~ Android Gingerbread 2.3.4 on LG GT540 Optimus

I have upgraded the operating system on my LG GT540 Optimus from the stock Android 1.6 to Android Gingerbread 2.3.4. I followed this updgrade procedure.

It is well worth it to spend some time upgrading the phone, especially from 1.6. Everything feels a lot faster and the upgraded applications, e.g. Gallery, are nicely improved.

The main reason I upgraded my phone is to get the open source accessory development kit (ADK) for Android working. I got the DemoKit application working after some time but need to do some more experiments to see if the hardware actually works: I am waiting for a USB Host Shield for Arduino. To be continued…

Projecten en Hackerspace Ghent

~ Athene

Athene, Griekenland.

Athene

Αίγινα

Alpen van boven gezien

Ancient Agora

Αίγινα

Αίγινα

Ancient Agora

Olympisch stadion

Olympisch stadion

Reizen

~ TwinSeats heeft Apps For Ghent gewonnen!

Vorige zaterdag werd Apps For Ghent georganiseerd: een activiteit om het belang van open data te onderstrepen in navolging van onder meer Apps For Amsterdam en New York City Big App. Tijdens de voormiddag kwamen er verschillende organisaties hun open gestelde data voorstellen de namiddag werd gereserveerd voor een wedstrijd. Het doel van de wedstrijd was om in enkele uren een concept uit te werken en meteen voor te stellen. Het uitgewerkte prototype moest gedeeltelijk functioneren en gebruik maken van (Gentse) open data.

Luk Verhelst en ikzelf hebben er TwinSeats voorgesteld.

TwinSeats is een website / online initiatief om nieuwe mensen te leren kennen. Met hen deel je dezelfde culturele interesse en ga je vervolgens samen naar deze of gene voorstelling. Door events centraal te stellen kan TwinSeats uitzonderlijke cultuurburen zoeken. Leden vinden die cultuurburen dankzij een gezamenlijke voorliefde voor een artiest of attractie of eender welke bezigheid in de vrijetijdssfeer.

Het prototype is ondertussen terug te vinden op TwinSeats.be. Let wel dit is in enkele uren in elkaar geflanst en is verre van ‘af’, het achterliggende concept is belangrijker.

Samen met Wa Kank Doen van SumoCoders werden we door de jury tot winnaar uitgeroepen. Maandag verscheen er een artikel in de Standaard over AppsForGhent met een vermelding van TwinSeats. Op de Apps For Ghent site is uiteraard ook iets te vinden over TwinSeats ook het juryverslag is er te vinden. Zoals het hoort bij die categorie evenementen werd ook wat afgetweet.

Er is ook een publieksprijs verbonden aan AppsForGhent die wordt over enkele weken uitgereikt.

Code, Projecten, Portfolio, en Hackerspace Ghent

~ The Pidato Experiment: Vibrato on a Digital Piano Using an Arduino

The Pidato experiment demonstrates a rather straightforward method to handle vibrato on a digital piano. It solves the age-old problem on what to do with the enigmatic “vibrato” instructions on some piano solo scores of Franz Liszt. The figure on the right is an exerpt of sonetto 104 del Petrarca.

Since there is no way to perform vibrato on an analogue piano there are all kinds of different interpretations. Interpretations of the ‘vibrato’ instruction include: vibrating the pedal, vibrating the key, simply ignoring it, a vibrato like wiggling with a psychological sounding effect, … A pianist specialized in 19th century music, explains his embodied use of vibrato in a youtube video: Brian Ganz on piano vibrato. Those solutions all seem a bit halfhearted, so I created an alternative approach which resulted in the Pidato experiment.

Pidato is a portmanteau of piano and vibrato, the d, a and o hint to the use of an Arduino. Pidato is also Indonesian for speech, expression. To get a feel of what it actually does I created the video below. Please note that this is a technical demonstration, not an artistic performance… in any way.

The way it works is by translating movement (accelerometer data) to MIDI messages. The hardware consists of an Arduino, MIDI-ports and a three axis accelerometer. The MIDI-ports are provided by this MIDI IN & OUT Arduino shield. The accelerometer is a MMA7260Q from Sparkfun. Attaching the MMA7260Q and the arduino is done by following the instructions here. One change was made: by attaching the 3.3V output to AREF and executing analogReference(EXTERNAL); fluctuations in power supply cease to have an influence on accelerometer data readings. It is represented by the purple wire in the diagram below.

The software should know when a vibrato like movement is made and how to translate such movement to MIDI messages. The software therefore contains a periodicity estimator and frequency detector to detect how periodic a movement is and how fast the movement is repeated. This was done with the YIN algorithm (more commonly used in audio signal analysis). A periodicity threshold was determined experimentally so the system does not yield false positives when playing the piano in the usual way. Another interesting bit of code is the interrupt setup that samples the accelerometer at a fixed sample rate and sends MIDI messages, also at a fixed rate.

MIDI messaging is done over a serial connection. From the Arduino sending a MIDI message is as simple as calling Serial.print with the correct data. For the task at hand (sending vibrato) Pitch Bend messages were used.

The YIN algorithm is encapsulated in a reusable Arduino library and can be used to detect periodicity and frequency for any signal. This guy used his implementation to create a chromatic tuner. The source code for both the Yin Arduino library and Pidato experiment can be found on github or here.

The Pidato experiment was done with the help the friendly hackers at Hackerspace Ghent.

This piano vibrato hack was also covered by hackaday.com and posted to the Hackerspace Ghent blog.

Pidato

Prototype

Internals

ff vibrato on a score of Liszt

Wire diagram

Code, Projecten, en Hackerspace Ghent

~ Efeze

Of Ephesus.

Reizen

~ Call for Participation: Newline

I am a member of Whitespace, a hackerspace in Ghent. It is essentially a loose collective of people with a passion for technology. We will organize an event for our first birthday and hope you will be there. This is our cal for participation:

I will be presenting a talk about fun applications of audio processing.

Code, Projecten, en Hackerspace Ghent

~ Find the MAC Address of your Android Device

Just a quick hint. If you ever need to find the MAC address of your Android device, and who doesn’t, check this file:

  


  
/sys/devices/virtual/net/wlan0

You can read the file with the Astro File Manager.

Hackerspace Ghent

~ Remote Port Forwarding with Ubuntu 8.04 and OpenSSH 4.7

With this post I would like to draw attention to the fact that remote port forwarding with OpenSSH 4.7 on Ubuntu 8.04.1 does not work as expected.

If you follow the instructions of a SSH remote port forwarding tutorial everything goes well until you want to allow everyone to access the forwarded port (not just localhost). The problem arises when binding the forwarded port to an interface. Even with GatewayPorts yes present in /etc/ssh/sshd_config the following command shows that it went wrong:

  
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user@local$ssh -R 2222:localhost:22 user@remote
user@remote$sudo netstat -lntp #on the remote server
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State
tcp6       0      0 ::1:2222                :::*                    LISTEN

It listens only via IPv6 and only on localhost an not on every interface (as per request by defining GatewayPorts yes). The netstat command should yield this output:

  
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user@local$ssh -R 2222:localhost:22 user@remote
user@remote$sudo netstat -lntp #on the remote server
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:2222            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN

I do not really know here it goes wrong but there is an easy workaround. By defining both

  
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GatewayPorts yes
AddressFamily inet

in /etc/ssh/sshd_config remote port forwarding works fine but you lose IPv6 connectivity (this due to the AddressFamily setting). Another solution is to use more up to date software: the bug is not present in Ubuntu 10.04 with OpenSSH 5.3 (I don’t know if it is an Ubuntu or OpenSSH bug, or even a configuration issue.

I have been struggling with this issue for a couple of hours and, with this blog post, I hope I can prevent someone else from doing the same.

Code

~ Oneliner to Install ssh-copy-id on Mac OS X

ssh-copy-id is a practical bash script, installed by default on Ubuntu. The script is used to distribute public keys. The following oneliner makes it available on Mac OS X:

  


  
sudo bash < <( curl --silent http://0110.be/attachment/be.0110/195/install-ssh-copy-id.bash )

This oneliner does three things:

1. It copies ssh-copy-id from this website to /bin/ssh-copy-id.
2. It makes sure that ssh-copy-id is executable, using chmod.
3. There is no three

The install procedure needs superuser rights because it writes in the /bin folder. Executing scripts from untrusted sources with superuser rights is actually really, really, extremely dangerous. But in this case it is rather innocent.

The ssh-copy-id script is the one provided with Ubuntu and Debian, I assume it is GPL’ed. I have not modified it for Mac OS X but it seems to behave as expected. I have only tested the install script and behavior on 10.6.5, YMMV.

Code en Mac OS X

ssh-copy-id.txt, install-ssh-copy-id.bash, en install-ssh-copy-id.bash

~ How to Develop for LG GT540 Optimus on Ubuntu

This post describes a crucial aspect of how to connect an android phone, the LG GT540 Optimus, to an Ubunu Linux computer. The method is probably similar on different UNIX like platforms with different phones.

To recognize the phone when it is connected via usb you need to create an UDEV rule. Create the file /etc/udev/rules.d/29.lg545.rules with following contents:

  


  
SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTRS{idVendor}=="1004",ATTRS{idProduct}=="61b4",MODE="0666"

On the phone you need to enable debugging using the settings and (this is rather important) make sure that the “mass storage only” setting is disabled.

Rooting the device makes sure you have superuser rights. Installing the android SDK is well documented.

Good luck!

Code en Hackerspace Ghent

~ OpenRD - A Low Power Server Running Debian on ARM

This blog post comments on using the Marvell OpenRD SoC(System on a Chip) as a low power multipurpose home server.

The Hardware

The specifications of the OpenRD SoC are very similar to the better known SheevaPlug devices, so it has 512MB DDR2 RAM, an 1.2GHz ARM processor and 512MB internal flash. To be more precise the OpenRD SoC is essentially a SheevaPlug in a different form factor. The main advantage of this form factor is the number of available connections: 7xUSB, SATA, eSATA, 2xGb Ethernet, VGA, Audio, … which make the device a lot more extendable and practical as a mulitpurpose home server.

The Software

Thanks to the work of Dr. Martin Michlmayr there is a Debian port for the Kirkwood platform readily available. He even wrote a tutorial on how to install Debian on a SheevaPlug. Installing Debian on an OpenRD is exactly the same except for one important detail: the arcNumber variable.

Once Debian is installed you can apt-get or aptitude almost all the software you are used to: webserver, samba, ruby, …

The Alternatives

• Sheevaplug
• Beagle Board or other OMAP3 SoC’s. The IGEPv2 e.g. has wireless and wired network connections.
• Alix system Boards are mostly x86 based.
• NSLU2 An ARM platform.

The Future

The next version of the SoC is known as Marvell Armada 310/300

NAS in the attic

OpenRD

Harde waren en Projecten

~ Ijsland

Ijsland.

Reizen

~ Doorhacking: Opening a Door With Your Cellphone

The problem: There is a group of people that want access to Hackerspace Ghent but there is only one remote to open the gate.

The solution: Build a system that reacts to a phone call by opening the gate if the number of the caller is whitelisted.

What you need:

• A BeagleBoard or some BeagleBoard alternative with a Linux distribution running on it. Any server running a unix like operating system should be usable.
• A Huaweii e220 or an alternative GSM that supports (a subset of) AT commands and has a USB port.
• A team of hackers that know how to solder something togeher. E.g. The hardware guys of hackerspace Ghent.
• A python script that reacts to calls.

The Hack: First of all try to get caller id working by following the Caller ID with Linux and Huawei e220 tutorial. If this works you can listen to the serial communication using pySerial and react to a call. The following python code shows the wait for call method:

  
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def wait_for_call(self):
  self.data_channel.open()
  call_id_pattern = re.compile('.*CLIP.*"\+([0-9]+)",.*')
  while True:
    bytes = self.data_channel.inWaiting()
    buffer = self.data_channel.readline(bytes)
    call_id_match = call_id_pattern.match(buffer)
    if call_id_match:
      number = call_id_match.group(1)
      self.handle_call(number)

The handle_call method … handles the call.

The second thing that is needed is a way to send a signal from the beagle board to the remote. Sending a signal from the beagle board using Linux is really simple. The following bash commands initialize, activate and deactivate a pin.

  
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echo 168 > /sys/class/gpio/export
echo "high" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio168/direction
echo "low" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio168/direction

Code, Projecten, en Hackerspace Ghent

gatekeeper.py

~ Jobsopschool.be beter beveiligd

Omdat er op jobsopschool gevoellige informatie te vinden is (bijvoorbeeld C.V.’s van kandidaten) is de beveiliging ervan belangrijk. Om die veiligheid te garanderen werd de vacaturesite voor onderwijzers op een volledig dichtgetimmerde aparte virtuele server geplaatst. Een server met enkel de broodnodige software zorgt voor een veilige en snelle afhandeling van requests.

Ook werd er voor gezorgd dat alle verkeer versleuteld wordt via SSL. De lighttpd webserver server werd geconfigureerd met deze tutorial die de configuratie van lighttpd met SSL bespreekt. Er werd een SSL certificaat van godaddy aangekocht omdat het root certificaat van godaddy in zowat alle browsers aanwezig is en omdat ze een redelijke prijs vragen.

Code en Projecten

~ Caller ID with Linux and Huawei e220

This is the scenario: you have a Huawei e220, a linux computer and you want to react to a call from a set of predefined numbers. E.g. ordering a pizza when you receive a call from a certain number.

The Huawei e220 supports a subset of the AT commands, which subset is an enterprise secret of te Huawei company. So there is no documentation available for the device I bought, thanks Huawei. Anyhow when you attach the e220 to a Linux machine you should get two serial ports:

  
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/dev/ttyUSB0
/dev/ttyUSB1

To connect to the devices you can use a serial client. GNU Screen can be used as a serial client like this: screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200. The first device, ttyUSB0 is used to control ttyUSB1, so to enable caller ID on te Huawei e220 you need to send this message to ttyUSB0:

  


  
AT+CLIP=1

To check for calls you should listen to ttyUSB1. A serial session for ttyUSB1 looks like:

  
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^BOOT:44594282,0,0,0,6
^RSSI:18
RING
+CLIP: "+33499311152",145,,,,0
^BOOT:44594282,0,0,0,6

The RING and CLIP messages are the most interesting. The RING signifies an incoming call, the CLIP is the caller ID. The BOOT and RSSI are some kind of ping messages. The following Python script demonstrates a complete session that enables caller ID, waits for a phone call and prints the number of the caller.

  
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#!/usr/bin/env python
import serial, re

command_channel = serial.Serial(
        port='/dev/ttyUSB0',
        baudrate=115200,
        parity=serial.PARITY_NONE,
        stopbits=serial.STOPBITS_ONE,
        bytesize=serial.EIGHTBITS
)
command_channel.open()
#enable caller id
command_channel.write("AT+CLIP=1" + "\r\n")
command_channel.close()

ser = serial.Serial(
        port='/dev/ttyUSB1',
        baudrate=9600,
        parity=serial.PARITY_NONE,
        stopbits=serial.STOPBITS_ONE,
        bytesize=serial.EIGHTBITS
)

ser.open()

pattern = re.compile('.*CLIP.*"\+([0-9]+)",.*')

while 1:
        buffer = ser.read(ser.inWaiting()).strip()
        buffer = buffer.replace("\n","")
        match = pattern.match(buffer)
        if match:
                number = match.group(1)
                print number

Code, Projecten, en Hackerspace Ghent

~ YIN Pitch Tracker in JAVA

To make Tarsos more portable I wrote a pitch tracker in pure JAVA using the YIN algorithm based on the implementation in C of aubio. The implementation also uses some code written by Karl Helgasson and Teun de Lange of the Jazzperiments project.

It can be used to perform real time pitch detection or to analyse files. To use it as a real time pitch detector just start the JAR-file by double clicking. To analyse a file execute one of the following. The first results in a list of annotations (text), the second shows the annotations graphically.

  
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java -jar pitch_detector_yin.jar  flute.novib.mf.C5B5.wav
java -jar pitch_detector_yin.jar  --file flute.novib.mf.C5B5.wav

The provided flute sample is from The Musical Samples library of the University of Iowa and converted to mono wav. The source code of the pitch tracker can be found below.

Muziek, Code, Cultuur, en Projecten

pitch_detector_yin.jar, pitch_detector_yin_src.zip, en flute.novib.mf.C5B5.wav

~ Boids 3D with Processing

Code, Projecten, en Portfolio

boids_windows.zip, boids.png, boids_macosx.zip, boids_linux.zip, boids_src.zip, peasycam.jar, Boids.jar, core.jar, en loading.gif

~ Order Pizza with USB Pizza Button

Recently I bought a big shiny red USB-button. It is big, red and shiny. Initially I planned to use it to deploy new versions of websites to a server but I found a much better use: ordering pizza. Graphically the use case translates to something akin to:

If you would like to enhance your life quality leveraging the power of a USB pizza-button: you can! This is what you need:

1. A PC running Linux. This tutorial is specifically geared towards Debian-based distos. YMMV.
2. A big, shiny red USB button. Just google “USB panic button” if you want one.
3. A location where you can order pizzas via a website. I live in Ghent, Belgium and use just-eat.be. Other websites can be supported by modifying a Ruby script.

Technically we need a driver to check when the button was pushed, a way to communicate the fact that the button was pushed and lastly we need to be able to react to the request.

The driver: on the internets I found a driver for the button. Another modification was done to make the driver process a daemon.

The communication: The original Python script executed another script on the local pc. A more flexible approach is possible using sockets. With sockets it is possible to notify any computer on a network.

  
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if PanicButton().pressed():
  # create a TCP socket
  s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
  # connect to server on the port
  s.connect((SERVER, SERVER_TCP_PORT))
  # send the order (margherita at restaurant mario)
  s.send("mario:  [margherita_big]\n")

The reaction: a ruby TCP server waits for message from the driver. When it does it automates a HTTP session on a website. It executes a series of HTTP-GET’s and POST’s. It uses the mechanize library.

  
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login_url = "http://www.just-eat.be/pages/member/login.aspx"
a = WWW::Mechanize.new
a.get(login_url) do |login_page|   
  #post login_form
  login_form = login_page.forms.first
  login_form.txtUser = "username"
  login_form.txtPass  = "password"
  a.submit(login_form, login_form.buttons[1])
end

Some libraries are needed. For python you need the usb library, the python deamons lib needs to be installed seperatly. Setuptools are needed to install the deamons package.

  


  
sudo apt-get install python-usb python-setuptools

Ruby needs rubygems to install the needed mechanize and daemons library. Mechanize needs the libxslt-dev package. You also need the build-essential package to build mechanize.

  
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sudo apt-get install rubygems libxslt-dev
sudo gem install mechanize daemons

To automatically start the daemons on boot you can use the crontab @reboot directive of the root user. E.g.:

  
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@reboot /opt/pizza_service/pizza_daemon.rb
@reboot /opt/pizza_service/pizza_button_driver.py

Code, Poging tot humor, Projecten, en Hackerspace Ghent

order_pizza_with_panic_button.jpg, pizza_daemon.rb.txt, pizza_server.rb, usb-panic-button.png, en pizza_button_driver.py

~ Touchatag RFID reader and Ubuntu Linux

This blog post is about how to use the Touchatag RFID reader hardware on Ubuntu Linux without using the Touchatag web service.

An RFID reader with tags can used to fire events. With a bit of scripting the events can be handled to do practically any task.

Normally a Touchatag reader is used together with the Touchatag web service but for some RFID applications the web service is just not practical. E.g. for embedded Linux devices without an Internet connection. In this tutorial I wil document how I got the Touchatag hardware working under Ubuntu Linux.

To follow this tutorial you will need:

• Touchatag hardware: the USB reader and some tags
• A Ubuntu Linux computer (I tested 9.10 Karmic Koala and 8.04 )
• SVN to download source code from a repository

The touchatag USB reader works at 13.56MHz (High Frequency RFID) and has a readout distance of about 4 cm (1.5 inch) when used with the touchatag RFID tags. Internally it uses an ACS ACR122U reader with a SAM card. A Linux driver is readily available so when you plug it in lsusb you should get something like this:

  
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lsusb 

Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 004: ID 072e:90dd Advanced Card Systems, Ltd

lsusb recognizes the device incorrectly but that’s not a problem. To read RFID-tags and respond to events additional software is needed: tagEventor is a software library that does just that. It can be downloaded using an svn command:

  


  
svn export http://tageventor.googlecode.com svn/trunk/ tageventor

To compile tagEventor a couple of other software packages or header files should be available on your system. Te tagEventor software dependencies are described on the tagEventor wiki. On Ubuntu (and possibly other Debian based distro’s the installation is simple:

  
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sudo aptitude install build-essential libpcsclite-dev build-essential pcscd libccid
#if you need gnome support
#sudo aptitude install libgtk2.0-dev

Now the tricky part. Two header files of the pcsclite package need to be modified (update: this bug is fixed see here). tagEventor builds and can be installed:

  
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cd tageventor
make
...
tagEventor BUILT (./bin/Release/tagEventor)

sudo ./install.sh
...

When tagEventor is correctly installed the only thing left is … to build your application. When an event is fired tagEventor executes the /etc/tageventor/generic script with three parameters (see below). Using some kind of IPC an application can react to events. A simple and flexible way to propagate events (inter-processes, over a network, platform and programming language independent) uses sockets. The code below is the /etc/tageventor/generic script (make sure it is executable), it communicates with the server: the second script. To run the server execute ruby /name/of/server.rb

  
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#!/usr/bin/ruby

# $1 = SAM (unique ID of the SAM chip in the smart card reader if exists, "NoSAM" otherwise
# $2 = UID (unique ID of the tag, as later we may use wildcard naming)
# $3 = Event Type (IN for new tag placed on reader, OUT for tag removed from reader)

require 'socket'

data = ARGV.join('|')
puts data

streamSock = TCPSocket.new( "127.0.0.1", 20000 )
streamSock.send(data, 0)
streamSock.close

  
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require "socket"  
dts = TCPServer.new('localhost', 20000) 
loop do  
   Thread.start(dts.accept) do |s|
     puts s.gets
     s.close  
   end  
end

The tagEventor software is made by the Autelic Association a Non-Profit association dedicated to making technology easier to use for all. I would like to thank Andrew Mackenzie, the founder and president of the association for creating the software and the support.

Touchatag hardware

Code, Harde waren, en Projecten

~ Jobsopschool

Ik heb in opdracht van scholengroep Sperregem een website gemaakt die het vinden van kandidaten voor korte vervangingen vlotter doet verlopen. Mensen met interesse voor een job in het onderwijs in de omgeving van Torhout, Kortrijk, Zedelgem kunnen zich er op inschrijven.

De website heeft enkele voordelen voor verschillende scholen in de scholengroep:

• Het zoeken van kandidaten is erg eenvoudig: na het invoeren van een vacature komt er een lijst met kandidaten met een geschikt profiel die tijdens de vacature beschikbaar zijn.
• Er kunnen e-mail of SMS-berichten verstuurd worden om kandidaten op de hoogte te brengen van een vacature.
• Profielen van kandidaten zijn altijd up-to-date: de kandidaten zijn er zelf verantwoordelijk voor en kandidaten lange tijd niets van zich laten horen worden automatisch op non-actief gezet.
• De historiek van kandidaten wordt automatisch bijgehouden en kan opgezocht worden.

Ook voor de aspirant onderwijzers is de website handig:

• De vacatures zijn publiek zichtbaar, kandidaten kunnen dus actief solliciteren.
• Ze kunnen zelf hun profiel beheren en bijvoorbeeld een vernieuwde versie van hun C.V. uploaden.
• Voor elke kandidaat is een gepersonaliseerde lijst met vacatures beschikbaar (ook via RSS), afgestemd op hun profiel.

Daarnaast is het ook voor de personeelsdienst een handige tool: die kan nu een beter overzicht bewaren over de vacatures en de invulling ervan in de verschillende scholen.

Hieronder staan enkele screenshots.

Startpagina

Nieuwe vacature

Code, Projecten, en Portfolio

~ Vooruit.be vernieuwd

Vandaag is de vernieuwde vooruitwebsite gelanceerd:

We bieden je nog meer video’s, foto’s, audiotracks en tekstmateriaal en hebben ook jouw persoonlijke voordelen uitgebreid. Wanneer je lid wordt van www.vooruit.be, kan je nog steeds je kalender aanvullen, vrienden maken en reacties posten, maar daarnaast krijg je ook aanbevelingen op maat, kan je voorstellingen tippen en kan je berichten sturen naar vrienden *.

Het gepersonaliseerde aanbevelingssysteem is door Greet Dolvelde en mezelf in het kader van onze thesis: Collaborative Filtering: Onderzoek & implementatie [pdf] ontwikkeld. Dus waar wacht je nog op? Word lid, check de aanbevelingen bij concerten en vooral je gepersonaliseerde aanbevelingen.

Voor de iets minder enthousiaste doorklikkikkers staan hieronder wat screenshots van de verschillende soorten aanbevelingen op www.vooruit.be:

Gebruikersprofielpagina

Aanbevolen evenementen

Buren

Aanbevolen artiesten

Evenementpagina

Aanbevelingen bij evenement

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~ Verhuis naar VPS

Waarschijnlijk heb je het al gemerkt: deze site gaat nu heel wat sneller. Dit is te danken aan een verhuis. 0110.be wordt nu gehost op een VPS.

De virtuele server heeft Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server als besturingssysteem en draait op een Xen hypervisor. De fysieke server zelf bevat een achttal Intel® Xeon® E5440 @ 2.83GHz CPU’s.

De server staat in Amsterdam en is rechtstreeks verbonden met het grootste internetknooppunt ter wereld: AMS-IX.

Code en Harde waren

~ Halte-R vernieuwd

Ik heb een nieuwe, ditmaal dynamische, site gemaakt voor Halte-R. Als je er enkele bouwstenen van deze site er in ziet: dat is geen toeval het werkt op hetzelfde CMS.

halte-r.be

CMS

Code en Portfolio

~ Snowboardvakantie 2008 - 2009

In Pra Loup.

Reizen

~ SQL-bestand met een lijst van alle Belgische postcodes en steden

Uit de lijst van postcodes van alle Belgische steden heb ik een SQL-bestand samengesteld. De gegevens bevatten de postcode zelf, de naam van de stad, de naam van de stad in hoofdletters en een veld “structure” waaruit de gemeente-deelgemeente relatie gehaald kan worden als er op gesorteerd wordt. Dit zijn bijvoorbeeld de deelgemeentes van Chimay.

6460   CHIMAY
6460        Bailièvre
6460        Robechies
6460        Saint-Remy (Ht.)
6460        Salles
6460        Villers-la-Tour
6461        Virelles
6462        Vaulx-lez-Chimay
6463        Lompret
6464        Baileux
6464        Bourlers
6464        Forges
6464        l'Escaillère
6464        Rièzes

Het sorteren kan in PostgreSQL met deze SQL instructie: order by translate(structure, ' ', 'z'). Het SQL-script zelf is een lijst van INSERT INTO SQL-Statements.

insert into cities(zipcode,name,up,structure)  VALUES ('1790','Affligem','AFFLIGEM','1790   AFFLIGEM');
insert into cities(zipcode,name,up,structure)  VALUES ('9051','Afsnee','AFSNEE','9051        Afsnee');
insert into cities(zipcode,name,up,structure)  VALUES ('5544','Agimont','AGIMONT','5544        Agimont');
...

Dit is het SQL-bestand met een lijst van alle Belgische postcodes en steden. Hopelijk is hier iemand ooit iets mee.

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