Planet Slackadelic

michielvwessem

2008-11-27T07:11:07+00:00

Well this weekend (well Thursday morning) kethry will be leaving for a long weekend away at her parents. Which means all kind of geekery time for me. Huzzah!!

Most of it started today really while I tried to figure a way to get putty on a USB stick so keth has a way to connect buhkit.net from her mom’s laptop. Normally putty writes to the windows registry. Thanks to straterra for pointing out that I can have putty store information in files rather than windows registry. This will also deal with the fact that I don’t have to worry that kethry has to figure out how to setup putty. Now she can just plug it in, click putty.exe and connect straight away.

Things to do:

Probably upgrading both Hades and Persephone to -current. (upgrade or reinstall)
Upgrade Dionysus (my Toshiba Tecra PII laptop) to the latest of -current and the (sorta) latest SVN pull of XFCE 4.6 [1] (with thanks to rworkman)

See if can convert my USB stick to ext3. [2]
Create the USB Installer on they USB stick, so I can have some way of booting Slackware-current’s installer.
Find a way to make more use of my 256MB (sure go ahead laugh) USB stick, than just a 25 MB Slackware boot disk. [3]

Still ponder why this piece of shite Lite-on DVD does not want to burn DVD’s in the first place. [4]

Drink beer, lots of it

[1] - XFCE 4.6 is really starting to look interesting. Although I am not sure that the extra clicks needed for the menu are helpful, It starts to fill in a nice gap below KDE and bare bones window managers ala openbox and fluxbox

[2] - Just for the heck of it. Considering I don’t have any Windows computers myself, so most data I transfer is between linux boxen anyway. Plus it beats using FAT16. If I really need to transfer data between a linux host and a windows host, I can always use kethry’s USB key.

[3] - Slax looks actually sorta interesting at 187 for the USB image. I wonder how much of it is really usefull. As for what I want really. Preferably a way to boot the latest slackware stable/current kernel, some minimal tooling would be nice, but the rest of the disk usable to transfer files.

[4] - Luckily, it does still write CD-RW’s. But I really would like being able if nothing else to make slackware-12.{1,2}.iso’s and slackware-current.iso’s. Just if I need to reinstall some computer without a net connection and not having accesss to my local mirrors.

ayaz

2008-11-26T14:52:23+00:00

Stock OS X 10.5.4 (Leopard) is devoid of MySQL. Thankfully, binary packages are available from the official MySQL.com website (MySQL 5.0.67, in this case). To use Python with MySQL, not least such when with the MySQL backend, Django is required to run, a Python binding to MySQL need be installed. It is called MySQL-python, and [...]

ayaz

2008-11-24T08:36:07+00:00

I have always dreamt of having a MacBook one day. Last week was nothing short of a dream coming true (much thanks to you know who you are). I got my first brand-new, shiny spanking white MacBook. It’s got a 2.1-GHz core 2 duo processor. I bumped up the RAM from the standard 1-GB to [...]

Jerboa and TypoFail

2008-11-21T23:44:30+00:00

It's been a while since I've blogged, mostly because of being fairly busy at work (more on that once the refactor branch is done), though I have found time for some work on a couple of C++/Qt hobby projects:

Jerboa's had a fairly major UI change (well, given the amount of UI there is, there's not much to change), and while the toolbar takes up much more space, I think it's better and more consistent. I also got around to making a DMG for mac users (windows users: MSI coming soon, builds and works fine though - linux users: cmake/qt4.4 from source). I've still not managed to hit my feature plan for 0.3 yet - when it's done ¬_¬.

I've also been working on a typing game, called TypoFail - only source so far for it though, and a screenshot or two:

The first is a clone of the amazing timewaster TypeRacer, though without the lag issues that annoy me over wireless; the latter is a clone of the venerable 'typespeed' game.

In the first mode, you type the quote as quickly as possible, and your score is your WPM. In TypeSpeed mode, your score is the number of characters in complete words you typed before you fail (10 words reaching the right hand edge of the field is a failure).

The game supports multiplayer (and pops up mini game windows showing your opponent's state), though requires a manually set-up standalone server at the moment. One neat thing about the quotes mode is that it reads fortune-format files, so you can easily load up whatever quotes you like - it'll even recognize ones which look like a dictation/IRC log:

Both of these applications are pure Qt4, and work fine on Windows, Linux, and OSX - though TypoFail's networking requires JsonQt, which it contains in a git submodule.

DVD drive firmware version under Linux

2008-11-13T20:33:50+00:00

Well, Blizzard apparently shipped a bunch of "faulty" DVDs of the last expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. However, many people resolved the problem by upgrading their dvd drive's firmware. That made me wonder how to check the firmware version under Linux... Well, a quick look at the hdparm manpage gave me the answer quickly: All I had to do is run (as root) hdparm -I /dev/hdd. At the top of the output, I could see: ATAPI CD-ROM, with removable media Model Number: PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-110D Serial Number: EJDL602101WL Firmware Revision: 1.17 Bingo!

JsonQt now has QVariantMap -> JSON

2008-11-05T14:25:40+00:00

As of a few days ago, JsonQt can translate both ways between QVariantMap objects and JSON strings (see the tests for examples). Someone sent a link to QJson my way; after a quick look, here's a couple of advantages and disadvantages of each:

JsonQt doesn't depend on bison, Boost::Spirit, or anything except a compiler, cmake, and Qt - easier for windows builds, and means I don't have to worry about syntax changes between one version of $parserGenerator to the next.
QJson is written using bison - if bison's your thing, this can make it easier to fix errors.
QJson can handle the top-level JSON "thing" being an array, not an object - JsonQt requires it to be an object.
JsonQt provides both translation both ways

The last point I think is due to me misreading json.org - though it's easy enough to change (make it so that the main public functions take/return QVariants instead of QVariantMaps, and if trying to parse as an object fails, try to parse as an array).

Update: QJson has the bison-generated files in SVN, in addition to the bison source files.

ayaz

2008-11-02T07:14:30+00:00

The biggest hurdle in writing mobile applications for Asian markets, in particular, is providing multi-lingual support. From hunting down people for translations to acquiring phones that actually support a big, diverse set of languages in common use in Asian countries, it is an all-round big challenge for mobile application developers. It is almost frustrating to [...]

What's in my bag?

2008-10-30T12:51:15+00:00

Well, HPR does it, so why shouldn't I? What's in my bag? too much crap... I dunno why, but I have this obsession with trying to carry my personal AND work laptops everywhere... which would be fine if my personal machine wasn't an old Toshiba Tecra 8000, where 8000 seems to represent the weight of the damn thing...