Advogato blog for groom

7 Mar 2008

Fri, 7 Mar 2008 17:35:49 GMT

python is cool: chapter 0

I finally rewrote a program (previously wrote in C) in the python language. I like it, mainly for it's well documented API and the way we can have both the functionnal and object language style. I took to me less than 12 hours to complete the program i made in 3 days of C, having not any knowledge of Python but a book. I'ts really cool.

15 Feb 2008

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:48:45 GMT

vala tutorial: chapter 0

after about 8 years of C and bourne, i finally decided to learn a descent language. and by learn, i mean learn from the beginning, as a baby. making things clean, trying to forget crappy things i made in the past. So, i decided to choose vala for testing my fresh baby brain. This first post on vala is be the beginning of a step by step introduction to this language for people who know C or C++.

first, read This Hello World in Vala

Here is a variant, which goal is to demonstrate how to use program's arguments, and how to get an array's length:

using GLib; public class Tutorial.CommandLineArgs : GLib.Object { public static void main(string[] args) { for (uint i=1; i< args.length; i++) stdout.printf("Hello, %s. ",args[i]); stdout.printf("My name is %s\n", args[0]); } }

Here you see the declaration of an array of strings which i called args, another declaration: an unsigned integer variable named i. Then you see the length member of the array type. Finally you see how to acces to an array's cell.

Question from the baby: how to get the real basename of args[0], having knowledge of basename() from <libgen.h> or g_path_get_basename() from GLib ? Reply: to acces g_path_get_basename() from GLib, Vala has this naming convetion: GLib.Path.get_basename(). Now it's up to you to make a better hello people program.

3 Oct 2007

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 04:17:26 GMT

vps experience

After the succcessful vserver experience for virtualizing asterisks and freepbx, i am now switching to the VPS technology provided by Positive software. The advantage is mainly that they provide a web interface to generete guest OSes. The cons is that it is not free for commercial purposes. see you later for more infos.

29 Sep 2007

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 17:08:35 GMT

why just not extending HTML ?

After playing whith GLADE for Gtk+ apps i still think xhtml is the easyest way to set up a quick form based graphial interface. So i am looking for a HTML to Glade converter or somthing like that. years ago I heard the XFroms would appear in several years since it is an W3C proposal. But anyway... we are still waiting. So, why just not simply extend xhtml for form based apps ? you know, many new widgets would be useful, like:


<date>01/01/1970</date>
<knob start="0" end="100"></>
<slider pos="vertical" start="0", end="100"></>
<menu class="main">
<item action="edit.php" target="new" >Edit</entry>
<item action="prefs.php"
target="new">Preferences</entry>
</menu>

9 Sep 2007

Sun, 9 Sep 2007 07:44:11 GMT

virtualizing asterisk

i'm on making asterisk boxes inside linux virtual servers. Frank told about the linux vserver patch and.. wow this is really nice and simple to use. I installed a fresh etch into my old p500 and installed the vserver kernel from etch.. simple. now here are the commands to create a full-featured vserver guest having a debian etch:


# uname -a
linux-image-vserver-686 blah...
# apt-get install util-vserver
[...]
# vserver server1 build -m debootstrap -- -d etch
[coffe men...]
# vserver server1 start
[see init process]
# vserver server1 enter
#_

and voilà!

1 Feb 2006

Wed, 1 Feb 2006 18:23:58 GMT

Sourceforge is really bad to me

Well, i decided to abandon releases on sourceforge.net since their release manager is really a crap. Also, i can't login anymore to sourceforge.net since they don't have correct no-cache meta tags on their login pages. So i switched to nongnu.org and yes, it is far better! You can see libspopc on nongnu.org's savannah.

17 Jan 2006

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 17:33:23 GMT

awffull color patch

i patched awffull to give it ability to read user's personal colors in awffull.conf and draw personalized charts. The patch has been made on awffull-3.02-beta2 but Steve McInerney have just released the 3.02 version today (not beta).
He told me he will include the patch for the next release (3.03). If you can't wait, you can get my patch here (applies on 3.02-beta2).

Update: this early patch gave not full color customization, the next official awffull will handle it better.

14 Jan 2006

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 04:01:01 GMT

webalizer : the contribs

several years ago, i patched the well known webalizer (2.01-10) in order to give it user defined colors capabilities. I recently found it on Brad Barrett's ftp site and discovered there are many unknown other useful contribs that extends the webalizer: check the webalizer contrib subdir on Brad Barrett's ftp site.

13 Jan 2006

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 22:25:18 GMT

libspopc 0.7 : SSL support !

On January 11, i had the pleasure to recieve an email from Jeff Pohlmeyer including a patch for SSL support in libspopc. I included it and also fixed some micro bugs. The SSL support is done thanks to libssl/libcrypt from OpenSSL. the SVN version of libspopc has also some other micro fixes (see the libspopc homepage to access subversion repository of libspopc).

Today, i discovered another small pop3 client library: it is the code used by Syllable's whisper email client. It doesn't fully implement the pop3 protocol, but it is clean!

8 Jan 2006

Sun, 8 Jan 2006 18:30:18 GMT

memory leak fix in libspopc

with this fix, libspopc is now in version 0.6.1. libspopc is now available with SVN :

$ svn co svn://svn.tuxfamily.org/svnroot/libspopc/libspopc

tarballs of 0.6.1 will follow later..