Older blog entries for lupus (starting at number 6)

Yesterday I got the ADSL connection at home: they were fast, since I requested the connection on Sunday. It looks good so far: I get 60+ KB/s from the Debian mirror...
I still need to fix the ethernet cable on the wall since currently it's spread all over the living room:-)
Anyway, in a couple of days I should be back on speed with my free software projects and my email backlog.

The Perl compiler tools are very powerful: I wrote a backend to implement xgettext for perl programs (needless to say using regular expressions to pick strings is not going to work very well:-).

I also wrote a module that allows the use of the gettext related functions from perl. Using closures it makes for a very easy interface also for modules. All the code that's needed is:

use gettext 'package';

and then marking the strings with __:

print __"Hello, world\!n";

I'll post it to CPAN for comments.

Ok, after such a long time without a diary entry it's hard to come up with an excuse that's not lame, so I'll skip that part:-).

Last events at my company have been quite interesting and enlightening: it looks like things are shaping up now and the future seems brighter.

That same events allowed me (well, in the time between the various company meetings) to hack on a few little things and ideas.

One result is dh-make-perl a program that creates a debian package out of a perl module. It can also automagically retreive the module from CPAN. The use is as simple as:

dh-make-perl --build --install --cpan 'Some::perl::module'

You can find it in the woody distribution.

I used it to try to impress ettore and make him switch to Debian from that other distro: still no luck, but I'm confident and time is on my side ;-).

It's been a log time since the last diary entry, but I was busy:-)

First came GUADEC and then I decided to start porting Gtk to nano-X.
Well, it took a week, but now I have gtk somewhat running under nano-X: some things are still missing, but some of them require additional support in nano-X and some are simply too boring to implement:-)

Tomorrow I'll probably develop a small client-side window manager so that testgtk could be more throughtly tested.

After that a rewrite of nano-X is needed (well, almost).

Had a great day.
Art and Brian from Linuxcare came visit us: Art gave me a 340MB IBM microdrive for use in the Cassiopeia and Brian a PCMCIA-CF.
Meanwhile I got the cross-compiler running and downloaded the first program to the PDA (I was even able to write a buggy "hello world" kind of program, it printed "hello wolrd":-).

Started writing a couple of slides for the GUADEC talk and polished a bit the Gnome::Designer toolbox (I stole the images from Glade, Gnumeric, Dia: it's too boring to paint all that little icons).

Yesterday I got a Flash Card writer, so I was able to get a kernel and a loader on the Cassiopeia.
Right now I'm using it through he serial console: need to write a keyboard emulator real quick:-).

The work on my Gnome::Designer module is progressing.
This module provides a consistent and easy to use interface to create GnomeCanvas items that can be manipulated by a user in an interactive way (i.e.e using control points and property dialogs).
The items can be serialized (for example to an XML file) and later re-rendered to another canvas.
A Gnome::Designer object keeps track of some important info that the GnomeCanvas doesn't provide (z-order, otherwise write-only attributes, etc.).
I need to release a new version of Gtk-Perl soon as developing this module I discovered a few bugs and needed missing features.