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Topreader Desktop Development

The last couple of days I’ve been doing some hacking in Mono/Gtk#. A year ago I created a small patch for liferea, I wanted to create some more patches but the damn thing wouldn’t build on my ubuntu box. I asked the mailinglist but the reaction was that they hadn’t gotten a clue what could be the issue. Now it is a default installed ubuntu box, no special thingies, just apt-get install gnome-devel, that’s it.

So I had 2 options, find out why the hell the autotools was crashing or start writting my own RSS aggregator. Well stupid me chose the second option.

You might ask Why?
Well actually very simple I wanted to do some heavy dutty development to get back into the gtk libraries. As I want to join in on the tinymail development somewhere in the future …
Secondly it had been more than a month that I did any c# development. So I created a simple project in monodevelop, took the 2 defacto standard rss and atom dotnet libraries and started hacking.

Where am I now?
Well I have a TreeView on the left with my rss feeds, I have a TreeView with all the unread items and I display the unread Items in a WebControl (firefox embedded). The feeds that are in my TreeView get checked for updates every 3000 seconds. If you click an unread item it doesn’t get displayed anymore. So basic viewing capabilities are getting there. 🙂
view the screenshot

How?
If I’m not mistakend liferea didn’t use a database, I instead decided to implement it using a sqlite3 database. All the folders,channels and items are stored in it. I have to say I really was amazed by the speed of it.

What’s next?
Well a lot has to be done but what will happen in a few days is the ability to add folders and feeds from the gui.

Long term goal?
Well very simple finally get the rss aggregator I want, all the aggregators I’ve tried all had some nice features but none of them combined the ones I want. The scratch your own itch thingy 🙂

The name?
TopReader
What? TopReader?Wtf? Well since a few weeks I’m self employed and the company name is TopCoders so … 😀

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Freenx font issue

As I mentioned earlier I’m experimenting with freenx, it works great but there was one issue my fonts weren’t great, the i and the l were sometimes missing what made it difficult for reading some sentences. I set it up on another machine and this didn’t have that phenomenon so I went on an investigation.

The machine I had the issue on was my laptop, I made some alterations in the fonts to give me a nicer user experience. It seems that because of these settings the font issue appeared. It’s one stupid setting and you don’t notice it when you use it on your pc but freenx seems to have problems with it.

In the font menu
font menu
You have the subpixel smoothing (for LCD) enabled you will notice this strange behaviour if you select best shapes it will render pixel perfect 🙂

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Freenx

Yesterday after a big meeting I still had some technolust in me so I started experimenting with freenx on my ubuntu dapper box. I have to say, RDP fuc* of* 🙂

Really, If you want to use a remote desktop and are on a small bandwith uplink (I wouldn’t call 1mbit up very small) you should really check this out. I tried vnc and rdp on this connection and beleive me freenx really kicks the ass out of both of them!!

Another nice feature about freenx is the fact that you can disconnect and reconnect on another computer (a feature I tought only windows had, guess I was wrong). So no I can leave my desktop open and reconnect from almost anyware.

Even surfing usering firefox is really like network surfing (maybe even faster)

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voip fax + grandstream gxp-2000

Big day today, but more on that at a later time.

Today my grandstream gxp-2000 arrived, it’s a nice sip phone. My girlfriend was complaining that the quality of the microphones sucked and that she some times lost the connection. Not sure if this was due to her computer or network or … I’ll checkup on it.
I have to say, it’s a nice phone. I plugged it into the network et voila dhcp gave it a nice ip. From the docs I read there was a webserver built in. Logged in, configured it for 2 extensions, one as normal and one as intercom. Created 2 extensions for the 2 lines, easy as pie 🙂

Now when I call my first extension using ekiga on my laptop the telephone rings. WhenI call the second extension the speaker turns on and we have an intercom system. Very nice actually and really easy to setup!!!

Second thing is, I figured it out with gfax, really but really stupid. I was always trying to connect to my asterisk box. Only thing I had to to was connect straight to the weepee account and it send the fax for me. Because I already had a free fax receiving account I sent it to there and voila within the minute a mail with attachment as an image my sent fax.

Hmmm, I have to admit I’m a geek. But don’t worry I’m proud of it!! 😀

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Asterisk + Ekiga

Yesterday evening I finalized my home voip network. I had bought some credits from weepee. And now I can call using my trixbox and ekiga 🙂 This week my voip telephone should arrive, so then I’m fully setup.

Here’s in short what I did to get all this working

  • Purchase account
  • Download Trixbox vmware image
  • Download vmware server (with keys)
  • Boot the trixbox and configure network
  • Configure an extension for yourself to connect to
  • configure a trunk to connect to the account
  • configure an outgoing route for the provided trunk
  • configure Ekiga to connect to your trixbox

Easy, no?

Now when I want to call an outgoing number I prefix the telephone number with 66 and my trixbox knows, hey this should go to weepee and off it goes 🙂

Stay tuned for my little list of how to send faxes using the same account from weepee. It should work with gfax, but didn’t get there last night. Maybe after the weekend 🙂

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One more converted

Yesterday I had a meeting with my boss. During our last workshop I did part of my demo on ubuntu and most of the other people were really amazed at how far the linux desktop had evolved. My boss mailed me a couple of times asking more information on my linux (ubuntu).
Yesterday he told me he had installed ubuntu and kubuntu. He was really amazed as all his hardware (including wireless) worked out of the box. With windows he had to search ages for his printer drivers, he had to seperately install his wireless,… in short he was dazzled with how far linux was.
I’m proud to say I converted one more it professional to ubuntu, let’s hope the count goes up rapidly!!

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gnome fonts

In my spare time I always use gnome, but during the day I have to use microsoft. (Client Company policy) One thing that was always bizarre was the fact that in my day job my computer is running at 1200×1024 and my laptop is running 1440×900. But I always had the feeling my windows maching could display more on a smaller screen. So I started looking around in my ubuntu menu’s and I found a configuration under System -> Preferences -> fonts (It was in dutch so I’m not sure if this is the actual translation but should be something like this)

I included a before and after screenshot, just like at the amount of information that is displayed on my screen now. I’m back a happy hacker 🙂

before the update
before

after the update
after

the font menu
font menu

I updated the font size and set it to 8 instead of 10, Appearantly if you change the dpi settings you can do something similar but I don’t know the exact difference between the 2 (I now what they mean but don’t know exactly what impact they have on the system.)

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Istanbul

As I like everybody like screencasts, I fiddled with Istanbul. Seems it has some problems recording my desktop. My guess is, it’s because of my ati pci-express videocard that wasn’t supported when I configured my X. Congrats to the team of Istanbul, I like your product. It makes screencasting really simple, and It even records in Theorra. What could a guy want more 🙂 (hmmm, maybe sound?). In combination with java applet of the fluendo guys that really makes a kick ass combo for doing demo’s and tutorials. As the people over here are also giving demo’s and tutorials I’ll show them the nice features of the opensource applications and who knows maybe they’ll even buy support.

I really need to follow up on my videocard support, maybe by now it is supported and I can run Xgl without my X crashing after 5 minutes 🙂

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Eclipse Callisto

As some of you might know, there is a new version of eclipse out. Well together with that version came some other eclipse projects. One of them was BIRT (Business Intelligence And Reporting Tools) well I think it’s really amazing. If you don’t believe me checkout this screencast and tell me I’m wrong!! Actually funny as at the moment we are doing a Crystal Reports integration and I had mentioned Jasper Reports here (an java opensource reporting tool), guess they have a strong competitor on the market. Let’s hope they push eachother to the limits and the community will only benefit from it!! To bad we still are working here with Crystal Reports, believe me I’m trying to convert everybody to opensource.

UPDATE
my bad, callisto is the name of all the projects combined 🙂
END UPDATE

Totally unrelated, I’ve been very very busy the last couple of weeks. I’m trying to get my needed capital to start my own sweet BVBA or better EVBA. On saturday I hope to get the approval for renting a nice 2 bedroom appartment in Leuven. If everything goes well, I’ll be having a lot more spare time in a few months and I can finally can help some projects I like but don’t satisfy my needs at the moment. I maybe sound stupid but I always get the feeling I’m not doing enough for the oss, I’m spreading it everywhere I come, I submit bugreports, now and then a small patch nothing fancy yet. I even set myself a goal “for every company I’ll work for, I have to at least introduce 1 opensource project”. But I hope to have achieved much more in a year from now, probably one of the first projects I’m going to take a look at is Diva. If you don’t know Diva go check it out!!

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mythtv finally!!

This weekend, I wanted to setup my mythtv box, I had planned already a couple of times, but almost everytime something came up. Well this weekend, I almost locked myself in and started it using the knoppmyth cd. Peace of cake you would think!! Well actually if you know what you’re doing, yes, otherwise no!!

First I had some very strange hardware issues. The computer I wanted to run it on was a used pc I bought half a year ago. Well I put in a 180 Gig hd instead of the small one that was in there first. The strangest thing happened, the hd was primary master and the cdrom was secondary master. The freakin thing wouldn’t recognise the hd. Okay unplugged the cdrom, k now it worked. Plug it back in, and same problem not recognised!!
Okay put the cdrom on slave, hd detected, but cdrom not? :s Okay put them on the same ide hd master with slave, cdrom slave (even cable select), none got detected? Finally I tried a new ide cable for my hd, the cdrom on another cdrom and the final thing I changed was I removed the plug on my hd. It was set in master with slave (there was no master only option). And finally this worked, okay already a couple hours lost 🙁

Then first install, but I remember from our lug meeting that knoppmyths be support was very poor. So I downloaded all the scripts, to bad I was running a different version then the scripts were for. The channels.sql script dropped the channels table and the whole thing blew up (hmmm, no backup of mysql made, pffff, restart).
After some hours testing and breaking it, I came to the simplest solutions thus far. Install the knoppmyth, scan for your channels. Use the guide.xml for the tv guides and then start renaming your scanned channels to the ones the tv guide has. Now my myth box is setup, I already recorded a csi miami and temptation island show 🙂
I still have to do some reading as the shows both are an hour and are 2 Gig in size. I did find a xvid option somewhere, well that’s for another time.

A funny note, my girlfriend isn’t always interested in my it stuff, but I showed here this thing and after 5 minutes I got a list of stuff I had to record for here. 😀