Programming

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I've used computers [see computers] and programmed (well, it depends of course of your definition of programming) for about as long as I can remember. Thus, I've done it for a quite long time, and should at least be halfway good at it. :-)

I've programmed in a lot of programming languages: BASIC, C/C++, assembler (x86, 68000 and AVR [see Work]), Delphi/Pascal, JavaScript, Java, Perl, Haskell, bash scripting, O'Caml, etc. etc. etc... I could go in detail of what I think of each one of them (and on my previous home page, I really did :-) ), but for now, it will suffice to say that I use C, C++ and Perl the most -- C/C++ is nice for stuff that needs speed, or larger projects that need good structure, and Perl is (at least if you know it well) good for text processing of various kinds, including the famous `one-liners'. :-) (This home page [see the technical stuff...] is made using a combination of C and Perl.)

Anyhow -- programming can be really interesting (or boring!), not to mention that it's actually quite useful. I don't really know what else to say about it, except that if you want to be a good programmer, you should pay attention in maths class [see school], and above all, always be prepared to try something new and unknown to you -- otherwise you'll never get anywhere. Learning programming takes time, time, time, talent and a lot of dedication...

The first year at university, I joined up with two others and created a team for the Norwegian programming championships (NMiP), and surprisingly, we just managed to get on to the regional finals (NWERC ICPC) by placing third. Although we `only' placed 22nd out of 54 teams in the regionals, it was a lot of fun, and given that it was our first attempt in the regionals ever, I think the entire team was quite pleased with the result. :-)

The second year, I had to be in Oslo around the time of the contest anyhow, so I decided to join with two others (ie. different from those I teamed up with the first time), and again we took third place. Unfortunately, due to slightly inflexible rules (all contestants have to be from the same university, or participate in the `open class', which can't go on to the regionals nor win) we were not allowed to go on, so there was no trip to Lund in Sweden this time. The third year I was sick after again qualifying, and the fourth year I didn't participate -- the fifth we again placed third but were not allowed to go on.

Software projects in Bazaar-NG

Most of my software projects, released or not, go into one of my Bazaar-NG repositories these days. You're welcome to look and play, but there are no quality guarantees :-) You'll need Bazaar-NG to check these out (you can look at the source without checking the projects out, though). The semi-active projects (most of them with completely meaningless names) include:

• audiosync, a few quick programs to keep the recording from multiple sound cards in sync (using one channel per card for a sync pulse).
• fat-rescue, some snippets for rescuing files from a FAT file system with a broken FAT.
• fp-downconvert, C code for converting 64-bit IEEE 754 floating-point numbers to 16-bit floating-point numbers, including correct handling of rounding, infinities, denormals and NaN.
• greasemonkey-scripts, a few Greasemonkey scripts I find useful.
• hamming, a simple but relatively fast implementation of (16,11) and (32,26) extended Hamming codes in C.
• itkwiki, yet another wiki engine.
• mbd, a daemon for relaying broadcast packets for popular games across multiple network segments, (ab)using directed multicast and helper functionality usually meant for DHCP.
• pitch, my FFT-based guitar tuning program.
• pr0n, the code used for my image gallery.
• qmfsplit, a moderate-complexity (O(n log n) in number of subbands, but higher constant factor than straight FFT), small-size (<2kB code with plenty of opportunity for optimization), low-latency, simplistic splitting filter based on quadrature mirror filters (QMF).
• rdpsrv, what was once supposed to be a server for Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (or: how far you can get with a copy of rdesktop and a few days of frantic hacking).
• remoteglot, a program for connecting an arbitrary UCI-compatible engine (such as Rybka) to an Internet Chess Server (such as FICS).
• sproing, a very primitive but fun-to-watch solver for (possibly overconstrained) trilateration, triangulation and hybrid problems.
• stupid, a chess AI that lives up to its name.
• sudoku, a lightning-fast Sudoku solver.
• ttk-gettext, an interface between Template Toolkit and GNU Gettext, allowing for simple translation of web templates.
• webpdf, the source code for pdf.sesse.net.
• xml-template, a completely logic-free, cross-language, wellformed-XML-outputting templating system.