been taken down. Rest in peace.

Just a couple of quick notes.

• Use ‘entropy-php’ to install the php module to run with Apache on your mac.
• Rename /usr/bin/php to /usr/bin/php4 (This is important.)
• Rename /usr/bin/pear to /usr/bin/pear13 (Even more important.)
• Create a symbolic link so that the php5 pear can be used: ln /usr/local/php5/bin/pear /usr/bin/pear (Most important.)

If you don’t follow the last two steps you will get all kinds of funny errors with pear. Pear upgrade will refuse to upgrade you to pear 1.4 because it claims it’s missing pear 1.3 (which is funny because if pear isn’t installed, how can pear say anything? And why do you need an old version of pear to get a new version of pear?).

The most likely message you’ll see if you don’t do the last two steps is:

“Command ‘pear.symfony-project.com’ is not valid, try ‘pear help’”

when you try to add the Symfony channel.

From there on you can just proceed with the normal symfony installation stuff.

pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
pear install symfony/symfony

All done.

I experienced this problem today. I bought a first generation MacBook (13″ 2.0 GHz Core Duo) for my brother. It came with 1GB of memory, but after playing around with a couple of programs I realized that was a little bit short. I was running a Windows XP in Parallels, and at the same time I had a Word document open, and a couple of browser windows. The machine almost came to a stop. Not that strange since Windows XP alone was using a couple of hundred MB of memory – maybe 400 MB. And Word running in Rosetta is a beast.

Anyhow, so I had 2GB of memory in my MacBook Pro and decided to swap a memory stick from the MacBook Pro with a stick from the MacBook. Then both machines would have 1.5 GB.

When you take out the battery pack from the MacBook you’ll find a little rail which you need to remove to get to the memory banks. Three tiny screws hold it in place, and it’s shaped like an L sort of. Here’s the thing: once I was done and I had put the memory in (marveling over the engineering making it possible to get to the memory hidden inside of the computer with the help of two cute little levers), I was unable to get the battery pack back in.

It just wouldn’t seem to fit anymore. When I tried to push the battery in it insisted on going towards the center of the computer instead of fitting snuggly. Anyhow to make a long story short it turns out I hadn’t put the L shaped rail back in place correctly. On the short leg of the L there is a little piece which needs to go into a little hole in the side of the battery compartment. Apparently I had missed that hole but since the L rail is made out of flexible metal it just bent a little and I didn’t realize it was put in wrong.

Solution was to use a little screwdriver to guide the little piece on the short leg into the little hole in the compartment wall. Then the battery fit great again and everything was A-ok.

Just writing this down to save people some time should you happen to come by this by place by Google or something.

Konkret, your one stop place for awesome roleplay dice rolling, has been upgraded with a little help page. Start rolling here or check out the new (kinda tiny) manual here. If you are a Konkret expert, feel free to post suggestions for additions to the manual in the forum.

When I started playing around for Ruby for the first time I was expecting some of the great convenience features of Python. In particular this:

a = [1,2]
print a # >> [1, 2]

E.g. when you print most instances you get code that would create them. This is good because it’s intuitive and usually a very concise way of expressing the contents and state of some instance.

However, when doing the same in Ruby, this happens:

a = [1,2]
print a # >> 12

It prints 12! This is not very helpful. You don’t even know it’s an array. The reason is that the default print method of an array just maps to array.join(“”) for some reason.

Anyhow, it took me a long time to figure out how this is supposed to be done in Ruby, cause I was convinced there would be some similar convenience method. Finally I found this postwhich reveals the answer:

a = [1,2]
print a.inspect # >> [1, 2]

Yey. Just what I wanted! I’m posting it here in case someone else has similar problems.

With Konkret doing so well it was time for another utility. Alexander has created a cool web 2.0 utility for Playing With Wire. It’s called Cuzimatter and allows you to create ‘digg this’, ‘add to del.icio.us’ and ‘add to blinklist’ links. These can then be added to your blog entries to promote exposure for your coolest work. Start creating your links here.

I had a field like so,

$F{image_blob}

which I was converting to an image by treating the field as an InputStream and then feeding it to an image object. However, I started getting class cast exceptions suddenly.

Turns out that after editing the report query I had reread the fields from the database and Jasper had ‘forgotten’ about the fact that $F{image_blob} was an InputStream, and it was treating it as an Object. Editing the field and changing it back to InputStream solved the problem.