Older blog entries for mallum (starting at number 25)

Thought it was about time I posted a diary entry with some of the newer stuff I've been hacking on in the last few months.

DidiWiki is a tiny (25k) self contained simple wiki engine. It has its own webserver and is written in c. Its pretty useful it you want something for keeping notes etc thats sharable between machines and is very simple to setup ( just compile and run, theres no deps other than a libc ).

Yesterday I committed some new kdrive stuff into freedesktop. kdrive now does XRECORD which is needed for things like Xnee ( useful for automated testing ). More interestingly I also committed a new kdrive backend - Xephyr. It basically uses a window on a host X server as its framebuffer. kind of like xnest but with support for modern extensions like randr, composite etc. Heres a quite large screenshot of lots of Xephyr's in action.

Matchbox work recently has been mainly small fixes and minor new features as I try and get things super nice for nearing 1.0 release. One new thing I wrote is matchbox-nest which provides a definable graphical ( with working buttons! ) background around Xnest ( or Xephyr ) - its basically a cheap handheld or whatever device 'simulator'. screenshot and Source.

Picked up the pony from the mechanics today - no more annoying gearstick rattle - but will it get me to France this weekend ?

woohoo advogato back :-)
Now running a linkblog too, http://del.icio.us/mallum .

Some more quick hackings for the mighty fine treo 600 - treo-grab-calls.c pulls the call logs from the phone and dumps them as csv data to stdout.

Hacked a little code today to pull images off a Treo 600 camera phone ( nice piece of kit ). The code is here . You'll need the pilot link libs for it to work.

Uploaded a few updated Matchbox packages. Nothing really new, just fixes to oddities in the 0.8 release.

Have my module based X Proxy now basically working. The only pluggin so far is a little Xauth spoofer. Finding it hard to motivate myself to do much more on it :(

Autotooled Xtst for freedesktop.org xlibs . The matchbox test stuff and the badly in need of some love, 'xkbd' both need it.

Nokia have an interesting software developer position ( url correct now ).

Some random linkage for today;

Socket now have a Cordless Serial Adapter with Bluetooth . Could be fun to connect with my stinger serial joystick and ipaq.

New mobile computing have Interview with Doug Turner and Chris Hofmann of the Minimo Project . Minimo totally rules especially with it small screen rendering. I really hope GPE start including it in images for high end ipaqs. It royally trumps dillo.

Finally got round to uploading my fosdem 'X Not on the desktop' slides .

On Sids demand got Sky+ installed yesterday which is basically the closest thing to Tivo here in the UK. It works pretty good, though Sid wasn't so impressed when I childishly set it to record all the adult channel 10 minute freeviews.

I also got a netgear me101 wireless bridge so I can reconnect up the mini-itx based mediabox to the TV and catch up on bittorrented 24 episodes missed whilst in the dial up wilderness. Cant seem to get dhcp to work through the bridge though which is odd as everything else seems fine.

Started hacking a simple 'plugin' based X Proxy to experiment with various ideas. Plugin ideas include; 'Allow XYZ to use this display' GUI tool, SSL ( though xlib would need hacking too ), mDNS support ( via howl ), compression, filtering etc ... We'll see how it goes.

Hopefully get a matchbox 0.8.1 release out towards the end of the week with various minor fixes.

Woohoo. DSL just got connected ( with BT in the end ). My 2 week dial up wilderness is over :-)

DSL is beginning to become a complete knightmare.

I phoned the ISP Id ordered DSL from to see how my order was progressing. They informed me the local exchange had run out of ports and it would be 2 weeks before they got any new ones. ( This was after waiting nearly an hour in a stupid phone queue ). So once these extra 'ports' are added the process of connectting me can start - which apparently takes 10-15 more days. So Im probably looking at another month of extremely slow, painful and expensive dial up - how depressing. After 3 years on a nice fast cable modem Id forgotten how slow dial up really is - Even doing a cvs commit seems to take forever.

I dunno what to do to improve the situation. I work from home and having just moved to the other side of London (SE) I have no friends near by with fast internet access I can 'borrow'.

I guess I can ditch this current provider and switch to BT, hopefully somehow finding out if they have free 'ports' at the exchange.

On a better note, getting into town is very quick from here ( half hour ) and the journey is pretty nice. I popped into TCR this morning and got a new battery for the tibook.

So we moved house and then the day after that I headed off to fosdem.

The house move went ok for us, but maybe not for the removal men. It took them nearly 12 full hours to do the move - they hadn't been told it was a 50M uphill trek to the new house and therefore didn't have trolleys etc. Mr Hallski was also a really really big help during the move though he didn't have to be ( He is the perfect guest ). Felt pretty bad about the mess up of move timings with Hallskis but Im pretty sure he still had a good time and made good friends with Sidske and the pugs.

So the morning after the move, Hallski and I headed via the eurostar to fosdem. Felt pretty bad about leaving Sid on her own in strange new house. The first night at fosdem we got maybe a bit too drunk on white beer. The next days hangover was amplified by lack of sleep and the sweaty overcrowded very smelly lecture theatures and hacking rooms at fosdem. It was a pretty bad day.

The next day was much better. I did my talk and though my laptop wouldn't speak to the projector ( dj adams was kind enough to lend me his laptop that did work - owe him beerage ) it seemed to go pretty well. Turnout was good and got asked questions etc.

The best thing about fosdem for me is meeting people in person, putting faces to irc nicks and getting to have fun with nice people in person you unfortunatly dont get to see very often. Also had a really fun time with Hallski and it was pretty sad when he departed back to sweden with the rest of the scandinavian conspiricy.

Now I back home on the dreaded dial up connection and a massive amount of unpacking todo. 10-15 working days till I get DSL again - urg !!