new Blah<Dan>().list();

my xinf project has taken a new turn with iteration3.

In short words the idea is to support basic SVG (likely the target will be SVG-Tiny 1.2 plus some CSS) with the Xinfony API instead of the full SVG/DOM APIs.

Anyway, i’ve gotten back to automated testing. Here are some results, to be taken with at least two grains of salt: a) the results (green/red) are sometimes wrong, pixel-by-pixel comparison doesn’t fit the official tests too well. and b) xinfinity is not anti-aliased, even though it looks good in the test results. that is because they are scaled down to 160×120, the size of the official reference images)

Some while ago, i bought a projector (aka “beamer”). The hard requirements were a >=1024×768 resolution and rather wide angle. Digital DVI input and network control were considered nice.

My choice fell on the Eiki LC-XB27N as it fit the bill at an acceptable price (EUR1500+VAT from these nice people, while it still seems to cost 2K “on the street”), features a well-equipped backpanel, is nicely bright, and, as i’ve finally figured out, supports both PJLINK (which i haven’t really tried, but it answers with ‘PJLINK’ on TCP port 4352) and it’s own simple TCP-based protocol.

I can now turn the baby on and off (and ask if it is running), monitor temperatures and lamp/projector usage hours and, with only a teeny little more work if i need it, switch inputs. Theoretically i could control color, contrast, speaker volume and such but i don’t really have use for that so i haven’t tried.

My findings about the protocol and a simple haXe/neko commandline control tool are here.

bought a car, a Volvo 245GT.
Yes, it’s an environment killer (”Emissionsklasse nicht bekannt”). My excuse is that it’s a temporary thing: for the next year or two, i’ll be travelling a lot, and taking a certain biggish thing with me (that you will read about soon), and i can’t really afford a new car. Last week, i’ve moved out of my beloved Weimar and put all my stuff to my parent’s place (feels rather strange at the age of 30!), where i now “officially” live.

I gave it a good scrub and polish, and fixed some minor things, now it *looks* fine . The motor inside and car underside don’t look this good, though. It passed TÜV allright, but there’s at least one major nest of rust that worries me a little.

It’s a Brit, BTW. Had to exchange the headlamp diffusors to have it pass in continental Europe. Sitting on the right side of the car is not really an issue though once you get used to changing gears with your left hand. The only real annoyance is that it’s considerably harder to peek by a truck you might want to overtake…

the IBM support for ThinkPad warranty issues amazes me again. I had an issue a few month ago that my fan was getting very loud- had to send in the whole machine, they exchanged the fan assembly with a new one. Took no longer than 5 working days until i had the machine back.

Now, my DVD writer thingie failed. That is, it would read only at 0.3x speed and refuse to write DVDs. I called them yesterday afternoon (around 1400). Today, UPS brought me a new drive, including a return sticker to send off the old one.

This is after 2.7 years- my warranty will expire soon (although it seems to be extended for the replaced parts- which now includes my main board, fan assembly, screen, keyboard and DVD drive :). I surely hope that lenovo keeps those service centers!

my affection for one certain VM doesn’t keep me from having a look at contenders. but tamarin’s “avmplus” interpreter (Adobe contributed the VM/runtime that flash player is based on to mozilla) wouldn’t build. here’s what i basically had to do:

• # mkdir tamarin; cd tamarin
# cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot -z3 co mozilla/js/tamarin
# cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot -z3 co mozilla/modules/zlib
# cd mozilla/js/tamarin
• edit “Makefile”, add “EXTRA_LIBS += -lz” in line 100 (below ZLIB_OBJS), to link against your system’s zlib.
• if you (like me) are still using gcc3, edit “makecommon” in both mozilla/js/tamarin/platform/unix and mozilla/modules/zlib , and remove all references to -Wno-invalid-offsetof (that will give you even more warnings than usual, but otherwise shouldn’t matter)
• # make
# ./avmplus
avmplus shell 1.0 build d684
...


don’t worry, this blog won’t turn into a ‘look what i found in the internet!’-one. but i have to let you know about the anti-telemarketing counterscript. imagine how much you can brighten the dull callcenter days of the ones slaving their life hassling you..

finally a new swfmill release!

0.2.12 includes a year of incremental fixes and improvements, and some contributions from other people. I hope that now swfmill is back on track to becoming a really stable tool. I feared, with no official releases, people might start to think swfmill is dead– while it’s really just stabilizing. This should teach them ;)

dan@y ~ $ glxgears
10645 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2128.818 FPS
dan@y ~ $ glxinfo | grep render
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R300 20060815 AGP 8x x86/MMX/SSE2 TCL

this (russian) guide proved the best quickstart to all the other howtos out there trying to help you get the open-source radeon drivers (aka Mesa DRI radeon) working. for the uninitiated: with a newer ATI graphics card on linux, you have the choice of either ATI’s proprietary (closed-source) driver (fglrx), which is crap, or the mentioned mesa opensource drivers, which are “experimental” and only recently support 3d accelleration for “newer” cards (>9000 or so).

anyhow, the last trick after upgrading to xorg 7.1 and getting ~x86 x11-drm was to link /usr/lib/dri/* to /usr/lib/xorg/modules/dri/, for whatever reason my gentoo requires this. i found out thanks to “LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo”.

so, sacrificing my working TV-Out (sadly), I now run on mesa-dri. hooray, no more flickering (ATI: please read about “LVDSProbePLL” in “man radeon”. my t42p has been flickering badly a lot, getting worse with later drivers), no more hangups when trying to switch to the text console, and even suspend-to-disk (with resume!).

# cat /sys/devices/pnp0/00\:06/resources
state = active
io 0x388-0x38b
io 0x220-0x233
io 0x530-0x537
irq 5
dma 1
dma 0

i finally discovered that linux now supports the PlugnPlay “standard” for the long-deprecated ISA bus well. as a result, and with a little help i managed to find the settings for the ISA sound card on my old baby (a thinkpad 600), and found that i’ll have to disable “QuickBoot” in it’s wonderfully quirky BIOS- and modprobe cs4232 io=0×530 irq=5 dma=1 dma2=0 and Swoooosh! Sound!

seems like the old thing is going to be of some use soon again.

them spammers are unbelievable. do they really generate so much money from selling ‘anti-obesity pills’ to justify sending my server thousands of spam mails every day?

to ensure continuous service, i had to move my own email and that of a spam-ridden customer to my other server, which handles spam a little better– just to take the load off the first. i also finally invented a little EMail-DeObfuscator in haxe/js to finally have “proper” email links on my websites again. As soon as i found out how to do autoresponders with postfix, i’ll quit my old f3c.com address, because it is inevitably lost to spam at least for the next 5 years…