Older blog entries for shlomif (starting at number 164)

August Penguin II

I attended the August Penguin II event yesterday. It was very nice and I met many people I knew there. At first Shachar Shemesh gave an instructive presentation about the Linux activities in Israel the past year. Then, there was a lecture about MOSIX by one of its Hebrew University workers. It was very nice as well. Afterwards, moshez gave a lecture about PyPy, instead of the Python internals lecture that appeared in the agenda. Moshe is a very entertaining lecturer and the lecture went very well.

Then came the geek trivia, which pitted two groups of three "geeks" and "nerds" against each other. It was very fun. And finally, came the key signing party , which I took part in and signed the keys of 20 people or so.

There were a few glitches there, as far as I was concerned. First of all, I discovered the building did not have any coolers and I had to drink water from the taps of the restroom. Then, it was too cold in the lecture hall, and I had to leave once or twice to regain my senses. Finally, my ride back to home, disappeared during the key-signing party, which caused me to have to take the bus again. But all in all, they did not spoil the fun.

After the event was over, I went back home, ate, and went to sign everybody's key. It turned out some of the key could not be checked out of the servers I tried. (read the thread for more information). However, it turned out mulix who organized the key signing party, prepared a keyring with all the keys, and was about to send it to everyone for signing. Thus, I was able to sign the rest of the keys.

Freecell Solver

I discovered a game of Simple Simon that could be solved by hand, but not by Freecell Solver (which gave up after checking only the initial state). So I set out to discover why. Apparently there was a function there which was responsible for performing the initial move, only it had a bug. I only had to remove one = from an <= operator and the bug was fixed and the game was solvable. Hah!

Reading

I finished a large part (most?) of "Games, Diversions and Perl Culture : Best of the Perl Journal". I also read the Freshmeat GUI Toolkits feature and started reading ESR's "The Art of Unix Programming" which is very interesting so far.

Subversion

I wrote a couple of tests for my Issue #1297 patch, and indeed the unpatched Subversion failed them both. However, I was told the patch is not correct because it does not handle some working copy parameters correctly.

LM-Solve

After releasing version 0.8.0 I discovered a bug and released version 0.8.1. Now I think I did not document the Hexagonal Planks ID in the man page of the executable so I'll need to release 0.8.2... :-). In any case, I also revamped the LM-Solve homepage and now maintain it separately from my homepage.

Finally, I announced LM-Solve on Freshmeat.

Dmoz.org

I finally got permission to edit the Perl "FAQs, Help and Tutorials" category on dmoz.org. I created a tutorials sub-category and will move all the tutorials there. I might create other sub-categories there if I feel the main one becomes too crowded. Let me know if there's anything you'd like to see there.

Lectures

I prepared a lecture about my solution to the Graham Function Perl Quiz of the Week. This time I used PerlPoint, which enabled me to quickly translate the summary into the lecture itself. Here's a discussion of it on Hackers-IL.

I also prepared a summary (but not the slides themselves) for a lecture about LM-Solve. Both are intended for the next Israeli Perl Mongers meeting.

Subversion and Neon Verdict

At the end, the Subversion maintainer told us we can use the HTTP error code to distinguish between the different kind of errors Neon is returning. So I wrote an updated patch and Ben Collins-Sussman commited it. (thanks, Ben!). Now, there's a part of me in the Subversion core.

LM-Solve Re-work

I spent part of the last couple of days reworking LM-Solve. I started out a Subversion repository for it, changed its namespace to "Games::LMSolve", added a lot of documentation, etc. It's also in CPAN now.

Studies

I took the test of Micro-computers on Wednesday. It went pretty well. I was first worried that I won't have enough time to finish it, but then it turned out I did have, even without the time extension. I still don't know what my score is. This is my last test for this semester, so now I'm free!.

Subversion

I submitted a patch to add a --config-dir option to the subversion command line clients to specify an alternate directory for the configuration files. The first incarnation became out of date after a change in the code. The second one was also more encompassing, and modified more configuration commands. I still have a small queue of patches that did not get accepted yet.

Perl Mongers Meeting

This Thursday the Israeli Perl Mongers had a meeting where Stas Bekman gave a several hours talk about mod_perl 2.0. Many people attended the meeting (about 20-25), and we had a lot of fun. The lecture was very instructive, and taught a lot about what can be done with mod_perl besides writing simple CGI scripts.

After the meeting was over, I explained to someone about Subversion as he said he had problems with CVS and was looking for a good alternative. (I eventually wrote an E-mail to the mailing list about it). Oron Peled gave me and Kfir Lavy a ride home as he was returning home to Haifa. We asked him about his past experience with UNIX and what he does now, and we had a very interesting conversation on the way home.

Project Introductions at the TAU OSS Course

Yesterday, I went to a lecture of the Tel-Aviv University Open Source development course. There was a lecture there about CVS, which I interrupted with some corrections and additions. After the lecture several people and I introduced our projects to the students.

I gave a 10 minute introduction about Freecell Solver (that was accompanied by a demonstration of kpat solving Freecell). One of the Xparam developers gave an overview of his Xparam project. Shachar Shemesh said some words about Hamakor NPO, and then introduced the WINE project to the students.

The students in the course are expected to choose a project to work on and to perform about 300 hours of work each on it. The Xparam guy got three students who were interested in the project and gave him their details. When I returned home, and checked my E-mail, I found out from the course initiator that two students expressed interest in Freecell Solver as well, and would probably contact me. I did not hear from them yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Subversion and Perl Makefile.PL - problem and solution

I now started to maintain LM-Solve using Subversion. However, after importing the project into Subversion, I encountered a problem that I remembered from Linux::Kernel::Module::Builder: the Makefile.PL also did something with all the files under the .svn/ files. (and in my case even corrupted the working copy).

A quick Googling made me realize that the solution was to install the development snapshot of ExtUtils::MakeMaker and use it instead. This has worked, and the Subversion resident Perl guru told me the same thing on the IRC.

Subversion Neon Usage

Subversion has a problem of asking confirmation of a certificate for as many times as the https:// path has path components, as it keeps trying upward components. I wrote a fix for this issue, and posted it to the Subversion development list. Ben Collins-Sussman criticized it saying it was a workaround and maybe we are using Neon (the WebDAV client library) wrong.

I inspected the code of Neon and found it does indeed return a plain NE_ERROR error if the certificate's authenticity failed. This makes it impossible to tell if we failed due to that or due to something else altogether. We decided to wait for the Neon project head to tell us what he makes of it, and what we should do.

Dmoz.org Perl Tutorials Category Blues

My application for editing the Dmoz.org Perl "FAQs, Help and Tutorials" category was rejected for the third time. This time, there were problems in the grammar of my submission (which I'll make sure won't happen next time) and some vague critique of what is present in my exis

Hacktivity

My Fix for Subversion Issue #1311 turned out to be faulty, and I discussed the best to really resolve it with one of the Subversion developers. Next, I provided a fix for Issue #1267 (have to say "no" several times to reject SSL certificate), which I had to update after a modification in the Subversion code.

Next I talked, yesterday, with Ben Collins-Sussman on the IRC about an issue I found in the bugtracker, and he suggested a way to resolve it. So I implemented it and added a new feature.

Nothing of what I did was applied yet, which is a bit frustrating, but I hope a core Subversion developer will find the time to review and accept my patches.

Studies

I met with my Micro-computers partner on Thursday, and we compared the two versions of the exercise that we solved. We shortly came to a combined version. Then there was the issue of handing it out which was resolved by me doing so on Saturday, when my parents and I travelled to move things out of the apartment (see below).

Since I only study on two days in the next semester, and it should be my last , we decided to stop keeping the apartment lease in Haifa. So we went there, and took our things, and moved them back to Tel Aviv. We took quite a lot of things and needed a few hours and several transactions to move everything.

At one time, I climbed up the stairs (7 floors) and when I arrived I was all sweaty, so I was told to take off my T-shirt, and after a while replace it.

Subversion Hosting

I encountered another problem with Subversion that took me some time to resolve. Subversion kept rejecting my SSL certificate and asking for confirmation. By talking on the IRC with some people, I was finally able to resolve this. Apparently, the problem was that I rsynced the SSL certificates from my localhost back to the server, and so ran it over, and invalidated what I had in the Subversion configuration.

I resolved the problem by generating a new certificate and syncing the Svn configuration with it, and then making sure the SSL overriding won't happen again.

Another problem solved!

Kernel 2.5.75

Persuaded by an IRC conversation with mulix, I set out to install the Linux kernel 2.5.75 on my system. The first problem I encountered was that the some of the kernel's modules would not compile. To solve it, I removed them from the configuration, but they were still enabled by default, so it wasn't my fault.

Then, after I had the kernel compiled, I tried to boot it only to find a blank screen, and some hard-disk activity. It turned out I had to enable some configuration options that enable the console and stuff. (check Dave Jones' Post Halloween Document for details). Then, the keyboard did not work, and some guy on #kernelnewbie helped me with some extra options to enable it as well.

Afterwards, I was able to boot it, and use the network and the sound card. But, then when invoking the full boot process, I encountered a problem that the system won't start. I traced the problem to /etc/rc.sysinit, and by adding a lot of echo messages, fixed it for the kernel. Then my system was operational, albeit some of the startup modules did not load and had to be loaded explicitly by me.

So, X worked, the sound card worked, and the network worked, but I could not get the Nvidia kernel drivers to compile with the new kernel. So I switched back to kernel 2.4.x. I can still boot 2.5.75 if I like, but I don't see much reason to.

Subversion Hosting

I discovered that I could save more space on stalker.iguide.co.il by deleting the subversion .a libraries, and stripping the .so ones.

I plan to link to my online subversion homepage repository there, from my homepage soon. That way people would be able to check out the source code of it.

Studies

I took the exam of "Intro to Software Systems" today. It went pretty well and wasn't very hard. I also handed in the assignment for this subject. Other than that, I only have the Micro-computers exam, and the last exercise in it to hand.

Studies

I got 93 as the final score of Financial Management. (yay!). OTOH, I did not do too well in the last exercise of Micro-computers. I'll have to see the T.A. about it. I also solved some exams for the "Intro to Software Systems" test and prepared part of the next Micro-computers exercise.

Hacktivity

I provided fixes for two Subversion bite-sized tasks. I also worked on the latest Perl Golf contest - Mathematical Forest - what a delightful waste of time.

GnuPG

I needed to get a password from someone, who refused to talk on the phone for some reason. So I eventually opted to generate a PGP public key and transfer it to him, so he can send me the password encrypted. This is the first time, I'm seriously using PGP/GnuPG for a long time now.

Forums, Forums, Forums

I don't like the fact that PostNuke requires registartion and logging in to post an article, so I was looking for an alternative forum. While I was, I discovered Phorum, which seems to behave very much like the Joel on Software web forum. I'll try to install it on my home server and see how it behaves.

If I like it, I'll install it on the Perl Beginners' site.

mod_php using Qmail

I encountered some problems on iglu.org.il with PostNuke. Apparently, I could not send mail. After I upgraded php to the latest version, I discovered that I could send mail from the command line, but not from mod_php. By "tail -f"-ing the web-server's log, I found out an error: "qmail-inject: fatal: read error". I searched for it and eventually found a post that says how to resolve it.

Worked like a charm.

Biking

I tried to fill air in my bicycle's wheel, and it worked. Hallelujah! Now, I've already went biking twice, and it's good to be back in the habit. I hope that's the end of the phantom problems with it.

Hacktivity

This and that. I've been trying to find some Subversion bugs to resolve, and so far have been only bugging with it the Subversion development list. I also wrote a Perl script to submit a site to dmoz, seeing how my browser gets stuck doing that. The script seems to submit everything, but the site does not arrive at dmoz (checked it with my own category). Then I discovered there is a better way for me as an editor to submit sites.

Subversion

The day before yesterday I wrestled with two Subversion problems. The first one was that whenever I tried to check a file out of an https:// mounted directory, I got a strange OpenSSL-error report. An old version of Subversion worked perfectly fine. It turned out to be a problem that the WebDAV library was not compiled against the most recent version of OpenSSL. A re-compilation of the WebDAV library solved the problem.

The problem I encountered afterwards was that Subversion kept rejecting my repository's certificate. In order to solve it I had to add a pointer to the server's .pem file to the Subversion configuration file. I mistakengly used the wrong configuration file, but eventaully Ben Collins-Sussman corrected me on the IRC. Then I discovered my certificate got expired, so I created a new one that will be good for the next 30 years, and re-tried.

This whole business took a few good hours, but now everything is working and I'm happy.

The IGLU Server

What kept me busy yesterday was an entirely different problem. It turned out that the Israeli Group of Linux Users's web-server version of Squishdot had a cross-server scripting problem. Upgrading it requires a lot of manual steps, and we got sick of Zope anyhow. So I had to install a new content management system. I first tried phpBB, but could not get it to look more or less like the original Slashdot-like way. So I switched to PostNuke, and managed to configure most of it yesterday and today.

Studies

I finished the last "Intro to Software Systems" exercise today (yay!). I'm enjoying the vacation before the next test.

Biking

I kept thinking my bike had a flat wheel. Yesterday, I went to take them to the bike fixer and it turned out there was still a lot of air in the wheels. So, I tried to fill the rest of it. However, in the front wheel, the filling caused all the air to come out. Aaarrggh!

Failed Linux Install

The one who contacted me about Knoppix, called again, and he gave me a life to his apartment. I brought my Knoppix CD and the Mandrake CDs with me. It turned out his computer was constructed out of "components he found in the garbage". Thus, we could not get either Knoppix or the Mandrake installation CD to load, no matter what we tried.

I invited him home to see my Linux system in action. When he left he was quite impressed from it. I'm still disappointed that we could not get Linux to install there.

Studies

I had the test of Financial Management yesterday. I did not understand the first part at first so I decided to move to the second part, which was easier. Then I returned to the first part and this time understood it and was able to solve most of it. Now I have some vacation until the next test on July 14.

The registration for the Winter semester is today, and I hope I can make a convenient schedule with Thermodynamics and another subject. I'd like not to have an apartment near the Technion next semester, so I need good times.

Knoppix

Someone testified on GNUbies-IL that he could not run a Knoppix CD he burned. To see if it happens for me, I downloaded and burned the Knoppix CD. I ran it on my computer, and it ran perfectly fine. I was impressed from it a great deal. I was able to use KDE, surf the Internet, see Java applets, and listen to mp3s. Very impressive.

Now it seems either his CD was not burned correctly, or there's something wrong with his computer. I'll check that out in the coming days.

Hacktivity

I fixed the style on my Dmoz categories. When I had tried to apply to a new category, I was notified that the style on some of the entries did not correspond to the dmoz guidelines. So I tried to remedy it.

Other than that, I worked a bit on Quad-Pres, and added multiple themes functionality to it.

Reading

I finished the chapter about SVG animations in "SVG Programming" and am now in the beginning of "Integrating SVG with HTML".

Studies

We presented the Software Systems project on its lesson on Tuesday. The presentation went very well, and the lecturer was impressed from both our project and the project of the other team. We'll have to see which team will win, but even the losers get a score of 95 or so.

Other than that I attended the final class hours for the subjects for this semester, and worked on the Financial Management homework. Evidently, it turned out that its solution was posted for us on its site. The semester is ending, and now the tests period start. I have a test of Financial Management on Sunday, and afterwards a long break (two weeks IIRC) before the next test.

Hacktivity

Nothing much. (that's being in the Technion for you). I worked a bit on Quad Pres while being at home (and discovered that I can use relative paths for the directories in its quadpres.ini file.). Other than that I created a Bundle::Zavitan bundle on CPAN to install all the modules needed by the seminars management project.

Haifux Meeting

On Monday, Shachar Shemesh gave an entertaining talk about WINE. There were a few glitches during the demonstrations, but they were expected. It was fun meeting all the people again.

Reading

In the SVG Programming Book, I finished everything up to the chapter about SVG animations. I covered all the static SVG stuff, and am now starting to read the dynamic SVG functionality.