AK's weblog

Today I announced on the diet libc mailing list that I managed to get the PostgreSQL [[Object-relational_database|ORDBMS]] running together with diet libc. This is pretty cool, IMHO, and the first widely-used DBMS that runs with diet libc.

Do you know this typical country-side smell of cow dung? Well, yesterday evening, it was just everywhere. You could not run, you could not hide. Outside on the street, inside the restaurant, even in the hotel room. Disgusting! That's another reason just to stay in a city with no farms with cows around.

Let me think... how could a pure virtual function be called? Pure virtual function calls shouldn't even be allowed by the C++ compiler. So how do they do that...?

WordPress is really nice when it comes to coping comment spam. You can configure that postings with more than a certain number of links shall be held for moderation. I, the moderator, then can go to the overview of the pending comments, and then decide which comments shall be posted, and which shall be deleted. It even supports a bulk-edit mode, which makes deleting or approving a lot of comments at once really easy.

So, as you can see, I'm still really happy that I switched to WordPress, as it makes so many things so much easier. It's even possible to get it conforming to XHTML 1.0 and CSS without a lot of work.

I just found Apout, which is described as a "user-level simulator for UNIX a.out binaries". I had to try it immediately, and while the code needed some manual patching to get it compiled on Linux, Apout works like a charm. While Unix V7's /bin/sh shows some bug, all the stuff in /usr/games seems to work. And the great advantage compared to e.g. SIMH is that Apout doesn't hog the CPU.

Right now, I created my first WordPress plugin, wikipedia-link, that enables WordPress to support the very same style of linking Wikipedia entries like Wikipedia itself by enclosing them with \[\[ and \]\] and optionally separating the linked word from the caption using |. This is also supported for the comments, so post some comments to link to your favorite Wikipedia entries. To write \[ and \] itself, use \ to escape it.

Here it is: the WordPress CSS Style Switcher. Really neat. And for a lot of wonderful designs, have a look at the results of the WordPress CSS Style Contest.

I won't miss you! Finally, with lots of hacking, I managed to move my weblog from the obsolete b2 to WordPress. And this is how I did it:

First, I installed WordPress to /wordpress/, including the usual installation routine, including the population of the tables in the database. Then, I set the table prefix from wp_ to b2, and started wp-admin/import-b2.php. After that, I had to drop the table b2options, and rename the table wp_options to b2options by running "RENAME TABLE wp_options to b2options;". After that, I moved the old /blog/ to /blog.old/, set the weblog URL to http://synflood.at/blog in the WordPress configuration (via the WP web interface), saved that configuration, and moved /wordpress/ to /blog/. Et voila!

In the last few days, I wrote yet another POP3 daemon (I already wrote one before), based on dietlibc and libowfat and using Maildir as storage backend. Expect a release soon, at least after I did more interoperability testing. BTW: currently, the stripped binary has a size of about 23k, statically linked! What would also be nice are performance tests. While I use fork() to handle several sessions simultaneously, I also used mmap(2) to map the mail files into memory instead of read(2)ing it into memory, just to make this process faster.

Last friday, tpp 0.2 has been released. tpp now does colors, sliding in text from left, right, the bottom and even the top. A good number of these features has been developed by Nico Golde, who joined the tpp development team, and also already created tpp Debian packages.



Another feature that will be fully usable by the next release is the tpp-to-LaTeX converter. As a small example, have a look at tpp-ac-am.tpp, an example presentation that can also be found in the source distribution, and at tpp-ac-am.pdf. The PDF has been generated from tpp-ac-am.tex which has been generated from the .tpp file by the latest development version of tpp. This looks quite promising already, doesn't it?

Don't drink Mate at 10pm unless you want to go to bed around 3:30am and wake up at 7:30am.

According to this page, the following 19 bytes of not quite valid "HTML" make IE crash (yes, I just tried it, and it works):

<style></style>@;/*

As requested in one comments, here are some tpp screenshots:

• a normal tpp slide


• tpp's slide overview


• tpp's formatting capabilities demonstrated


• that's what source code looks like with tpp

Last friday I bought the "Lost dogs" album by Pearl Jam, a collection of 30 previously unreleased tracks on 2 CDs. On the first CD, the second track, there's this song, "Sad". It's definitely one of the best Pearl Jam songs ever done.



When I first listened to this song last friday, I instantly knew that I heard this song before, somewhere. After some thinking, I could even remember that I saw some video of it, when Pearl Jam were playing this song, I even have the picture of Mike McCready playing the song's intro in front of me. So, the first thing that I did was looking at the Pearl Jam Touring Band 2000 DVD (a really fine music DVD, btw!). But... nada! There was no song named "Sad" on it. Then I had a look at the Pearl Jam Mp3 files that I have in iTunes (I swear, I own all CDs to the Mp3 files!), which are quite a lot already (over 180 songs), but there is no other track named "Sad" somewhere.



So, the big question that bugs me since friday is: where do I know the song "Sad" by Pearl Jam from? Where could I have seen a live performance of it? I really hate deja vu experiences, especially when they could be real ones (i.e. that I've never seen any video and never heard it before in reality, but that this is only my imagination).

This weekend, I wrote tpp ("text presentation program"), an ncurses-based presentation tool. The idea is really simple: you write your presentation in a simple description language (similar to MagicPoint) using your favorite editor, and then display the slides on any text terminal that is supported ncurses, be it an old VT100, the Linux console w/ or w/o framebuffer or a simple xterm (or any other terminal emulator for X11).



I had the idea for tpp on my way home from Anif to Linz last friday, and as soon as I came home, I went to my computer, and started hacking it using Ruby. In the late evening, a first usable version was ready. And on saturday I made some cleanups and added a few more features. Actually, developing tpp went a lot quicker than I thought, but this is yet another example that Ruby is extremely good for rapid prototyping, and in this case, the prototype became the actual program. Or maybe not...? Rewrites of tpp in C & ncurses are gladly accepted.