Camera batteries

I've been looking for new batteries for Janne's digital camera. We're getting tired of buying expensive Duracells. The cheap batteries go dead almost immediately.

After having read the Wikipedia articles on batteries and discovering that lithium-ion AA-compatible batteries do not appear to exist (update: I later found some on batteribyen.dk, but unfortunately not rechargeable), I was going to buy Sanyo 2700 mAh rechargeable batteries from batteribyen.dk. The shop owner recommended Sanyo Eneloop, however. They are supposed to be able to keep their energy for longer. But they are only rated for 2000 mAh...

But then I found this page (which in turn references this test, I also found another big test). Apparently some cameras are very picky with the voltage they get from the battery, turning off at the point most batteries deliver the bulk of their energy at.

But not the Eneloops. So I'm going to be buying a set of those with a charger.

The small things

Still settling in at our new home. It's funny how small things can make a big difference.

Like the lighting. We've bought and put up a couple of lamps. Transforming the apartment from a grave or a scene in a detective story in the evenings. Actually I have already formed a habit not to press the light switches since they didn't work. Will have to unlearn that.

Or the stove and cooker hood. The stove is quick to warm up and easy to clean. And the hood doesn't make much noise while actually sucking pretty hard. The one at the old place sucked a lot too, but not in the sense you want it to.

Or the fridge, kindly borrowed from Janne's sister, which has one large instead of two small vegetable drawers, meaning that it can store cucumbers, probably the second most common vegetable after tomatoes in Denmark.

Or the wall-mounted things that I haven't had the time to put up before now. Changed the setting from construction site to something closer to a home.

Or the fact that the two phalaenopsis orchids which have bloomed the last few months are still carrying their flowers while the two others decided to bloom almost simultaneously. So we now have four blooming phalaenopsis in a row at the counter between the kitchen and the living room. Pictures soon, I promise.

Still on the todo list is digging the garden. Yesterday I put felt feet under the piano, in attempt to reduce floor vibrations, hopefully transmitting less sound to the neighbours. Tilting the piano was like lifting an elephant.

Efficient work force

Janne mentioned yesterday that the head of a recycling company was eager to hire former farmers. Over the last couple of decades a lot of farmers in Denmark have had to stop because small farms cannot produce enough surplus to give a decent income. They used to large or medium farms, now they're simply too small. So many farmers have had to find a job.

A similar wave hit the country when industrialisation started kicking in and women in large numbers began joining the work force. I remember reading about egg-packers in a factory in literature classes in high school. The point is that those women were also valued because they were used to work for themselves and thus act responsibly and conscientious.

I think there's a parallel here to open source developers who have run and nurtured their own projects. It shows that they care.

Whether there really is a difference, I don't know. I haven't met that many non-open source developers and in any case I'd think that discipline is much more important in non-creative factory work.

Finally moved

So we moved the remaining things Saturday and are now officially living at the new place. We were pretty bombed Sunday but managed to buy some flower bulbs and a small raspberry bush to put in the garden. I'll post pictures soon. It's nice with the extra space, although the bed got stuck in the staircase a couple of times - we barely managed to squeeze it through.

We still need to do some cleaning and painting in the old place.

Also the internet connection arrived today (5Mbit/256 kbit ADSL2) right on schedule. So far it's working fine.

AJAX

I started looking into AJAX. We want to use AJAX for doing searches for client.

Turns out it is much simpler than I thought, at least if you have worked with asynchronous programming, callbacks and closures before. First thing to note is that it's a good idea to use a library to do most of the Javascript stuff because of browser incompatibilities. I digged up jQuery which seems sensible. I suggest starting with this tutorial from the documentation page.

There's really not much more in it than a few lines of simple Javascript code (because of the library) on the client side. You register a callback and can inject things into the page when you get data. On the server-side is a standard PHP/Django/ASP/whatever script that parses GET or POST parameters and returns an XML string. It's even simpler than normal form processing because you just return the data you need on the client side instead of a whole page.

There are also a couple of links to tutorials on the Wikipedia page on AJAX to understand what jQuery is doing under the hood.

Moving

We started moving our stuff last weekend to Vilsundvej. Yesterday the piano was moved. I'm relieved it's done, but it was a sad moment. The acustics in the empty living room with its hard walls and wooden floor was just perfect for playing Bach.

This weekend we'll move the things we use daily, completing the journey - we still live in the old apartment. I took some pictures, will post them later.

Then it's just a question of getting the old apartment cleaned up and repainted.