Older blog entries for DV (starting at number 9)

Left Ottawa, now in Seattle. Original flight was cancelled, I'm still trying to reach Air Canada to get news from my lost backpack. I nearly missed my connecting flight to Seattle, they closed the door 20 secs after i rushed in the airplane. I hope I will be able to recover my collection of Linux T-Shirts :-(. It seems that Air Canada still didn't located my backpack.

Worked a lot in the plane, mostly on the MySql back-end for rpm2html, this starts looking Okay.

Congratulations to ajh and the whole team organizing OLS, those developer meetings are incredibly productive. This is great to still have such event organized, Kudos again !

Linux Symposium is great, but I will be exhausted at the end (or before :-\). Lots of good talks, lot of them occuring in the corridor... Looks a lot like a mini-IETF except there is no ties at all :-) . Networking and especially wireless is great, when it works.

Speaking of networking, I was able to make a new release of libxml (2.2.1) during the Docbook BOF. Again people are deseperately looking for graphical editing tools. Seems Conglomerate and Amaya/Thot are among the only alternatives right now, but I'm sure this is gonna change/improve soon.

I discovered yesterday that rpmfind.net had been out of the net for 10 hours, seems the Eepro100 driver died, I was able to log in from the PLIP connection I maintain with a nearby machine, stop eth0, unload the eepro100 driver, and restart eth0, I *love* PLIP. I must be one of the few using it it was broken from 2.2.7 to 2.2.14 ...

Yesterday evening we went to a thai place, Mike Shaver seems to order 1/ too spicy 2/ too much food. Since I was sitted next to him I ended up eating most of his left over. I skipped the Corel party and went out for a beer and pool with Gerald as well as Michael Meeks, David Mason, and Gegl. This was great even if the Emacs team did beat the Vi team 2 to 1 ... well they need a revenge from time to time.

Arrived on Ottawa for the linux symposium without troubles, I'm a bit tired.

Hacking on adding a MySQL back end to rpm2html... this is growing a 1 million+ file list database, this is scary, but doesn't seem to impede indexing speed too much. I seriously need to improve the rpm2html/rpmfind combo, having an intelligent and flexible database for advanced queries is a step forward. This should also help on currently very annoying mainainance problems.

Linux Symposium is impressive, most of the Linux geeks are here, I had a lot of interesting talks, and assisted to Miguel keynote and the Docbook presentation. We badly need a generic (not too compex but helpful) XML authoring environement. If gtkhtml(2) evolves properly this may be a good fundation for such a tool.

This is Bastille Day, and it's raining ! Perfect day for hacking :-)

Wrote a page describing internationalization support in libxml. I dislike writing docs, I prefer commented code but unfortunately this is not a good way to pass the information to the users :-\

I think I'm gonna release libxml-2.2.0 RSN, it has everything andersca needed for gtkhtml2, and now it's better documented.

Seems I fixed the (contributed :-( ) bugs which were preventing me from releasing rpm2html-1.4 . This also mean that the resources pages on rpmfind are worky again (and that the flow of mail "where can I find a package for libxyz.so.X ?" will decrease !).

Ok libxml-2.2.0 is out ... next in the pipe is rpm2html-1.4

Back from LSM, and sick... It seems I got a cold while sitting outside at the restaurant. Waited 4 hours for my plane in a freezing airport yesterday, this didn't improve things :-( . The flight was delayed, this concord with my current statistics about airplane schedules, 50% have a problem, either delayed by more than 30mn or cancelled. People complains about computers failure rate, seems nobody does for airplanes schedules, why ?

Released libxml-1.8.9 after fixing a serous problem in the FTP code which was giving rpmfind serious troubles, the bug was exposed when I switched from wu-ftpd to proftpd, seems nobody agrees on how to interpret RFC 595.

Seen an XLink related announcement listed in linuxtoday, good ... Now I want to see more code :-)

Though I was sick yesterday, I did one thing which was needed for a long time, I registered the libxml domains, and made them point out to libxml web page. I was annoyed enough when I discovered someone registered rpmfind.com :-\ , this time I registered the com net and org for safety.

At the LSM since yesterday. Gave a talk on the work toward unifying packages formats (or is there a life after RPM and DEB ? Answer should be yes it seems :-).

Jacques Gelinas is here too, we discussed a lot at the restaurant yesterday evening, he's a really enjoyable person (food and wine were good too !), this is great to meet people directly.

I was so tired that I woke up after 11am today, I missed the morning session and RMS talk, oh well...

Worked on cleaning up the FTP problems (still) in libxml, seems better now. I also fighted for months wondering why APM was not working anymore on my laptop since I upgraded to RedHat-6.2 . After trying all the tweaks I could think of including upgrading the Dell Latitude BIOS, I found a perfect solution: remove the apmd package ! The kernel handles APM very well. The only usefulness of the user level daemon was to crash the machine <grin/>. At least this is solved now :-)

Fixed bugs, in rpm2html, in the FTP client code of libxml.

Seems my ADSL installation is completed, now I can be connected *and* have phone call simultaneously (they were out of stock on ADSL line filters). Setup DHCP + IP masq, checked FTP code in that environment, seems to work better now

Compiled ext3-0.0.2e kernel RPMS, just to notice at the end that sct had released 2f, generating kernel RPMS takes more than one hour on my dual PII at work :-\, it's still compiling ...

Will leave early tomorrow to go to LSM I expect to see wiggy there. I'm supposed to talk on packaging, we will see ... I hope I will be able to connect without pain.

There was probably one of the longuest thread ever started in the libxml list, all about ports to Windows. It's funny to heard that Linux has no unicity, and that MS provides a far less fractionned environment, when one see the pain generated by the multitude of incompatible C environment and compiler on that platform. From that point of view on Linux it's quite better. Did some cleanup with SunPro cc on solaris, interesting how each breed of compiler caches differnent classes of errors, so sometime diversity of environments is good too :-). BTW will Purify ever ship to linux ?

Didn't slept well, not long enough, was in a bad shape today.

Ditched wu-ftpd from my servers, replaced with ProFTPd, I feel safer now, it also seems to have an interesting impact on the system load, it used to be around 15, and now it's more like 3 to 5 for roughtly the same traffic (a bit less US don't work today). Maybe it's the internal ls, we will see how it turns. This also immediatly broke rpmfind :-(, due to misinterpretation of the RFC959 probably, I fixed the nanoftp implementation of libxml and turned on the proftpd compatibility switch in the meantime.

A new release of Amaya is out so I generated amaya 3.2 RPMs. They implemented support for the simple links of XLink, like Mozilla, good ! I'm still compiling amaya with the old release of Motif-2.0 I ported 5 years ago, maybe I should switch to OpenMotif, there is also beta Gtk support since amaya-3.0, but it's still really alpha I was told

Yeahhh ... After XPointer, XLink is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation too ... This mean I should feel less stressed and have more time to work on code :-)

Still working on some issues related to read/write encoding support in the HTML code of libxml, Still need some work on the saving side and in the parser internals.

I also need to provide a non-buggy ISO-Latin-1 <-> UTF8 set of functions, I had a look at the iconv code from glibc but could not nderstand how it was working. Should not be too hard, in the meantime I'm using the optional iconv support for the tests.

My first advogato diary ever ... though I am probably one of the oldest accounts.

I hope the HTML parsing code work :-) ... speaking of which I have spent some time lately working on libxml again. I released an old 1.x update, the 2.1.0 followed closely by 2.1.1 :-\

I spent some time this week on the HTML parser module to help the implementation of gtkhtml2. It now autoadds properly (it seems) HTML/BODY/HEAD when not specified (the space saving hacks of SGML definitely sucks rocks...)

Wrote a libxml FAQ

Added charset detection/conversion to the HTML parser, mostly just some syntactic sugar and calling the code done from the XML parser. So this should not take too long to debug. Well excepts all the tests for proper encoding inside the parser itself :-\ ...

Recently got my ADSL at home ... the first time since I'm back in France that I don't have to worry about connection time, what a relief ... And the bandwidth is better too but that not the most important. Seems I'm among the very first connected in the area, maybe it will degrade later.

rpmfind maintenance have been giving me some troubles recently, archive is getting to big to be rescanned everyday, rpm-4.0 broke the old lib, and the rpm-3.05 for testing breaks rpm2html seriously. i will have to switch to a databased backed-up solution (did i ever said I *hate* databases ?). Yet another project I should spend time on oh well ...

Seems the conference in Bordeaux next week lacks speakers, I was enrolled at the last minute, i will be there from Friday morning to Sunday afternoon, good my laptop is repared.

Oh and I will be at OLS, my ticket confirmation is just pending a return flight Boston->Europe, so I should be set travel wise.

Note: Raph, any chance to add a spellchecked to preprocess diary submissions? I feel lazy