olpa, OSS developer

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) allows developers to use the Java programming language to build no-compromise AJAX applications. After announcing my project in its discussion group, I got a reasonable question: “Can you explain how this could be used within the GWT client code?”

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I’ve announced Generative XPath in few places. This entry is to assist tracking responses. xml-dev | comp.lang.xml | Google Web Toolkit | google-ajax-discuss | comp.lang.scheme(.lisp) | ssax-sxml.

From “Poor Man’s Trackback“:

$ curl -d url=[my entry's URL] [trackback URL]

You can also specify the title, excerpt, and blog_name using additional -d parameters.

All blogging tips recommend to have the full RSS feeds. To my unpleasant surprise, I found that my feeds are partial, disrespecting the option “Full text” is set. The explanation is simple.

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Many conferences create and share the list off all the participants. Before, I had a problem: I was not able to make an use of this list, and was not able to through it away (too valuable resource). And now I know what to do. I scan the list, find those who communicated with me, and create connections on linkedin. Fine. By the way, here is my profile.

Installation instructions of many WordPress plugin contains recommendation to add something like this to a theme:

<?php tla_ads(); ?> 

Actually, the Right Way is:

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After lots of trials and errors, found: to capture from webcam:

spcaview

To get a video:

mencoder -fps 6 tv:// -tv driver=v4l:width=320:height=240:\
fps=6:device=/dev/video0:hue=-40:saturation=-40:contrast=-40 \
-ovc lavc -o test.mpg

To view the result:

mplayer -fps 3 test.mpg

I still have to find how to set correct fps on input and output, and to tune brightness parameters.

After spending a lot of time to make sound working, I found how to create /dev/dsp. In my case (00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02)), it’s just:

modprobe snd-hda-intel

Based on experience of XML Prague 2007 and GTTSE’2007, I’ve updated conference checklist. The main addition is the section “before departure” and especially the item “switch off all the alarm clocks”.

For a few days, smtp.gmail.com has a bad SSL certificate. As result, some well-behaved mail clients and transfer agents can’t send mail to and from GMail. Quite possible, it’s the answer for a report that messages from HotMail to GMail are not delivered.

I have a program which is an example of usability nightmare. It’s easier to create data in Excel and somehow migrate them to that program. Unfortunately, the only access to data is through GUI.

Well, I decided to find some automation tool for GUI testing, with Python as a scripting language. The need of Python is essential, because I don’t want to learn yet another scripting language, especially if it is claimed to be user-friendly.

The first try was TestComplete, but the license costs too much for me ($600), therefore I didn’t even consider it. Then I skipped several tools because of unknown scripting languages. Finally, I found something promising: Ranorex.

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Recently I started a new blog “Spam Bots and CAPTCHAs” (will be announced later). I plan to have many authors on this blog, therefore I disliked that the blog postings were not annotated by the author names. After some investigations, I found that it was the default WordPress behaviour. The fix was simple.

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First, I was going to increment a string using this construction:

s = s + "xx...xxx"

s = "%sxx...xxx" % (s, ...)

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