olpa, OSS developer

I’ve got stuck in phpBB. I’ve just announced new anti-spam hack: Textual Confirmation. Yet another must-have for phpBB. Discussion on phpbb.com.

Seems interesting: plasTeX is a LaTeX document processing framework written entirely in Python. It currently comes bundled with an XHTML renderer (including multiple themes), as well as a way to simply dump the document to a generic form of XML. Other renderers can be added as well and are planned for future releases.

I was writing a MOD for phpBB, and at some moment I found I can’t go further without unit testing. I found it’s quite a hard task because phpBB is written without testing in mind. However, unit testing for phpBB is possible.

(more…)

At some moment, I found that I’m afraid of writing new code. The reason was simple. I wrote in PHP and, obviously, without unit testing. I got the programmer’s block as punishment. To overcome the block, I had to create tests first.

As usual, the first thing I made, was searching Usenet. And I’m astomished by the result. The search for “unit testing” in the group “comp.lang.php” generates on four (4!) pages! PHP developers suck!

(more…)

I download my mail using fetchmail. During the process, “tail -f” shows the subjects of the incoming letters. Unfortunately, most of them are unreadable, something like “=?windows-1251?B?0e/g7CDt4CBwaHBCQg==?=“. Finally, I tired of it and decided to make life better.

(more…)

I thought “use strict” is enough and didn’t try to run an application with the “-w” flag. (Don’t blame me, it was under Windows.) As result, I played ping-pong with an user trying to identify an error instead of preventing the error.

(more…)

XML tools are good when the input data is XML. And they are awful when the data is XML-like. As result, instead of using “xmllint --noent“, I had to write my own entity substitutor “entity.py”.

(more…)

In xml-dev mailing list, William Gilreath posted an preview announce of XString, an XML technology “XML as a String”. I found time to look at the paper and write comments.

(more…)

A new tool from me. Psnup2.pl puts two PostScript pages onto one page. It is similar to “psnup -2”, but
* psnup2.pl drops the margins, and
* zooms the pages as much as possible.

Recently I updated ghostscript, and it stopped working even on its own examples:

$ pwd
/usr/share/ghostscript/8.15/examples
$ ps2pdf alphabet.ps ~/a.pdf
ERROR: /invalidfont in findfont
Operand stack:
   (Palatino-Italic)   Font   (Palatino-Italic)   228176   (Palatino-
   Italic)   --nostringval--   (Palatino-Italic)   URWPalladioL-Ital
   Times-Italic   NimbusRomNo9L-ReguItal
Execution stack:
...

(more…)