BangBits

A YouTube viewer found my old  demonstration of ER301 anti-collision and asked if I could make the source code available. So I cleaned it up a bit and wrote this small blog entry about it. When I started tinkering with the unified Danish transit card about a year ago, it was using a cheap Ehuoyan ER301 NFC/Mifare reader which I got from ebay. This was the first time I played with NFC stuff even if I would since move on to other and better devices. The cool thing about the ER301 however, apart from the price, is that it's relatively easy to interface with. This is because it's using a plain virtualized serial port with native ( cp2102 ) driver available in Linux and even Windows. No software came with the ER301 reader but there was a download link at the ebay site. The software was very basic, and all examples revolved around a driver DLL for which the source code sadly was not provided. With the documentation in hand and tracing the traffic going over the serial int...

Last year I went to the  2013 GOTO conference in Aarhus, Denmark. This year, I got the opportunity to visit the  2014 Øredev conference in Malmø, Sweden. The following is just a short reflection of my experiences and they may of course be entirely different than those of other attendees. The whole setup of Øredev is similar to GOTO and with 1300 attendees I believe they are about the same in size. Being in Sweden, albeit right across the water from Copenhagen, the crowd was predominantly Swedish with perhaps 20-30% of Danes. The speakers were slightly less known than those at GOTO, although a few speakers from Thoughtworks, Oracle and Microsoft stood out. The good Øredev feels quite a bit more intimate and cozy than GOTO did. It could be due to the constrained space and the lighting, but the pillow sacs, live jazz and plenty of popcorn, chips, candyfloss and beer sure didn't derail that perception. Wifi coverage was generally good and there were plenty of se...

It's been many years since Linux became my #1 OS of choice, for a variety of reasons. However, I changed job recently and one unfortunate side effect of that, is that I'm now having to spend my work hours on Windows again. Apart from the lackluster command-line, bloated environment, inhospitable development experience etc. etc. one of the annoying aspects, is how desktop and window management basically haven't changed since Windows 95 - for instance, it's still up to the individual application in question, whether it wants to allow the user to pin down a window, promoting its z-order to always be on top. This blog entry is about my attempt at bringing a bit more power to window management as seen from a Linux user. Gnome Linux desktop Talking about "the Linux desktop" is a bit of a misnomer. There are of course countless of XOrg window managers . All the recent KDE and Gnome versions I've come across, supports being able to pin a window on top (promote ...

Siden mit forrige blogindlæg, har jeg taget kontakt til Rejsekort A/S og efterfølgende haft flere møder med dem, primært med chefkonsulent Gregers Mogensen. Det har været ganske interesant at få lejlighed til at stille spørgsmål og få indblik i de problemstillinger i systemet som jeg selv har oplevet. Rejsekort A/S har været overaskende imødekommende og selv om min opfattelse måske er, at der har været lidt vel mange kokke i køkkenet, svarer de rimelig godt for sig og har anlagt en god pragmatisk holdning til tingene, hvilket incl. mig og mit lille indspark. Der har udspillet sig lidt af en kamp på ord , imellem pressen og Rejsekort A/S, som også jeg blev en mindre del af . Min eneste kommentar til denne del af debatten er nok, at jeg ingenlunde forventer at mobilproducenterne retter ind efter et dansk rejsekort, selv om det da ville være skønt hvis de gjorde. Udlevering af stationer/stoppesteder Ved mit andet møde fik jeg uden viddere udleveret et Excel-ark med samtlige station...

Læs også nyere indlæg om emnet i form af  Rejsekort Scanner i samarbejde med Rejsekort A/S . Status og statistik Så er det 2 uger siden at første version af Rejsekort Scanner landede i Google Play butikken, og en uge siden version2, og efterfølgende medier, tog nyheden op og fik udbredt budskabet. At sige at min hverdag tog en drejning, er en underdrivelse. Pludselig vrimlede det med aktivitet i min indbakke, på twitter, på Google Plus, YouTube, Linked In osv. Ja der var også kontakter fra folk der skriver speciale i det ene og det andet, eller som vil hjælpe med markedsføring, viddereudvikling osv. og det var ikke alle jeg nåede at vende tilbage til. Peak var på førstedagen oppe på små 50 samtidige brugere, der dog sidenhen er faldet en del. Som forventet, benytter folk app'en ret kortvarigt, ca. 10-20 sekunder af gangen. Der er nu over 5000 aktive brugere af app'en, der er landet på førstepladsen inde på Google Play både i den danske kategori "Transport...

I went over 5 years owning a state of the art smartphone without ever breaking the glass of one of them. However, those fine statistics came to an end about 10 days ago, when the phone slid out of my hand and went screen first straight into a tiled floor. Although the Samsung Galaxy SIII is no longer state of the art, it's still plenty fast and one of the latest smartphones which still has NFC Mifare support (to understand why this is important to me, read my previous post ). Furthermore, early march is possibly the worst month to go out and invest in a new smartphone, since both HTC and Samsung are launching their next generation model in a month from now. I've seen various videos on YouTube of people fixing the screen so I thought I'd try that, having very little to loose by attempting. I ordered this little kit from Amazon which arrived just a week later. As a guide to the actual process itself, I relied mostly on the one from iFixIt . The kit came with a sc...

Unusual to this blog, the following entry is in danish due to the topic being the national transit ticketing system in Denmark, also known as Rejsekort . Læs også nyere indlæg om emnet i form af   Opfølgning op launch samt Rejsekort Scanner i samarbejde med Rejsekort A/S . Rejsekort Scanner Som det eneste program af sin art, lader Rejsekort Scanner dig aflæse dit Rejsekort direkte og øjeblikkeligt blive informeret omkring check-in status, saldo, rejsehistorik mm. Der er altså hverken behov for data-forbindelse eller kompliceret opsætning! App'en er fungerer med Rejsekort Personligt, Anonymt samt Flex. Man skal bare have en smartphone med NFC der understøtter Mifare Classic smartcards. Rejsekort Scanner er en uofficiel app uden adgang til Rejskort A/S' officielle systemer, og programmet kender derfor heller ikke alle placeringen for begivenheder udover dem der er fundet manuelt. Hvis du ønsker at opdatere denne liste kan du slå "Download placeringer...

VirtualBox remains my favorite virtualization solution; it's free, runs everywhere and just does its job real nice - let's hope Oracle doesn't screw this one up as well! Specifically VirtualBox helps me as a developer needing to work in .NET/C#, without having to leave the Linux platform entirely. Let's face it, once you tried the power, freedom and flexibility of a GNU Linux operating system, it is rather hard to go back to the constraints of a Windows box. VirtualBox shared folder VirtualBox has a nice feature, where it can expose a folder from the host operating system, as a network share to the client operating system. This has been an approach I have used in the past as well, in order to still have the powerful Linux command-line available along with common utilities like maven, subversion, diff etc. Remember for this to work, you will have to install the Guest Additions in the virtual image. However, when working on some .NET code using DirectoryCatalog wh...