Log

From tomorrow (Aug 26) until Sept 7th, I'll be on vacation. We (Wouter and me) will be traveling around Europe for 10 days by car. We have no idea where we're going. No initial direction planned, no accomodations planned, nothing. We'll just have to see where we end up.

So, until I return I will not be available. Out of office. I won't respond to e-mail, irc, msn, yahoo, jabber, icq or my cellphone. See ya!

Uche Ogbuji (remember that name. If you ever run into anything having to do with XML you'll see his name popping up everywhere) writes on his O'Reilly developers weblog:

"I think the most pervasive problem in XML adoption is ingorance and even wilful sabotage of the international foundation on which XML is built. In several recent incidents, both in my consulting work and in my OSS/community work I have come across systems that ignore or break XML's Unicode character model.
I've almost grown tired of saying it, but it is worth saying until I've worked through my very last nerve: the single most important aspect of XML is its character model. Ditch XML and use something else before you mess with that. A tremendous amount of damage is done by people who can't see past the pointy brackets as the point of XML."

Then he points us to this article, which is quite an interesting read. I haven't learned anything new that can be applied by me straight away, but the article is a nice introduction into internationalisation (i18n) nonetheless.

A reintroduction to XML with an emphasis on character encoding

Just the other day I realised something: CVS Sucks. I mean, you can't even move a file around in the repository! How dumb is that? It also has all kinds of problems with empty directories and other file problems in general. So I decided to do some research into Subversion.

And it just so happens that today there's an article on MacDevCenter about Subversion. The article's title is "Making the jump to Subversion", but it's not really about converting, just about Subversion usage.

For a little info on converting from CVS to Subversion check out this page.

It might appear that I haven't been working on any projects for a while, but looks are deceiving. A little while ago I announced that I would be diving into GTK 2.0 in preperation of the porting of Nimf to GTK 2. I started with creating some simple lists and, before I knew it, I was working on a new project.

The new project will be a replacement for quicklist. While quicklist is a nice application, it is lacking some features which I would like to see. Next to that, the interface is terrible. For one, the keys are all wrong (copy/paste is alt-c, alt-v). At first I decided to work on the source of quicklist, but it's quite old (still uses GTK 1.x).

So was born: Listpatron. (I'm not sure if that'll be the final name). Since it will probably be a while before it's released unto the world, here's a little sneak-preview:

Import dialog
Imported list of books
Editing and menu

Update : I've just noticed that the official website of quicklist (www.quicklist.org) is for sale. The application hasn't been updated in quite a while, but was still available from the website. Now it's gone. There are still the Debian Binaries and sources, but the original source is gone. I've tried to find it somewhere else on the internet but couldn't.

I've created a levelset of sokoban levels for XSok, the sokoban game for Linux. The levels are a copy of the Sokoban levels in Nethack. I use them to practice a level before playing it live in Nethack. (If you make a single mistake in the Nethack Sokoban levels there's a chance you can't finish the levels).

Finally, there's a gnome application repository:

http://www.gnomefiles.org

During my programming years, I've noticed that Developers documentation adhears to a couple of laws:

• If you write documentation, they don't read it.
• If you don't write documentation, they complain about it.
• If you update documentation regularly, they don't.
• If you don't update documentation, they complain about it.
• If you read other people's documentation and you follow it, it is out of date and they complain about it.
• If you don't read other people's documentation, they'll complain about it even though the documentation was out of date and wouldn't have helped anyway.

These laws are unescapable. I'm sorry.

I saw a trailer for the movie I, Robot and was disgusted.

The movie's supposed to be based on a book by Isaac Asimov. Asimov was one of the best science fiction witers of our time and it was he who conjured up the Three laws of robotics. These three laws were used in his fiction books and have been used by many others since then. I'm sure that by the time we invent A.I, these rules will be applied to it.

Unfortunatelly the trailer for the movie made 'I, Robot' look like a complete travesty. I haven't even seen the movie yet and already it appeared to me that this was the worst book-based-movie ever. Nothing more than a Yet Another Action Movie with a dumbed-down story because, well, the audience should have to really think about anything, should they? They're just ignorant little consumers.

Maddox agrees.

I'm hereby banning this movie without even having seen it, just because maddox says so.

I hate hollywood.