rock'n roll » book

Backup, iPhone, dev

dinhviethoa — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:35:42 +0000

1. Backup

I finally got a solution for incremental backups: rsync allow this. When synchronizing, there is an option to copy the files that will be modified or deleted to an other folder (creation of file is not tracked). Let’s call that folder the increment folder.

a/ I will have a backup folder that is synchronized with the folder I want to backup
b/ There is one increment folder per day.
So that if I want to restore a given version of a file, I use the backup folder and apply each increment until the desired version.
The only drawback of that method is that I don’t track the date when a given file appeared.

2. iPhone

These last days, I tried the iPhone.

a/ Cool things:
- With this phone, we finally got rid of the PDA pen. Touchscreen user interface controls are finally the size of the finger.
- The most interesting thing in that Phone was the SMS part: The SMS are classified by person and shown as a conversation.

b/ Not-so-cool
- The touchscreen-keyboard is rather difficult to use.
- Calling a contact in its address book is less easy than on a sony ericsson W800/W810/W880.

3. etPanX

Implementation of filter backend is done and matches the description in my previous post. Still the configuration UI to create. Filtering is not blocking the user interface: that’s nice.

Now, I have to think about virtual folders (evolution semantic), which are called “smart folders” on Mac OS X Mail.app.

4. libetpan

Documentation of libetpan was a pain to maintain. It was static, in SGML. Nobody knew how to edit it. Nobody know how to build the HTML from the SGML.

Still, I think that doxygen (or javadoc-like stuff) does not fit the needs since this is an automatically generated documentation. This is not human-oriented. On every doxygen documentation, I was wondering where to start reading. Code samples are not easy to add or I am missing something.
I switch to something more dynamic: a wiki.
It is based on mediawiki. We now have a more collaborative way to edit the documentation.
- We lost the multi-format output but since HTML was the most used, that’s ok.
- It’s less easy to get an offline documentation.
- The code is not synchronized with the documentation.

5. Reading

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information – Edward Tufte

libEtPan, PaperLess, etpanX

dinhviethoa — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 01:38:59 +0000

1. libetpan

There is some work available in the CVS :

- libetpan has a new build system for Unix automake is now used. Thanks to Marcus Brinkmann for this work.
Funny that automake will automatically import the GPL licence into your project in a COPYING and also overwrite this file if this contains something else. Use –foreign to avoid this behavior.
- Sebastien Marinier did some work to fix the Windows build.
- a basic RSS/ATOM fetcher/parser has been implemented in libetpan. This was based on rssyl-ng/libfeed implementation. Thanks to Andrej Kacian.

2. PaperLess

A basic scanner application has been implemented for Mac OS X. This is called PaperLess. This will allow you to perform multiple-page document scan and save the document to PDF.

3. etpanX

etpanX is still in progress.

3.1. Account synchronization

An IMAP synchronization and POP synchronization has been implemented. Still some improvement is needed but user experience is now nearly a local access when reading mails in the IMAP account after the first synchronization with the IMAP server.

3.2. Filter

The implementation of filter is in progress. The plan for filter implementation is :
- Filter will not block the user interface even if it takes some time.
- Only messages from the main mailbox of a given account will be filtered.
- Message that were not yet filtered will be hidden.
- As soon as messages have been process, they will be visible.

4. Reading

Konrad Lorenz – Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour

What is my process doing ?

dinhviethoa — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:45:55 +0000

1. Process profiler

This week-end, I worked on a tool to discover what a process is doing.

1.1. What is it ?

This tool will show the stack trace of the part the process is spending time in. This is mostly like gprofile and friends but in this case, you don’t need to recompile your tool to do measures.
Here some example where it is useful :
- when the CPU is used,
- when the UI of the process is not refreshing,
- when the UI is not responsive.
binutils development package is needed to build it.
download here.

Example of use :

I sampled etpanX for 3 seconds when I clicked on a folder.

See the output here.
Though, a user interface will be needed.

1.2. How it works

Sometimes when people want to know what their process is doing on Linux, they stop it by attaching with gdb and they look at the stack trace. I automated that and improved that by repeating the operation automatically a number of time chosen by the user. Currently, the user choose the delay in seconds and the stack trace is reported every 10 ms.
This works exclusively on Linux/x86. There are a few parts that are linux/x86 dependent. They need to be ported for other systems. This tool was inspired from an exisiting tool on Mac OS X.

2. Reading

Elisabeth Badinter – Fausse Route
ISBN: 273811265X

Darwin – Origin of Species
ISBN: 0517123207

etpanX work

dinhviethoa — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 22:57:14 +0000

1. etpanX
I am back working on etpanX.

1.1. message viewer
- message viewer is mostly finished, text/html (lynx will be called to convert the content to text) and text/enriched can be viewed.
- attachment can be downloaded or opened.

TODO :
- show a list of non-visible attachment
- don’t show the entire list of recipient if it is too long

1.2 message list
- contextual menu has been implemented.
- ‘mark messages’ is not yet implemented.

TODO :
- message are not expunged yet
- option are not greyed out when needed

1.3. folder list
- progress indicator is on the folder list

TODO :
- mark folder as read
- contextual menu needs to be implemented

1.4. preferences
This part is a work-in-progress.

1.5. general
- drag & drop, filtering and spam filters are not yet implement

2. libetpan
An error has been done in libtool versioning of libetpan. This will be fixed in next release.

3. music
Listening to Sikth, Dredg, Static X.
DVD of Killswitch Engage is out.

4. books
Reading The Logic of Scientific Discovery — Karl R. Popper.
ISBN: 0415278449

libetpan 0.39

dinhviethoa — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 09:56:56 +0000

… is released (as requested for sylpheed-claws).

1. libetpan
high-level API for SASL (CRAM-MD5 and other strange kind of authentication).
compatibility with GnuTLS is improved.

2. music
went at Opeth concert.
planned to go to Pain of Salvation concert.

3. books
read traité d’athélogie (french only).

4. other oddities
Well, how long mean nerds/geeks/hackers work for open source …?

workaround old Courier IMAP bug

dinhviethoa — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 07:27:19 +0000

1. Courier IMAP nightmare is back once again.
A workaround has to be applied in sylpheed to workaround a bug in old Courier IMAP servers.
if we quote atom such as “Reply-To”, the server won’t understand the command.

It looks like (in opposition to what I said earlier) we could fix that by not quoting words with ‘-’ char. (1)
The workaround that has been applied is fetching all headers instead of performing a fetching a selection of headers.

Maybe I’ll workaround this also in libetpan by using (1).

2. music
listening to Spineshank.

3. books (french)
“Vacances dans le coma” – Frederic Beigbeder – ISBN 2253140708.
“XY, de l’identité masculine” – Elisabeth Badinter – ISBN 2253097837. english version : “XY, on masculine identity” – ISBN 0231084358

sociology, biology

dinhviethoa — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 19:01:15 +0000

The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
ISBN: 0192860925
french version ISBN: 2738112439