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This article is a proof…

Had a Futsal match on wednesday morning with few of the Movial guys. My team lost the game with the score 8:10, but I’m still quite happy with the outcome, because I haven’t played football seriously for a number of years now.
I also spent some time with Pango’s configurable backends problem yesterday and it’s beginning to take some shape…
Spent the evening looking into the new Scratchbox2 version which focuses on ability to use vanilla host tools directly. As I was too lazy to emerge debootstrap package, I just used the Gentoo’s stage1 bootstrap which sort of worked.

Last night was the first night to sleep in my new apartment near Helsinki center. Spent the evening trying to get the cable broadband connection from Welho. It took 3 tries to get it right…
First time I went to the Verkkokauppa store in Ruoholahti, they sent me back because they wanted to know MAC-address of my cable modem (well, as I already had one, I didn’t want to buy a new one…).
I went home, took the sticker strip containing MAC-addresses and serial number and returned to the store. This time things were going a little smoother until the guy wanted to add the MAC-address to the list. The system didn’t allow it. Bah… Then he suggested that I should go to official Welho customer service and get the MAC inserted there. “Time for ADSL…” ran through my mind but I still decided that I should go and see what the guys in Sanomatalo tell me…
The girl in Sanomatalo was quite nice to me, but the only problem was that she didn’t want to add my MAC-address to their system… It took her lots of discussing with her colleagues to finally enter my cable modems MAC into their system because I was sure that I didn’t want another modem. During the conversation with the support lady I was trying to be nice, but eventually I gave up and started using lots of buzzwords (DOCSIS, Protocol, Firmware)…
After receiving and signing all the papers I was a proud owner of 1Mbit connection. Well almost, because I didn’t have the cable which carries data from wall outlet to modem. Next stop - Clas Ohlson.
From there I bought one cable and one adapter and later at home applied my skills to make it suitable for wall outlet. And when I found out that I have Tx10 head for screwdriver I opened the cable modem too to find out whether it has place to plug the JTAG adapter. It had
After assembling everything together, plugging in the cables and connecting my WRT54G to the modem, I was online…

And in the morning I drove to work with bike…

First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.

Mahatma Gandhi

Last night I did some initial work (well, re-started with a different approach) on Pango’s –{disable,enable}-backend support and while doing that I was also playing some stuff with Totem, when I noticed that while the View->Switch Angle was disabled, it still responded to its accelerator key resulting a small delay of ~100ms in both sound and video. So I filed a bug marking it as trivial… During the bug filing process I also noticed the Totem’s UI was in English. Big WTF, because I had spent so much time translating this application. So I dropped to #gnome-hackers and got confirmation that this was indeed present in >1.5.91. Filed another bug and marked it also as CRITICAL because it loses information… Pressed submit, reviewed both bugs once and went to bed.

In the morning I see that both bugs are fixed. The i18n problem was marked fixed 30 minutes after I reported it and the trivial accelerator problem was open for 42 minutes. My big respect to you, Bastien!
Unfortunately some people still do not understand how the Open Source works…

What do you do when an application you are using suddenly crashes? Just a few minutes ago I encountered a situation like this and this is what I did:
I was using Yelp (The GNOME Desktop Help browser) to search for some information and after typing in my search phrase and pressing enter I was suddenly facing a nice and sexy - “Your application has crashed” dialog. Hmm.. I quickly checked the backtrace, clicked cancel and tried to reintroduce this under GDB (the interface of bug-buddy is a bit… well… not very useful for debugging). Yes! I had successfully crashed this application twice…
Now.. let’s check the backtrace. Hmm.. crash occurred somewhere near line 1808 in file called yelp-search-pager.c.
As I’m using an open source operating system I just unpack the program sources with a simple command like this:
tar -xjvf /usr/portage/distfiles/yelp-2.15.5.tar.bz2
And no, I didn’t type in the whole path myself, I just used tab-completion.
Ok.. let’s analyze the file a bit…
1804: if (line == NULL || line[0] == NULL)
1805: continue;
1806:
1807: title = g_strdup (g_strstrip (line[0]));
1808: after = strstr (line[1], ")");
1809:
1810: tmp = g_strndup (line[1], after-line[1]);

As we can see on line 1808 we are searching for string “)” from element 1 in array called line. It’s perfectly legal, but we have to be sure, that the array item on this index isn’t NULL. On line 1804 we can see similar checks for array itself and its element 0. In order to fix this crash we have to check for line[1] too, so line 1804 should look like this:
1804: if (line == NULL || line[0] == NULL || line[1] == NULL)
So.. we ./configure –prefix=/home/amd/opt and make and make install and run the new and hopefully fixed program - no crash!
View the bug information in the GNOME Bugzilla and the simple patch that fixes the crash…

That’s why I just love the open source - if it’s broken, I can fix it…