Older blog entries for Kay (starting at number 40)

Today I played a little bit with mathematics. my goal was to calculate the coordinates of stars in a fictive galaxy with spiral arms. The result was a nice looking 2D galaxy with two spiral arms. But this result was mainly achieved by trial and error because I am not a mathematician. So I searched the net and found a nice DOS program from Ben Motz complete with source code. I borrowed the algorithm and converted it to a python script which generates a 2D view from the 3D galaxy and writes it to a PNG. This algorithm is nice because it can be configured in many ways (i.E. the number of spiral arms, arm width, number of stars in the disk and core, etc.)

The problems I have with the cross-compiled version of Xfree86 4.2 (KDrive Xfbdev) are still not solved. I forwarded a description of the problem to the Mailinglist and got the attention of Jim Gettys. He can reproduce the problem and will take a look at it together with Keith Packard. I'm looking forward to having a working XF4.2 running on my iPAQ soon :-)

I'm still trying to get my own cross-compiled Xfree86 running on my Compaq iPAQ H3600 handheld. I have the source code from an early 4.1 release which is working but my goal is to get the current 4.2 release running. The only thing which is not working is the touchscreen. After a few hours of source code reading I found an ugly hack to get it working but Xfree is segfaulting on shutdown if I use this hack. Maybe tomorrow I'll find the final solution... Or maybe not...

Cross-compiling Python is tricky but finally I have Python running on my iPAQ. Unfortunately I was not able to find a way to cross-compile it without modifying the source code. I have written a small patch which makes the cross-compiling process a little bit easier and I have documented the process of cross-compiling Python. I hope it's useful for someone.

Today I found the time to resume my work on my linux distribution for the Compaq iPAQ. I left this work some months ago in a state where it boots a 2.4.17 linux kernel with busybox and lrzsz. Now my target was to get Xfree86 running. Cross-Compiling Xfree is a real pain. My first run resulted in a "Completed" message but there were nothing useful compiled. I noticed that the compilation doesn't abort if an error occured. So I compiled again and redirected the output to a file to find out what's going on. Basically some libraries were missing in the cross compiling toolchain so I cross-compiled zlib, Berkeley DB, Linux-PAM, ncurses and flex. After a few other issues I got the xserver compiled and it works on the iPAQ but the touchscreen is not working... Don't know why, shit.

But a good thing is that I've written down the procedures to cross-compile the libraries and programs which I have running up to now and I have inserted that stuff in my ARM cross-compiling howto. Hopefully it will be useful for someone.

Some so called webmasters are just nerving. Where is the sense to set an editbox to size="1" if you want to show two digits in it? And where is the problem to fire up an editor and change it to size="2"? I have reported this problem more than once, nothing happend. They are not interested in solving this bug because Microsofts IE seems to draw the editbox wide enough so the content can be read. They are not impressed by the fact that all other browsers are not behaving like this, because they behave correctly!

Now I solved the problem by myself. I wrote a small rewriting proxy server called reprox which fixes the content of buggy webpages on the fly. It's just a small python script which replaces the buggy content by using regular expressions. That was also a good opportunity to learn how to program a HTTP Server and Client with Python and how to use Python's gzip module.

1 May 2002 (updated 1 May 2002 at 11:23 UTC) »

I created a patch for Ian Bell's Text Elite so it can be compiled on a linux system (and maybe other unix systems as well). The patch and a prepatched and precompiled tarball can be downloaded here.

I contacted Ian Bell, I think he will include the changes in the original version of Text Elite.

28 Apr 2002 (updated 28 Apr 2002 at 20:44 UTC) »

It's terrible. So much plans and no motivation to finish any of them. Since years I want to write a 3D space combat simulation. Now I have the knowledge for a simple 3D engine but no motivation to continue the work. Since years I want to program a simple MUD, but the motivation is fading as soon as I write some lines. I want to play with simple artificial intelligence to write a bot which can play a mud without user interaction. Yesterday I began with this work but after I have written some python code which retrieves the vital informations from the game which is needed to react properly my motivation is fading again. And currently I feel the strong need to write my own browser-based MUD, but I tell you: I'll never finish it. So much ideas and so little motivation and time... Damn.

Fortunately there is one project which seems to get to a finished state. That's because I'm paid to work on it. It's an abstraction layer and template engine for PHP, called phable. There isn't a lot informations online now, but there is already a place where informations will be published in the near future: www.phable.org.

The qmail package which is distributed in Debian Woody is already patched with the badmailto patch. This patch conflicts with some patches like the relaymailfrom patch and the tarpit patch.

That's why I have modified those patches to work with Debian's qmail. They can be downloaded on my Loft's patch repository.

It's seems like it is not easy to get the compression utility arc running on linux. I've written a small patch which modifies the source code of arc version 5.21e so it can be compiled on a modern linux system like Debian Woody.

The patch and a copy of the original arc sources can be downloaded here.

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