The Stream

The GoneME project seems to be a good idea. I use GNOME 1.4 at home and 2.2 at work (unfortunately I haven't used 2.4 or newer) and I must honestly say that I prefer 1.4 over 2.2. Yes, the 2.x is modern and uses an advanced architecture, much better than 1.4, but it sucks in many other areas, mostly those user-visible. It looks like it has been designed for some computer newcomer. Anyway, I agree with GoneME on some issues, like the button order for example (it's really annoying in 2.x). People, the button order should be easily changeable in the control panel (is it too hard to achieve this?), but unfortunately the whole control panel is very poor.

Back to libmu_cpp hacking after more than 20 days. Uhm, it's so hard to find enough spare time these days. Anyway, I added the streams support today and now I am able to compile the http.cc (and sfrom.cc already) -- yupie!

I have also some new ideas about GNU Anubis. One of them is the XELO extension, which will improve the remote database access. Another issue is to fix the database plain text format and use the colon separator instead of white spaces. Otherwise it is impossible to omit the 'account' field and it's often necessary to do that. This has a high priority.

I recently watched a TV programme on Discovery Channel about traveling around the World using the human power only. The Expedition 360 (formerly known as Pedal for the Planet) launched by Steve Smith and Jason Lewis in 1994 still goes on... It's all very impressive. As far as I know, Jason is currently preparing for the Indonesian leg, and Steve is no more participating in this event. He abandoned the expedition after the Hawaii Hike. Anyway, I watched the episode where they crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a small pedal boat (they are the first to pedal the Atlantic Ocean from East to West). This took them "only" 111 days.

By day 55 we had reached the mid-Atlantic Ridge and were suffering badly from salt sores, chronic tiredness and the mental stresses which build under confinement made worse by constant motion. Imagine a funfair ride which becomes irritating and ultimately nightmarish as it refuses to stop to let you off in order to maintain a positive outlook we opted to avoid depressing fatigues by both sleeping for 8-10 hours every 10 days and leave the boat to drift...

More at www.expedition360.com
and www.goals.com/Expedition360/

I updated the gawk translation (3.1.3l) today. It seems that gawk 3.1.4 will be released soon.

Spent Saturday outside the city.

Playing with my new camera :).

My workplace at home.

I bought a new camera yesterday, Sony DSC-P100 (info). It's very fast and the image quality is excellent.

Unfortunately, the camera is currently not supported by the Linux kernel, so I had to hack the drivers/usb/storage/unusual_devs.h file (v2.4.24) and add the following code:

UNUSUAL_DEV(  0x054c, 0x0010, 0x0500, 0x0500,
		"Sony",
		"DSC-P100",
		US_SC_8070, US_PR_DEVICE, NULL,
		US_FL_SINGLE_LUN | US_FL_MODE_XLATE ),

Now it works fine.

Hacking

I released IMM 0.3 today.

Roadmap to GNU Anubis 4.0

v3.9.95

the maintenance release.
release target: July, 2004.

v3.9.96

will introduce Dixie's new testsuite.
release target: September, 2004.

v3.9.97

after this release, no considerable changes will be added to the CVS repository.
release target: October, 2004.

v3.9.98

after this release, we will focus mainly on removing all critical bugs first.
release target: October, 2004.

v3.9.99

the final test!
release target: November, 2004.

v4.0 is out!

release target: December 15th, 2004.

Mono 1.0 is out!

Congratulations to all Mono developers and contributors.

blogRight! is ready, Sir.

I'm moving my blog to my home page, here, but for a while I will still be doing some updates on advogato.org. This blog uses the blogRight! engine, the code I wrote.

Wow! A real 'must-have' toy: Sony's PSP.

A long time ago I mentioned about writing my simple educational compiler. Well, this is still true and the work is in progress, but very slow progress. I hope to finish it by the end of this year. In the meantime I wrote a tiny, mini intro-example to a few basic compiler techniques, uhm. Send me the feedback if you like it ;).

There is one missing feature on Advogato.org site; it is when you read some old people's diary entries and you want to go forward in time. There is no a convenient way to do that (there is only an X older entries... link :/). Sigh.

»

Conference on Software Patents, Warsaw 2004

I am now the European Union citizen, whee!

An interesting reading to learn something about the historical background of Free pax utilities is available at http://web.archive.org/web/20040402040528/http://paxutils.progiciels-bpi.ca/.

Good luck Sergey!

Kurt Cobain 1967-1994

Nirvana changed the sound of the nineties.
Hard to believe it's been 10 years...

Tired a bit (am both studying and working as a programmer). I'm glad the weekend has finally come. Recently metaur discovered some vulnerabilities in GNU Anubis. This was the first serious (and hope the last one) bug report since the last stable release in Dec 2002. Now heading the v3.9.94...

Got a job! CRM/Web development. It's good to see that the company uses mostly free software. Right now, my daily workstation is RH9 with GNU Emacs.

My site of the day is Bike China Adventures. Great website with many interesting stories and pictures. One day I'll sign up for the bike tour!

Finished a major reorganization in the Mailutils documentation. It's still not up-to-date and there is missing a lot of stuff, but I believe it should be now easier to complete it.

Watched Jackass: The Movie... yuck. Where is my brain?

Not much... just a little mailutils hacking. We now support the maildir format, which is very cool, the file: auto-detection url is great, and all from-like utilities now use rfc2047 decoding. We have also a new tool, called movemail.

And yesterday I went to listen to the 2,5h lecture on LaTeX. I already know Texinfo, which is obviously similar, but has different goals and is less powerful.

Today it was a hardware hacking day ;). I have moved my old Amiga hard drive (Seagate 1.7 GB) to my current workstation. There were six AFFS partitions, so I had to compile AFFS support into Linux kernel. I made several back-ups (old source codes, images, documents, etc.) and reformatted the drive using a common ext2 file system.

Not much to do... Savannah is down. This means no CVS write access.

Now reading an interesting article about the MSIL Assembly Language. Huh, this assembly language is even object-oriented, kinda funky ;). I was also googling for a document which shows the difference between .NET 1.1 and 1.2, but couldn't find anything. Then I finally started reading the C# 2.0 specification, which looks quite promising.

GNU, Debian, and now Savannah... all were compromised recently. What will be next?

Hacking

Sergey and I made a lot of progress on GNU Anubis... :). The Ident protocol will be superfluous soon, but this still requires a lot of work to be done. I expect that version 4.0 will be released in Q1/2004.

Released a fresh new memory testing tool, designed as a wrapper around the standard libc memory allocation routines malloc, calloc, realloc, and free. It is called IMM and it's licensed under the LGPL.

Today I downloaded GNU Hurd image for Bochs. At last! Now I must find a real machine where I will be able to try GNU/Hurd as a native OS. Check out my homepage (hurd) to see the screenshots with Hurd running under Bochs.

Learnt some parts of C# and, as a usual exercise, wrote a simple stack and queues implementation. Now I am writing (just for fun ;) a simple RPN calculator with variables and function definitions. All on my home page. Today I also discovered a silly bug in Mono, which makes Ahead-of-time compilation disabled while using mono foo.exe instead of mono ./foo.exe (of course after doing previous mono --aot foo.exe). At the beginning I couldn't find the reason for this strange behavior, but lupus on #mono pointed me the solution.