Older blog entries for chakie (starting at number 252)

raph: as you are fixing up the RSS generation code, could you please also fix the XML-RPC generation code that is used for diary.getDates()? It seems the generated XML is lacking a <value> tag around the array. See this link for some more info, it's the last comment.

It would be nice to be able to complete my little KDE Advogato interface. :)

Quiet and nice weekend.

Did some more work on the manual for the Civil scenario editor. Fixed some small bugs too.

Hohum. Have a little idea for a little side project that I'll hack up one day. It's been a while since I developed something KDE related. :)

Started working on a little manual for the scenario editor for Civil. The actual editor still has some rough edges, but it works pretty well and can be used to create scenarios just fine.

A new release should be out next week if all goes well.

Got some wood that I'll use to build something to put our rear speakers on. Will be fun, I like to do stuff with wood (and plastic, for that matter).

Been very busy with our house project. We're at the final stages now and should be able to decide today which supplier we'll go for. It's a big decision, so it has to be given some serious thought.

Not much has happened on the development side for a few days. I've been lazy and much time at home has been spent discussing house costs and plans. I'm trying to get a 0.82 release of Civil done, but I've just been too lazy to do it.

I did do a little modelling for Panzers and added something that could look like a home base. It's a silly little halved cylinder, so it's nothing fancy. I'm not really sure what the ultimate goal for this project it, what kind of game should it eventually be? Is it something that should compete with bzFlag, Scorched Earth or some more arcadeish seen-from-above blaster. I don't know.

Uraeus: it is really naive to think that the only thing "serious consequences" can mean is a total war. I think the security council in the UN would have been much more positive to a war (allowed it) if the inspectors would have been given time to do their job. Now they had to rush the inspections and eventually never got time to complete them. How long do you think it would take for a bunch of, say, Germans, to find all hidden weapons in, say, Texas? Think about it a bit. There was no hurry with the war, except the fact that Bush wanted a war and thus had to go to war before the Iraqian summer hit with full force...

So far nobody has given any *real* reasons for the war. We could look at the reverse situation. The US illegally started a war, so thus the UN should actually threat the US with "serious consequences" (which apparently means "war") unless they withdraw immediately.

Digi box

I put up my little and more or less useless VDR contributions on this page. Probably nothing a normal user will ever need. :)

Panzers

Did some work on this little gem. We will be moving from freely movable cameras (well, at least the height of the camera and the distance from the tank was adjustable) to a few fixed ones that track the vehicle from a few fixed positions. I think that will be easier in the long run and simplify for the players.

We've also been looking at some logging solutions, but have agreed on nothing yet. log4cpp seems niceish, but it's brutal overkill and the Debian package is from 2 AD. Apparently nothing in Debian uses it, so it's fallen behind.

Civil

No progress for a few days.

War

I feel so sorry for the people of the US. It must be so hard to have so dumb leaders? How can so few be allowed destroy so much for so many? So far I've seen no reasons for this war (except for the evident ones: the oil and the need for every US president to do some international terror bombing before elections). Not to forget that the whole war is totally illegal without the UN standing behind it. As it is illegal, it is just as bad as, say, blowing up the WTC, and thus the US commits acts of international terrorism. Think about that for a moment...

Finally got the components for my little LED display for the digi TV box. Did some heavy duty soldering (a few resistors, LEDS and a connector) and now have two leds controlled by the parallel port. Works excellently and it was one of those things that worked without anything going wrong, largely thanks to this info.

I ended up doing a tiny little app parout for writing a byte of data to the parallel port, as I found nothing that did it. It's basically a wrapper for the funtions ioperm() and outb(), but I packaged it up and put it up here in case someone is interested in such a tool.

Digi box

Finally got our car back from repairs. Now I finally can get into town to get the LED:s and other stuff I need to make the digi tv box show some status LED:s. Will be fun.

Civil

Did some heavy updates last night on the GUI components of Civil, and I'm pretty satisfied with the result. Fonts are now shared much more efficiently among various widgets, so a lot of bloat should be removed. Dialog creation speed on slower machines could also be a bit faster. All in all a good thing.

I'll also start to look into making dialogs load the base look and widgets from XML files. Some kind of simple format could save some time and also make it possible to at some later point in time add a simple dialog editor. Creating dialogs by hand is a bit tedious, some kind of visual editor would be nice. Yes, of course it is totally unnecessary, but wouldn't it be sexy? :)

Darn

I've been trying to post this diary for about a day now, every connection with Advogato has timed out. It's a new day now, so let's try again....

mglazer: the fuzz with XML-RPC is because it's the interface Advogato uses. If there was some other way (API) of accessing and posting diary entries I'd use that. XML-RPC is simple to use and very portable between languages. It's unfortunate that there is something that keeps the second most important method in Advogato's interface from working.

Advogato's XML-RPC interface

I hacked up a little app to access Advogato's XML-RPC interface, and it all works just fine, except the method diary.getDates, which is supposed to return the creation and update dates for a diary entry. The result returned by Advogato seems to be a bit invalid. I get the following error:

XML-RPC ault #-503: Expected element of type <value>, found <array>

Googling a bit I found this discussion which seems to indicate that the response is indeed invalid.

One solution to the problem is to instead of using XML-RPC get the diary XML directly and parse that. Well, it doesn't really work either, as the content in the XML file is eventually the raw text that the user input, along with all illegal formatting. :) My own entries for instance are not valid XHTML, so my XML parsers barf out when reaching the content for an invalid entry. I doubt that too many other diaries are fully valid XHTML either...

So, the conclusion is that I can make my app edit and upload diary entries, but I can't fully download them. I can get the content using XML-RPC, but not the dates, and that info is just as important as the actual content.

What to do, what to do?