I've decided to retire this blog — I don't really see myself updating it any time soon, and haven't for over two years anyway. I intend to leave the content on-line for the forseeable future, but have converted it to a static site. As a result, dynamic things like search and comments aren't really going to work.

You can find me on Twitter or on Google+ if you like. Alternatively, I'm usually on IRC as LawnGnome on Freenode.

Thanks for reading!

Archive for the 'Dubnium' Category

You gits

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

I’ve been looking at GitHub more and more of late. Initially, it was just because lots of people were using it, but since I’ve been using Git on my own server for my own projects for a while anyway, it started making sense to upload some bits and pieces to it to save me worrying quite so much about trivial things like backups. Plus, GitHub seems like a pretty good home for those random bits of code that you tend to churn out from time to time as a developer.

So, I’ve spent the last couple of days pushing a few things up. It’s not going to completely replace my need to have some Git repositories on my own server (there are things that aren’t open source or aren’t for public consumption, like my resume — although making that open source could be entertaining), but it’s definitely handy for other things.

Obviously, my user page is going to cover the full list of things at any given time, but the projects I’ve uploaded so far include:

  • CineJS — the Javascript video processing library originally introduced at LCA 2010 and in an earlier blog post. There are a couple of releases probably coming for this in the next few months: an interim release to work around what looks like a bug in Mobile Safari on the iPad, and a more featureful release which will hopefully have the first steps towards WebGL support. I’ll probably get rid of the Google Code site for CineJS in the near future, since there’s no point having two issue trackers.
  • Dubnium — long time readers will remember this as my Google Summer of Code project back in 2007, and it’s been neglected far too long. It is, in essence, a cross-platform GUI debugger for PHP code. It’s gotten a bit of love in the last few months and I really just need to spend a day or two cleaning it up for a release. Unfortunately, part of that process involves getting a Windows build environment set up, and that’s rather killed my motivation so far.
  • A couple of little Gopher related things: the source tree for wp-gopher, my Python-driven Gopher interface to WordPress (which you can see in action on this very blog) and a Gopher stream wrapper for PHP that I knocked up on my lunch break today just for the hell of it, which I’m currently imaginatively calling php-gopher. Let’s face it: these are obviously Important Projects.

So, yay GitHub, helping me procrastinate from doing actual development work in my spare time for two days now. (Yay may not be the right word.)

Late Night Wanderings

Monday, November 26th, 2007

Just wandered out of my hotel to grab a snack and a drink (strangely, minibar prices remain unattractive to me), and I was surprised at how many people were still on the streets of Brisbane at a bit after 10 pm on a Monday. Coming from Perth, the land of it’s 5:01 pm — quick, everybody out of the city so the tumbleweeds can roll!, it’s a little disconcerting.

I drove up to Rockhampton on Friday and then spent a long weekend there and Hervey Bay. Going to Rockhampton and Great Keppel Island (for a daytrip) means that I’ve now entered the tropics within Australia, which is another remarkably minor geographical milestone that I can cross off. GKI is nice, but incredibly expensive (even moreso than Queenstown, which isn’t something I ever expected to say). In spite of being subtropical, Hervey Bay actually felt more like the stereotypical tropical paradise — the laid-back beach lifestyle just didn’t seem as forced. Plus, way less expensive.

Tomorrow it’s time to get my hacking boots on, because OSDC is here. I’m looking forward to it; it’s my first OSDC and my first conference since LCA in January. Feel free to say hello if you see me wandering the halls — I don’t bite.

Well, there was that one time, but I maintain he deserved it. Also, I was five years old. I’d like to think that I’ve grown since then, if only physically.

(Finally, since Derick just prodded me about it on IRC, no, I haven’t forgotten about Dubnium. I’m hoping to be pretty close to a 0.2 release — that’s the release that might actually be usable — in about a fortnight.)

Dubnium SVN

Monday, August 27th, 2007

I’m still working on the Trac installation for Dubnium (and since it won’t be ready tonight, I guess it could be a few more days before it’s done), but there’s now a public Subversion repository at https://svn.dubnium.info:81/ with the 0.1.0 code. Read-only access should work without needing to authenticate.

For those not yet introduced to the ways of SVN, the following command should get you the 0.1.0 release:

svn co https://svn.dubnium.info:81/tags/0.1.0/ dubnium-0.1.0

And for the latest trunk code (which at present is exactly the same):

svn co https://svn.dubnium.info:81/trunk/ dubnium

I’ll pop up another post when I actually have Trac working as it should.

What I Did With My Winter Holidays, Part n

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

Dubnium

Well, it’s deadline time, so I’m going to push a release of the DBGp frontend formerly known as wxDBGp and now known as Dubnium out for GSWoC evaluation. Nevertheless, I don’t really recommend using this just at the moment, because this release is cursed.

No, really.

In the last week, I’ve shredded my left knee for the second time in eighteen months, rendering me unable to drive a manual car (again), unable to walk without pain (again) and, importantly, unable to sit at a computer for long periods (again, and it’s made finishing off a release difficult). On top of that, I’ve been wholly unsuccessful in finding hosting that doesn’t suck (which rules out Sourceforge) and actually works more than 43% of the time (rules out Google Code Hosting and its entertaining array of internal server errors). To top that off, I discovered tonight that the secondary DNS for the domain that would have been the fallback has apparently chewed up my carefully crafted zone file, spat it out, and replaced it with an old one — and, naturally, it’s getting used instead of the primary for some reason I don’t have time to figure out. I blame Virtualmin anyway. Oh, and my ADSL connection has spent the night going up and down entertainingly, which I suspect is a sign of imminent phone line doom (again).

It hasn’t been a good few days.

So, with the venting and dire warnings out of the way, and the unhappy thought that I’m actually not really done with this and don’t actually consider what’s done releasable just yet, you can now get a copy of Dubnium for yourself. At some point I’ll get Trac and a public Subversion server set up for it, but for now, you’ll have to content yourselves with either a source tarball featuring a wacky SCons-based build process or an MSI that features absolutely no user interface, but which does actually seem to install and uninstall correctly. You can report bugs in the comments if you really want, but I’d wait for Trac.

Source tarball: dubnium-0.1.0.tar.bz2 (119kB)

Windows MSI: dubnium-0.1.0.msi (1.3MB)

Mac OS X users will have to wait a little longer, as I haven’t had time to whip the application bundle generation into shape (and won’t bother now that I’ve decided to scrap SCons as a build system and — sigh — move to more platform-specific systems) as will anybody wanting something that doesn’t suck. I’ll try to get a real release out the door when time permits, which with my courseload this semester, may be a bit further away than I’d like.

I’d say this will be my last (or next to last, if I decide to send through a post when there’s a home page for Dubnium) post on Planet SoC, so if you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. I’d like to thank Google once again for letting me have a go at this, and Derick for mentoring the project.

So, Dub on! Just… not until 0.2.0.