Older blog entries for josef (starting at number 48)

iBook
Got external VGA to work (yeah!). Now the only minor annoyance left is that there's no 3D acceleration yet, I'll have to recompile the DRM for the Radeon chip. Thoughts about a customized iBook-Knoppix were floating through my head, but I don't have the time right now, exams will start soon.

GGZ
When the current stack of privacy/security-related patches has been applied, we've more features than we planned to have for the next release. Some others are missing though, probably waiting some more weeks makes sense, but it shouldn't take too long. We got exactly 3 votes in the game tome poll so far, which is discouraging but on the other hand shows that there's lots of work still to be done. Hell, 3 years in the makings and still infantile. But then again there's no alternative to get ideas from (like the desktop environments got from CDE, Windows and others, or Linux got from Unix), so it's acceptable.

Nas ne dogonyat
Of course not.

KDE hacking
Danimo invited tokoe and me to celebrate a hacking weekend in Chemnitz, where we'll also staff the KDE booth during the 5th Linuxtag in some weeks. We'll most certainly share our booth with that other desktop environment project. Well, currently we're sitting here, listening to good ol' music, and writing not so ol' code.

GForge
Installed 3.0pre8 into my UML at work, and the installation of mailman brought the machine down to its knees. UML users prefer SCSI disks. It's really convenient that if a partition gets filled up, a new one can be created with dd, mounted, synchronized, unmounted, and then replaces the old one. Yet I think the advantages of both a database's write-ahead-log and UML's cow devices could be merged so that fast-growing partitions can be shrinked with some new kind of moo tool. This would allow for point-in-time recovery, but the performance would probably go down. But this is what optimization freaks, like, er, me, really like. There's still room for advanced algorithms, and even today's algos are only halfway implemented. I recently tried to google for MPM networks, the number of results is discouraging.

Kamikaze
First Debian packages built. Now all I'm waiting for is that KDE 3.1 enters unstable.

While others waste their time with watching TV, I was curious to find out how and why search machines direct people to my homepage. Not only did PHPSysInfo reveal the model of my CD burner (which was the search term for 2 people in the first days of January alone), but also pages related to the flood, or games ("stupid americans", when looked up on Yahoo, guides to my XBill mockup ;). Lots of people also look for KDE build documentation. I'm guilty here, haven't been updating that stuff for months.

There are quite a lot of spiders (googlebot, mercator, ...), and none of them gets caught by the WPoison script (or equivalents). Time to remove the perl toys again.

kamikaze
Added several hundred lines of C++ server code today, albeit most of them are taken from the client and converted from Qt to STL. So, the server does now play the game, it just doesn't tell the client about it yet. Version 0.0.2 was scheduled for about now, but it's harder to get it right than I thought initially.

university
...will start again soon. Bleh. I really need to use the remaining days for practical learning, not just reading books. Nevertheless, I should have had this thought 2 years ago...

Got a cold, slept around 30 hours, couldn't eat or drink anything, woke up and called the firemen because several gardens behind our house were burning. This was truly a Weekend In Hell. Under such circumstances, reading a classic ("Distributed Operating Systems") can be considered heaven already.

In other news, some proprietary online games were found to be not secure at 19C3. Ha :)

TCPA My anti-TCPA sweatshirt arrived today. The first anti-something piece of clothes, just to make a difference. Next one will be a pro-something again.

Le mur One of those situations when one cannot continue to hack on a project: one has a plan and knows all the details already, just not the big picture. Like a wall in one's head. A game development wall, this would then be the one to be blasted by a bomb put somewhere by some player.

I am thinking about using two loosely linked network threads, one for synchronous data (important events), the other one for asynchronous data packets for player movements and the like. Well, better hack than talk about it...

bagder: Did you have a look at getaddrinfo() and getaddrinfo_a()? The good ol' gethostbyname seems to be deprecated, yet it's used all over, including by me. Habits...

coding Some smaller bits today, nothing to release.

Had some fun using WindowMaker as a presentation app. Why is WindowMaker better than MS Powerpoint? Because it runs perfectly on crappy old laptops. Remove the clip and icons, and setup the background image selection menu so that it auto-hides into some corner. That's all.

qt Probably fixed a bug in Qt 3.1 (awaiting response), now pixmap arrays with one pixmap only work correctly.

kamikaze This is my current target. What would be nice to have is a daemon which scans my /src partition every some hours and collects statistics about which files were changed. Then, by the end of the week, it would write a little HTML file with the top 5 projects or so.

mysql Getting paid to hack on MySQL is not the worst job. Going to lunch with management until they agree to opensource the changes is even better.
kde I had automatically been unsubscribed from KDE mailinglists (not the first one - uhm). Not noticing it first (has been a busy week), I wondered about whether all people would be busy with packaging 3.1 :)
french movies Watched 2 of them recently, both were very well done. Looking forward to see Hollywood burn down.
knoppix Due to a hard disk crash, Knoppigurator will still take a while to be usable. Yet I remain confident.

Comtec was quite nice. Among all the visitors and help-I-installed-Linux-8.0-doesn't-work-help people there were some skilled people, some from university, some from outside the country. At the KDE booth (cross-cheers to the LWCE guys ;) we demonstrated KDE 3.1pre and Opie.

Tuesday, I tried to fulfil my vcomputing duties, and got Hurd running on KBochs, and User-Mode-Linux too, both accessible with a single click on an icon. Linux on L4 didn't work though and I gave up when one of the people involved in L4 development told me that CVS is going to improve soon.

Wednesday we visited the Microsoft booth but they were not so pleased to have us standing around them with our penguin-branded geek shirts. We had an estimated 10x their guests, so this wasn't bad at all :)

Thursday, we booted Knoppix on a PC at another booth which output bb, xaos & friends onto a huge screen so nobody could miss it. I couldn't get at my PC this day because some of the business people had kids with them who discovered openracer and gltron...