HCoder.org

I just got my OLPC. It’s sweet (and green!). I’ll take pictures and post them later…

w00t!

EDIT: And now I have Opera!

So, the other day I was reading about Scientology, and I stumble upon the Space opera in Scientology scripture. Apart from the odd article title, I couldn’t help but noticing the picture on the right. It has the following footer: “Hubbard said that the galactic ruler Xenu transported his victims to Earth in interstellar space planes which looked exactly like Douglas DC-8s”.

“Wow”, I thought, “that looks like a picture (and comment) from Uncyclopedia, not Wikipedia”. So, obviously, right after thinking that I just go to Uncyclopedia and check the Scientology page. It’s just hilarious, don’t miss it ;-) Apart from the funny reference to the poor journalist in that BBC documentary, it says things like:

Please be aware that Scientology’s beliefs are so absurd to begin with, that writing an Uncycopedia article about it is a massively difficult undertaking.

Not to mention that their parody of the plane is almost exactly the same :-)

I just saw in Adastra (Spanish only) some really cool Star Wars figures built by some very talented guy:

• 1942 Star Wars figures
• Steampunk Star Wars figures
• His own vision of Star Wars figures

I’m not a huge fan of Star Wars myself, but those figures are just awesome, I had to share :-)

It’s kind of funny. I created a twitter account many months ago. I never really used it, because I guess I didn’t see the point or something. During all that time, several people started “following” me (in twitter jargon), even if I had no content at all, nor plans to add any.

Just today and yesterday, three people added me, so I got kind of curious, and decided to login and have a look. I made a comment just today, about me finding it funny that so many people started “following” me, and someone replied. So I started “following” other people, and reading, and I have made a couple of more comments since. I’m not really sure I’m going to use it everyday, but now I have installed a really handy Opera widget for twitter, so this might be “the start of a beautiful friendship”.

Alas, not just twitter, but I also started using eBay (and, to a certain extent, PayPal) this week. Why? Because I have been trying to find one of the greatest PlayStation 2 games ever made, Ico. It’s quite hard to get in a shop nowadays, even second hand, because it’s an old game that wasn’t very successful when it was released. Now it’s a kind of cult game that you’re better off finding in eBay or similar, hence my sudden interest in using eBay:

Note that most of that is actually while being played, not videos. It looks like a film because it doesn’t have a HUD.

I have to say that the eBay experience was satisfactory: it was really easy to find what I wanted, it was easy to bid (special mention to the automatic bidding system, which I didn’t know, that renders the old bid monkeys kind of obsolete), and I won the item, yay! For the maximum money I wanted to pay, but still. I did have a couple of really weird problems with PayPal when paying for it, but it finally worked.

Another thing that just happened to me today is that I realised (stupid me) that Skandiabanken works like a charm in Opera. It was my fault for being so nazi with the cookies.

Finally, although not a website, I’m really amazed by the new Opera Mini 4.1 beta. These guys have managed to make a really awesome browser that works in any crappy mobile phone (and that means working around stupid limitations and bugs of tons of different models). Kudos to them!

After porting Haberdasher to Rails 2, I had forgotten to execute all the testsuites I had (unit, functional and acceptance, with Selenium and Selenium on Rails). The bad news is that they didn’t pass. The good news is that it wasn’t such a big problem making them pass again.

The functional tests failed because of some stupid change in Rails 2. Namely, it seems that now you can’t make more than one request in a single functional test method (bug?). The acceptance tests had some minor problems due to some changes I made in the interface. The rest worked without problems.

Now that everything is ported and working like a charm, it’s time to make some interesting changes. I had been wanting to use a really cool library called RemixUI, made by my former company, Fotón Sistemas Inteligentes, and these days I finally had the chance to use the latest version. RemixUI is a “web widget” library, similar to DJWidgets, MCWidgets and RemixWidgets (all of them available in the Fotón BerliOS page, but unfortunately obsolete), that makes it much easier to write validation, integration between client side and server side, interface improvements with Javascript, reusable widgets/controls, etc.

I haven’t used it that much yet, but I’m really eager to change all the forms and controls in the application to take advantage of the cool stuff offered by RemixUI. The problem now is that the RemixUI gem is not public yet, so I can’t really release the new version of Haberdasher. I’ll try to make them put the Gem somewhere public, so I can release Haberdasher, and other people can have a look at RemixUI.

I’m kind of back to Haberdasher work, so I’m playing again with Rails. However, I’m a very late adopter for many things, and that included Rails because I wasn’t that interested in investing time in learning all the new stuff and porting my applications to the new version.

But the universe had its own ideas about Rails 2.0 and me, so I had some retarded compatibility problems with Haberdasher and the up-to-date rake utility version in Debian. The problems were related to some Rails plugins I was using, and they made me have a look at upgrading to Rails 2.0 from Rails 1.2. It turned out to be really easy to do, the hardest by far was replacing the plugins that gave problems with application code or other plugins (yes, I know that if I was going to get rid of them anyway, I might as well have stayed in Rails 1.2, I just thought it was a good idea to upgrade if I was going to resume Haberdasher development).

To be honest I haven’t really learned new stuff yet. I’m just using the same things I was using, only now powered by Rails 2.0. A couple of improvements/clean ups in syntax, deprecated code removal and similar, but nothing big yet.

The other news is that now that I have a working Haberdasher again, I’m making some changes I had in mind since months ago, namely adding some user preferences “framework”, and adding the ability to assign a copyright notice to the patches (with a configurable default notice per user, hence the user preferences). I haven’t published this work yet, but I plan to do it in a couple of days, after updating the demo installation and checking that everything’s alright.

Haberdasher has been quite silent in the last months. I wanted to add some things, but I never got to actually devote some time to them, partly because of my work on dhelp.

However, yesterday I added something that I wanted to add long ago: some simple changes in the RSS code, to make it actually useful. Namely, (1) now the pre tag is used for the patch contents, so they are readable, and (2) each news item adds the name of the program the patch is for (it used to be just the patch name/description, which is not that descriptive if you don’t know which program it’s for of course).

Those changes are of course updated now in the demo installation, so go and have a look at the new patches feed or some application patches feed (in this case, my fake PDF::Writer patches).

Comments welcome :-)

As part of my QA work on several projects, months ago I was looking for a continuous integration server. I looked at several, but most of them seemed really scary judging from the documentation. I finally went for CruiseControl.rb, and I have been really happy with it all this time. It’s a really nice, very simple continuous integration server written in Rails. I had it up and running before I even understood how to install the others I looked.

Even though is a really cool piece of software, I was missing some better test result reporting. It was actually there, but only for Rails projects, and unfortunately we don’t have any Rails (or Ruby, for that matter) projects at work. So, I just had a look at the sources to see if I could hook my own reporting there, and the code turned out to be impressively easy to understand (especially taking into account that it’s a rather non-standard Rails application, as it has builders running as daemons, it doesn’t really use a database, etc).

The result is a patch for CC.rb, already submitted to their BTS, that adds a plugin-based result reporting, that can be extended to understand any kind of testsuite. It’s basically a parser that collects all the test passes and test failures from the testsuite output log.

Also, the other day I had another need, which was even easier to make because it could be implemented as a simple CC.rb notification plugin. It depends on the above patch, and it collects all the bugs in the current build, searches in the history of the project, finds out who made the commits that produced the regressions, and bugs all those people by e-mail, pointing out which failures were supposedly made by them, and which build they started failing (so it’s easier to locate the offending code).

It’s not perfect, and it cannot be, but it’s a nice addition to continuous integration. This notification plugin is not public yet, but it might be in the future (especially if they accept my patch as part of upstream), so stay tuned if you’re interested.

Some good news in the dhelp front: after talking to some people and a couple of messages in debian-i18n, dhelp has (hopefully) full support for UTF-8, and two more translations, the first two apart from the Spanish one: Russian and German. It’s really cool seeing some program you have written producing output in cyrillic ;-)

I haven’t uploaded yet, because I found two new strings that weren’t in dhelp.pot, but I’ll upload soon, when I receive the updates for the translation. The UTF-8 update is related to some improvements in doc-base, so things are looking good in the documentation tools side of Debian, yay! :-)

I have always hated mobile phones. I always had problems with them (coverage, battery), I always found them ridiculously counterintuitive, expensive, impractical…

But then I moved to Norway (from Spain), and, partly because I wanted to be able to use OperaMini, I decided to buy a new phone. I didn’t buy anything fancy at all, especially for Norwegian standards (a Sony Ericsson K310i), but I must admit I’m simply impressed by the phone. I know it’s old now and probably half of the phones in the latest five years have been good in those regards, but I find it really intuitive to use, very well thought out, with lots of tiny details that make it easier to understand and use, and frankly, for my modest needs, it’s just great. Sure, the camera is very crappy, almost useless, but I never trusted a camera phone anyway.

Also, living in Norway, any phone services I could want to use (normal calls/messages, international calls, Internet access) feels affordable, almost cheap, and now I can just check Mick Jagger ’s age if I’m arguing about it with somebody in the middle of the street ;-)

So, after buying the phone, I wanted to make backup copies of the contacts and messages, and I also wanted to be able to copy pictures and videos, and (why not?) games, ringtones and other stuff. I tried fiddling a bit with the IrDA and Linux, but I didn’t get it to work and I got frustrated, so I decided to just go and buy a (insanely expensive) USB cable. The good news was that the phone had a mass-storage mode that is compatible with pretty much any operating system. The bad news is that that mode doesn’t let you access the contacts or messages, just ringtones, pictures, movies, themes and similar.

I was quite desperate, especially after having bought the cable (I did find some really great games in the net, though, so I used the cable for something), so I decided to download the official Sony Ericsson PC Suite, and try on some Windows machine (real hassle, because I don’t have that at home). And, oh the horror, that wasn’t a solution either, because I couldn’t just make a backup of the contacts, I had to “synchronise” with Outlook. And that wouldn’t work for me, that’s for sure.

So I didn’t know what to do, I tried with other progams under Linux, but nothing really let me back my contacts… until I found gammu and especially the oh-wonderful wammu GUI. I just had to specify the USB device in some wizard (in my case, /dev/ttyACM0) and everything just worked like I wanted to. They even have a Gammu-supported phone database, with a Sony Ericsson K310i entry.

I’m so happy now, everything works like a charm with wammu, I can backup my contacts, messages, and even the calendar, todo list and list of calls, if I wanted to. I can also access the ringtones, themes, pictures, videos, so I have everything I need now, under Linux without problems. Yay!