Advogato blog for pvanhoof

22 Mar 2005

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 09:17:48 GMT

Moving out

I will post my next blog entries here and I have moved my olders blogs to that location. For me it's okay that the trust metric system of advogato is broken. However, also the RSS feed of advogato doesn't always work. Therefore I decided to move my stuff. Nevertheless, thanks to advogato for their hosting facilities. I do need, however, a little bit more stability and I do like some of the features modern blog systems offer.

Bye bye advogato

21 Mar 2005

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 11:56:00 GMT

Last weekend I went skiing in La Bresse, France

My girlfriend and I stayed at a very lovely chalet in Gérardmer. What I can tell you was that we had beautiful warm weather (around twenty degrees Celsius). Yet there was snow on the mountain for skiing. The pistes where not in a perfect condition but overall they where okay. The area wasn't very huge. Nevertheless it was big enough for a "one weekend" ski-trip. You can find a picture of my girlfriend sitting both in the snow and enjoying the sun here. And on this movie you can actually see her skiing.

For her it was the first time she went skiing. I recommend La Bresse to everybody who's going to ski for the first time. Since it's perfect for weekends. Not very expensive. And when driving from Belgium it's not even far from home.

17 Mar 2005

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 17:18:44 GMT

Bounty

Cool! I finally received my bounty cheque! It was for doing this bounty. Clickerdieklik for a webcam snapshot.

16 Mar 2005

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 13:01:41 GMT

Getting free cd's from Ubuntu

Yesterday I gave away the free Ubuntu cd's which I mentioned here.

I needed fifteen minutes to get rid of one box of fifty such CD's and I left the remaining 100 cd's to get picked up this Friday by a second teacher who's going to give them away to students and by colleagues who haven't got one from me personally. A few weeks ago we already distributed a box of fifty Ubuntu Warty CD's at our company. So that brings the number to 100 owners of an Ubuntu Warty CD. Thats one in seven. Sweet.

We are actually getting some questions about Ubuntu on our Linux company mailinglist. So I assume thats a sign the CD's are actually being used.

14 Mar 2005

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 22:06:39 GMT

Hacking Evolution

Yesterday I wrote about the multi alarm notification dialog box. Evolution hacker Dobey was a bit displeased with my userinterface.

So he proposed a new one. After some discussion on IRC and sending some userinterface-mockup screenshots in both directions to each other we found this getting more or less the way we want it. Other screenshots here and here.

This might get into Evolutions 2.3 release. It's posted to the evolution-hackers mailinglist and filed as an assigned-to-me Cosmetic bug here.

It's not a promise it will be available in that release. But chances are getting high.

13 Mar 2005

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 15:02:42 GMT

Hacking Evolution

During one of the #evolution-meeting's I got interested in implementing a feature request. The feature request requested that the alarm notification dialog would be shared for all alarm notifications that happen while you're not paying attention.

At this moment will Evolution spawn a new instance of a dialog box each time an alarm notification happens. If you leave your Evolution instance running for a few hours and extensively use the calendaring and it's alarm-features. You might end up with a desktop with lots of such dialog box instances.

After my work on this, Evolution will make a treeview/listbox at the left of the already created dialog visible and will add the alarm notification to the dialog box instance.

Click for a screenshot

This won't make it to the Evolution 2.2 release. I'm not even sure yet whether it will ever be included whatsoever. Nevertheless can you already try it.

You can find documentation on building Evolution from source here. You'll have this alarm-notification stuff after applying this patch. I created that BuildEvolutionFromSource a few weeks ago for people who are planning to hack on Evolution. So don't let the hassle of building Evolution hold you back. It's easy.

Getting free cd's from Ubuntu

Ubuntu is so cool. A few weeks ago I used this URL to ask for 200 Ubuntu Warty cd's to giveaway at my company (Cronos/X-Tend). They actually shipped it. So now I have a box full of Ubuntu Warty cd's. Thats so cool! Thanks Ubuntu! I can't wait for my Hoary order.

I've already gave 50 of the cd's to a friend of mine who is going to distribute them in schools. He's a teacher informatics and maintains software and hardware in a few schools here in Belgium/Antwerp.

13 Mar 2005

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 13:45:15 GMT

16 Jan 2005

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 11:12:28 GMT

Friday the fourteenth

I've never been superstitious nor ever really believed in a God or anything that can't be seen, can't be studied with my own eyes. Nevertheless I'm okay with people who do.

Last Friday, however, (my) destiny seemed to have it's periods.

Thursday evening I just couldn't stop thinking about the meeting that we had at my current Customer, Maia Scientific (read about them and what I am doing there in my bio). The consensus was that we couldn't use any other way than some difficult mathematics to know at which exact location the motor that makes focusing the microscope happen is.

Somehow I caused a breakthrough in knowing the exact position of the motor in real-time, programmatically, by using some special techniques for reading results from and instructing commands through the RS-232. Friday antemeridian, the result was that the microscope can be set in focus. And the really nice thing is that it actually can be reliably reproduced. The mathematically technique only 85% reproducible for a yet unknown reason. Mine, so far, has been 95% reproducible.

So we where all very happy about that. Postmeridian I went back to my personal laptop, and noticed that the screensaved was hanging. I couldn't login to it either. It really seemed like a hardware problem, actually. So I forcefully rebooted the laptop. The result was that even GRUB failed to load! The harddisk was making funny noises: Tssk Tssskk Tsssk. Panic!

At home during my recovery attempts, using Knoppix, this weekend, it seems that sometimes I can actually mount the harddisk. But the more I try recovering from it, the more it starts failing. I am suspecting a headcrash or something.

So I decided to advertise the brand of my laptop, so that you people know what type you should buy if you want harddisk failures too: Acer Travelmate. I just hope that their service is good. I've bought this device a half year ago so it should be warranted. I wonder if and with what argument they'll try to void that. Probably something like: Fedora Core 3 isn't a supported software on the device, we can't therefor test the harddisk and we can't therefor test whether or not it's broken. I guess I'll have to pray to the Gods in which I don't believe. Damned.

13 Jan 2005

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 20:29:24 GMT

Having fun with Dia code: The properties of all selected objects in a diagram

Yesterday (and other evenings this week) I had some fun with the code of the famous diagram drawing application Dia.

While I was doing a diagram for my current customer (Maia Scientific for whom I'm developing software for a scientifically microscopical device) I got very annoyed with the fact that Dia cannot handle setting the properties of multiple selected objects simultaneously. The current release will only set the properties of the first selected object. And it isn't a bug. It's actually coded that way.

So I decided I was going to fix that when I was done at Maia Scientific, that day. This illustrates how much of a code addict I am. I just can't stop, also not in the evening. Luckily my girlfriend knows how to stop me, from time to times. IMHO, an addicted programmer, is a healthy programmer. No? We ought to be addicted. It's our passion, job and life. (or replace "our" with "mine" if you're a programmer and dissagree with this).

A few hours later I mailed my intentions to the mailinglist of Dia. A day later I had my first prototype diff file ready. Some other Dia developers responded. Eventually also the man in charge, Lars Clausen, who appears to be one of the current Dia-maintainers, responded.

Lars told me he likes the idea. There's still a few features and bugs attached to this new feature (manipulating properties of all your selected objects). Like how to show which property has changed and thus will be applied on all selected objects, and which property isn't changed. And how to store the undo/redo history (make the whole set of propertysets atomic. The undo will have to undo all applies on all objects that where selected at the time).

However. We or I am expecting support for this in Dia in the next release. They told me this has been a very frequently requested feature. So I guess it's good news for all the Dia users that people, like Lars and me, are working on this today.

9 Jan 2005

Sun, 9 Jan 2005 00:23:59 GMT

Tackling the many problems I have with clipboards on the current UNIX desktop

I got myself interested in clipboards again. I kinda lost my interest while trying to maintain gnome clipboard manager a few years ago. The clipboard of X has lots of problems which I wanted to tackle by doing a clipboard manager.

I didn't succeed for the simple reason that the X clipboard wasn't very accesible. For example to know when another xclient became the owner of the current clipboard, you had to make sure you (as a clipboard manager) had to own it at all times. By stealing it from the new owner and claiming ownership. Simply because the only event available was "you have lost the ownership". Well actually, I did succeed in creating it. But I didn't in making it actually being used. For the application itself was ugly clumbsy and needed to perform horribly ugly tricks to get it's job done.

The new xfixes extensions, however, make it possible to know about clipboard-owner changes more easily. Therefor some common clipboard manager tasks can be done more easily today. I'd like to create a common clipboard manager daemon that can be shared by different popular desktop environments.

Some of the tasks such a clipboard manager could do:

Make the clipboard persist when an xclient who's owning the clipboard is about to die
Make the clipboard persist between X sessions
Create a clipboard-history
Share clipboards between different hosts

I also want to tackle the problem that an xclient needs to first deliver it's clipboard to the xserver when another xclient is requesting it. While often both xclient processes are running on the same host, the xserver isn't always. It makes sharing larger clipboards, in such a situation, a very network intensive job. It causes lots of network-traffic. And honestly, it's slow. In my humble opinion, it would be better to utilise an Inter Process Communication mechanism. An added advantage would be that sharing the clipboard between non xlib applications and xlib applications could take place much more easily. Today this is only possible while utilising a clipboard manager or an xclient like xterm which will copy it to the console-window it's displaying, as if it's being typed by the user. Imagine vi supporting pasting the HTML-source behind the selected text of your Firefox instance without the need for first going to the source of the website you're viewing. Imagine two instances of vi copy and pasting to each other in both directions without the need of temporary files (which is more or less how mcedit does it). Imagine copy and pasting on the console as easy as today on X.

One problem with implementing such an idea was the fact that there wasn't an IPC-system being liked by the programmers of the popular desktop environments. For example KDE preferred to use DCOP whereas GNOME preferred ORBit. Today, however, a new such mechanism is being designed just for the purpose of desktop inter process communication by the freedesktop.org organisation: DBUS.

We have all the ingredients to implement these idea's. I am working on a very first piece of testing code here. For non-programmers there's nothing interesting to see there at this moment.

There's a discussion about this going on at the xdg mailinglist of freedesktop.org.