jd:/dev/blog

You fragged...

jd — Sat, 10 May 2008 16:21:00 +0200

This made my day.

OpenArena, comment que ca m'éclate

jd — Sun, 04 May 2008 09:39:00 +0200

C'est à dire que j'avais un peu oublié Quake 3 Arena, tout ca, c'était du passé vous voyez. Et puis voilà que je tombe sur OpenArena, le jeu qu'il est forké de Quake 3 et qu'il est bien.

Alors OpenArena, c'est quoi ? C'est simple, ca ressemble à Quake 3, ca sent comme Quake 3, mais... c'est Quake 3 !@!#!

Alors évidemment, les puristes diront sûrement que non, mais en fait si. La seule différence, c'est que tous les graphismes, les joueurs, les objets, les cartes, ont été refaits à la main par les auteurs, étant donné que tout ceci n'a pas été liberé par ID Software.

Conclusion ? Ca fait juste un Quake 3 en beaucoup plus moche. Certains objects sont três bien fait (le Quad, le shotgun, le mega-health, les drapeaux, …), mais le reste est globalement vraiment pas beau. Les cartes ne sont pas sublimes non plus, ca manque de textures, de détails, etc.

Ceci dit, à part ca, ca reste du bon gros Quake, donc j'aime. Allez, je me suis même fait plaisir, j'ai jouer en tant que C4 pour défendre l'honneur, tout en mettant une claque aux gentils admins de TuxFamily qui ont leurs propres serveurs où vous pourrez peut-être me croiser quand je me détends !

Extending pango markup attributes

jd — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:00:00 +0200

I'm currently facing a problem I just can't solve, involving pango and GMarkup's glib API.

I currently use pango markup in awesome, but I'd like to extend it to support more attributes.

Pango markup uses GMarkup API to parse the formatted string. The problem is that there's no way to extend what is parsed, and if a tag is unknown in the pango parser, it will just fail.

I've tried to implement my own parser with GMarkup, but… When I encounter a tag I don't know but that pango does, I just can't pass it to the pango parser function for this tag, since this pango function is private.

There was a try to extends the markup parser 2 years ago, but the patch was crappy since it exposed the private elements of pango markup parsing, which is the bad way to solve this.

So for now, I've no idea how to do this. I was first using the bad parsing method with string.h's functions which I for now reverted, because I do not really like that.

Updating my .plan

jd — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:46:00 +0200

I've been on holidays for one week now, breaking my usual workflow. Well, that allowed me to rest and to think about what I'd like to do and things I need to handle during next weeks.

The urgent things this next days will be my primary server replacement. It is currently dying, and I already had to change its power supply twice in a month. Unfortunately, I'm now at a point where I do not have any spare piece so if things go wrong again, I'm screwed. I need to collect some money and buy a new server, or maybe get a server if someone have an old or spare one to give me, I do not know yet.

On the awesome front, I'm about to release awesome 2.3, which will be the final minor release of the major branch 2. This will lead me to work on awesome 3 at a slower rate and a cooler pace.

Then, the thing I do not have to hurry for is awesome 3. There's no big problems in awesome 2, and the xcb-util stuff are not stabilized yet. After my gentle yelling on XCB mailing list, it seems that things will move but will slowly. So I do have time to make things right and do what I want on that branch, making bugfix release on awesome 2 if needed. You can read more about futur on my last post about awesome.

All this should give me some more spare time to work on the upcoming Debian release, lenny, which I'd like to work on. Two years ago (my god, time flies), we've done good work with the french cabal squashing critical bugs and I'd like to go back on this and squash asses again.

awesome: from 2 to 3

jd — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:32:00 +0200

Last week I sent a mail about the upcoming developement strategy for awesome.

Long story short; we begin to work on awesome 3, dropping Xlib in favor of XCB, bringing out the first window manager using this bindings (if you do not count the demo one in the source repository ;-)).

Thanks to the amazing grunt work of Arnaud Fontaine, we already have a working version of awesome using XCB, and it works very very well. Better API, better code, and even faster code. That is awesome.

awesome 2.3-rc1 was released this morning so we'll begin shortly to work on the 3 branch and merge it into the master one.

PHP applications code quality

jd — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:57:00 +0100

Ah, Erich, that IS so true. I never found a well written PHP application anyway, or it was only 10 lines long.

I guess that's primarily the language fault. It permits to do a lot of stuff and does not simplify, help nor force the simplest implementation methods like MVC which should be the base in Web developement.

Well, take as example what we would do with Python and GTK+ if they were like PHP and HTML (I do not have the API reference so it will be somewhat improvised):

#finally we do not need this module I wrote everything myself
#import somemodule
def main():
    # Well we want to do some printing
    window = GtkWindow()
    # Connect to the database without any abstraction, that sucks
    db = mysql.connect()
    data = db.query("select RANDOMLYTYPEDDATA from MYONLYTABLE");
    while data:
        # Ah, we do not have include() so we cannot reuse code
        # I'm a PHP developer, I do not know functions
        import somestuff
    window.print(somestuff.result)
    # Obviously, forgot to close db connection, etc.
    if form.data.field == "hello":
        # The user asked for hello, print hello
        window.print("hello")
    # debug
    print data[0]
    if form.data.anotherfield[0] == "morning":
        data = db.query("select anotherdata from MYONLYDATA")
    else:
        sys.exit(42)
    label = GtkLabel()
    # Yes know we construct the view!
    window.add(label)
    label.print(data)

That is typical PHP code: we just take randomly typed data from our DB eng... no wait, from MySQL (remember that's LAMP!!! Not LAPP or anything else, bitches!), then we print some HTML code with data, and we do tests on environment, forms, etc, and we get back data, reprint them, do not use functions but include() multiple times thousand of files and then do not close/free anything.

It's so easy to do bad code that lot of people coming from nowhere and who did not learn anything from other languages are doing it.

Another hypothesis coming from my experiment: PHP is a language which can be developed under any OS since it's server-side executed. A link between mostly brain dead "developers" from the Microsoft world and whose from the Free Software world. A clash.

I apologize to some of my coworkers doing better PHP all the day.

Are chickens hacking?

jd — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:01:00 +0100

I was just taking a look at #awesome IRC stats, and I saw that there was a huge traffic 2 days ago. That was weird, so I did take a look in my log files. And yes, in fact, something happened.

At 03:26 GMT+1, suddenly, several hundreds of users joined the channel in somethng like 1-2 minutes, and then just left in same timeline. Some minutes after that, some guys began to talk with one of the real awesome user who was hanging out there.

It seems that these guys describe themselves as a "Turkey Hack Team".

I've seen a lot of hacked box in my (short) sysadmin life. Many of my customers have no idea of what security is, and this week I'm still working for a customer with an hacked box.

And one of the thing I never got was why all these "hackers" were downloading and installing IRC bot or IRC proxy on these compromised boxes. I say "hackers" with big quotes, because when I see in their command line history somethings like "rm .bash_history; logout" or "./exploit_of_dead_to_become_root" when the user they got the password has sudo right, I must laugh.

Now, I understand: it seems there are doing some sort of "parade", making all their bots joining an IRC channel and then left. That's so amazing. that I can say for sure: if I'd be a chick, I'll be stripping my shirt vehemently.

But the thing is that so far I've no idea if a turkey hack team is somehow related to chickens.

We've been almost down

jd — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:02:00 +0100

I had a big fright this afternoon. My friend ludo asked me to shut down my main server (delmak.naquadah.org) for racking one of my new equipement.

Delmak is my oldest server, hosting almost everything since 5 years. I knew I will have to shut it down some days, but after 280 days of uptime I was pretty confident everything will be allright.

But obviously, it refused to boot again. Fortunately, only the power was burned, and after changing it with a new one, we manage to get delmak booting again.

Now I'm really thinking about some better solution to not having everything on a server that can explose any day now.

The sloppy focus

jd — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:28:00 +0100

While most of you people and readers are doing quick and great works in Python, Ruby, or any modern language, there's still people like me fighting with The Low Level.

I like that, but the X architecture is just the proof of concept of an architecture which wrongly evolved because it was not designed to. Xlib and all concepts it is based upon where probably fun and sufficient in the 80's, but nowaday, it can really be a joke. I really hope that somedays Xorg will break things and start a new fresh X design (at least from Xlib point of view).

It's not that I think Xorg people are doing bad stuff, but there are mostly bailling out from a long code and design history IMHO.

So, last weeks I was trying to fix the sloppy focus in awesome. I've found a real interesting Web page from Alex Hioreanu about various issues that we encountered too. I've been trying ahwm hack, but it's not really reliable.

And then I've been trying a lot of things, and this morning I figured out something which works pretty well. It just fails in some corner case with GTK+ apps that are not reporting XMotionEvent when the pointer move, and I don't know why and how get them.

Let's see.

Back from holidays

jd — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:10:00 +0100

After 10 days of nice holidays, I'm back. I was totally offline, so I had to read some hundred of mails first, which is done now.

For a good restart, I've fixed a bunch of bugs in awesome and released 2.2-rc2 version. I've also migrated apt-build repository on Alioth from Subversion to git. I've uploaded a new version of this one with some patches, and a also put in the archive a new version of the mp32ogg package.

Next step will be to move my packages repositories which are in my global home Subversion repository, to my own git repositories on Alioth.

Testing out GRUB 2

jd — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:13:00 +0100

After reading Jordi post about GRUB 2, I decided to give it a try on my EeePC.

I've just installed the grub-pc package, answered the questions, and that was it. I tested it with the chainload method from GRUB legacy, and it worked. I just had to rerun grub-install to replace the legacy with the new one. And I've a nice Debian background in the menu now!

What seems amazing is that GRUB now see my... LVM logical volumes! So this seems to be really cool, because this means no more /boot-without-lvm-ext3-formatted partitions because my-boot-loader-sucks-a-bit.

Holidays and projects

jd — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:53:00 +0100

Long story short: I'm busy.

These days are quite busy. I'm working (you know, I need to eat so I've a job), to the point that I have many vacation days to take. So I'll be in holidays and offline from friday for 10 days.

I'm still working on awesome developement. Code base is quite good now, so I don't do 30 commits/day anymore, and update are less frequent. It's very nice that the users base is increasing every day, without polluting the mailing list and the BTS with bug reports and request for documentation. That means we at least achieve to do a not-so-bad code with a not-so-bad documentation. The feature requests list is still a bit long, but I think it will decrease in the next weeks.

On a human side, that's the biggest project I ever managed and it's very pleasant to have so many users and contributors.

I've some more project I'd like to work too. I plan to write a small git stats generator in Python when I'll have some more spare time. I'd also like to do some developement work around LDAP and Python for my servers, but I did not find the courage to do it neither the good library to handle LDAP object correctly (a DB_Object way would be good).

I'm always following Debian developement with one eye, so I'm not totally out. I really hope I could to some bug squashing like I did with several Debian buddies 2 years ago for the etch release.

Stay tuned.

Moving old projects to git

jd — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 10:02:00 +0100

I finally did it.

Most of my small and personal projects (telak, sysrqd and mod_defensible) were maintained in my home-svn-repository. This had the side effect that I did not have a good overview of the current status of the project, and that I never though about tagging releases.

I used git-svnimport to move this stuff to git, with great success. Now, I see that only one release on three is tagged correctly, bad me. They are now on my git server.

But with a better tool like git I'm sure I will be more precise when I will work on that source code, so it was time to switch. And now my source code is public, which is far better than before.

New laptop: EeePC!

jd — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:56:00 +0100

This morning, the snail mail brought me a new toy! A brand new EeePC!

It's a very very nice device. I did not test the Xandros system more than 5 minutes, but it looks fine for dummy users. I've plugged an USB key into it, booted on the Debian installer (provided on the Debian wiki) and installed it in a few minutes.

The hardest part was adding wifi support, since I needed to grab madwifi svn version, added a patch, and compiled it. It was not so hard after all, just don't expect to use Debian packages for now.

It even boot in less than one minute! The hardest part is to type on a such tiny keyboard.

Plectrum as reference size

Generating documentation from C source code

jd — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:18:00 +0100

Dear Lazy Web,

I'm looking for a tool to extract and generate user documentation from C source code. No, I don't want doxygen which I already use, but something that can extract comments from C source and print them to a text file. The ultimate goal is to generate manpages (using asciidoc).

Anything that may look like that, a program, a library or a trained poney might interest me.

First RC version for awesome 2.1

jd — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:04:00 +0100

And here we are. awesome 2.1 is coming! And it's really really nice.

It got a brand new set of widgets (icons, text, progress bar, tasklist, etc) for the statusbar, which is very configurable.

It also has a better EWMH support, which brings things like stick or fullscreen state support.

I still have to write the changelog between 2.0 and 2.1, but git log shows near 400 commits, it's gonna be a bit long.

EWMH and XRandR

jd — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 19:48:00 +0100

Today I decided to add some EWMH support to awesome. It now supports a bunch of this extensions quite nicely.

However, while reading the spec and writing the code, it appears that this forces a window manager to behave in only one way: have a poor desktop support, and no multi-head/XRandR/Xinerama support at all.

The main caveats are that in Xinerama/XRandR mode, you'll have only one root window. And the root window is where you must store the NET_WM X properties… So you cannot handle screens in a independant way like awesome does. That's really a shame.

There's also a big problem for window managers like awesome which are happy to draw several desktops at the same time. There's no support for stuff like that.

So far, I think EWMH is nice but is really too narrow-minded for softwares and people who want to think window management in a different way.

Christmas gifts for awesome users

jd — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 21:35:00 +0100

I was ill since several days, and totally unable to work and even more on awesome.

Today I tried to hack a little and so I've add 2 new widgets using the new widget system Aldo wrote last week.

First we have a iconbox widget which can draw any PNG you want it to:

And then.. the support for the so legen... wait for it.... wait a little more... dary! NET_WM_ICON:

Obtenir un accès Internet en 2007

jd — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 12:24:00 +0100

Et dire que cela pourrait sembler chose facile.

Jour 1:

Appeler Free pour connaître le numéro de l'ancienne ligne. On me parle bizarrement et on me dit que "non, il n'y a pas de ligne"
Appeler l'ancien locataire de l'appartement pour savoir si il avait une ligne: non.
Se rendre compte qu'il va falloir faire une demande de raccordement en NDI: ca peut prendre 2 mois, donc on passe.
Aller dans une agence Orange pour ouvrir une ligne fixe: se faire insulter parce qu'on a pas de pièce d'identité.
Appeler le 1014 pour ouvrir une ligne: un nom, une adresse et un RIB. C'est tout ce qu'on demande par téléphone, et la ligne est créée et ouverte 3 jours plus tard et on vous donne le numéro de la ligne le jour même.

Jour 4:

Le numéro que vous demandé n'est pas attribué.
La ligne est reconnu sur le site de Free comme étant soit une ligne France Telecom (sur le bon DSLAM !) soit une ligne inactive dans un village voisin. Choisir la première option et se voir envoyer paître à la dernière étape: numéro déjà inscrit.
Appeler 2 fois Free pour avoir 2 réponses différentes: a) "Vous vous êtes trompes de numéro Monsieur, le numéro est une ligne inactive" b) "Le numéro est déjà inscrit chez nous, vous devez vous tromper"

Jour 5:

Appeler Orange pour demander pourquoi la ligne ne marche toujours pas. Réponse: un technicien va passer brancher un câble.
Appeler Free pour demander à nouveau de nous inscrire. Réponse cette fois: une personne s'est déjà inscrite avec ce numéro de téléphone sur la mauvaise offre. Elle va être résilié mais Free ne pourra prendre d'abonnement a ce numéro avant décembre.
Appeler Orange pour changer de numéro de ligne fixe (oui, au bout de 2 jours), mais s'entendre dire qu'il faut attendre la fin de l'intervention technique.

Jour 6:

La ligne marche enfin. Appeler Orange pour enfin changer de numéro: ce n'est pas possible, la ligne ne fonctionne que depuis 24h.

Jour 8:

Orange refuse toujours de changer le numéro de la ligne.

Jour 11:

Orange refuse toujours de changer le numéro de ligne (à chaque appel pour une raison différente).
Le service technique d'Orange m'appelle sur mon GSM pour me demander si la ligne fonctionne. Je réponds "oui'. 5 minutes plus tard Orange est heureux de m'informer par SMS que la ligne est fonctionnel (lol ?).

Jour 12:

Après deux appels au 1014, Orange refuse toujours de changer le numéro de la ligne tant que la première facture n'est pas arrivée. Et je passe les batailles verbales "mais pourquoi vous voulez changer de numéro ?".
Finalement s'inscrire par dépit chez Neuf Telecom.

Jour 15:

Neuf Telecom téléphone pour nous confirmer que notre inscription a été prise en compte et que la demande câblage est en cours.

Jour 34:

Toujours pas de nouvelle de Neuf Telecom. Pas de Neuf Box. Le suivi indique toujours que la ligne est en cours de raccordement. Appel au service client: un robot demande le numéro de ligne et me redonne le même suivi que sur leur site Web. Impossible de parler à un commercial.

Jour 35:

Après un message sur un forum, un technicien de Neuf Telecom me dit que ma Neuf Box va bientôt partir.

Jour 38:

Enfin un courier de Neuf avec des identifiants. Le suivi sur leur site donne un numéro de suivi de colis.

Jour 39:

Réception de la Neuf Box. Mais le décodeur TV n'est pas avec. Après recherche sur Google, il faut attendre 2 à 3 semaines pour le recevoir. (ca devait être marqué en tout petit quelque part)
Branchement de la Neuf Box: pas de synchro, tout les voyants sont éteints.

Jour 43:

A 15h, plus de tonalité sur la ligne fixe. Branchement de la Neuf Box: ca marche. S'ensuit une longue configuration, une redécouverte du PPPoE, de l'IP dynamique, des services qui ne marchent qu'avec IE/ActiveX. Neuf Telecom n'est définitivement pas un bon FAI, Free me manque.

Jour 64:

Réception du décodeur Neuf TV. Surprise: pas de connecteur RCA pour la sortie son, que du péritel. Marrant, il faut mettre une carte à puce dans le décodeur. Et le mediacenteur ne peut pas marcher en mode bridge...

Voilà, après 64 jours de galère, un semblant d'accès Internet et de service associé. *soupir*

Et un goùt amer pour un ancien Freenaute heureux.

Fruit Fly in the box

jd — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:22:00 +0100

awesome 2.0 just released. Great.

Someone on #awesome pointed me to a post of Don Stewart comparing the rise of the new tiled window managers. This is quite encouraging, and I hope awesome will grow more with the next releases!