Software patents in the EU

Saturday, May 8th, 2004

Against it? Sign here.

XSLT 2.0 III

Friday, May 7th, 2004

Yes! Part 3 of the excerpt on the XSLT 2.0 book.

RPM Packages

Thursday, May 6th, 2004

DevChannel has a link to an article on Linux Magazine about RPM package creation. The article is more of a plug for the package format than an unbiased introduction. But it’s interesting non the less. I’ve been working on a new build enviroment which will also support creating RPM’s, so this article was posted at just the right time.

XSLT 2.0 II

Wednesday, May 5th, 2004

Part two of the XSLT excerpt from the book “XSLT 2.0 Web Development” is out on DevChannel.

XSLT 2.0

Monday, May 3rd, 2004

OSDN’s DevChannel is carrying an excerpt on XSLT 2.0 from the book “XSLT 2.0 Web Development“.

The article discussing some of the new things in XSLT 2.0. Look promissing. Of course you can always check out the XSLT 2.0 standard at w3.org to see what’s changed.

WTP v1.0

Sunday, May 2nd, 2004

Well, after almost exactelly two years, the WTP project is finally finished, stable and (as far as I know) bug-free. So I released version 1.0.

Changes include some small bugfixes and tests with win32 FTP servers (which seemed to work straigt away).

Now Murphy’s law should be kicking in, and people will suddenly start reporting all kinds of bugs.

Debian Social Contract amendments

Tuesday, April 27th, 2004

There has been a vote on an amendment to the Debian Social Contract. The amdendment extends the non-free policy of Debian to cover not only software but just about everything about Debian. Where in the past documents and things such as firmware where apparentely allowed in the main archive even if they were not free (as in freedom), in the future this will not be allowed anymore.

The voting came out in favour of adopting the new amendment. Therefor Debian will be removing all non-free non-software elements from the main archive and move them to the non-free (or contrib?) archive. Chances are that this process will greatly delay the next stable release of Debian: Sarge.

Although I thought that Debian would completely drop the non-free archive, it seems that they will continue providing non-free to the masses. Like before, the non-free archive will not be an official part of Debian GNU/Linux.

Old page fading out

Sunday, April 25th, 2004

Well, my old site is finally being faded out. Since of now visitors to the old site will be automatically redirected to this site.

Since some of the stuff on the old website hasn’t been (and will not be) transferred to this site, some things might be missing. If you are looking for something on the old site which seems to have disappeared, please contact me and we’ll see what we can do about it.

New building environment

Saturday, April 24th, 2004

Since thursday I’ve been working on creating a rather nice new building environment for my projects. The building environment will be used for automatic compilation of sourcecode and manuals and uploading to the proper webspaces.

My old environment was nice, but is now falling a bit behind. It can’t really handle building debian/rpm packages and manuals. Everything is tied together with rather hackish perl and bash scripts. This, in itself, isn’t such a bad thing, but they’re a bit too custom and don’t adapt well to new situations. The new building process should be somewhat better.

The new enviroment will consist of a bunch of generic and custom (per project) shell scripts. Everything will be pretty independant of the other scripts which will hopefully make things more adaptable. The scripts will help me automate some tasks like:

• Leaching source from CVS and preparing it for packaging
• Building source, binary, debian and rpm packages
• Compile User and Developers manuals from DocBook SGML/XML
• Create manual pages
• Uploading/distributing the new packages and docs to the proper project-page
• Perhaps even: Automatic announcements on maillinglists, project-pages, my homepage and freshmeat

I’m currently working on mapping out my current build environment and thinking about how I will make everything work seamlessly enough for it to remain flexible. Some stand-alone scripts are already finished, like a enhanced Search and Replace script for putting version numbers and contact information in place.

I almost forgot how much fun Bash scripting is. I’m still amazed at the fact that the concept of glueing together programs with nothing more than piping and redirection of output can become such a powerfull tool. There isn’t much that can’t be handled using shellscripting. Some things won’t be pretty though ;-)

Reminds of a project I had to perform during my eduction. We wrote a E-learning platform with a MySQL backend in Bash scripting. Ugly, but it worked. Pretty cool hacky stuff.

Nimf v1.1 in my dreams!

Wednesday, April 21st, 2004

Shit, shit, shit!

I was just trying to build some debian packages for Nimf and it started complaining about conflicting version numbers.. Only then did I notice a terrible mistake:

I accidentilly released Nimf v0.1.1 as v1.1! Ooh, the pain, the horror! I’m sorry people, but I really don’t write code that fast.

The problem has been corrected. I hope no repository sites took over the wrong package.