BeClan Blogs

http://mmadia.zelect.org

Designed for a java-script enabled browser, such as SeaMonkey or Firefox.

Has fall-backs for non-javascript and NetPositive.

As always, any comments are appreciated.

Mikael had been ragging on me for a while to try and address the ridiculous spam flow, so while thinking about doing something to help I realised that i may as well just roll out version 2.0 of WordPress! So, guess what you’re looking at now?

If the colors aren’t to your taste, the layout doesn’t work for you - then talk to Mikael and he can fix it Yep, I’ve made him an administrator and so he can now fix stuff here.

If you want a plugin added, yell quickly (list is available here http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Matt/2.0_Plugin_Compatibility) and I’ll see what I can do to get it installed. Apart from that, let me know if you have any problems

Enjoy!

Update: slaad asked for gravatars, so they’re now installed… No idea what they are, let alone if they work, so go figure

A R5, R5bone, and R5.1d0 bootdisk archive is in the works and needs your help.

In short, the following users are invited to test images for correctness.
-AMD users
-Intel users that require the IDE Replacement Driver ( or require it be absent )

The archive is 48 images made up of all possible combinations of
{R5, R5bone, R5.1d0} , {intel, amd}, {floppy, cd}, [ ideReplacementDrivers, ramLimitBootloader ]

items enclosed in [ … ] can be combined with each other, eg, none, ideRepl, ideRepl+ramLimiter
items enclosed in { … } cannot be combined.

The floppy images were created with `makebootfloppy -cd` and saved as a raw image by using `dd`
The cd images were created from the above with, `mkhybrid -b foo_floppy.img -c boot.catalog -a -r -J -V BeOS_Boot -o foo_cd.img` ( http://betips.net )

The images can be downloaded from : http://mmadia.zelect.org
Those that need to be tested are are prefixed with “untested_”.
On BeOS, the images can be written with `dd if=/path/to/foo_floppy.img of=/dev/disk/floppy/raw`
*nix and *BSD’s can use a similar `dd` command.
In Windows, rawwritewin-0.7.zip can be used.

Please leave a comment or email me at mattmadia -at_sign- fuckmicrosoft -dot- com
Thanks to ChaOS for file hosting.

Just a quick “we’re still working on it” note to let you know we haven’t forgotten about the new release. Seems like the bug tracker was a success, we’ve gotten a bunch of things reportedd we didn’t know about an some it’s been fixed already. So hang on a bit longer..

We’re currently preparing to release a new alpha of the Kit, and are thus looking for things to fix before we release it. If you have any requests or, more importantly, know of any bugs that you’d like to see fixed, this is a good time to let us know!

Post a comment here, or send an email to the IM Kit list!

In other news, Andrea Anzani (xeD) just commited an inital version of a brand new Jabber protocol to the SVN. Works well, just needs a few finishing touches! He’s also working on adding emoticons for the im_client, for those of you who fancy that kind of thing..

So, what’s been going on the last half year or so you ask?

Well, I’ve been working on school stuff mostly, which means that I’ve done next to nothing on the Kit. Shame on me. slaad on the other hand has been coding here and there, among other things he’s been making a very fancy web client, have a peek over at his web site!

Other news include localization in Zeta, maybe someone can take that as a challenge and add localization for R5 too? What else.. I’ll have to have a look at the SVN log.. Oh, the Info popper has been updated and polished and now support multi-line messages. Very nifty. Now if I could just find some time to update the email notify add-on for MDR 3.0.. Shots over at that .au place.

Other than that it seems to be mostly bug fixes, which is a good thing too. I’m hoping to have more time free from school in the spring, so maybe I’ll be able to add a thing or two to the Kit then.

I’ve been using Mozilla for my browsing and email for a long, long time now….it must be 4 or 5 years,,,,…and that’s on Linux and that other OS…what’s it called ? oh yes, Windows….man i must be getting old to forget about *that* OS and of course BeOS, although Mozilla mail was not used here.

And of course those that know me know that i’ve been using BeOS since R3 (x86…ie Intel) came out in March/April 1998. I used Mail-It from Beatware http://www.beatware.com/ and i paid for it, and i paid for the various upgrades as it was (and still is) a quality product.

So here at Loved Central ( )…aka Loved.com i’ve been using a few Linux distros for a long long time. Mandrake 6.5 saved my @ss a few years ago and i’ve liked it a lot, but then when i went all out and installed Mandrake 9.1 on all of my servers i discovered that Mandrake Linux enabled all Apache plugins that were known to mankind. This resulted in a couple of Chinese sites hooking in to my site (Loved.com, which i hosted at home on my own servers) and taking advantage of the Mandrake Linux Apache mod_proxy “open door”.

I closed the “door” after a few weeks and thankfully there was not much traffic from the Chinese ppl, but i think i was lucky for being vigilant. I removed the Mandrake Apache RPM (rpm -e httpd-2) and compiled my own and rolled that out to my servers.

Very very lucky as it didnt cost me anything in terms of increased bandwidth.

So i tried a few other distros…and here i am now.
I have Yoper http://www.yoper.com/ on all of my computers. It’s fast. It’s reliable. But it also suffers from a few issues all the others have.
Mainly around hardware detection and drivers. Yoper actually works. I was very suprised. Version 2.2 is due to come out in the first quarter of 2005 (Q1, 05 for you marketing tyoes) and i really look forward to it.
I like Yoper though as it is a nice quick distro and it’s one of the very FEW distros where all of my hardware is detected and well…just works.
Nice.

I also tried Ubuntu. Everything workd, except for my TV card. Which works in Yoper, and Mandrake 9.1, (fails in 9.2 and 10.0) and 10.1it works again.
I actually paid for Mandrake 10.0 and well…am sadly despondent about that release.
Ubuntu….well…yeah it’s all nice and works (not my TV card though) ….but it has the Debian mantra of stuff like “no Sun java” coz it’s not open source.
Well….given people who would want to try Ubuntu would most likely be developers (like me) and would pass on their experience based on that….well i find this whole “Debian/Ubuntu no Java coz it’s not open sourced” crap to be well…crap.

As an acive developer and one who uses Eclipse ii can understand that i may have to download a compatible version of Suns Java, but to read the doco on the Ubuntu site about their stance on Java is well….in MHO amateurish.

And i tried the new Novell “Desktop Linux” and aalso arranged to meet with Novell as i work with a large Aussie bank….and got a very interesting presentation from them.

They are not going to be dropping SuSe like some other past errors they have made. SuSe/Novell Linux is here to stay.
Given issues we have around Red Hat’s ability to servicee us it’s highly likely we may end up using SuSe/Novell Linux before the end of 2005. Sweet. And i like SuSe. And compared to the slug that is Red Hat (kernel 2.6.x anyone???) i think that that is a Good Thing.

And don’t get me started on the AMD Opteron v Intel Titanic…i mean Itanium…..i’ll save that for another blog

And so….back on topic and back to the subject.

I’ve been using Mozilla as i mentioned in the opening paragrah for a long time.

So i have finally stopped using Mozilla as an application. I now use Firefox and Thunderbird. I had a few issues with importing my Mozilla mail into Thunderbird, but found that i could drag and drop the contents into Thunderbird ( i copied it, not moved it just in case) and lo and behold all of me email was there.
Fantastic.
The next thing i am looking forward to is Sunbird, the Calendar application. I have a few thougts on that and may convey that to the Sunbird team.
Anyway, i just thought i’d say that Thunderbird works damn fine down here in Oz for my multiple email accounts and so you should NOT hesitate and switch over to it.
cheers
peter

after taking a break from trying to port QNX’s Gecko Embedding code to Be, i’m now taking a shot at KDE’s Qt Gecko Embedding code.

So far, Qt’s code is significantly easier to follow in terms of API complexity. Out of 20 files, only about 5 or so need to be changed.

A decent amount of it is rewriting Qt’s “emit [signal](data)” to BMessages and that should be more tedious than difficult.

I even feel mildy confident about most of the Qt –> Be API changes. Although if you’re decent at Qt and would like to lend a few minutes to answer some questions, things would go smoother.

In other news, Nokia released an early alpha of a Gtk WebCore/KHTML. It’ll be interesting to see how they worked around Apple’s Objective C.

Well, it’s been a while since there were any IM kit updates to talk about.. But recently there’s been some work going on with the InfoPopper. Our Australian friend (slaad, in case you didn’t know) has extracted the actual popper from the IM kit source, so it’s now a completely separate app that’s open each and everyone!

Showing a message can be as easy as “hey InfoPopper ‘’ipAM’ with title=SomeTitle and content=’woot! it displays’”, or you can do it the coder way. Incredibly handy, if you ask me, and easy to use. I’ve already written a little filter for MDR that shows a message when an email is received, took maybe thirty minutes including the time it took to figureout the MDR filter stuff.

screenie.

I’ve heard that other people are considering adding support for it too.. Let’s hope it spreads like wildfire!

The blog software has now been upgraded. This basically means that you’ll likely need to remove all old cookies for the site before it’ll let you in!

The reason was to add the functionality for blocking the annoying comment spams that had been getting a bit out of control in recent weeks. The web used to be such a nice place…

I must have applied for hundreds of loans. And, well, i need a lot of Viagra. My printers always seem to run out of ink. I’ve apparently won sooooooo many lotteries i didn’t know i even entered. And all these sexy girls want me to watch them on their web cams.

Do they know that i can lose weight in 30 days or less? If they did, would they send me their web cam offers?

And soooooooo many people want me to allow them to deposit money in MY account!! Jeez how fortunate am I?

I must just be the worlds luckiest bloke and all time winner of everything

Man, I am so lucky!!

later

peter

i’m back at my sister’s ripping up more blueberries ( in the same patch). During the few days i was home, most of them were spent building her soon-to-be son a toy chest out of 3/4inch pine plywood. It’s turning out nicer than i imagined.

……still waiting a final answer from the AmeriCorps group in Seattle, WA.

no progress w/BGeckoView ( mozilla rendering engine embedding ).

edit:
-realized the patch is 20 feet by 100 feet , not 20 x 50 as i originally thought.
-no go for AmeriCorps…. good news for BGeckView.

talked with phb aka phearbear on irc today… he explained some stuff to me.

End result: I need to start looking at TestPhEmbed application (tests the embedding widget) to see how the PtResources are modified / queried. Based on that, i can code more ::MessageReceived.

spent the past few days doing yard work at my sister’s. ripping up a total area of 20′x50′ ( 7m x 17m approximately ) blueberry bushes, which have a very viney root system. good to be outdoors at least

coding should resume on monday or sometime after aug 9th

wrote a few more BMessengers / BMessages, started to understand PhDim_t and rewrote some as BRects.

PtResourceRec_t aka a Photon Resource Record table still partially eludes me.
QNX dev docs

some random notes ….
// { type , modifier / set function, accessor / get function}
// { type , null = no set function, null = no get function, argt->value — the data, argt–>len — dont fully understand it }
// Pt_QUERY_PREVENT makes it write only
//The arg_value member is used for all resources
// arg_len is used to set a second widget structure member.

one question i have, is for resources records that supply buth a modifier and query function, how is it determined which to call ?
i’m sure that as i learn more, more q’s will surface…. someone , please kidnap a QNX developer. I’ll give you a foot rub….ok fine, both feet.

started BGeckoView::MessageReceived function. created the switch (msg->what) and case statements. Next i need to switch the printf(”Foo msg received\n”); with an appropriate function call. This will be determined by the PtResourceRec_t tables, which i’m still figuring out. some table entries list both accessor and modifier functions. need to figure out how QNX photon chooses which is called.

slow and steady…. slow and steady…

after a stroke of realization, i can do some more coding on BGeckoView.cpp.
This is rewriting methods that use PtArg_t, a QNX Photon specific object, by replacing them with BMessages. Once that’s done i can look at my list of BMessages and rewrite the data extraction sections. ex., PtArg_t *argt; int foo = (int) argt->len; char *bar = (char *) argt->value;

I’ve also created a more detailed TODO document, which lists each segment of every class that needs work, aka “// FIXME”

If you haven’t seen, BeosFrance will be doing some muckups of the browser that will use BGeckoView. TBJ post here.

We’ve got a big push to move our servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux where possible. This is largely to reduce costs. So i phoned our Red Hat rep here in Oz and asked if i could get a copy of RH Desktop and RH Workstation (WS) to evaluate as a possible platform for our desktop PCs as a separate project. The next day the CDs arrived (very impressed) and one of my colleagues installed it and i was going to try and find a PC i could use for my part of the desktop eval.
In the interim, i took home both versions and attempted to install it on my PC without success. WS failed to detect my NIC or graphics device which are a Realtek 8169 10/100/1000 and an ATI Radeon 9600 XT with 256MB RAM.
RH Desktop had no problems detecting the hardware, but incorrectly detected 16MB of RAM on the video card and froze every time it tried to load X Windows.
After another two unsuccessful attempts i gave up. So over the last 6 years this is the sixth time i have tried to install RH on any of my systems with six failures. Not all of the systems were as modern as my current PC either.

So last Tuesday i tried again, this time forcing it into text mode by deliberately misconfiguring the /etc/X11/XF86config file by copying over my Mandrake 10 XF86config file after mounting the Mandrake ext3 partition.
Then, i copied over the official ATI driver RPM i had previously downloaded from ATI and forcibly installed the driver. I then typed in “startx” and it worked fine.
It’s not as snappy as Mandrake 10 but has a reasonable look and feel. I’ll play around with it a bit more this weekend.

I’m a bit concerned, though, with the “adopt Linux at all costs” approach here at the bank. We have hundreds of servers running Sun Solaris and they are as solid as a rock. Migrating to Linux requires the same level of stability. A lot of our vendors haven’t certified their software and hardware to run on RH EL 3.x or RH AS 3.x. They’ve only certified for 2.1. These include storage vendors, storage management vendors, (for NAS and SAN) database vendors and cluster management. I’m not going to name the vendors, but you could easily guess or assume who they are.

We’ve also been told to use Itanium 2s. Performing a quick price check and Itaniums are more expensive than the equivalent Suns. I can get a four CPU Sun V480 cheaper than a 4 CPU Itanium 2 system. If i don’t need the CPU caching that the V480 has, i can opt for the V440 which is less than half the price of the Itanium 2 system, plus i have the knowledge that Sun servers are extremely reliable and mature.

Itanium 2s are too new and immature to be used in a HA (high availability) situation in my opinion.

Opterons have not been certified for a lot of the above software as well, but they are nice and cheap. But we’re not allowed to use them as our architects want the Itanium 2s. I’ve told them i won’t be buying Itaniums due to the high price and if push comes to shove i’ll stick with Suns.

So here’s the bank wanting to use Linux to save money, but wanting to buy Itanium 2s which are more expensive than Sun.

As the Americans say, “Go figure.”

peter

Did some work on the Kit again today, after a few days of working on other things. Not a big change today, just fixed the ‘”can’t copy in client” bug (now if you hit cmd-c in the client it first checks if you have anything selected in the input control and copies that if you do, otherwise it forwards the copy message to the history view) and added a test so the im_client asks if you really want to quit it if the im_server is still running.

Also, we received our very first donation a little while ago, but I didn’t notice until today due to some mail troubles on my part. Oops. A very big “Thank you” to the donor (don’t know if he would like his name posted or not, so I won’t disclose his identity) and an almost as big “sorry for not responding sooner” too =)

In the spirit of all things blog, I take the first steps amongst the many who have blogged before me.

Back to the red lizard, Gecko… Currently I’ve been re-writing QNX Photon’s callbacks and related structs as BMessengers / BMessages and appropriate message.AddFoo(bar) functions.

Here’s a quick TO-DO: