ping.fm is dead

Hello,
lately I've been using ping.fm for a couple of weeks because I've found it really useful.
Today I've tried to update my status through sending a mail but I received delivery failures... I then discovered that ping.fm is dead!

FreeSpeak, a GTK+/GNOME translator

Hello,
I've worked on FreeSpeak a couple of years ago, a Python/GTK+/GNOME project to translate text and web pages by querying already existing online translation tools.
PRO: It has been packed for Ubuntu and it has been publicized by a journal in Italy.
CONS: It has been discontinued until now. In fact I restarted the project and I'm doing a huge refactoring because of the ugly code I wrote in the past.



It's already working, but some features are still missing.
The new approach will allow applications to use FreeSpeak as a Python library to embed the translation widgets.



Contact me if you intend to help the project with suggestions, bug reports, critiques and coding.

How to contribute to APT

Debian Get Satisfaction

Hello,
lately I've found getsatisfaction, a social web2 free customer support for all companies and products.
Of course, what have I done is to look for the Debian company. Well it's there, but unused.

1. Easy for novice users to ask and find answers there.
2. You can share you ideas and get help
3. Report problems and get help on bug reporting
4. General and specific discussion
5. Subdivide the service in variuos products (for examples ports and distributions)
   

GTK Apps to replace Gnome Files

Hello,
everyone knows that gnomefiles has went offline with that boring redirect to osnews.com.
Now many people is looking toward gtk-apps.org, I didn't know it before. It's looking really good.
The only problems is that I had (and I guess I'm not the only one) a few unmaintained projects on gnomefiles and they are now lost.
I'm wondering if it will be publicized a day by gtk.org to be something more official.

Where are you? Yahoo! Fire Eagle

Hello,
the Twitter question was "What are you doing?". The new question is now "Where are you?"

Yahoo! has launched a sort of social application called Fire Eagle for updating your location and share it across other web services.

Cincom Industry Misinterpretations reached the 100th podcast

Hello,
I'm listening to the Industry Misinterpretations podcasts (though my English is so poor to understand only a few words) and now they reached the century mark. They're managing an account on Podcast Alley.

Stay tuned!

Interviewed by Clubsmalltalk

Hello,
lately I've been interviewed by the new clubsmalltalk. Hey, I know, I'm not so good with English ;)
I'm glad of this, thanks to Hernan Galante.

Vagalume, GTK+ and Last.fm

Vagalume, GTK+ and Last.fm
Originally uploaded by Lethalman

I've found this great gstreamer application to listen to the last.fm stations. It works perfectly, fully functional and up-to-date. Features several IM status updates, including telepathy. It's definitely good-looking with my dark theme.
Homepage: http://vagalume.igalia.com/
Last.fm group: http://www.last.fm/group/Vagalume

Compiz with ATI RS480 on Debian

Hello,
after years that compositing has been introduced in our desktop, it's finally come the time to try it.

Uninstall fglrx
My video card is not supported very well with Mesa 7.0.x, in fact I've been using the fglrx driver for a long time.... until now!
I had to manually dpkg --purge all the related packages.
Now it's better to rmmod fglrx.

Install mesa 7.1 from experimental
On #compiz-fusion some guys hinted me I should have used Mesa 7.1rc because of recent improvements on my video card. The only way to get such version was to include experimental sources.
Ok, no problem, if it doesn't work I can downgrade back to the previous one.

Upgrade xorg to experimental
But there're still problems, I had to upgrade to the latest xorg in experimental because of mesa compatibility. In fact AIGLX couldn't load DRI drivers because of missing symbols.
I had to dpkg -l|grep xorg the install the one by one. I did pray for everything to work, really.
Now backup xorg.conf and go ahead with X -configure.

Install compizconfig-settings-manager and compiz-fusion-plugins-extra
For some reason, the first time I've tried running compiz it's gone Segmentation Fault. On the IRC channel they hinted me to install the crash handler plugin to back track the error. After installing such packages, magically compiz --replace worked!
Now I have a GNOME Desktop with the Blue-Joy theme and the Avant Window Navigator.

Everything both nice and unuseful, but now I understand how eye-candy fancy stuff can change your desktop.

Before the war:


After:

iStream

iStream
Originally uploaded by Lethalman

Very useful applet for listening to the radio. It lacks a perferences dialog, but it's still nice.

Gnome main menu

Gnome main menu
Originally uploaded by Lethalman

Hello,
while I was playing with apt-cache I've discovered a new kind of main menu in GNOME. It's being developed by SuSE. It feels nice, robust and innovative.
The screenshot is showing the documents tab.
To install, aptitude install gnome-main-menu and add the new applet.

kqemu on Debian amd64

Hello,
I've been using qemu a lot lately because I'm creating an usb hdd with debian live.
The image contains a system running postgresql, development packages for gtk and python and gnome-core . All this ends up loading in more than 5 minutes, this is really boring.

Then I begun looking for a faster virtualization system, and found KVM. Unfortunately my processor hasn't the right flag for it.

Finally I found kqemu, which is a module for the kernel that speeds up a lot qemu. I never thought it could speed up things...... so.... much!
Let's install it:

m-a a-i kqemu
modprobe kqemu

That's it, for those who owns an amd64 processor, this is the right way to use kqemu:

qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel-kqemu [your options]

You shouldn't get any error, if you do... boh.

The image now boots in 33 seconds down to the bottom init scripts, and GNOME works only with a slight delay but it's definitely a great speed up. With the real machine, I enter gnome in about 40 seconds.

Keep going the good work Qemu team, and thanks as usual to everyone who helped me on IRC.

Debian and zd1211 wifi

Hello,
I'm using debian lenny and I've got these two problems:

• With versions of the linux kernel prior to 2.6.20 (maybe) I could install zd1211 firmware using the module-assistant which has been now dropped from testing and unstable.
• Boot process slowed down by 30 seconds and couldn't plug-in the usb pen because udev/hal screw up
  

What I've done is to remove the source and its created firmware, with the one shipped with testing and unstable (bug #411912):

aptitude remove --purge zd1211-firmware zd1211-source
aptitude update
m-a clean zd1211
aptitude install zd1211-firmware

Now let's fix the hotplug part, open /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules and remove similar lines:

# USB device 0ace:1215 (zd1211rw)
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:1d:0f:b3:66:f7", NAME="eth2"

Now try to detach and reattach your usb pen and everything should magically work.

Thanks to Nss (#debianizzati), dcbw NetworkManager developer and gsimmons (#debian).

Syx gaining more stability and speed

Hello,
in the new branches of Syx (an open source Smalltalk-80 implementation) we're working to try a new kind of memory management and add many features that have been missed until now to focus on other stuff.

The new faster and more modern v0.1.8 release will contain the following refactoring:

• Objects will be variable-length (minumum 12 bytes on 32-bit processors and 16 bytes on 64-bit processors)
• By changing the objects also the GC changed to a mark and compact GC
  
• Threaded-switch statement to run processes
• More efficient method cache (maybe a simple global cache lookup for this release)
  

API for primitives will only change slightly.

Suggestions for any new particular technologies are welcome.

identi.ca is worse

Hello,
I'm using Twitter in this week and the API works "almost" perfectly while the website is down most of the time.
I've recently heard about identi.ca, so I decided to try it.
My first impression was bad, because I've seen many redirects of the page, and DNS changes sometimes.
But ok, I tried to register and again... I had problems. When I submitted the registration twice it just did nothing.
I then waited for a couple of hours then I've been registered to identi.ca.

Once I tuned all my account settings, the service has gone down. What happened? Too many twitterers have switched and now identi.ca is out of service? In the while Twitter has magically reopened its gate.

New debian tool proposal

Hello,
this is my second post about Debian. I'm lately discovering all the tools for both managing my Debian system and creating packages.
dh_make is the first tool I've used for the "first debianization" (called so by the New maintainers' guide) which creates a basic template for your package.
Anyway after a few packagings I've seen that something redundant could be automatized further.
What I suggest is a tool that does the following stuff after dh_make has been called:

1. First dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
2. Check for libraries and binaries and create new packages in debian/control
3. Find docs in usr/shared and modify the doc-base
4. Check for .desktop files and .xpm then create menu
5. Find info and manpages files
6. Obtain copyright from COPYING/LICENSE and such, authors from AUTHORS and so on
7. Find ITP on BTS and fill in the bug number in the changelog
   
8. Rebuild the project
9. Check for lintian errors and warnings and try to fix them (such as empty directories, wrong library name, etc.)

I'm sorry if I'm missing any files such as init.d or cron.d but I'm still newbie with packaging and I haven't tried all the stuff yet.
How this tool sounds to you? Would it be useful and easy to make at least for simple autotooled projects?

Syx 0.1.7 has been released

Hello,
after several months a new version of Syx has been released. This release contains mostly VM changes and some changes to the Smalltalk Collections. As usual, release notes follow:

This versions enhances a new version of the interpreter, major updates to the scheduler, and as usual a lot of bug fixes. Syx left the Google Code SVN repositories because of many connection problems.

You can find informations about the new GIT repository here: http://code.google.com/p/syx/wiki/GitSource?tm=4

Installation instructions: http://code.google.com/p/syx/wiki/InstallationInstructions

API and environment:

• SYX_ROOT_PATH and SYX_PLUGIN_PATH environment variables have been introduced.
• Process and context creation changed.
• New functions have been added for the scheduler, for manually do events iteration and adding idle functions to wake up semaphores.
• Startup responsibility has been dropped from libsyx.
• Added syx errors for system signals to be used with syx_signal.
• Image recovering has been fixed.

Smalltalk:

• Covered several standard methods for Collections, Numbers and Object printing/storing.
• Error reporting from the VM now drops the exception to the Smalltalk environment when the interpreter is running.
• Random class has been added.
• Signal handling improvements for the GTK+ plugin.
• #display family methods have been introduced for Smalltalk objects.

Interpreter:

• System signal handling has been improved.
• Cache hash code of Symbols.
• The interpreter has been refactored to use one stack per Process.
• Contexts are now created only on demand.
• Optimized Symbols creation.
• Signal class has been abstracted.

Parser:

• The parser have been changed for handling new interpreter specifications.
• Several fixes to the parser for special cases.
• Fixed blocks scope.
• Support <- assignment.

Image:

• Image snapshot will nullify C pointers
• Image format has been changed for handling new interpreter specifications.
• Handle internal interpreter C pointers to be restored the right way.

Scheduler:

• Different behavior of the scheduler for POSIX and Windows systems has been introduced.
• Scheduler external idle sources have been added.
• Asyncronous command line and GTK+ loop using semaphores. This leads to dropping readline.
• A simple round robin scheduler has been added.
• Dropped image saving of POSIX fd poll

Documentation:

• Added lots of new comments.
• Started documentation project including a manual still under development and a manpage.

Thanks to everyone contributing to the project.

See the ChangeLog for a complete list of things that changed.

Syx, GTK+ and threading

Hello,
you all know that Gtk+ has locks for the GUI when dealing with the X server and prevent async events to be sent. This is done by manually acquiring/releasing the lock on Gdk. Many Gtk+ ports don't do this automatically.

Syx used gtk_main() into a thread and automatically put gdk enter/leave for each function in its wrapper. It would be somewhat ugly in Smalltalk code having to enter/leave each time.
Of course, on Windows everything leads to troubles with threads.

But Smalltalk has Processes, handled by an internal scheduler. I decided then to not create a thread but cycle through Gtk+ events in the scheduler itself. Now everything works correctly.

Difference with other wrappers? The way Smalltalk is thought let you perform multi-tasking without the need to use OS threads, which means no problems on Windows and no need to take care of the Gdk lock everytime.

In addition, I rewrote part of the Console (Smalltalk-side) to be asyncronous using Semaphores. Now you can work on widgets after you run Gtk main! A small example:

Smalltalk YX 0.1.7 is ready.
Type "help!" to get help.
> Smalltalk loadPlugin: 'gtk'!
true
> | w |
> w := GtkWindow new.
> Gtk main.
> w add: (GtkLabel new: 'hello').
> w showAll!
a GtkWindow

You can imagine the result ;)
If you want to try it out you can download the scheduler branch snapshot.

Stay tuned for next 0.1.7 release.

Syx Manual

Hello,
I report the post on the mailing list below:

Hello,
with the next release 0.1.7, once I get a working interpreter and updated all the parts of Syx,
I will move output of doxygen to doc/reference and start a texinfo manual in doc/manual.

My idea is to have this kind of manual:
1) What is Smalltalk
2) Why Smalltalk YX
3) Introduction to the language
4) Introduction the Syx environment
5) COMPLETE Class and methods documentation, EACH non private method will be documented with examples
and EACH class will have usage examples
6) Embedding
7) Advanced topics, internal documentation

I know it's not the time yet for Smalltalk YX to get such documentation but I think it will be
a nice boost for the project and also for the entire Smalltalk community.
Since I don't have such fantasy now I will start directly with all except the 5th topic.

Any hint will be appreciated.
Bye.

EDIT:
The Smalltalk reference will be created automatically from Smalltalk itself.