Advogato blog for djcb

13 Apr 2005

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 23:05:37 GMT

Wow - after days of fruitless trying, ap-get up(date|grade) finally gets me some new stuff on my Ubuntu box. The successor to Hoary is called Breezy. And for some unknown reason I do apt-get update several times a day. I am *so* bleeding edge.

Oh, regarding my previous post, it seems that the analog clock in gdesklets is burning insane amounts of cpu cycles. Remove that and I am grand.

Wrote a perl script to conjugate Finnish verbs; it works nicely and my Finnish colleagues couldn't even find a misbehaving verb; well he probably did not try hard enough (well, there are few irregularities in Finnish verbs. How nice). Now if only I had a perl interpreter in my head...

Last year I wrote a similar program for *Dutch* verbs; and I used Haskell that time. I find perl easier to program, but maybe that is this low iq thing people keep on telling me about.

27 Mar 2005

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 11:33:36 GMT

As a proud AMD64/3400+ (note the '+') owner, I am happy that I can now use more of the abundance of processing power on candy for the eye. So, I run xcompmgr -cCfF -r8 -o.63 -l-10 -t-8 -D7, enabled the nvidia cursor-shadow feature, and now everything is all-singing, all-dancing and all-shadowy. Beautiful. There seems to be a new focus on getting all kinds of eyecandy features on our Free desktops, and it is good. We have of course the work of Seth and friends, but never forget Rasterman and friends.

Still, I hope they can speed it up a bit; virtual desktop switching will make Xorg jump to 90% or more (in top). And there seems to be some bad interaction with gdesklets, which causes both to eat *a lot* of CPU-cycles when run together, even while not switching virtual desktops.

I am also interested in ear candy. Since I bought a sound card somewhere in 1993 or so (they were not a standard part of PCs in those days), I wanted to have auditive feedback for my interactions with the computer. But, apart from the occasional beep and ploink, current desktops don't seem to fully exploit the possibilities, to put it mildly. But of course I have to admit that I don't have a Plan in this area, on the fine line between useful feedback and annoying beeps. Has any research been done on this?

6 Mar 2005

Sun, 6 Mar 2005 23:10:58 GMT

My AMD64 is a really nice machine, but unfortunately, I keep on running into incompatibilities. jhbuild is a problem (already in gettext. And today I wanted to try the new übercool Enlightenment (well, I loved it in 1999, and the avi looks cool). But of course imlib2 broke down on the assembly code; there might be ways to solve that, but apt-get (which I could not use for E17) has made me lazy.

I released a new version of ttb. I am slowly learning Python while coding; and slowly using more and more Python idioms. I got Learning Python and Python Cookbook from the company library. I am trying the the time-based releases, weekly at the moment.

Wow, I am looking at Ubuntu's March Desktop Background, a yummy blond girl lying naked on top of my taskbar :-) Not bad.

5 Mar 2005

Sat, 5 Mar 2005 22:38:46 GMT

Weekend. I'm working on integrating some patches in ttb teletekst browser; I was lucky enough to have found a major contributor, who has been feeding me a lot of patches this week. In the open-source world, there are various ways to deal with incoming patches... people like Linus might loudly reject patches, even if people spent a month or longer working on them. In other projects patches may be ignored, or spend their life in Bugzilla (Firefox, Gnome), like the Ark in the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Of course, in my tiny project, everything is different. I try to encourage contributors by at least tell them I have received the patch and I am reviewing it. And, luckily, the patches are pretty good so far. That does not mean I will apply them blindly - I prefer to type them by hand, looking at the patch and the exising code. Thus, I get the advantages of still understanding my code afterwards, and also of reimplementation, which usually gives better quality. Well, I assume a lot of people like to do it that way, which may explain why many big projects cannot seem to digest the patches that are submitted.

I also saved some webserver from impending death - the website was mentioned in some magazine, and suddenly 600k people are trying to access it. The database got pounded *really hard*, and I got a desperate call for help... Well I did some ugly hacks to help it a little, but then discovered the mysql query cache... that did the trick.

1 Mar 2005

Tue, 1 Mar 2005 21:55:16 GMT

So, finally got the teletekst thingie working for python 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4. Hurrah. The weird thing is that I don't actually understand what caused it suddenly to work... hmmm...

Of course I am writing way to much about such a pathetic litle program. But I like it anyway, and so do the users. And while having little available time, for me it's still providing me with the free software feeling - that is, getting suggestions, bug reports, thank-yous and flames from users, and even patches! So I try to keep momentum and enthusiasm by quickly respoding, and thanking people for their contributions.

I have to admit that I prefer the little-work-high-visibility projects; but those are important too :-) And I try to make my program attractive to normal users, to Just Work. It's hard for hackers to think like that, because we are not normal users. At least not of our own programs.

Example: last weekend, I wanted to make a little video with Kino, a nice video editor, surprisingly (considering the name!) a GNOME app. Well, it *can't* load MPG-files; I first need to convert my homemade pr0n to 'dv' files using ffmpeg by hand. Now, for every time your GUI program requires the command-line, you loose about 75% of the audience. [And yes, I am sure the CVS-version does this automagically...]. I must say, apart from this - Kino is really nice, and the best of breed on Linux AFAIK.

24 Feb 2005

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 20:34:46 GMT

Yesterday, I released my little teletekst browser thingie, and today I was confronted with the Python's Dark Side - the difference between versions. My old version did not run on Python 2.4 anymore, or on 2.2. Well, I fixed that, and did a little hack so 2.2 will work now as well. But based on the reports I received:

Ubuntu/Hoary, Python 2.4.1a: does not work
RH/FC1, Python-2.2.3-7: does not work
RH/FC2, Python-2.3.3-6: works
RH/FC3, Python-2.3.4-13.1: works

And now the new version:

Ubuntu/Hoary, Python 2.4.1a: works (my machine)
RH/FC2, Python-2.3.3: does not work
RH/FC3, Python-2.3.4: does not work
RHEL3, Python 2.2.3: works

Arrhghhhh...

I did however find out that the official teletekst website now points to my website. Very nice, but put's some extra pressure on my late hacking sessions to get these version problems fixed quickly.

23 Feb 2005

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 21:19:25 GMT

Today, after three months or so, I finally sat down and fixed ttb, my teletekst browser, of interest mainly to the 21 million Dutch speaking inhabitants of this planet. I was able to remove some ugly work-arounds for HTTP1.1 that are apparently not needed anymore. Hurray. I actually borrowed the Python Cookbook from the company library, but I didn't need it. But I'll read it anyway, it might be interesting.

My current job does not involve really that much coding - but still after working long hours I don't have too much energy left to do some heavy coding. However, still there are these times when I reach 'deep hack mode'. When food no longer matters, when you don't realize that you've been listening to the same song for the last two hours, when you and your editor get into some symbiotic relationship. Well, I did not reach that magical state with the little lightweight Python coding I did tonight :-)

Anyway, I've uploaded my code, announced the release worldwide, and now I am enjoying a Koff beer.

22 Feb 2005

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:40:53 GMT

I like writing programs and releasing them as free software. I do like the thought of helping others with my software, but also I write them for selfish reasons . I want to find out something, play a bit with technology, do some experiment. Most of these experiments never leave my harddisk, but sometimes they could be useful to others. Even while 'only' experiments, I do try as much as I can to make the programs easy to install, easy to use etc., in short, they should Just Work(tm).

Too often I see programs announced with remarks like 'I know it's buggy and unstable, but here it is!'. Well - who would be enthousiastic to use such a program! So I try to do a bit better; it's almost unavoidable that there will be problems anyway, because people's environments differ from mine. But I'll do my best. (And still then, I found out the hard way that there are significant difference between Python 2.2/2.3/2.4, and PyGTK... Arghh.)

I said I like writing programs. Well... writing programs for me is a bit like running - it's a masochistic joy. It's especially nice afterwards.

Actually, there is another reason I write free software - I like to see other people using my stuff and writing about it (to feed my arrogance of course). Now, it's really easy to find a thousand links to your software in google. If you're in debian and freshmeat, mirrors and feeds will quickly make your program pop up in a million places. But with a little better searching I can find reviews for my program in Russian or German, or my Bonobo-Tutorial in Korean. That is just cool.

So I always try to give my programs a name that's not too generic and easily googable - don't call it, say, reader or eyeball or... LaTeX [actually, searching for latex gives you pretty good results]. Just don't call your uptime-improver v1a9ra.

And my final word of wisdom for today: there's no need to check for the return value of g_new and friends - they will never return NULL.

20 Feb 2005

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 13:10:40 GMT

helsinki Well, I have landed in Helsinki nicely, found a nice place at Lauttasaari, which is an island connected to the mainland by a bridge, and I can reach the office in a 20 min walk. Excellent. My job at Nokia has been demanding but mostly very interesting. Of course, there's always the bureaucratic side of working in big organizations, but also I need to apply every single bit of knowledge I gained in the last couple of years, both about management, but also of free/open source software development. If you are bored enough to want to read more about my life and can read Dutch, visit my blog. Let's keep it technical here.

I also finally got the ADSL-connection at home (two weeks ago); they are relatively expensive here, but apparently it's getting better. The first thing I had to do was wait for an gigantic apt-get upgrade, to give my machine the latest Ubuntu/Hoary love (after being offline for more than a month). It turned out that there have been some problems with Evolution; ie. at startup it would only tell me 'floating point exception'. It seems an AMD64-specific problem, which has been fixed by now (the Hoary version of Evolution is quite buggy though). What is amazing is that I can apt-get update my systems almost hourly and find some updates; these Hoary people seem to be locked up in a basement somewhere, receiving electroshocks if they don't deliver updates continually. And that is in fact what Ubuntu means in Etruscian! At least, that is what Dan Brown told me.

In general, AMD64 is a nice platform, but there are these little problems of not being truly mainstream. Thankfully, I can set up a dchroot-environment and install a 32-bit environment in there. I wanted to watch the Dutch TV-news, of course they have it in some Windows media format. So I needed to setup a Firefox in the 32-bit environment, in order to get the mplayer-plugin working (which uses some win32-dll's - amazing these work at all in Linux). Well, it works now, but it's not really up to standards with the normal pain-free Ubuntu standards.

Same for Wine; another amazing piece of software (yes - from and end-user viewpoint there are still many problems, but it's incredible what they've accomplished). I installed Wine in the 32-bit environment, to see if I could get DC++ working. Well, it works pretty well, except that actually downloading something will crash DC++. Hmmm.... The Linux version linuxdcpp is much more buggy, but at least that part works.

And then there's skype which requires 32-bits. Its user-interface could use some love, but it's quite a useful program in general. Too f*cking bad it's not released as free software, they're not making money on the client anyway; or at least make a non-gui libskype that would allow for writing your own GUI, perl-modules, elisp-scripts and plugins for evolution and gaim and friends.

And jhbuild seems to be broken somehow in my setup, such that gettext compilation breaks a linking time with some duplicate __fini found. Argghhh... But the exact same thing happens in my 32-bit environment. What's going on here?!

Well enough of that, time to go out and run, where snow is everywhere, beer is expensive and scantily clad women are very rare.

2 Dec 2004

Thu, 2 Dec 2004 15:25:43 GMT

on the move I'm going to work for Nokia R&D in Helsinki, Finland, starting Jan 3 of the next year, developing all kinds of beautiful Linux-based things. Looking forward to it!

Finland is quite cold, but it's not all that bad. (Urban) legend tells us that scores of Fins cannot face life anymore in the dark wintertime, and start either writing kernels or killing themselves. But it's not all that bad; I had a look at the WHO Suicide Report (PDF), and the number of suicides (among men) is only about 2.5 times higher than in The Netherlands. The figures for the former Sovjet-Union are scary though.