ejabberd vs freebsd vs me

I started setting up some stuff on a jail I’m sharing with some friend, freebsd-6.2

– installing ejabberd is quite painless through the port (good)
– configuring it was alike gentoo (nice)
– having ejabberdctl working needed some tweaking (and learning what a cookie means for erl)

now, time to test the beast

– web stuff working as should
– connecting doesn’t using tls ?!
— trying on gentoo shown the same issue -> solution on gentoo: set proper perms to the ssl.pem and using absolute paths.
— on freebsd that isn’t working for unknown reason.

Time to play with gentoo on freebsd in a chroot inside a jail.

humor me plenty!

Some random updates

First of all I’m eventually snapshotting a newer ffmpeg, I’ll need some help to get it play nice with all the other applications. The new ffmpeg has lots of improvements but it changes its api slightly so every application should update accordingly, time has passed so I hope upstream caught up with the change.

Once it will be unmasked I’ll hopefully put the next release of feng in portage, currently I’m studying lighttpd internals in order to

  • Have feng using the same lighttpd syntax for configuration
  • Improve its behavior as server

So far I started importing lighttpd datatypes and lemon based parser directly in a separate branch and reshaping a bit feng in order to make it more rational. First thing learnt from lighttpd: keep everything in instance variables.

In the other news my alubook got its fan broken (and the tibook is in the same sorry shape), if you know where to find replacement parts for it please tell me (bonus if they aren’t that pricey).

Influencing projects: do and do not

There are many ways to get an opensource project fit better your needs:

– you contribute to it by doing the missing bits yourself.
– you contribute to it by funding somebody so you get the bits done.
– you ask politely about those bits and you make a point on how those bits could be useful for the developers too (so they will use their time and skill to implement them)

There are also many ways to hinder an opensource project (trying and failing to have it fit better your needs):

– you assume you can lead who is doing since you are using what’s done by them
– you assume that there is democracy and the fact “everybody”* want something (but the people actually doing something) makes that relevant
– you try to annoy people till they give in or give up.

* from interestingly inflated self made estimation

How to contact developers

Let me give a bullet list about ways to contact developers:

– IRC: most developers are present on irc, you may query them, talk to them in the topic channels (e.g: #gentoo-media) or ask for voice in the #gentoo-dev channel. Irc logs may or may not be available for past digging.

– email: again you can either contact the developer privately using the ${nick}@gentoo.org email or using the mailing list (gentoo-dev, gentoo-project, gentoo-$topic), you may also read the archived discussions.

– jabber: we got IM too, you may again use ${nick}@im.gentoo.org to contact them directly.

Those are two way communication routes, you ask and you got replies, most of those let you have a nice log so you can even point past discussions for clarification. If someone disregard about you usually can voice it and it remains.

There are 1 and 1/2 way communication routes like blogs, it’s up to the blog owner let the comment appear or not (so he could make like he got full support by everybody just silencing who isn’t exactly keen on what’s there).

There are even 1 way routes like the GWN and GMN in which the editor can write whatever he wants.

If you wonder why I’m just stating the obvious like this, well, seems that some people got a disconnected perception on how communication works so it’s sorely required even if dead boring.

Looking for an Abstraction Layer…

You probably know that I’m a fierce antagonist of anything that isn’t simple, that is over engineered or that is plainly ugly.

Now I’ll spend some lines of this rant^Wlog writing about how HAL is annoying, conceptually broken and ill conceived.

You may start thinking about other technologies that now are maturing in something nicer like dbus (even if could be lighter and faster) or udev, they improved a lot even if I would avoid force feeding ingenuous lambs (I mean people using linux and posix systems before and not yesterday windows converted users that really NEEDED that stuff NOW and that now appear to be the main target for opensource applications nowadays, see David’s post)
) with them.

Now, udev is good at reacting to hw events and dbus is good at passing messages, why something that should be just a little layer of glue between them has to be that complex?
Why it needs to have lots of square wheels reinvented, while we have perfectly round ones available for free?

Cardoe already voiced his frustration about it and I’m plainly not using it while I can, still I’d like to have something lighter, simpler, saner to notify userspace applications that something in the hardware changed, since the idea isn’t that stupid.

compiz adventures

I started testing compiz and compiz fusion to keyword it ~ppc, that was my first experience with it…

– I don’t use gnome and I hate gconf, I happen also not to use kde…
– Currently I’m using xfce to test compiz
– I have a more or less old xorg configuration

Here the pitfalls list:

X
– make sure you have DRI and AIGLX enabled: (Option “AIGLX” “True” in your ServerLayout in case you are wondering)
– add some options to your Device: Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “true” and Option “XAANoOffscreenPixmaps” “true”

compiz
– make sure that compiz-start script doesn’t have gconf if you don’t want it, otherwise the decorators won’t show up.
– ccsm is quite a nice utility if you aren’t using a full featured DE
decorators:
– emerald is the decorator you want, at least it allows some degree of configurability.

I think I won’t use compiz right now since I’m not so fond of the effects, anyway it looks quite nice.

(once I get the cvs updated so I can keyword the stuff I’ll mark most of it ~ppc)

About standards

Lately I happened to read something that made me think, basically Miguel de Icaza stance on microsoft’s pseudo xml format and microsoft’s flash workalike.

He tried to remove some polarization we have on anything made by Microsoft and tried to compare in a less biased way the 2 spec AND flagship programs, most of the people could stop at the first part and get the message “ms stuff isn’t that bad afterall” or even the “ms stuff has nice ideas here and there”. I read it as in “there is MUCH work to do and ignoring them isn’t productive”, I’d add my point of view as in, instead of following them and doing their same errors or supporting their same horrors, we could just learn and try to do something different (and broken in different ways) starting for our own foundations and nothing that could be undermined by them?

Having a microsoft offerings workalike may be good for some, but since there are way better tecnologies out there waiting to be improved it’s just a waste. (e.g. Vorbis, wavpack, mkv, nut, XUL, D, parrot, Dirac, snow, SVG…)

Anyway the nice thing of opensource is that everybody is free to do whatever he wants and usually sharing good ideas works in the end, if more people make usable/better tools more people will use them.

Random update

I had been busy doing my usual load of random stuff, most not completely gentoo related, some a bit more.

Let’s start with the nicer ones: Marco spent lots of time and eventually it paid off, ffdirac now supports Iframes just fine, it’s quite an important step! As mentor I hadn’t to do much beside watching the evolution of the code and suggesting course of action. In the other news there is a new dirac spec released just today, probably some of the changes are due Marco’s work =)
Today we tried to do some hackery to get git-svn play nice with the braindamage we have on the ffmpeg soc svn. Sadly my side works great, his side not (fetching from svn and pulling to an ffmpeg.git branch works, pushing back to svn not).

About the dirac project I must say that they started with the right frame of mind from day 0, I couldn’t find a group more open to discussion and suggestion, no matter if were things like “It’s wrong to implement dirac in C++, nobody would use it” or “the latex pdf output as you made it is unreadable. I hope to eventually have the time to get texlive working or find something that converts the tex files to docbook and provide a better pdf for them, really I cannot stand reading it for more than 5min… Now I hope this summer of code effort will lead to get a better dirac overall (and that eventually BBC will use it for streaming their fine contents, oh, did I mention that I have a student on my university that should work on getting dirac-rtp a reality? check LScube in the next month)

To sum up, I’m quite happy with this summer of code experience and I thank Marco again for being a great person to work with.

While we are at it some more informations about ffmpeg related efforts, I eventually hacked again a bit on roundup resulting in fixing/workarounding some problems with the email integration, if you happen to have some problems on ffmpeg please give it a try.

Beside that, my work at LScube is still going on, sucking lots of my time… Lately I tried to add more packetizers to feng but w/out much success, looks like my aac implementation is a *bit* wrong, usually relooking at it after a while helps me fixing the issue (as I did for h264) I hope to have it (and many more) completed for the next release. On the client side libnemesi is still waiting for more depacketizers while Alessandro is cleaning up the network stacks, making it less quirky.

Now I could speak of gentoo related stuff, I’m trying to fix some of the programs still using the img_* interface, since it is an annoying task I waited a bit hoping upstream would adapt… No reaction so far so I’m starting with something simple as blender and then hopefully move on other ones. What sucks about the img -> sws move is that sws is less commented, has quite ugly but performant code and it’s a pain to hack on, I started to clean it up but then got sidetracked so there are still some patches waiting completion…

I guess this is a post long enough, probably I’ll add another update tomorrow.

Latex should die (or evolve a lot)

Lately I happened to not tolerate anymore the ugly dirac spec, the pdf produced is w/out a index, the font are horrible and the reason is that they made use of latex instead of something saner (docbook anyone?)

This rant isn’t about the dirac spec anyway, the content isn’t bad at all, is just the presentation.

This rant isn’t even about their usage of latex, it is pretty much correct and produces documentation even if you have an ancient tex distribution (tetex).

Now my angry words are at latex in itself since it is the root of the problem.

Latex pros:
– large library of modules, styles stuff
– large userbase
– very nice programs that makes use it less annoying (kile)

Latex cons:
– Doesn’t support truetype fonts out of box, nor lots of image formats.
– It’s default fonts are anything but beauty on screen
– the syntax is between bad and ugly
– you end up with overcomplicated systems to keep your documents in shape
– you spend more time figuring out what to use instead of using it (and the time isn’t short)
– the document build system isn’t exactly an example of clarity.

Seems that many of those issue got addressed on texlive, that sadly we don’t have in portage since few people would touch tex since it is an ugly monster.

All in all you may think that latex is good enough since there aren’t saner alternatives if you want produce a book that doesn’t look a wordprocessor printout… Well, there are nicer alternatives IMHO, one being xml markups since you can convert them with ease (almost), you may produce them using maybe quicker markups (e.g. texy), you can mix and match them (including mathml and svg in docbook isn’t difficult. Sadly there aren’t good authoring tools like kile. Would be simpler make a good authoring tool (yea, I know emacs is wonderful for xml editing) or make latex less ugly from an user and developer POV?