21 Mar 2005 shlomif   » (Master)

Gimp Testing Framework

I began the work on an automated testing framework for GIMP. One part of it involved making sure the pseduo-random number seeds that a seed-less call to g_rand_new() are predicatable. That was done using an LD_PRELOAD trick, and writing a TCP server for assigning them.

What I have so far works pretty well, but there's a relatively small number of tests. This helped me in a revamp I did to the gimp-ace codebase.

YAPC::Israel::2005

YAPC::Israel::2005, the Israeli annual Perl conference took place at February. There are summaries of it are available in the Israel.PM mailing list archive, including one of mine.

MikMod for Java

I re-incarnated the MikMod for Java homepage, this time in Berlios. A problem I encountered was that I originally designed the site using Web Meta Language, but this got lost in the hard disk crash, and I was left only with the final HTML pages, which I was able to fetch from the site. So, I had to re-WMLize them. That proved to be not very hard.

Then I went to work on the code a bit. So far what I did was made the code compile cleanly on JDK 1.4.x (the hardest part was figuring out I had to provide the -sourcepath . options to javac to eliminate the "cannot resolve symbol" errors).

Another thing I did was add a driver to write a WAV file to the disk. In the process, I discovered that the WAV file that MikMod generated was not identical to that generated by a sox conversion from the raw file. I discovered one of the outputted numbers was wrong, wrote a fix for libmikmod and sent a patch to its maintainer.

Now what I'd like to do is write a driver for the Java Sound API, so people can use it as a normal player. I had received a few E-mails from people who did just that, but I'm not sure if the packages they wrote were not misplaced. I'll have to check.

Job Hunting

I had a very good interview in Tel Aviv University for a position in their System team. I also had several interviews in a company in Hertzliya. I don't know the status of these two positions.

Upgrading Mandrake to 10.2 RC

I wanted to upgrade Mandrake to 10.2. Only problem was that when I wanted to do that, the bandwidth limit per connection I had on my Internet link was very low. Trying to complain about it to my ISP help-desk yielded no result.

Eventually, I decided to upgrade KDE to KDE 4.0 instead. I was able to download the packages fast enough using prozilla, and then went to install them using urpmi. This has failed and generated a lot of dependency problems, errors and stuff. Clearly, the packages were not prepared well.

Then I found a Mandrake 10.2 RC mirror with which the Internet bandwidth was OK. So I set up the sources and upgraded. I encountered many problems in between, and had to restart urpmi several times. It was possible that the KDE 4.0 packages messed up my system. Eventually, I opted to downgrade them all, which involved some text processing of the packages' list. (don't ask).

But all's well that ends well. I now have a Mandrake 10.2 RC system, which works very nicely and all. I found out a bug in which one could not invoke Konqueror. I found it in the Mandrakelinux bugzilla, and it can be resolved by upgrading to the latest kdebase packages from cooker.

Problems with the Ovid CPAN-to-RPM Converter

When invoking X-Chat, it barfed on me because the Perl extension I wrote could not find the Xmms::Remote module. Due to the Mandrake upgrade, the Perl @INC paths have changed and the module could no longer be found. I had to re-install it.

This time I decided to make each module into an RPM package using Ovid. However, I encountered some problems using it. Its own RPM refused to compile. It turned out it couldn't two problems with the new ExtUtils::MakeMaker conventions and with Mandrake. But I was able to fix them.

After I got it to work, I was able to build Xmms-Perl and all of its dependencies as RPMs, and to install them. Then X-Chat worked beautifully using my extension. "Hacker sees bug. Hacker fixes bug."

Telux Meeting: GIMP 2.2

I updated my GIMP lecture slides to GIMP 2.2. Herouth Maoz was the one who volunteered to give the presentation at Telux, and she translated my slides to Hebrew and somewhat revised them.

The presentation she gave (yesterday) was very nicely executed, and I enjoyed it very much.

New web-site for Telux

The Tel Aviv Linux Club now has a New web-site. I converted the pages to Web Meta Language, to HTML::Widgets::NavMenu and to my lectures manager (originally create for Haifux). Now, the site is up, with no frames or any other resident Evil.

PySol Problems

If my mother wouldn't be able to play Simple Simon on PySol, she'll go mad. The PySol in Mandrake 10.2 was broken due to the fact that it placed the code at the same directory of the games, which caused them to be loaded as plug-ins. After trying to solve it in several ways, and eventually being victorious, I posted a fix in the Mandrake bugzilla bug-report for it. Now Mom can sleep well at nights. "Hacker sees bug. Hacker Fixes bug."

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