Behdad Esfahbod's daily notes on GNOME, Pango, Fedora, Persian Computing, Bob Dylan, and Dan Bern!

My Photo
Name:
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Ask Google.

Contact info
Google
Hacker Emblem Become a Friend of GNOME I Power Blogger
follow me on Twitter
Archives
July 2003
August 2003
October 2003
November 2003
December 2003
March 2004
April 2004
May 2004
July 2004
August 2004
September 2004
November 2004
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
July 2008
August 2008
October 2008
November 2008
December 2008
January 2009
March 2009
April 2009
May 2009
June 2009
July 2009
August 2009
November 2009
December 2009
March 2010
April 2010
May 2010
June 2010
July 2010
October 2010
November 2010
April 2011
May 2011
August 2011
September 2011
October 2011
November 2011
November 2012
June 2013
January 2014
May 2015
Current Posts
McEs, A Hacker Life
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
 service stop DDC; service start OLS

[I'm dropped out from Planet GNOME again, for the same old reason. Seems like it's sensitive to conferences, last time it was on GUADEC 6's first day, this time DDC'05's first day.]

Random comments that I got during my talk: Keith Packard (keithp) noted that X contains a couple hundred kilobytes worth of locale data, parallel to glibc's, and that probably can be replaced by a central locale data library too. Daniel Veillard (DV) is seeking a lightweight (<30kb) way of having locale-aware collation in libxslt that supports ascending/descending and lower-first/upper-first/locale's-default options. So far he has only found that in ICU, but ICU is multiple times bigger than his whole library, so that's no option.

Anyway, DDC second day went pretty smooth. DV and I got together to find a solution for his problem, and I started hacking up a solution based on strcoll functionality of the libc. The main problem is supporting that ascending/descending and lower-first/upper-first/locale's-default thing. here is the part of the XSLT spec about sorting. Doing all these in a not-that-slow way was a torture that I managed to survive after a few hours of hacking. Good hacking for a day. The code is available here and is in public domain. The algorithm is described in the comment at the beginning of the file. I would like to hear from people whether what I'm doing makes sense, is there any easier way to do this, etc.

Later in the afternoon we headed out for dinner with David Schleef (ds), Chris Lahey (clahey), and a few other people. Caught Michael K. Johnson (mkj) in the elevator and had a long conversation about their packaging system and sitro. Then ran into Colin Charles of the Fedora Project fame. Ah, he recognized me as a Summer of Code student of them, but I still told him that I've not started the C code yet. So we all had a good dinner and left for the final party at Final Party at Vineyards Wine Bar & Bistro. This time we spotted H. Peter Anvin (hpa) wearing a cool t-shirt (got photos, will post later) and his wife Suzi. While talking standing still an hour later there, Dave Jones (djones) joined us and another half an hour passed before we left them and headed for the party.

The party was awesome. Lots of good drinks, chatted with Hubert Figuière again, and more with Jon Phillips (rejon) and Bryce Harrington, two InkScape developers. Also got photos of Colin Charles and David Zeuthen (davidz) taking photos of eachother! Will post them all really soon. Also met Soeren Sandmann, which was good. I finally figured out why planet is called planet (apart from the obvious reason): After hooking my weblog on p.g.o, all the planet knows that I work on Persian support, I didn't make it to 6UADEC, and even that I finally found a place to stay for DDC!

OLS started pretty good too. I was in bert hubert's talk about On faster application startup times: Cache stuffing, seek profiling, adaptive preloading (he mentioned me working on preload too) when DV wrote on IRC that he's looking at keithp's eye-candies. So I walked to the next room and got some of the eye candy at Keith's talk. I've been wondering whether is possible to do a decent desktop in say 32MB, and decided no, but this talk started changing my mind and thinking what should we do to get an order of magnitude (not really, but) smaller.

Got a chance to talk to Seth Vidal, the hero behind yum. Seems like latest yum is doing all items in my wish list. So for example you can say "yum install /usr/bin/mencoder" instead of the nasty "yum list *mencoder*" (in livna they have packaged it separately as mplayer-mencoder, girrrrrrr.) There's also a yum shell, yes! No more "yum list this"...takes 30sec..."yum list that"...takes 30sec... And they are aiming for transactions, so you can run the shell, say "remove sendmail", then "install postfix", and then "run"... Beautiful.

If I find some time tonight at the welcome reception, I would like to hack on dasher. They need some help with autotools, I will fix all that, and if time remains, work on fixing the cpu-usage problem. Currently dasher in a stopped state still eats ~40% of my 2.4GHz CPU! It should not. After that is to cache the language model so it doesn't eat 100% CPU for 10 seconds on startup. Way to go...

And finally, in a few minutes is the keysigning that has brought lots of signatures to my PGP public key.

Comments: Post a Comment



<< Archive
<< Home