Lars Olav Torvik’s blog

Created a bugfix release for the release yesterday. Sorry about creating two releases in so short time, but tonight I finally managed to reproduce the main gadget not updating. It seems Internet Explorer is caching the windows gadget data, at least on my Windows 7 installation. This caused some problems with the main gadget showing old time. This should hopefully be fixed now.

If anyone still have this problem let me know! I also appreaciate feedback on some of my questions in my previous post.

Today it is 17.May and the Norwegian national day. Norwegian are always very interested in the weather for 17.May since we have big celebrations outdoors and many people plan to take out the barbecue. Not that I plan to be much outdoors today since I’m using crutches after a football injure earlier this week… arg! So since I have been spending some time indoor and to prepere us for the 17.May I have created a new release of the weather widget. Release 1.3.0 is available for download. This is big upgrade from last version so alot of code have been rewritten for this release. Some things you will notice and some “under the hood” fixes Overall I’m very pleased with this release and I hope you the user will be please too.

• Replaced the old template design with a much more versatile solution. You can now select the text and background color. The colors from the old template is still available in the color picker, in addition you can write whatever hex color code you want! Use your favorite image editor or an online color picker to select your perfect color. This should guarantee that the gadget matches any desktop background possible!
• All old background images have been replaced with new dynamic solution using CSS. This result in a minor design difference and makes it much easier for me to add more optional flyout pages etc in the future.
• When you add a new gadget instance it will try and retrieve the name, longitude and latitude based on your IP address! This will especially help all users not located in Norway.
• Default language on the gadget is now based on Windows regional setting. This makes it easier for non Norwegian speaking users since they will not get Norwegian as default language like they used to.
• The default gadget view should now get updated both when you close the settings window and the flyout. This is done so it easy to force a refresh of the widget.
• Fixed bug that didn’t allow negative latitude and longitude.

As allways I apreaciate all feedback I get here, so write away! I’m especially curious on how getting the location based on IP works. I have done some successfull testing on IP’s from bigger cities in Norway and abroad. But I would love to get some feedback on how it work for you!. Do it get the correct location and how small towns do it manage to collect. Also if you live outside a town, what do it find?

There are still some possible errors not fixed, reported in the last version. Somtimes it do not refresh the main window. It might be related to loosing internet connection but it have not been confirmed yet. Also there are some repports that the gadgets opens the flyout out of the screen instead of into the screen like it is suposed too. My suspicions are that this is related to Windows and gadgets in general and not this spesific gadget. If anyone are able to find a way to reproduce this or other usefull feedback please let me know.

Enjoy and have an excellent 17.May celebration!

As you might know, I’m using the symfony PHP framework for many of my projects. Especially on bigger projects like filmprices.com I find it very useful.

Symfony have somthing called tasks that you can run from command line of your server. Tasks together with a cronjob would be great combination for updating the product list from the different shops in filmprices.com. So I set up a cronjob for running my product:update task looking somthing like this:

0 5 * * * ~/path/to/my/symfony/poject/symfony product:update

But I just got the following error message:

There are no tasks defined in the “product” namespace.”

The problem is that the symfony cli need to be run from the symfony project directory so it do not manage to find my product namespace. I did not find any similar examples on google so I did some basic “try and fail” with my cron script. I finally managed to get it to work with the following script:

0 5 * * * cd ~/path/to/my/symfony/poject && ./symfony product:update

When looking at the solution I guess this should have been easy for me to figure out, but I have not worked much with cronjobs earlier. So hope this helps if you ever run into a “There are no tasks defined in the “<namespace name>” namespace.” message when setting up cronjobs with symfony tasks.

As a side note you might have noticed I set up my script to only update products once a day. I will increase this for the shops that update their products lists often when I take this project out of beta. So do not worry the products and prices will be up to date!

A new version of the weather gadget is ready for download. Just download and double click the package and it should install over the older version. To check the version just check the settings page and the version is stated at the bottom (unless you have the 1.0.0 version).

• Possible to select hour by hour forecast instead of 9 day forecast as flyout. (requested by Steffan)
• Increased the timer used to check for new weather forecast. No need to check for new weather forecast every few seconds

Enjoy!

I have created a simple a Norwegian home server site (hjemmeserver.no). It aggregates news regarding home server from different Norwegian new sites. At the moment I get news from the following sites:

hardware.no, vg.no, digi.no, dagbladet.no, nettavisen.no, itavisen.no, computerworld, pc world norge, dinside.no and klikk.no.

If you know of any other Norwegian sites with rss feed that might write about home server, please tell me!

A new version of the weather widget is out with some updates based on the feedback I got from users on this blog and on mail.

• Now shows a moon instead of a sun when displaying the midnight weather.
• Fixed a bug that made it sometimes show the wrong current weather when minimized.
• If you write in your custom name for a location and press save the choice will be saved for later and show up in the auto completion search.
• Added version to the setup page to easy see what version is installed.
• When a new version is out you will be notified when entering setup.

I had to create a new name of the .gadget package that did not contain the version number for easy upgrade in the future, but if you have the old application installed you need to right click the sidebar and select “Add gadgets”. Then right click the old weather gadget and select “Uninstall”.

I created a weather report Windows Gadget with data from yr.no this summer and have been using it since then. I now decided that I would like to share this Gadget to others that might want to use it. The design is very simple since it was mean’t as private Gadget and I’m a programmer not a designer, but feel free to create a new design for me and I’ll include it in the application

For more information take a look at weather.larsolavtorvik.com. I used to have my old UWA widget at that address but I removed it for now, atleast temperarly. If you miss it feel free to tell me and I’ll share the code.

I put out a new beta of filmprices.com 01.01.2009. This is a PHP project using the symfony framework. The new design is created by Marte Berentine Breivik. I think she have done an excellent job. The whole page is basicly rewritten with lot of improvments, especially regarding the search engine.

I have a couple of stores available for each market (Norway, Denmark, Sweden and UK). I will add more functionality and stores the next months and hopefully it will become a site both you and I will use when we buy our movies

If you find any bugs or have features you would like feel free to tell me here. I have alot of features on my todo list but allways good to hear what other users would like!

There will be alot of things happening on filmprices.com. I will try and update once in a while on this blog but I can promise yout that I will update filmprices.com more often then I update this blog!

Together with the server move I released a new version my regex tool.

• Improved logging.
• Fixed problem where long text strings would not fix their “box”.
• Fixed some typos.
• Fixed some misc minor bugs.

At the moment only PHP PCRE, PHP POSIX and JavaScript are enabled. Hopefully I will get the other up and running soon too, but I need help from my host to get the problems solved.

I have moved larsolavtorvik.com to the new servers. Sorry for the short downtime. If there are any of my tools or other things that do not work as expected feel free to tell me here.