Posted by George Wright
Fri, 26 May 2006 17:36:44 GMT
Since announcing that I am working on kNX this summer for the Summer of Code, I have received lots of comments from people who have been suggesting/telling me that I should be working on integrating kNX with krdc.
I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that by the time I’m finished with kNX and nxc, kNX will be nothing more than a GUI wrapper around nxc. Because of this, all the functionality will be in a (cross-platform) library and should be trivial to integrate with krdc etc. It should be pointed out that my proposal’s intention was to fix the state of open source NX clients - not to fix krdc as well (which is in serious need of UI love at the moment anyway) - and that a project could follow after I do this one to add NX functionality to krdc. However, I deem my current work as more important than krdc because as far as I am concerned, I believe that this work is a necessary prerequisite before working on krdc. I would also like to concentrate my time on polishing and ironing out problems with nxc (and hence knx) instead of trying to fix/understand krdc at the same time.
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Posted by George Wright
Wed, 24 May 2006 10:15:22 GMT
I got an email this morning from Google informing me that I have been accepted for the Google Summer of Code 2006 programme!
Congratulations! This email is being sent to inform you that your application was accepted to take part in the Summer of Code. Please check your student home page in the SoC web app at http://code.google.com/soc/student_home.html to determine which of your applications was accepted.
I shall be working on kNX and my proposal is at http://www.gwright.org.uk/proposal.txt, in case anyone is interested. If anyone has tested my current work (see my previous blog entry) then please email me as much feedback as possible. Thanks!
5 comments
Posted by George Wright
Thu, 04 May 2006 21:45:00 GMT
14:53:30 < CIA-11> gwright * r537330 knx/trunk/kdenonbeta/knx/src/ (7 files): Update kNX to use the nxc backend library (which works!)
So for the past couple of days I’ve been doing a bit of work on nxc/kNX to get them to play a bit more nicely together. I have now successfully transitioned the nxc stuff into a unified buildsystem which builds nxdriver (libXdriver), nxcompsh (libXcompsh) and nxrun together, and then installs nxdriver and nxcompsh as shared libraries on the system. Thanks to Thiago Macieira and Michael Pyne for helping me with my automake/autoconf troubles, and thanks to Fabian Franz for initiating the port to nxc.
As for kNX, it’s not very pretty at the moment. It runs, and even connects to servers. What it can’t do, though, is create NX configuration files, so you’re going to have to use the official NoMachine client to do that for the time being. It also can’t do suspend/resume, or PNG support (it’ll only connect using JPEG compression).
A quick howto for those wanting to play with it:
0) Make sure you have various NoMachine apps like nxproxy, nxssh etc under /usr/NX/bin/ (I will add these as configure checks soonish)
1) Grab nxc 0.1.1 from my site
2) Extract, run ./configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install
3) Grab kNX from SVN:
svn co -N svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdenonbeta
cd kdenonbeta
svn up knx
svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/branches/KDE/3.5/kde-common/admin
4) Compile kNX and install it: make -f Makefile.cvs && ./configure && make && make install
5) Ensure /usr/NX/lib is in your LDLIBRARYPATH, run knx, type username and password, select a configuration file from the combobox (it automatically searches in $HOME/.nx/config/*.nxs for configuration files, then adds them to the list) and connect!
Have fun!
6 comments
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 02 May 2006 22:40:54 GMT
I recently got onto the T-Mobile Flext 35 tarriff and I’ve been investigating the possibilities of data deals on T-Mobile, and thought that it may interest other people in the UK.
A few notes about Flext. First, they use an “allowance” based system so Flext 35 at £35 per month gives an allowance of “£180”, with texts charged at 10p per message, voice minutes at 20p per minute and MMS at 20p per message. It seems that data is NOT included in this allowance (which I was a touch disappointed by), so don’t try that one (I know someone who thought it was and managed to run up a £360 bill through data charges). Not only that, but calls to “special numbers” are also not included in this allowance.
However, T-Mobile have this funky Web ‘n’ Walk deal, charged at either £7.50 per month or £10 per month. I have some details from a T-Mobile spokesperson (through email) which isn’t made very clear on the site:
“The fair use policy is different depending on which plan you choose. If you choose the £7.50 web n walk it is not to be used for other activities such as modem access for computers, internet based video/audio streaming services, peer to peer file sharing, internet based video download, internet based telephony, and internet based Instant Messaging. The £10 web n walk is limited to 2gb which can be used on anything.
You can use it on 3g and you won’t need to have a different sim card, as long as you have 3g phone.”
So, in fact, it seems that with Web ‘n’ Walk at £10 per month you can use Skype. This is very cool because T-Mobile charge ridiculous fees for calls to national rate numbers. It seems T-Mobile have a fairly decent offering for those out to look for cheap mobile internet deals.
6 comments
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 02 May 2006 07:54:04 GMT
Yesterday the Summer of Code programme went live for student signup. As intended, I have now submitted my proposal which is to revamp kNX and nxc so that there’s a decent open source client for the FreeNX server. Incidentally, if you haven’t tried out FreeNX, take a look - it’s seriously cool stuff.
The plan is to basically sort out and debug the nxc client library stuff, then rewrite parts of kNX so that it uses nxc as its backend instead of its own (completely non-functioning) backend. On top of this, a configuration interface will be made so that we can configure the NX sessions ourselves instead of using the binary client to generate the profile. :)
All in all it’s going to be a pretty fun project so stay tuned.
4 comments
Posted by George Wright
Fri, 28 Apr 2006 10:06:46 GMT
Recently I’ve heard Google come under a lot of fire for buckling to pressure from the Chinese government to filter results on their Chinese search engine. People say “Google is evil, they’re filtering results, I’m never using Google again”. The problem is, though, that the Chinese government would have probably blocked Google from being accessed if they didn’t comply, and in my opinion, some information is better than no information. For example, the wikipedia is blocked in China, and I’m sure Google would have been too if they didn’t comply. It’s not Google’s fault that the PRC feels the need to restrict access to information, so don’t blame them for it.
Of course, my take on the whole situation may not be to your liking, but that’s what free speech is for. Google provides a good service, and I use it.
12 comments
Posted by George Wright
Thu, 27 Apr 2006 08:47:51 GMT
It’s contract renewing time this year again, and I managed to get a nice deal on T-Mobile which gave me a Motorola SLVR L7 phone. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting it to be too good, but it’s actually better than I had thought. It was unlocked (which is always a bonus), and jmIRC runs quite well on it. IRC on the phone is really quite usable, and coupled with Orange’s GPRS deal (£1 a day for unlimited GPRS usage, bought only on the days you want it, on their pay as you go sims only), it makes for a useful travel companion.
Not only that, but the phone also acts as a generic USB card reader for the microSD cards it takes, which is unbelievably cool of Motorola to do (no silly drivers needed!).
As for the Summer of Code, I’ve started to sort out my development environment again so that I can start working on the project in my proposal. I figured as I’ve got exams during most of May/June (which are pretty important as they determine which university I go to), I’d better start working on it now and getting in front while I can. For now, though, it remains top secret. :) Let’s just say it’s a KDE project.
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Posted by George Wright
Wed, 26 Apr 2006 19:46:28 GMT
Well, I finally got round to upgrading serendipity and in the process I did some exploring in the configuration panel and noticed that you can setup serious spam filtering. It’s very good, actually. Serendipity was also astoundingly easy to upgrade - just extract new tarball over the old directory and hit “upgrade” in the web interface. Kudos to the s9y devels!
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Posted by George Wright
Tue, 25 Apr 2006 08:10:47 GMT
So, it seems that spammers have found my blog. They’ve been posting for a while on here, ranting on about some drug called ‘phentermine’ or some other rubbish, but luckily they’ve been limited to a couple of instances a month or so. In the last week, I’ve been getting 50+ comments posted every day telling me about this wonder drug and also telling me to go play online poker.
In this respect, Serendipity is very good because it generally doesn’t let spam comments through (it’s caught all but about 5 of the spam comments, and hasn’t had a single false positive), but what is annoying is that it sends me an email for each and every comment posted saying that it’s dodgy and requires my attention. What’s slightly more annoying, though, is that spammers managed to spam me with trackbacks and slipped through the filter; deleting the trackbacks from the comments section seemed to get rid of them, but Serendipity doesn’t want to update the trackback count back down to 0 for my last entry. Time to upgrade I think.
If anyone knows of a more effective remedy for this spam please let me know how to deal with it. I am starting to get a sizeable volume of the stuff (at least 10 messages a day now, up from about 10 messages a month), and so I’m a little irate.
9 comments
Posted by George Wright
Thu, 20 Apr 2006 22:25:30 GMT
So here I am, back at school, for the final term before I go to university. This term is going to be fairly hectic; I’ve got lots of exams to do (which will take up the bulk of the term), and on top of that, I’m applying for the Google Summer of Code programme. I am finally old enough - I was fairly annoyed that I wasn’t old enough last year (age limit is 18). Hopefully I’ll get on it this year though; I could do with $4500 if anything! Because of the amount of work this term, I actually took the plunge and decided not to take my desktop to school. It’s a first for me, but probably worth it in the long run.
In other news, Taiwan was quite good. It was really hot - hotter than Malaga was last year, and they haven’t even hit summer yet! I can’t really get used to the Taiwan lifestyle though; it seems a bit unorganised/hectic for my liking. However, I did manage to pick up a nice cheap ThinkPad X40 whilst over there (hooray for buying equipment after it’s been phased out of the market), which will be the machine I will be taking to Ireland for aKademy 06!
Speaking of aKademy, it looks to be quite good this year. I, for one, am glad that our overlords voted for an English-speaking country to hold it in (although I may have trouble adjusting to the Irish accent!). I’m hoping that this year there will be a strong turnout from KDE-GB seeing as we’re right next door to Ireland, and on that note, is anyone planning to drive to Ireland and willing to take some people with them? ;)
Anyway, back to the grindstone to do some more work.
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