Older blog entries for fxn (starting at number 37)

I'll go to the IV Congreso Hispalinux tomorrow morning and will be there until the end, on Saturday night. It's a pity you cannot attend the congress jacobo, it would be nice some advogaters had a few beers in Madrid, wouldn't it?

MyAdvogato 0.3 is out, ChangeLog lists what is new. The release has been submitted to Freshmeat but until it appears in its project page you may download it from here if you wish.

I have had little spare time to code at home these days. Yesterday we had a deadline at work and the job got done in time.

I have been using the next version of MyAdvogato and it looks good, though some fine details need to be worked out, as consistency in POD notation and that please, lemme do just a little bit more code clean up one would never end :-). I hope I can sit my ass down on this chair next Saturday enough hours to release it.

As for reading, I am now finishing Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology, delightful, though a bit too assertive for my taste sometimes.

Coding. Cleaning up MyAdvogato, factoring some routines out, adding comments and porting the README file to POD. The symbol used to distinguish people in the notify list will be a parameter as well.

Tech Reading. Among the books listed some days ago I have decided to study Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp. Also, reading Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C in parallel.

richieb: I am far from being an expert, but have used JDE to write Java in GNU Emacs and Tramp for editing remote files on a regular basis. Drop me a line if you wish, I'll be glad to lend a hand if may be useful.

Subconsciuos draining: Debugging damn nested JSPs is a fucking nightmare.

Ahhhh, better now.

I would like to release MyAdvogato 0.3 shortly. The functionalities I wanted to add to this version are already written. After some code clean up and testing it will be available.

MyAdvogato modifies also recentlog.html .

As I explained some days ago, I thought this could be useful because once one has certified most of the regulars s/he doesn't need to go to personal pages so often and recentlog.html might be more suitable to read diary entries. Or, simpler, the user may prefer that page anyway.

The additional information regarding the user is displayed in a similar fashion. Screenshots here (Mozilla), and here (links), the last one with the new flag plain active.

Malx: Are you looking for Shaffing and Winnowing: Confidentiality without Encryption ?

I am trying to see why Advogato does not return the Person not found page if the account name of the URL has non-alphanumeric characters as seen by isalnum(3). User names in Advogato are not allowed to have those characters (according to acct_maint.c), but a The document contained no data-like message results instead if you ask for /person/foo%20bar/, for instance.

I think it has to do with the call to db_xml_get on line 728 without checking db_key for NULL, but I am not quite sure.

Anyway, MyAdvogato has a bug having to do with non-existing or non-valid user names. IMHO what is a valid user name in the site it's not its business, so I'll try to fix it taking into account the current responses in both cases.

Work. We are rewriting the wrapper for CPLEX to use XML::LibXML (a Perl interface to gnome-xml ) instead of XML::Simple . We didn't anticipate input files could be that large. Now the Perl model of 4MB of XML is built in less than 3s (versus the former 50s) and it seems we can stay with Perl, at least in the prototype.

If we find the time, we would like very much to give a chance to lp_solve (perhaps through the wrapper Math::LP::Solve) and compare timings.

Home. I've been using FreeBSD in my laptop at home for some months. I have learned a lot of things because before I played with FreeBSD the only Unixes I had used were some GNU/Linux distros. However, I miss dselect, so I'll probably install Debian again.