iTunes Agent is currently looking for a dedicated .NET developer to join the team. You should be an experienced software developer, but years of professional full time experience is not a requirement – talented students are encouraged to get in touch.

Requirements:

• Experience with .NET and C#
• Be familiar with portable media devices in general.
• Be familiar with the iTunes software.
• Open source enthusiast – understand the value of contributing to the community.
• Ability to work independently and organize work through digital communication
• Excellent English language skills, both written and verbal.

iTunes Agent is an open source project, built solely on the efforts and dedication of volunteering open source enthusiasts. The project has seen a big increase in interest over the last couple of months climbing from an average of 8.000 downloads per month till around 15.000 downloads per month during May, June and July 2010. The total downloads since the project’s birth has recently passed 400.000 registered downloads on Sourceforge.

We are now looking for a more continuous resource to help improve the application and deliver quality to our users.

If you are interested, or want more information, please contact sfkarbo@users.sourceforge.net.

A new version of iTunes Agent has just been released. The new version is a minor update bringing a couple of enhancements to prevent misconfiguration which has caused problems for some users.

I hope this new version will continue to satisfy your media synchronization needs between iTunes and your portable media players!

Download and more information is as always available over at http://ita.sourceforge.net.

It’s about time I write a post about one of my newest projects, Codemunchies.com, which I started together with a friend of mine, Aleksander, a couple of months back.

Codemunchies.com is a blog focusing on development related topics and so far we’ve had a good coverage of Google Collections and Guava as the first big series of articles.

We wanted to start the blog to have a place to share our ideas and experiences with other developers and hopefully also create a place for fruitful discussions around practices and specific implementation.

Head on over to Codemunchies.com to check it out. Subscribe to our RSS and make sure you follow us on Twitter and Facebook as well

Photo by André Eide

Last week I attended JavaZone 2009, one of the biggest developer conference in Scandinavia. I had a great time, both learning-wise and on the social level. Nothing beats Club Zone Wednesday night

The agenda was filled with good talks this year as well, and it’s always a big puzzle to make it all fit and attend as many interesting talks as possible. I spent a couple of hours at the javaBin stand this year as well, as I am the leader of the Southern Norwegian branch of the user group. It’s a good way to meet the rest of the javaBin crew, as well as other people stopping by either for information, a cup of coffee, a discussion, or ice cream – yeah we had an ice cream bar this year. Guess who dove into that one on Thursday morning, with a sliiiiiiiiiight hang over…

BeerDuke - Providing the javaBin Heroes with free beer (An RFID modified soda vending machine)

Among the most interesting talks I attended this year was Arjen Poutsma’s talk on Spring 3.0,  Jevgeni Kabanov’s talk on class loaders as well as his Lightning Talk on JavaRebel, Erik Hatcher’s Solr talk and Jason Van Zyl’s talk on Maven 3.0, Nexus and m2eclipse. There were several more excellent talks, and I would probably cite most of the agenda listing them all, but these were the ones that resulted in something concrete that I will sit down and get my hands dirty with.

The first thing I have started looking at is JavaRebel. I got it up and running today, and it’s clear it’s going to make a lot of our development much more stream lined. I am giving a demo of it to the rest of our team on Friday, and hopefully they will find it just as useful Then it will only be a matter of convincing the boss to purchase the licenses!

We also joined a Solr and Lucene meetup at Oslo Plaza on Wednesday evening, and had three hours of very interesting talks and discussions with other’s in the search business. Hopefully we’ll manage to have a couple of more meetups over the next year

Anyways, it was a great week and it’s fun to be back at work having loads of stuff to start studying and working on

On Tuesday I am off to Oslo and this year’s JavaZone! It’s gonna be a blast This year there will be five of us from Integrasco attending the conference, hopefully next year we’ll be able to send all the developers and QA staff.

The agenda was just released last week and I have not had the time to sit down and figure out exactly what I want to see, but that will be the task for Monday or Tuesday evening I’ve found a couple of talks that I have to catch, especially Erik Hatcher‘s talk about Solr. But there’s a lot more space on my agenda to fill, and there does not seem to be a lack of interesting talks to fill it with this year either.

I’ll also be spending some time at the javaBin stand as I have previous years, so drop by and say hi

There’s a couple of videos on the JavaZone site which is worth checking out – very entertaining, even if you’re not a software developer!

I’ve been testing EVE Online for the last couple of months, nothing heavy, but a few hours here and there. I had a go at the game a couple of years ago as well, but gave up because of the overwhelming complexity. This time I decided to give it a bigger chance and try to get through the tough first hours of tutorials.

After giving it a couple of weeks of really trying to get into the game I’ve come to really like it. The reason I decided to try it out again, was really to satisfy my urge for space MMO after looking through screens and gameplay footage of the upcoming Jumpgate Evolution. Since that game is still in closed beta and will not be out before well into 2010, I decided to find something else to cure my abstinences with

I love the freedom to explore space, seek wealth and fame through pirate hunting or resource mining and evolve your space ship! There is still a lot to the game which I have not experienced, but I feel I have gotten past the steep introduction and look forward to seeing what lays ahead in the next unexplored region of space

If any of you are playing, add me to your contact list as “Karboto” – very original.

We have just released a new website at Integrasco today, with a brand new logo design as well. A good upgrade for our online profile and we’re very pleased with it

Head on over to www.integrasco.com and have a look. Also make sure you become a fan of us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!

Opera 10 Beta 1 was released earlier this week, after several iterations of snapshot and alpha releases. I was quick to download the beta (even before they got “Ubuntu” up as an option for 64-bit Linux versions), backed up my Opera data folder and installed.

The reason I have titled this post with “(really?)” is that I have yet to find any serious bugs! For me Opera 10 Beta 1 has been running just as stable as the previous 9.6x version I had installed. The only thing I have seen so far is that the mail composer does not update the signature if I switch the account I want to use when sending. Other than that it is working like a charm, and believe it or not, it feels even faster than before.

Opera has yet again increased the speed of their rendering process in Presto 2.2 and the browser itself also feels much more lightweight and responsive, especially with many tabs open and extensive use of heavy JavaScript applications.

To increase performance on slow connections, Opera 10 also introduces Opera Turbo.  Turbo is a feature which compresses the websites on Opera servers before they are sent to you. Image quality is also reduced, which may give some websites a rather strange look. However, when browsing over a GPRS or 3G connection this feature is so stress reducing you actually want to marry it. A small icon in the corner will also tell you when your connection seems to be slow, and let you choose if you want to automatically let Opera choose when to use Turbo or not, always use Turbo, or turn it off. I am guessing this feature is going to make the traveling days easier for many, as well as save quite a lot of money when it comes to  phone bills

These are the new and noteworthy features in Opera 10 Beta 1, in my opinion:

• Opera Turbo – as mentioned above.
• Improved speed dial – The new speed dial is much easier to expand, no need to hack Opera configuration files to get more sites on your speed dial! You can now also customize the background, if you don’t like the plain white one
• Tab bar with previews – If you limit your tab bar to one single line, you can now have Opera display thumbnails on your tabs. I usually have too many tabs open to enjoy this feature, but it’s definitively useful!
• Spell check, all over the place – Opera 10 brings spell checking everywhere in your browser. Earlier you had to install the spell checker and dictionaries separately, but now it comes with English spell checker right out of the box, and you can easily install new dictionaries simply by right clicking anywhere which has spell checking capabilities. No more excuses for typos in blogs and e-mails!
• HTML e-mail composer – The e-mail composer now supports composition of HTML e-mails. It’s a feature I have not missed terribly, as I prefer plain text e-mails, but it’s still a great addition.
• Auto-update – Opera is now able to automatically update itself when there are new versions available.
• Add RSS feeds to your favourite feed reader – Opera now allows you to add RSS feeds to other readers than the built in feed reader. Clicking on a RSS feed now allows you to subscribe to it in Google Reader, Bloglines etc directly from the RSS preview which was introduced in Opera 9.5 (?).

There are loads of new goodies in Opera 10 Beta 1, and even though it’s a beta the stability has been great so far. I have no reservations against recommending an upgrade! Just make sure you do a proper backup, but of course you already do that every day….!

Thanks, Opera, for continuing to create this fantastic browser!

Opera 10 Beta 1 with the new default theme

This is quite a techy post, so be warned! It has been a while since my last one though, so you can’t really complain…

About half a year ago I wrote a post about organizing my desktop and how I was testing out Compiz Expo and a few other plugins to make my work, and general desktop usage, a little more stream lined.

I’ve now been using this setup since November, and I can tell you I will never go back! Web or e-mail? *Swooooooosh* (that’s the sound of desktop switching, if you did not catch that… ) Desktop 1! Music? *Swoooooosh* Desktop 4! By simply moving my mouse to the corners of my dual screen setup I get the overview picture shown above and I can choose the desktop I want by clicking it. Or I can use the Super+E button to bring up the Expo as well. Works like a charm. In addition I have configured the Compiz Place Windows plugin to place all my applications on the right desktop and screen when they are launched. Except for the usual special app, which has to be enrolled in special classes – Place Windows works perfectly. I get the applications where I want them with no hassle at all.

Currently I have my desktop organized as follows:

1. E-mail and browsing – Opera on screen 1, Firefox on screen 2.
2. Instant Messaging and chat – Pidgin on screen 1, Xchat (IRC) on screen 2.
3. Development – Eclipse across both screens, other tools spread across both screens whenever needed.
4. Music – Spotify on screen 1, Songbird on screen 2.
5. Misc – I very seldom use this desktop to be honest, not sure why it’s 5 and not 6 which is empty, tho…
6. Log monitoring – Usually running Terminator on both screens following logs in different locations, as well as JMeter and other monitoring applications whenever I use those.

Many of you may wonder why the hell I do this and if it’s not just easier to click the window in the task bar or Alt-tab your way to the application you want? Well, I used to do that. However, when you have 2 browser, 2 media players, 2+ IM/chat applications, Eclipse, database management and query applications and several terminals open, it quickly becomes a mess. You try to find your browser to check your e-mails, you minimize it without wanting to, and have to bring it back up, then you need to shuffle through all your windows to get back to Eclipse. A little later 3 of your friends want to ask you something on IM and they all pop up and reduce the size of your task bar button from the impossibly small 3 pixels wide to 1 pixel. Good luck finding those chat windows.

I must admit it took a few weeks before I was truly comfortable with having the applications spread across several desktops, but now that I have gotten used to their location I almost bring up the good desktop without even thinking, and I don’t have to shuffle through with Alt-Tab or roam the taskbar for hours before finding what I want. I simply click the “Web” desktop and I got all the windows I need. Right there in front of me, ready to use.

For me, this setup has enabled me to switch context much faster. If I am in my code editor and need to lookup documentation online, I quickly shift to my Web desktop, and I am right in the browser, ready to start looking for the documentation. When I find it, I can easily send it to my development desktop if I want to have it right there next to the editor.

If you often feel overwhelmed by a stack of windows on your desktop I can recommend testing a setup with several desktops using Compiz or similar applications. It has really made my desktop-life better But I must insist that you should give the experiment a few weeks. It does take a little while to get used to this way of using your desktop, but once you’re there – I’ll bet you half of those 92 million NOK I’ll win in the lottery tonight, that you’ll never go back

Checking my Google Calendar this morning, I found that Google had automatically added a new alendar; Stardates. Wonder if it has anything to do with the premiere of Star Trek here in Norway today?

Stardates in Google Calendar

A geeky curiosity from Google

Today's stardate.