plaes.org

I went through my local sympy branches and cleaned up some smaller fixes in order to submit them upstream. I did not push the PDE stuff yet, as I feel it needs some more testing. So only four patches this time:

Added corner case for Bernoulli equation.
Small cleanups to the ODE solver and tests.
Fix typo: s/trascendental/transcendental
Fix path to aboutus.txt url.

And also a small note to myself how to publish and delete remote branch:

git push server local_branch:remote_branch
git push server :remote_branch

I have spent almost whole day playing with Zope and so far I am not very impressed. Come on - it is 2009 already, but you still have not fixed your product to make it Python-2.5 compatible. Both Zope2 and Zope3 require 2.4 in order to work... I'm really wondering whether enterprise adoptions are good for open source projects.

While testing mesa 7.4_rc2 I ran into a weird build error where some file was requiring a stubs-32.h file. So today, when I was trying out X11 overlay I had already b0rked my system and I did not feel like going back I decided to look into this issue.

Turns out that the culprit was /usr/bin/makedepend which did not know that it was running a 64-bit machine, setting the default __WORDSIZE to 32-bits and well.. causing the include of stubs-32.h instead of the 64-bit one. With gcc it works fine as it defines both __x86_64 and __x86_64__ and therefore right stubs file is included.

You can fetch the fix from here and I can continue fixing the mess left over from libxcb's library removal.

[EDIT]: It seems that the real cause of these build failures were caused by depend files that came with the tarball.

Today I played again a bit with one of my pet-projects - Poker Square and upgraded it to use jquery-1.3.2 and jquery-ui-1.7.1

I wish I could say that the migration was painless, but I run into one small problem caused by my own sloppy javascript skills :P Fortunately fix came quickly and then I decided to take a peek into jquery ui's awesome theming support.

Adding theming support for widgets was easy - I just had to include the required CSS file and then reload the page. It just worked.

Yesterday I bit the bullet and managed to add a simple solver for the separable variables PDE case into Sympy.

I have also set up a git repository viewer and my two patches can be viewed on the pde-upstream branch.

..in case you did not know - GNOME 2.26 is out.

PS. They broke my camera mounting and lost my mixer applet (no - I do not want pulseaudio).

Yesterday xan released WebkitGtk+ 1.1.2 (with follow-up 1.1.3..) together with Epiphany 2.27.0. As this is the first official version which only supports only the Webkit rendering engine I decided to take a look.

My feelings so far are mixed - new version is missing some of the everyday features I have got used to (so I have filed a bunch of bug reports), but in general it feels faster and lighter (might be because of these missing features :P) plus it comes with a built-in WebInspector (which itself comes with a crasher bug that's easily reproducable) :)

But Ephy/Webkit is here to stay.

In January I took a ham-radio operator exam and passed it :)

Unfortunately I do not know yet what my callsign is, because when filling out the forms I added my home address in Saaremaa (I did not want to put the temporary address I have due to university studies).

During recent weeks I have been playing around (and occasionally breaking it) with Sympy. This fiddling has earned me a position among Sympy developers. But I really like this project and I also have Google's SoC in mind...

I also took some time to work on Genso stuff last weekend, but my Hamlib patches haven't yet got any review.. :(

Although SSL certificate management with Cacert.org quite an easy task, there is one problem - I usually need to do it once in ~6 months and every time I have to look for some kind of tutorial on how to do it...

• Create a certifificate request:

  openssl req -newkey rsa:1024 -subj /CN=example.com -nodes -keyout private.pem -out request.csr

• Submit it to cacert.org

• Save the key generated by cacert as public.pem

Done :)

I am currently writing this blog entry while sitting in a bus traveling from Tartu to Tallinn (~2.5 hours). The seats are uncomfortable and I do not have enough legroom. But I don't actually care because there is a wall plug fo my laptop (the battery is dead) and I am connected to the internet over the wireless provided by bus company. The view from the window is great and there are also few newspapers for passengers to read. Of course there are also annoyances - radio is playing (it crackles thanks to the reception problems) and there is a considerable amount of whole body vibration (making it hard to type on computer or to read the newspaper).

When talking about service, it is actually not the good things that matter but the small annoyances that ruin the good feeling you get from the service. When it comes to open source projects it is possible to report bugs, but in real life issue reporting is hard and can sometimes even be hazardous (when dealing with assholes).

So, I am sitting in a bus and I have actually no idea how to deal with these problems. And this is actually very annoying. I really do not feel like walking to the bus driver and complain about the radio and vibration because he is steering a bus doing ~90kmph on a curvy two-line road and in order to stay in schedule has to take risks overtaking slower vehicles. So I really have no choices unless I want to distract the driver and thus reduce the probability of getting to my destination safely. :)

So in order to keep your customers happy - please provide some info how they can safely provide the feedback about the service.

Of course, I am not only complaining but I also have a solution. Last year when I visited London, I took a bus from airport to the center. In the bus they had a small sticker on the window next to every pair of seats which read something like this:

Do you like our service: Comments with SMS to +xxx or by email feedback@... Thank you!

Also please forgive me my crappy sentence buildups and logic mistakes - the radio in the bus didn't help with concentration...