Streaming Sports (3)
The bookmakers are currently very eager to offer live streaming of sports events. I might as well expand the list of stream providers given by my previous posts on streaming sports.
Unibet and Bet365 are now both streaming different types of sports. They seem to buy the signal from the same provider – atleast the offered events are exactly the same. Futhermore it is – atleast for now – free, the only demand is that you sign up for an account. The quality is alright, the signal is delivered via a flash player so it works on a variety of operating systems and browsers.
Commercial Map Data on Demand
Most people know Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth… excuse me – Bing Maps. They see a map – and mostly think a map is a map.
Though – as many commercial users know – this is not exactly the case for them. The licensing for these data almost always prohibit commercial use, at least if you do not show a big logo or the like. This is a thing most people do not want in there brochures, architectural projects etc. And what if I do not want to buy the whole of France, Denmark, England etc. but only the 1000 square meters I am showing in the brochure?
The guys at CentreMaps have thought of a solution: Why not target these “small customers” who have special needs, which the traditional suppliers have a hard time fulfilling. Their service, called CentreMaps Live, is the answer to most of the demands these small fish have. You can buy a map of the small area you want to show in your brochure – and you do not have to pay for all of England to show your new three house architectural project in Cheddar. Of course the payment is very easy with credit card payment for instant access as the ordinary user is used to from his or her usual Internet shopping.
And what about those nice obliques they show on Bing Maps – why not buy the one that shows the office and put it in our brochure? Or what about a laser scanning for a true digital surface model of the site of the achitectural project? CentreMaps has a collection of different types of data.
I am not only fond of CentreMaps because part of the product is supplied by my own employer. It is just a brilliant idea to supply maps to a part of the market which is still mostly unexplored.
Streaming Sports (2)
In my previous post on streaming Danish sports I wrote about tv2sport.dk.
For Danish citizens there is a much more powerful resource for streaming sports. The Danish Gaming Monopoly, Danske Spil, is streaming a lot of sport on their site. The only thing it requires of you to see it is a login to danskespil.dk. You then login and click on “Danske Spil TV” in the menu, and click “Live TV”. You then choose the match/event you want to see, and it is shown in their cool Flash player.
The use of Flash as player makes it possible to see the events on a number of platforms. This is a very cool feature. I have several times tried to watch events through Bet24s live tv (through CDON) but they only support an old version of Windows MediaPlayer, and only on Windows.
Take a look at the plethora of sports being shown on Danske Spils site. Unfortunately Danish Football is not shown (as MTG and TV2Sport owns the rights for this)
Experiences on Greylisting
As I was overrun by spammers wanting to sell my everything from cheap televisions to sexy lingeri, I decided to take som serious measures. Bayesian filtering by using spamassassin did not solve my problem, so I had been looking for a serious alternative.
I decided to try greylisting, and to my joy it has almost stopped all spam. Earlier I would receive several hundred spam mails a day, now I am “lucky” if I get a single spam mail a day. Of course there is a price for this: emails which do not meet my criteria for immediate access to the mail server, will be delayed – or be delivered through the secondary mailserver (which fortunately also uses greylisting, though on a much higher number of domains than my own server). As I was drowning in the spam earlier, this is a price that I have found to be very small.
I use the postgrey package on my Debian server, the setup was very easy. If you want a simple setup you can have it ready in two minutes, with almost no work. I used this guide from Debian Administration. As almost 95% of my “legitimate” mail and 0% of the spam comes from Denmark, I have chosen to add the following line to /etc/postgrey/whitelist_clients : /^.*\.dk$/ This allows all Danish servers to send me mail, without it being delayed. Other mailservers must retry sending the mail, if they do that more than three minutes (default is five minutes) after the first try, the mail is accepted. Furthermore after three (default is five) successful tries (within the last six months – default is thirty days) the server is automatically whitelisted.
All in all greylisting has been a very positive experience for me. Though it is obvious that one needs to consider the effects of greylisting (the delays, the possibility of lost mail etc) before using it.
Server Changes
The hosting provider for gpweb.dk has been changed. I was very satisfied with the service provided by my previous host, SurfTown, but as I have now invested in my own Virtual Server, I saw no real point in letting the few websites etc. be hosted by SurfTown. The DNS is still hosted by GratisDNS and through a sister company to them I also have MX-backup.
The Internet is a Powerful Resource
I was working on solving a problem that seemed simple – just translate one format to another – but then got stuck trying to find the exact right algorithm. The vendor – Adobe – of the format I was trying to read, only included some of the base information to be used by a specific algorithm.
I tried the couple of obvious solutions and algorithms, they seemed to give answers very near to the “correct” ones, but not close enough for me to certain that the translation was good enough. So what does one do? Of course I started out by doing a thorough search on the web – “Googling” the problem and a number of similar problems. This did unfortunately not help me. Although in the end, it actually did help. I found an old usenet post, in which another person described – in a few words – the solution he had used.
Alas, this solution didn’t seem to work for me, so I wrote the guy, thinking “Well I might be lucky; he might not think I’m stupid, but actually be willing to help me.” So I wrote him a mail, and he actually did answer me. Right now I am giving his piece of code – which he send me – a look, and in a couple of days I’ll be checking up on my own code, probably being able to find the spot where a screwed it up. 
And this is the reason for title of this post: The Internet is indeed a powerful resource.
Thanks to Mike Russell, curvemeister.com, for his help!
Cheap(er) open source alternatives to Matlab
Almost anyone who has “been exposed” to a technical university (some would even say anyone who has come in contact with an engineer) will also have been exposed to the wonderful programme called Matlab. Matlab by Mathworks is a wonderful programme for modelling mathematical problems quickly – especially when it comes to matrices. Matlab is also a very fast environment for proof-of-concept programming.
Alas as my status as a graduated engineer meant the end of the student license fee of around 500DKK (89$) and the beginning of the “Commercial license fee” of 15,000DKK (around 2700$) (the listed fees are for Danish students/companies). Thus encouraged I began looking for alternatives.
I found among a lot of projects Octave, which I find very promissing. It seems to me as if Octave is the candidate which covers the most of Matlabs functions and syntax. Other candidates cover “a lot” or “some” of the functionality, and their syntax is not quite the same. Using Octave (on my home computer with Ubuntu) I have not experienced any major flaws. I also tried it at work on my 64 bit Vista workstation and it also seemed to run quite well on Windows.
I use Emacs as editor and on Ubuntu I have also played a little with the QtOctave frontend, which looks a bit like the real graphical Matlab frontend.
Installing on Ubuntu is as easy as: doing a “sudo apt-get install octave qtoctave” or using one of the graphical installation utilities and searching for octave.
Streaming Danish Sports
As most of my friends, colleagues, and such know I am very fond of football (Association Football / soccer). To my joy I have found out that the Danish sports channel, TV2 Sport, streams a number of matches each week. Some of the matches are streamed on a pay-per-view basis, but most are streamed without charge (probably to Danish IPs only). To their credit the streams also work on Linux – at least on my Ubuntu installation.
A link to the overview of current streams: http://tv2sport.dk/streaming
(To those interested in UEFA Champion League matches, these are streamed to customers of the Scandinavian bookmaker Bet24, though their streaming software requires Microsoft Windows).
Hello World
As always, the first thing to do in a “new place” is to write a “Hello World”-programme.
So: Hello World!
Then the explanation: I missed a simple and easy way to write and update small articles, when I write a little programme, script or the like. My old home made CMS was not good enough any more, thus this blog of IT, Statistics, and Junk…
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Gregers Petersen, M.Sc.E
Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
Note: The views expressed in this blog are mine, and not necessarily shared by my employer, friends or relatives.
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