So anyway, recently Opera released 10.60, which is awesome news because finally Linux has a modern stable release, because of the amount of new eye candy in the UI, the new supported web standards (like Geolocation or WebM video, yay!) and… because of the amazing speed (“much faster than a potato“).

On Saturday, DailyTech published an article comparing the speed of several browsers, Opera 10.60 included. Obviously the conclusion was that Opera is the fastest (I wouldn’t link to that article from this post if it wasn’t the case, would I? :-P), and shortly after reading that, I came across this hilarious video that sort of follows up on that:

I mean, the video even mentions Opera Link, I have to like it :-P (although yeah, the claim is not correct, Chrome does have something similar). My favourite quotes are:

• “You promised innovation, but look at Opera!”
• “Maybe Opera is hiring”

And the second reminded me that yes, we are hiring!

My first impression is fairly good: even though it’s the first decent Android phone and quite old now, I find it very nice to use and quite customisable (which is great, considering all the applications and widgets available for the platform). And even when using an old version of Android (1.5) I don’t find it slow. At least not enough to be irritating.

However, there are several annoyances and things I found out that I figured I’d share:

• It doesn’t automatically import SMS from the SIM card, let alone use the SIM card as the SMS storage. I find that really silly, but to be honest it doesn’t bother me that much. You can of course import your backed-up SMS using some utilities (I haven’t bothered).
• It took me a good deal of effort to import my contacts from the old phone. I tried some app called vCardIO, which sounded awesome but it didn’t work for me. The final solution was using a utility called “Import Contacts” that doesn’t seem to be in the Android Market (?). I had exported my contacts using gammu/wammu, but I had just in case removed the X-GAMMU-* lines from it. I don’t know if it had anything to do.
• I found the default mail application to be kind of sucky, so I looked around and found K-9 Mail. I’m quite happy with it.
• The default browser is some sort of bad joke, but luckily there’s Opera Mini. Opera Mini 5 totally rocks, especially with Opera Link.

The talks themselves went pretty good I think, although I’d have preferred more people attending. I guess it was normal that there were less people than I’m used to, since the Linköping office is much smaller. But anyway. The Debian course went quite well and some people got started packaging stuff almost right away. The other talks were an introduction to automated testing (advocacy and arguments for it, advice, basic examples and small rant about a different kind of QA), which went ok, and an entry-level talk about unit testing in Python (thanks Ask and Batiste for the information and reviewing the slides!), which went very well. I’ll try to get the slides for all the talks available somewhere.

About the city itself, it’s a charming little part of Sweden where:

• Restaurants have insanely different prices for food whether it’s for lunch or dinner. Typical prices for lunch are 80 SEK (around 8 EUR) and typical prices for dinner are around 250 SEK just the main course!
• Restaurants usually serve some Swedish dish for lunch… and I mean every restaurant, meaning all the Greek, Vietnamese, etc. Considering “real” Swedish restaurants are very expensive, you usually go to those foreign cuisine ones when you actually want to eat Swedish food.
• Restaurants typically have some salad (that you have to take yourself) while you wait for the food… and some coffee, tea and cookies (that obviously you have to take yourself) for the end.
• Related to this, restaurants are usually very self-service. I thought service in Norway sucked, but boy was I wrong, at least there is some service. And: there were typically long but pretty-fast-moving queues, and there was this one place where you didn’t even get the food on the table after ordering at the bar; instead, you were given some gadget with some wireless receiver, and when your food was ready it’d beep so you knew you had to go to some special place and fetch your food. Is it really cheaper maintaining some gadgets than hiring a waiter? I guess so.
• The restrictions on the amount of alcohol that can be bought outside the special Government booze stores are even harder than in Norway. You can only buy booze with up to 3.5% alcohol outside “Systembolaget”. Now that is sad. And I was complaining about Norway’s 5%.
• Partly because of that (I assume/hope) the Swedish “cider” you get in Sweden is even sweeter and worse and the Swedish cider you get in Norway.
• We went to this nice student pub… which was literally for students. They actually checked your student id, but each student could bring one non-student along. Once you were “identified” as a non-student-coming-with-a-student, you’d get a stamp on your hand so you wouldn’t have to bring along the student when you ordered again. Also, the place was so very slow it was almost funny. One of the good sides was that they had what I thought it was the only decent Swedish cider… but after checking just now, it seems it’s actually American. Bummer. And the name of it was funny too: “Hardcore Cider”.
• Right before leaving the office on Friday there was a small gathering in the canteen (the “Friday Beer”), where they had a Dreamcast with one of the most awesome games I’ve seen in a long while: The Typing of the Dead, a version of The House of the Dead 2 in which you kill the zombies by typing words that appear on the screen, instead of aiming and shooting with a gun:

The initial idea of the loanmeter widget was to show where in the world Kiva was offering loans. However, as I used the widget myself, I realised that the location in the world was less important for me, and I was more interested in knowing what the person was going to use the money for. So, I added some options to filter by “sector” and I figured that having some graphs comparing how much money was requested and already funded, for each sector, would be a very quick and visual way to get the information I wanted. I started playing with flot, and I have to say that except for a couple of relatively minor problems, it was quite easy to use. I don’t have screenshots showing the graphs, but feel free to try the widget itself and have a look (hint: you have two buttons at the bottom right corner to switch between “map view” and “graph view”).

The other widget I have been working on is a monitor widget for projects in CruiseControl.rb (a really simple and neat continuous integration server we use at Opera). More than one year ago, my colleague Nico had written a very quick & dirty widget for monitoring the result of the test runs of the My Opera functional testsuite. There were a couple of things I wanted to change, and I also wanted to monitor other projects, so I figured that I’d rewrite the widget to have a more maintainable codebase and then make it generic, so you could configure which CC.rb installation and which project to monitor. I’m moderately happy with the result of the refactoring, and happy enough with the final result. I know it has several issues, and I expect that once anyone outside our team starts using it, there will be things to improve and fix :-) If you use CruiseControl.rb, give it a try!

In case you have been hiding under a rock these days and you don’t know what I’m talking about: Opera Unite is the latest crazy idea from Opera Software. Basically, embedding a web server inside the web browser, so that people can be more than spectators on the web, share their data without having to upload to third party services, and generally change the way they interact with the web. The cool thing is that the system is not limited to sharing files or whatever, you can actually program your own Opera Unite services to do pretty much anything you want (check the documentation in Dev Opera if you’re a developer). However, do note that this is just a Labs release, that is, just a preview of relatively immature software. For a more complete introduction, go to the Labs blog post introducing Opera Unite.

Opera created quite a bit of hype before the release, which seemed to work pretty well. In particular, the teasing in the HTML comments of the preview URL (http://opera.com/freedom), which were being updated every day by adding some more words, was brilliant. There has been a lot of press coverage of Opera Unite this week, and even some Russian fella created the website unitehowto.com the same day Unite was released, and he wrote (collected?) a bunch of information, articles and tutorials about Opera Unite.

I have to say that, although there has been some quite challenging times while developing Opera Unite (it’s a quite ambitious project that involves several departments with massively different backgrounds and values, what did you expect?), I’m quite happy with the result and I think we have made, in general, a good job. As I said, this is just a very rough version, and there’s a lot of work left to do, but I’m sure it will improve a lot before we release the final version. That said, I’m sure that the most exciting things about Unite will, without doubt, start happening once people start writing interesting services, changing the way we see Opera Unite and the way we see the web. I’m so eager to see what people are going to build with this…

I have to note here that I’m very proud of being part of Opera Link, which is consistently mentioned in the list of innovations.

Happy Birthday Opera!

• I learned QUnit, which I used to write some really useful unit tests. It’s quite nice to be able to write Javascript unit tests easily.
• I made some heavy refactoring (see above) which made me learn some more Javascript and made the code much more flexible, so now the widget is not limited to a single Kiva API page of results, but to as many pages as needed to fetch whatever number of loans the user wants. Not to mention that the data source need not be a URL.
• Now the widget actually has some configuration. Namely, the number of loans to show in the map. It also stores it persistently using the preference store, which is quite nice.

As I said, I used Git for it. I don’t “hate” it anymore, but I still find some things annoying, like the horrible, confusing names some options have (I’m thinking about “git checkout ” to revert the local changes, or “git diff —cached” to see the contents of the index/staging area; seriously guys, W-T-F?). I used to be skeptical about the “git add” for changes and then “git commit”, but I actually find it quite nice: it’s easier to plan a commit that way, and if you don’t want to plan it, you can always just “git commit ” directly. Also “git add -p” is really nice to commit just parts of a file (at last, someone copies some of the good stuff Darcs had had for ages!). Apart from Git itself, it’s cool that there is GitHub, so it’s easy to share your repositories without having to rsync to some web server or similar… not to mention that your project is much more visible that way.

But the World Loanmeter wasn’t the only pet project I was working on these past weeks: I also wrote a simple sudoku solver, demisus, in Ruby. The reason? Writing a prototype of a sudoku solver in a language I’m fluent with, to play with the design and get something interesting and easy to maintain… to rewrite it in Haskell. I have been trying to learn some functional language for some years now, but I never find a “project” that is interesting enough to write some “real world program” in the language and I end up not learning anything. After starting reading Real World Haskell, I really felt like trying to learn the language once and for all, and I figured that a sudoku solver was easy enough to write, something I know enough about, and something math-y enough to be reasonably easy to implement in Haskell.

So, if you’re interested in any of them, you can have a look in Github and even contribute ;-)

I couldn’t resist the temptation to have a look at the documentation and start thinking about some application to use it. Soon after I started reading I came up with the idea of writing an Opera widget. There were a couple of reasons for that:

1. I had never written a widget, so it sounded like a good excuse to learn how to write them.
2. Widgets use Javascript, and that felt like a natural fit (as the API returns JSON).
3. I didn’t really know that much Javascript (just enough to write a couple of event handlers), and that seemed a good opportunity to start learning the language “properly”.
4. A widget in http://widgets.opera.com had more possibilities of actually being used than a random pet project of mine lying in some obscure repository of some obscure version control system (well, actually I ended up using Git for it, so it’s not that obscure in some sense; but you get the point).

So I started by learning a bit of Javascript. After asking around, the best thing I found to learn quickly was a very good series of videos by Douglas Crockford hosted in Yahoo! Video.

Then, I had a look at the excellent articles in Dev Opera about creating widgets and started creating one. As I had the idea of creating something that would show loans around the world, I started looking for HTML and Javascript for building maps, and found a very good article in A List Apart about accessible maps. The sad part is, once I understood how everything worked I destroyed the whole accessibility of the solution, but it was for a widget anyway (you have excellent support for CSS and Javascript in Opera, no need to have a fallback to show textual data in a widget) and my code ended up much much simpler and easier to maintain.

Finally, for Git, I had a look at the screencasts hosted in GitCasts. I already new some basic Git things, but I think I started to feel more comfortable with it after watching a couple of those videos. Still, too many references to the obscure objects and SHA names and whatever, but clear enough to understand your way around it.

In short, I have to say that creating the widget was easy enough, and it was lots of fun to write it. I had some frustrations debugging it, but things worked fairly well in general. When I finished it, I uploaded to widgets.opera.com and after a couple of days it was already approved and public for everyone.

So, if you want to give it a shot, just go to my widgets page and download the World Loanmeter! Enjoy it! :-D

Around one year ago, however, I found the first useful widget, a kind of simple “monitor” for the Continuous Integration server run for some project. It was really simple and actually useful (basically, a big window that is either green or red). Shortly after, someone pointed me at a “random lolcat” widget (best widget ever, I say; unfortunately is not public), so I started to wonder if I was wrong and widgets were maybe useful after all.

Since then, I have found another widget that I find very handy, the Twitter widget, and I even realised that the performance problems were something of the past, so I could consider trying a couple of games. And, alas, it turns out that there are at least two games worth trying: Bubbles and my favourite, Ninja Ropes Extreme.

So give them a try, you might be surprised :-)

And the experience, taking into account the limited interface, is pretty good. And they add features and improvements in every release (namely, they brought back “skins”, added notes to the list of supported Link data types, and probably other things I haven’t noticed). What else can I say?

The other day I wanted to go and buy some board game. I had gone to BoardGameGeek (awesome website BTW) and had made a list of the games that looked interesting. So I go to the shop, and of course most of them weren’t there… but there was some other game that looked interesting but I hadn’t seen before: Primordial Soup. Having Opera Mini in my phone, I could very easily check the rating and some basic information for that game, which helped me decide if I should buy it. Not only that, but thanks to Link I had the list of games I wanted to buy in my bookmarks (I had added them from my Desktop computer), so I could even compare the ratings for that game and the ones I wanted to buy to start with. How awesome is that?

Go Opera Mini team!