Sune Trudslev's WebLog

My big interview

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 20:18:47 +0200

So, Brandy is getting into the whole blogging scene, and I had sent her an URL for a blog which is written by the wife of a person that I know from the EasyUO site.

So, Tracy, as the woman is called who is writing the blog, decided to interview Brandy and have her post the answers on her (Brandy's) blog. So I decided to have Brandy do an interview on me and then I would post my answers here (Well, okay, she kinda dared me to do it! ).

Whats the one material possession that you own, that you couldnt live without, and why? That is almost a silly questions, since everybody in the entire world would know that, that is, of course, my computer. I am a total geek, when it comes to computers, I have been working with then on a daily basis for about 22 years now. I go to work 8 hours every day and work on a computer, and guess what I want to do when I get home?
Whats the best thing about you? The best thing about me is that I never give up. Some people would probably argue that it is also the worst thing about me.
Which actress or celebrity do you find sexy, and why?
Well, since I believe that sexy is mainly in the mind of people, it is a little hard to answer that question, since I don't actually know any actresses or celebrities.

That being said (and I'm probably being totally boring now) Angeline Jolie is pretty sexy. There's something about her, that I would describe as a "Sean Connery" aura. When you see her, you want to know more.

I guess I just wish my wife was an actress or a celebrity, so I could say her, because she is by far the sexiest woman alive (too cheesy? well, she knows I mean it).
If you could pack and up and leave the country tomorrow, where would you go?
If I could, I would travel the world, until I had seen all the places that I've yet to see. The places that have culture, history, and something to sparkle my instincts, tickle my senses, work out my intellect. I just love being stimulated.
What is 1 thing that your wife doesnt know about you?
If you ask her, she doesn't know much about me at all. I, however, feel like I an open book, and tell her everything about me. She probably doesn't know that I worry. As a guy you're supposed to be strong, and strong people don't worry at all, right? I know I got it all wrong, but what can you do?

The rules for this little interview game, is outlined in these 5 simple statements:

Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Disk Defragmentation -- Useful optimization turned hoax?

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 19:36:00 +0200

I LOOOOOVE defragmentation. I love the thought of my files, my bytes, my bits, on my harddrive is laying in a nice and orderly stream; perfectly aligned and ready to be read right off the magnetic surface of my disks.

So, I was sitting there contemplating the concept of deframentation on a modern harddrive. These days, the disks don't actually report the actual geometry of the disk, instead it maps the "virtual geometry", which is exposed to the OS, to the actual geometry of the disk. This way the disk can easily detect bad sectors on the drive and move and map them to another position on the drive, in case a part of the disk goes bad (which is probably more often than we'd like to know).

So, we power up our favorite defragmentation program and has it move all the files around so that they are ordred perfectly in the "virtual geometry". The problem, as I see it, is that when the disk actually has to read the data, it will be read from the actual geometry of the disk, which could, at least in theory, be scattered all over the disk.

Does this mean that defragmentation is more useful when the disk is new (and has less bad sectors)? Does it even make sense to defragment your disk?

Lightbox Test

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 08:25:05 +0200

This is a test of the lightbox script. It seems to work quite nicely. Try and click the thumbnailed image.

Photography in the genes?

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 09:57:18 +0200

So every time I run around like a mad person, clicking away on my camera, Amalie seems to be watching me like a hawk.

So, the other day where we took a "tourist" trip on the canals of Copenhagen, she got to be in charge of Brandy's camera. She was snapping away like a mad person, barely able to wrap her fingers around the camera. Sometimes making excited sounds, sometimes grunting is discontent.

So we got home and we popped the camere in it's dock and proceeded to transfer the pictures. To our big surprise the girl (who's only 6 at the moment), took alot of good pictures (and alot of bad ones too, just like the rest of us).

I took a few into photoshop, straightend a bit, auto contrasted, and cropped. Here's what I think is the best one:

The new opera house in the Copenhagen Harbor, captured by a 6 year old girl. Not bad, eh?

Taking Popart further...

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 09:53:20 +0200

Trying to take the Popart concept a bit further, I found this excellent tutorial on how to create popart in Photoshop.

It's definitely not something for absolute beginners, but in a few hours I produced this:

My beautiful wife, Brandy, again posing as Popart

Momondo again..

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 08:28:50 +0200

So we are nearing a release of www.momondo.com. I am really happy with the results. We have moved all the different services to different servers which has resulted in a serious improvement of performance on the site. Results are blazing out.

Also, the work we have done with ensuring the quality of the robots and adding many new robots, the data quality is excellent. I have no doubt that our site has the best coverage out of all the different sites that seem to be opening lately.

I hope you will all go check it out and book your next vacation through our links (which will in turn give us a small kickback from the airline), so that the site can become the success that, I believe, that it deserves.

The current state of Denmark

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 08:49:31 +0100

PissedOffPencil writes in his blog how Jyllands Posten made a grave error in judgement when publishing the infamous pictures of Islamic prophet Mohammed.

While I agree with the thruth of the statement he comtinues to say that "they" (not sure if he means Jyllands Posten or the entire Danish people) are hiding behind the freedom of speech that we have in Denmark.

See, that's just not true. What people are defending when it comes to the freedom of speech is the fact that right after the pictures were published, the Danish Prime Minister (who is, btw, not a social democrate, but a right wing liberalist), were approached by a number of official people from countries that mainly have Islam as their religion, and he was asked to intervene and take measures against Jyllands Posten. He declined, because the political system cannot enforce their views on the press, but the press has to be dealt with, first, by an ethical board, and then the courts. THAT is what people are defending.

Okay, so the Prime Minister did decline to talk to 11 ambassadors for these countries, which, in my opinion, has made this sorry ordeal what it is.

Now we can just sit back and see what will happen.

I, personally, hope that we can conclude this in a nice and respectable manner. Muslims and people of any religion are welcome in my country. Their religious symbols should not be made fun of.

Peace.

Sune Warhol?

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 22:16:54 +0100

Tonight I thought to that I would work on my Photoshop skills, so I loaded up a picture of my beatiful wife Brandy that I took just a few days ago.

I removed the background and made it black and white, then I ran it though the Cutout filter and saved four copies. I took each copy and colored it with bright colors. So here is my venture into pop-art alá Andy Warhol:

Winter's Bite

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 10:13:02 +0100

So, I am turning into a photo-geek. I guess it's just another geek thing to add to my list. Well, my wife uses the pictures I take on her blog, but I thought I would show people some of my favorites.

Saturday and yesterday I was out in search of winter pictures. It had just snowed and all the trees were full of ice, so I got a few interesting shots.

I hope you like them:

Happy New Year!

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 11:33:28 +0100

Have a happy new year. I hope 2006 will bring you anything you want, need, desire and wish for.

Travel cheap

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:05:14 +0100

I mean, who cares what the flight is like, as long as you can trust the airline, not to crash the airplane. Okay, so it's not just me that thinks that, but people in general. The success of low-cost carriers like easyJet and RyanAir.

So, what I do for a living, is make a low-cost carrier search system. The system itself is called SpeedFares and is targeted at business travel agencies as a complimentary system to their GDS (Global Travel Distribution System) which mainly includes classical airlines, like, SAS, KLM, Lufthansa, and the likes.

So lately we've been toying with the idea of taking our search engine to the web. I've recenly finished a "to-the-bones" version of the search engine. Programmed with Ajax techniques. It has a spiffy dropdown for choosing the cities to travel from and to, and a very cool dynamically updating price comparrisson page. In short I'm pretty proud of the result.

So, if I caught you interest you can go see how you can travel cheap on Momondo for yourself. I hope you will like it, and that you will use it the next time you are going to go somewhere.

If you feel any routes or carriers are missing feel free to leave me a note here.

Gallery: A giant among midgets

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 17:18:37 +0200

When picking out a web-based image gallery system, the choices are almost endless: Comdev Photo Gallery, IMS Pro, PhotoStore, PhotoPost PHP Pro, Coppermine Photo Gallery, and my personal favorite: Gallery.

I recently updated my wifes web-based image gallery which was using Gallery 1.5.1. We had decided that it was looking a little bland, and might be in need of an update, so I went scouting for what was out there.

After taking the whole trip around, I ended up with Gallery again. They had recently released 2.0.0, so I decided to try it out.

I have always felt that Gallery was well designed, inside and out, but I have to say that the installation process really blew me away. It was step based and each set would tell you of any problem. For example I php's maximum script memory set to 8M. The script told me it need to be updated to 16M to run it. It was a breeze to install and about 5 minutes later I had a running version of Gallery2.

Fiddling around with the importer in about 5 more minutes. I got it to import the captions so they would work with Gallery2, and then it just had to run for about 45 minutes (importing, scaling and thumbnailing 1600 pictures).

The look is excellent, the features are great, installation is as easy as it's humanly possible, and it doesn't cost 1 cent.

You be the judge.

SQL: SELECT by priority

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 18:57:00 +0200

I have been working on a project at work where it should be possible to set up what suppliers are available to our customers and their users. We also wanted to be able to be able to provide the customers with a standard setup (sort of a template) based on what type of product they are using.

Here is the solution I came up with.

First the tables we already have available:

Customer

Column Name	Value
CustomerId	Int (PK)
CustomerName	Varchar(30)

Office

Column Name	Value
OfficeId	Int (PK)
CustomerId	Int (FK)
SupplierTemplateId	Int (FK)
OfficeName	Varchar(30)

Supplier

Column Name	Value
SupplierId	Int (PK)
SupplierName	Varchar(30)

So then we will need to add a table to hold the templates:

SupplierTemplate

Column Name	Value
SupplierTemplateId	Int (PK)
SupplierTemplateName	Varchar(30)

Last but not least we will need a table to hold the actual supplier selection:

SupplierSetting

Column Name	Value
SupplierSettingId	Int (PK)
SupplierId	Int (FK)
SupplierTemplateId	Int (FK) NULL
CustomerId	Int (FK) NULL
OfficeId	Int (FK) NULL
Enabled	Bit
Priority	Int

A setting can either belong to a template, a customer, a registration number or none (which makes it a default setting).

The priority is assigned as follows:

Condition	Priority
No owner	1
Owned by a template	2
Owned by a customer	3
Owned by a registration	4

So now we can fill in some data:

Customer

CustomerId	CustomerName
1	Test Customer

SupplierTemplate

SupplierTemplateId	SupplierTemplateName
1	Template 1

Office

OfficeId	CustomerId	SupplierTemplateId	OfficeName
1	1	1	Test Office

Supplier

SupplierId	SupplierName
1	Test Supplier 1
2	Test Supplier 2

Now all that is left is set up the suppliers:

SupplierSetting

SupplierSettingId	SupplierId	SupplierTemplateId	CustomerId	OfficeId	Enabled	Priority
1	1	NULL	NULL	NULL	true	1
2	2	NULL	NULL	NULL	false	1
3	2	1	NULL	NULL	true	2
4	1	NULL	1	NULL	false	3

Here is a textual representation of the above data:

On a global (default) level 'Test Supplier 1' is turned on and 'Test Supplier 2' is turned off.
On 'Test Customer' level 'Test Supplier 2' is turned on'
On 'Test Office' level 'Test Supplier 1' is turned off.

So how do we get this data out so we only have one row per supplier with the correct status? Well, the answer is a SELECT statement with a sub-SELECT to find the highest priority for the current supplier. Enjoy!

Here it is:

DECLARE @OfficeId INT
SELECT @OfficeId = 1

DECLARE @CustomerId INT
DECLARE @SupplierTemplateId INT
SELECT
  @CustomerId = CustomerId,
  @SupplierTemplateId = SupplierTemplateId 
FROM 
  Office 
WHERE 
  OfficeId = @OfficeId

SELECT 
  * 
FROM 
  SupplierSetting s1 
WHERE 
  (CustomerId  = @CustomerId OR CustomerId IS NULL) AND
  (SupplierTemplateId = @SupplierTemplateId OR SupplierTemplateId IS NULL) AND
  (OfficeId = @OfficeId OR OfficeId IS NULL) AND
  Priority = (
    SELECT 
      MAX(Priority) 
    FROM 
      SupplierSetting s2 
    WHERE 
      s1.SupplierId = s2.SupplierId AND
      (CustomerId  = @CustomerId OR CustomerId IS NULL) AND
      (SupplierTemplateId = @SupplierTemplateId OR SupplierTemplateId IS NULL) AND
      (OfficeId = @OfficeId OR OfficeId IS NULL)
  )

Lego: You just gotta love it..

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:50:27 +0200

I've always loved Lego. Being a Dane, I'm also proud of Lego, because it's probably the most popular Danish invention ever.

So one of my friends sends me a link for something new Lego thought up: Lego Factory. It's just up my alley: Create your own Lego designs in a program, upload it to their site and buy the pieces needed to build it yourself.

Pure genious.

Regular Expressions is the stuff

nospam@example.com (Sune Trudslev) — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 10:01:30 +0100

I just found this excellent beginner's tutorial to Regular Expressions. If you don't know what Regular Expressions are, or know what they are, but not how to use them, I strongly urge you to read the article. Your life will never be the same, well, at least your programming life.