Bloggy

At some point soon I’ll be away again. So, I’ve made a new release of kdesvn-build so that people not tracking the trunk version of it can still use the nifty asynchronous download/build feature. (Sorry if the output still seems buggier, you can disable using –no-async if you don’t like it).

If I haven’t been very communicative recently I apologize, but I’ve been really busy. So stay safe and I’ll be back soon.

Posted by mpyne under Personal & kdesvn-build | 1 Comment »

So at long last the first release in the KDE 4 series, KDE 4.0 has been released.

A couple of days after they tagged 4.0 I switched to using KDE 4 as my working desktop. (btw, isn’t it odd that the tag name is 4.0.0 if the release was called 4.0?)

It was remarkably more stable and usable than it had been just 4 or so weeks before when I had tried it last. I managed to fix a couple of JuK bugs (one very minor, another a crash) before 4.0.0 was tagged. Unfortunately I didn’t get time to do nearly enough testing so JuK as shipped with 4.0 has several bugs which are already fixed, including:

• Allow JuK to load the playlists and cache for KDE 3’s JuK (so you’ll need to wait for 4.0.1 to load your old collection. Sorry. :( )
• Correctly save the collection list after running JuK for the first time (so you’ll need to wait for 4.0.1 to save your new collection. Sorry. :( )
• JuK files in 4.0 will not be compatible with 4.0.1 due to the bug that prevented loading 3.5 data. But if JuK fails to load the files it will try again in a mode that should allow 4.0 files to load, so fret not.
• Some icons that used to show up had their names changed and I didn’t update JuK. Fixed in 4.0.1 and greater.
• I fixed a bug causing the Play Queue to show up twice on startup, and it was pretty random as to whether JuK would save whether you wanted the Play Queue shown or not on shutdown.
• The track announcement popup is pretty much completely hosed in JuK. I would disable it until 4.0.1, which has bugfixes for cover icon size, and track popup positioning.
• I fixed a bug where the list of playlist columns you wanted visible was not saved properly.

All of these issues are fixed in the 4.0 branch (what will be 4.0.1) and in trunk (4.1). There is still a bug where the History Playlist doesn’t have the extra “Time” column that it is supposed to have (and I’m not sure why it doesn’t). And of course JuK is still a little rough around the edges. But it is good enough for daily use I think even though the underlying code could probably still use some porting love on my part.

If you use kdesvn-build then it is possible to build the specific 4.0 release (using the tag 4.0.0 option pretty much everywhere) but I would recommend building the 4.0 branch instead if you’re going to be going to the trouble of using kdesvn-build. Especially since from what I under Gary L. Greene will be porting Konstruct to work with KDE 4 tarballs. Tarballs are mirrorable and put much much less load on our SVN servers. :)

Also I plan on pushing out the next kdesvn-build release at some point soon. kdesvn-build in /trunk supports downloading module updates while building which can be an impressive speedup. It introduces a few (minor) bugs which I may not have time to fix before I must release it or wait but I think the net benefits will be worth it.

Back to KDE 4 though, I wasn’t sure if I liked kickoff KRunner (the new Alt-F2 Run Dialog) but when I went to try and launch System Settings, as soon as I typed “system” it noticed what I was trying to type and brought up an entry to launch that program. Very helpful.

(Incidentally the reason I was doing that was to test switching cursor themes. I heard that in KDE 4.0 it worked without requiring a reboot of the X Server, and it worked for me so that’s pretty cool.)

So congrats to all the developers, testers, translators, artists, bug wranglers, marketers (I guess we have those now ;) and everyone else who worked so hard to pull of the next major release of KDE. I’ll try to keep doing my part (time permitting unfortunately).

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Programming & kdesvn-build | 3 Comments »

I’ve started on work to implement a feature requested in bug 109619. Namely, to allow kdesvn-build to start the build process as soon as the first module has been updated from subversion and then to run the two updates in parallel as much as possible.

It’s harder to do than it sounds at first but I think I have something working. If you try it out (latest kdesvn-build from trunk/KDE/kdesdk/scripts) and it’s broken for you please let me know.

Also some KMail/Kontact tips for you: I don’t know why but I was under the impression that the “Mark Thread As->” feature required you to click on the root email of the thread in question. That’s not the case, any message in the thread will cause the whole thread to have the desired attribute applied. Also, if you ever get messages in your inbox that simply refuse to go away then you may have a bad message folder cache. At least for Maildir type accounts. In that case, shut down Kontact and KMail (including from the system tray), go to your Maildir folder (mine was ~/Mail) and look for hidden files of the type .folderName.index* (I had .inbox.index, .inbox.index.ids, and .inbox.index.sorted in mine).

RENAME these files to something else (I moved them to a backup directory), and then restart Kontact. It may take a couple of seconds to rescan your folder (although it was near instantaneous on my system) and then you should have your folder corrected with all the undeletable messages gone.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Useful Tricks & kdesvn-build | 3 Comments »

Back from my last patrol. Now I’m close to being fully qualified. That will be nice to finally achieve.

I had been contacted by a representative of Packt Publishing before I left, who had read my article dealing with some QMail administration issues. They had a new book out, QMail Quickstarter by Kyle Wheeler and were wanting to know if I could review it.

I agreed to do so, with the proviso that it was unlikely they’d be able to get the book to me in time. I was right. :-). However I’ve taken some time to read it and think I can get a decent, if belated, review. Note: The review copy of the book was provided to me free of charge, for those who are concerned about that sort of thing.

The book is a relatively short affair, which bills itself as an easy to follow guide that can get you up and running quickly using QMail. It is certainly true as far as this is concerned. Even with the standard material at the beginning describing the book layout, what QMail is, blah blah blah you can be issuing commands to start the installation by about page 6 or so. After you have QMail installed the author describes how to configure QMail, and goes more in depth on the actual operation of QMail. He also demonstrates his knowledge of the resources available to the QMail community with his sampling of commonly-encountered problems (and solutions) and his descriptions of available patches for QMail. This includes patches to QMail to allow for better filtering when receiving messages over SMTP, patches to provide SPF and DomainKeys support, and recipient validation patches to help prevent “joe-jobs“.

There are, of course, several areas where the book comes up short:

• The installation and configuration steps are well done overall with a procedure to follow that will lead you to a configured and working qmail installation. However, although several tricky points of concern are addressed (including build fixes for glibc > 2.3.1 and the well-known qmail prohibition on delivering to root), there’s not a lot of detail on what to do if something goes wrong. This is a minor point given that it’s a quickstarter guide and some knowledge of UNIX and Google use needs to be assumed implicitly.
• Also, no mention is made of using distribution-provided packages. My QMail is the distribution provided one and the book works fine against it. However many distributions will apply patches to the QMail installation and it may be useful for the reader to know if they can use the distribution QMail and if so, to warn them that it may be already patched.
• Speaking of patches, although they are often referenced, and the author does a very good job of explaining why they are (and are not) useful, he doesn’t go into a ton of detail on how to actually use them. If you follow the directions from the beginning you’ll likely have to recompile QMail at least one time as you’ll have it installed and mostly working before you realize that you want to install a patch.
• And finally, just as an overall point the author is kind of hit and miss on providing procedures to do some of the neat things he references from about the middle of the book on. For example, he gives instructions on how to authenticate POP3 communications using checkpassword. The very next section describes webmail without so much as an appropriate program to look at. Likewise for DomainKeys (which have examples detailing how to use them) and SPF (which is described, including its weaknesses but without implementation help).

The book however has a lot to recommend it:

• If you are someone who learns better from diagrams then you will like this book. It includes diagrams on the email flow of a qmail installation, including which portions are root, which portions share the same protection, etc. This diagram in particular makes the entire system much easier to understand, and makes it easy to pick out where to add filter programs (i.e. for virus scanning, user validation) or what you’d need to change/patch to add support for new features.
• The included diagram/flowchart on virtual domains is also very useful although I don’t use virtual domains.
• The book is filled with little tips, gotchas, and other notable things that you may miss if you’re not paying attention on your initial read-through (for instance, what happens to mail being delivered to an address with an empty alias file, or the headers qmail-inject uses to guess recipients and senders). I almost had wished they were more obvious but the book is a short read without much fluff so you owe it to yourself to just read through it.
• The book covers the stuff that needs covered, like config file syntax, command syntax, how to use tcpserver and svscan for those going the whole DJB way, etc. Although the author may not spell out the most useful situations he covers enough between the examples and diagrams that it shouldn’t be hard to add that one feature you want (especially if you already have the program and you just need to place to plug it in).
• He covers enough material in the book to at least glance on such topics as: .qmail/.forward files, aliases and defined users, QMTP, virtual domains, vpopmail, IMAP, Spam and virus filtering, encryption, mailing lists, logging, log analysis, and optimization techniques.

The final verdict? It depends on what you need. It is $25, which although cheap for a computer book is probably slightly more expensive than its size would have you believe. However if you are new to QMail then you should get this book as you will save enough time overall to be worth the $25. If you are already familiar with QMail and have a working installation then the book could be useful as a reference but you’ll probably be OK with Google and the man pages you already have.

Also of note: kdesvn-build has been updated to version 1.5. If you haven’t already removed kdeaddons from your .kdesvn-buildrc you probably should as it’s gone from SVN. Likewise with kdenonbeta (1.5 has fixed unsermake support to deal with the new layout). Other than that there’s not a lot of major new stuff in the latest release.

Posted by mpyne under Book Review & KDE & kdesvn-build | 1 Comment »

I’ve released kdesvn-build 1.4 just now. It includes a couple of minor bugfixes, the default options and modules have been revised, and now kdesvn-build supports using the KDE FTP Subversion nightly snapshots when checking out trunk KDE modules. (Thanks to dirk for fixing the FTP mirror script to support kdesvn-build).

In other news I’m back from riding with a different boat to augment my qualifications since I was let off of my last patrol early due to my son being born premature. I ended up going back to work basically as soon as I got back so I’m still catching up on my TODO list (both work and home) but things are progressing.

But anyways, it’s 2 hours past my bedtime so I’m off. :)

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Navy & kdesvn-build | No Comments »

I think I’ve finally implemented all of the features that mornfall and
berkus have suggested, with the exception of separate compilation and linking,
since that seems to be impossible.

So, I update the entry on
kde-apps.org, and when the content page comes back up, what do I see? This is a
screenshot of what I saw. If I were a superstitious man I’d be nervous
right now.

Hopefully nothing bad turns out with this release, Perl has given me enough
problems that I’ve been seriously pondering how to introduce a testing
framework into the script. That would be nice, since I already use a
packaging script for the program, I could just force the script to run all the
tests before doing any of the packaging.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Screenshots & kdesvn-build | 1 Comment »

Hmm, been a few days since I’ve posted a blog. Been sorta busy myself,
between the coding I’ve been doing and real life.

For instance, I’ve been going to the bowling alley with my wife much more
often now than we used to. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my score has improved in
the process. It used to be a very big deal if I broke 100 points in a single
game, but now I’ve been breaking that mark pretty routinely. Just 2 weeks ago
I scored a personal best of 159, and then matched that score this past
weekend. So it looks like practice can help even the most hopeless bowler.
:-)

Also, I’ve finally been able to get Unreal Tournament 2004 to play halfway
decent on my computer thanks to the latest ATI proprietary drivers. I really
wish there were good open-source drivers for the Radeon 9600, but at least I
can shutdown the X Server now and still be able to use the ATI drivers.

As far as coding goes, I haven’t worked on JuK for a few days. I added a
bunch of things to my code base all at once, and now I’m trying to decide if I
want to split it up into separate patches, or just submit the whole deal to
Scott for some more review.

What I have been working on lately, thanks to mornfall and berkus,
is my own program, kdecvs-build, which
has been the recipient of a lot of work from myself over the past few days
thanks to feature requests and bug reports from them, along with greater
testing from myself. I’m still adding a lot of features, but hopefully soon
I’ll have the code stabilized and then I can concentrate on improving the
documentation and working on bug fixes. As it stands now I’ve been using to
build KDE from CVS every night for the past few months.

Anyways, it’s bedtime for me.

Posted by mpyne under Personal & kdesvn-build | No Comments »

Fixed a weird error in my build script just now, which was preventing
kdepim from compiling. Of course, I had let kdepim sit there not compiling
for about 2 weeks or so, wondering what it was the coders could be smoking.
:-(

Other than that, my build script seems pretty stable. I’d like it to make
a symlink to the latest log directory to make scanning for errors easier,
which I’ll probably implement after working on drag-and-drop retagging
for JuK.

But first, I’m hungry. It looks like dinner tonight will be Oreos dipped
in milk. :-)

Posted by mpyne under Personal & kdesvn-build | No Comments »