Older blog entries for olecom (starting at number 3)

About first one.

Yes, C is cool. In the kernel development it is even cooler. Or is it?

If source writing was done with line-based parsing in mind (sed), then crap like [0] wouldn't been existed.

[0] http://lxr.linux.no/linux/scripts/unifdef.c

Also i want to ask, what is more cool, that CPP/GCC triks or [1] C/C++ comments remover?

[1] ftp://flower.upol.cz/dts/Sed0000/hacks/strip-c.sh

So far i didn't find mis-parsing problems. But C and especially C \/ C++ comment soup can have many stupidly hard things to do, that i was fail to envision. This script, BTW, runs faster than most comprehensive one on sed.sf.net: remccoms3

== This leads to question why text parsing is so doomed? ==

Why i type those html tags _here_, why syntax parsers of compiler cannot be used and are not used to high quality and usability syntax highlighting, etc., etc.?

A bit about some issues i wrote here http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.usb.general/632. Yet modern academia students, that are doing hard-core(?) kernel programming, like to fix kernel, rather than stupid, useless zoo of syntax highlighters [2].

[2] http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2008/1/24/603419

As skills go, it's far more useful than "how to trim the trailing whitespace" and the rest of checkpatch.pl-inspired crap that got so popular lately... http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Decoding_Oops

Yea, Al, whitespace and syntax LKML-guys appeared quite recently. They doing stupid, but yet useful work, work from the wrong end.

I myself, as an amateur newbie, was deeply impressed by appearance of the stuff like[3,4],

[3] http://lxr.linux.no/linux/scripts/cleanfile 3492 bytes
[4] http://lxr.linux.no/linux/scripts/cleanpatch 5132 bytes

I've came up with this one:

ftp://flower.upol.cz/clean-whitespace/clean-whitespace.sh 1024 bytes

Which isn't quite same funcionality, but this meant to be same result[5].

[5] http://mid.gmane.org/20070607230657.GV7266@flower.upol.cz (use subject link to navigate in thread)

Yes, whitespaces were my PITA right from the first patch. Crappy Linux Makefile(s) + GNU Emacs with smart whitespace damage cleanup ==> big diff just after opening the file. I didn't understand, why there is such damage, because before any programming work i've studied The Tool - A Text Editor. It turned out not only technical problem (text editing), but maintaining one: whitespaces in diffs's context are important. Thus, cleanup in one file may break quite many patches elsewhere in people's trees.

-- coming next --
tabstops, `expand` (from clean-whitespace) and more on text
parsing
-- 
-o--=O`C
 #oo'L O
<___=E M

From summer 2006 to summer 2007 i was reading and sometimes participating in LKML. I was quoted once on LWN[0], like that:

One remarked that "Coloring isn't useful. If it was, it would be implemented ~16 years ago."

[0] http://lwn.net/Articles/253726/

That was very silly topic(more on that later).

But i'm going to share some real stuff. Main topics will be:

 * userspace sucks
* parsing, compilers, editors (that are suck)
* building (which is suck) a program from the source code
* and more (like HTML, XML, CSS, browsers, OSes suck)

 I'm doing this writing in Firefox/win32. I tried lynx once,
without success, so i forced to do spell checking in gmail
by copy/paste. Also i cannot use jed and more accessible
text editing.

 For some reason every new paragraph's first line here in
pre tag is shifted right. Crap, i thought pre should have
no formatting, except damaged CSS.

 Anyway, let's try first real posting, and see what will
happen.

Almost an year ago I've posted my first entry here. Now I decided to patch and update it (comments are welcome).

Also, after more than year, there are some news about my GIMP's usability bug. Dark desktop theme and GIMP toolbox' buttons.

Debian GNU+Linux updated X Window system, so ati driver (as noticed by it's author) is trying to damage (burn) video chip on my laptop.

Blackbox's (window manager) author, after many years after 0.65 version started to develop and released 0.70 version, that has completely new look of window and menu decorations, that I dislike(hate!). But this let me saw Xfce. And after a week of stall (I've managed to kill Xfce in testing and broke testing at all ;), I'm going to check sid's 4.3.90.1-2 version.

Having such a great opportunity, I want to meet freetype here: "Hi ! How are you doing ? Good luck !!!".

My first post is my shame.
I must patch it with (hopefully) correct English and reply to myself. 

 > I don't know if somebody will read this...
I still wonder and waiting for advice.

 > Is there something like was proposed on <http://www.levien.com/fps.html>?
Yes. It seems to me yes, there is, and name for that is Gnome Bounties
<http://www.gnome.org/bounties/>.

 Anyway I don't know why on modern notebook PC all desktop is even slower than
I felt it on win16-win95-xfree3+rh62.

 Discovering LISP myself with help of Emacs, Paul Graham, and others, then
seeing traces of it in modern python-based projects (f.e Twisted, with it's
banana protocol), I still wonder why all is that, as it is ? And "XML
optimisation" isn't a way <http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=1397>.
IMHO HTML, XHTML and other brain-damaging "technologies" with it's XML are
broken by design[1].

 Why world doesn't have any usable computer and OS with it ? Only home-wifes with
ready-to-use-get-the-facts toasters and technicians with 1-2GHz FSB,
Gigabit ethernet, 21" screen oscilloscopes[2] ?

 I can't buy one even on cost of new excellent car !
I'm deeply disappointed...[3]

 [1] IMHO PDF, as published by Adobe, is current best solution for every type of
documents -- online or offline. PDF is not craft of html,css,gif,flash or whatever !
And Xpdf software on linux-gnu is an excellent proof of good style of layout
(comparing to Adobe's software and hance PDF spec.), vs. having Gecko/KHTML/gtkhtml...
Dot-coms crashed, but consequences remain: web standardisation is a crap, home-grew
"specialists" in web-design-programming with flash ads. with dot.com's like business
models are everywhere.

 [2] Originally IBM opened architecture of IBM PC. So why many of modern hardware is
being closed by manufacturers, that use this IBM's concept ?

 [3] IMHO. There're a lot of good ides, but very few of them have correct implementation
and wide usage...

 > I'm _still_ pretty sick of GTK2/Pango rendering speed.
> Maybe I'm wrong and need to do something with
> preferences on my Debian GNU+Linux system.
>
.. by design...

 > Thanks.

 And thank You, all !

 [I've finished physics department in one of the post-soviet countries. Now
I really want to have chance to study CS. But it seems like technical progress
had stopped in 80's on USSR(well, something is developing, but inside of black,
military closed boxes), computer science and application progress (in software)
had stopped on time even prior to dot-coms.]