Older blog entries for herzi (starting at number 25)

Criawips

Got some more feedback about people who like criawips. One new guy wants to contribute, he's currently working on the save operation. This and the preferences work from Adrien will make some of the cool improvements for 0.0.9.

I'm still working on less visible stuff like refactoring, implementing some working rendering framework (maybe I'll extract some general MVC code into a small template library).

One thing I'm working on right now is to fix the debugging messages of criawips (a normal build currently displays more than 80 lines of debugging messages, opening a file raises the number easily above 1200). I want it to be there, easily to be disabled for "production builds" (e.g. distribution's packages) like G_DISABLE_ASSERT disables assertions. The most important thing is that I'd like to listen for the classes/functions/passages to be debugged by using an environment variable.

Hardware

Got my Pegasos 2 today. Played around with it a bit, unfortunately the front cover (from the AOpen H360A) doesn't automatically open when I push the CD tray button (obviously the resistance of the front cover is too big for the CD drive).

Had some email conversation with Sven Luther afterwards, he told me that there a Ubuntu people working on support for the Pegasos 2. So I have one more reason to wait for the Hoary Release.

Criawips

Released 0.0.8 and 0.0.8a last week. Started to refactor the rendering code to become more performant and to become easier extensible. Committed the first pile of changes today, will cleanup the second pile tomorrow and commit it then.

Nice side effect: some crashes in one of my local criawips-fucked-gnome-canvas branch have disappeared. I need to rename the branch to broken-gnome-canvas now, maybe tomorrows pile of changes will make that code work (which would be pretty cool for maintenance as we could reasonably use glade for the main window - at least for everything except menu and tool bars).

I still hope that I get the refactoring done and start working on slide editing to be able to release 0.1.0 this year. Lets see...

Friday

Slept until half past one PM. 't was very relaxing. Went into the city to go shopping, ended up with a new fan for my barebone (once I get rid of those old hard drives in there, it should be very quiet).

Downloaded Ubuntu's xfree86 source code, patched it with a patch that I got from Aurelien Gerome. Now I'm building my own server to check whether I get the DVI out of my powerbook running. Just after starting the compile session I got an email from Bernhard Reiter asking whether this one works (side note: I don't believe in happenstances, these things happen too often, see my last blog entry wrt custom ubuntu kernels).

Asked Julius to fix the Admin-C entry of my domain www.blaubeermuffin.de.

Went to the cinema with Julius and his girlfriend, have been watching 7 Zwerge - Männer allein im Wald. It has been very funny.

Catched up with my blogging for this week.

Sent a mail to Ben Herrenschmidt about Mac OS X driver spying. I need to update my Powerbook pages for features and some information to start hacking on an airport extreme driver (if/when I find to for this).

Thursday

Had a quite relaxing day at the LWE.

Don't count your chickens before they are hatched. Have been travelling from Frankfurt to Dresden (linux info days this weekend). The travel using the ICE train went very fine. After about 2:50 hours we arrived Naumburg (the last but one stop for me) in time. Leaving Naumburg and travelling for about 10more minutes the locomotive got damaged, we stopped for about 25 minutes an then continued our way to Laizip which we arrived 45min late. My connecting train was already waiting 35min when it left Leipzig towards Dresden. I arrived 30min late, lost my way in Dresden, arrived at a friend and went to bed.

Wednesday

A very busy day on LWE. Met some people to talk about the AlBooks of Apple when Mark Shuttleworth came up to the GNOME booth to talk about Ubuntu. I was talking about my XFS issues (should have been the perfect solution to address my problems) and that I'd like to have a Custom-Ubuntu-Kernel-HOWTO.

Had my talk about GNOME, I was quite happy with it as I didn't finish the talk and had almost half an hour of my time left :). When taking back my hardware Debian's Alexander Wirth came up to me and told me that Ben Herrenschmidt released a test patch for suspend to ram (funny, haven't I been talking about a custom-kernel-howto for Ubuntu some hours before?).

Created a new custon kernel for my powerbook (which is still runnning Ubuntu). I used the standard Debian way of kernel compilation, removed the initrd stuff from yaboot.conf (this will break future Ubuntu kernels, but I don't care about them). At least suspend to ram works (including the "breathing" LED).

Tuesday

First day of the Linux World Expo: Frank and Christian organized the formal start of the German GNOME association called GNOME Deutschland e.V. Had a press conference about it in the afternoon, everything seemed to went all right so we can target the next formal steps.

Finished my talk for tomorrow in the evening. Have been talking to Rene Rebe (former Rock Linux developer) about kernel mouse drivers and some synaptics features. I was wondering how one can find out whether his notebook is stuffed with such a cute touchpad.

Visited the HeLaBa tower in Frankfurt to get a view almost on top of Frankfurt (there have been just a few buildings higher that the viewpoint).

Monday

Have been travelling to the Linux World Expo to Frankfurt. I wonder that the Deutsche Bahn happens to organise some trains in a way that you enter the train and reach your destination in time. Almost finished my talk for Wednesday evening.

Well, I think Ubuntu has trashed my systems. I was getting random IO errors and file system problems (have you ever been forced to use xfs_repair in a week more than 7 times?).

The day before yesterday I bought a new disk (IBM/Hitachi, 2.5", 80GB). I set up Ubuntu once more (hoping that the Warty RC fould fix my problems), but it didn't (I wonder whether any of the Ubuntu developers is using XFS). So I still have to trashed systems (my Athlon XP1500+ based Shuttle and my Powerbook) and a friend of mine told me that he needed to fix his XFS file system too. Guys, there's something definitely going wrong there.

So, while my systems have been trashed, I was working to get the TV out of the Geforce4 MX/440 running. I recall that this built-in device has been a very strong enemy when setting up this machine in march. I was able to see 2 movies yesterday without crashes, but the system is still very unstable, I haven't even been able to boot a Gnoppix CD and get into GNOME before X crashes with this device.

Debian Sarge just got installed on the Barebone, so it's on me to set it up now... (anything I should be aware of when downgrading from GNOME 2.8 to 2.6?)

Back to work...

The last 6 weeks have been a very nice time since I quit at Elkware because they don't need the services of a GNU/Linux software developer anymore. I'm going to have one or two weeks trial period at Lufthansa Systems to maintain the software that I've developed at Elkware which has been sold to LH.

Back to life...

Had a very nice day at the baths in Itzehoe. The day ended up very nicely with a new girlsfriend. Life's quite funny, once you have time for a girlfriend you won't find one until time is getting rarer... (hopefully this make girlfriend time more recreational than otherwide...)