taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Open Source: A good entry at sourcefrog.net describing some reasons people are driven to use open source — the closed-source component library one, in particular, drives me nuts.

I’ve run into this in the past — here’s an example I can point to. That’s a fixed version of Java 1.0’s java.util.StreamTokenizer class, to fix a bug where space cannot be treated as a special character. (Hopefully it’s now obsolete, seeing as I wrote that 9 years ago!)

Note that I probably do not have permission to use and redistribute that class. Also note that the bug fix I submitted to Java 1.0 probably never made it into the code, because I was an individual user and not a major corporate client. The bug may have been fixed independently, however, given that StreamTokenizer still exists, but I doubt my fix ever got near the dev team. (However it still means I can say I fixed a bug in James Gosling’s code ;)

Invariably, getting access to source, and being allowed to fix bugs in it, is a key issue — and one that continually drives developers to open source/free software libraries. RMS has been saying this for years, of course.

Music: A massive selection of links to mp3 blogs. gabba > Pod looks very interesting… they even had a copy of Egyptian Empire’s Horn Track recently, one of my favourites.

Tags: bug, class, code, component, entry, fix, java, open, source, sourcefrog, streamtokenizer

Linux: So, I like being able to move windows around using the keyboard very quickly. In particular, one nifty feature of Sawfish was corner.jl, a Sawfish lisp snippet which ‘provides functions to move a window into a screen corner.’

Some background: my desktop layout is essentially divided into 4 corners (e.g. 4 xterms in a ‘one in each corner’ layout), or 2 sides (e.g. mail reader on the left, web browser on the right), depending on the size of the windows.

Using corner.jl, one could just throw the mouse into any part of a window’s area, hit a key, and the window would move where you wanted it.

I’ve since moved to KDE, and missed that functionality. So a while back, I reimplemented it as a patch to kwin. Here it is, and bug 65338 is the KDE bug entry tracking it as a feature request.

Not much traction in persuading the KDE folks to apply it, but hey, that’s open source for ya. The patch will always be around anyway ;)

Pets: My cat brings me presents.

Specifically, today he brought me a mouse’s liver and left it on the doorstep. At least I think it’s a mouse’s liver; the scale seems right. No sign of the rest of the mouse, though…

This is with no less than 3 bells on his collar; I don’t know how he does it, unless it’s simply that the rodents round here are just not used to the concept of predation.

BTW, the mouse’s liver wound up flushed down the toilet.

Tags: bug, corner, feature, kde, layout, linux, liver, mouse, patch, sawfish, window

Rottenflesh.net, a piss-take of Freshmeat.net (found via Sweetcode).

About: openJ-GNU is a web secure server that quickly generates backgrounds. It uses mv for menubars. openJ-GNU generates user-interfaces.

Changes: openJ-GNU 3.24.7 enhances robustness for sites that also use newGeekNr. It also was rewritten in Tcl and patches a remote root bug in configuration. One of the developers was sacked. It also compiles.

Tags: bug, freshmeat, newgeeknr, root, rottenflesh, server, sweetcode, tcl, use, web