skweez.net

Today I improved the language-support-cpp-java plugin a little bit. And yes, I sinned, because this was not my task. :-)

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Last week I learned how autogen works. Therefore I had the ability to adapt the new parser-clang plugin so that the plugin will be only build, if llvm and clang are available on the system. Otherwise it will be ignored by the compile process. After this work I played a little bit with clang. Once you know the way of working of clang it’s very easy to program with it.

This week I continued with splitting language plugins in a parser part. The language-support-python plugin does nothing other than operate with rope. And at first view this is also the same case at the language-support-js plugin. So splitting these two plugins makes no sense, because after that, there is no basic plugin left in the basket, which we can use as a language-support plugin. The Vala language-support plugin has some dependencies on the parser part, which are not trivial to solve.

Hence I stop splitting the language-support plugins and finally I split only the language-support-cpp-java plugin. The new interface for the completion engine is called IAnjutaParser. So I integrate IAnjutaParser in the Vala, Python and JS language-support plugin now. Only C/C++ has its own parser plugin and consequently not the language-support-cpp-java plugin, but the two parser plugins parser-cxx and parser-clang integrate the IAnjutaParser interface.

Last weekend I began to split the parser part from each language plugin to a separate plugin. In the future the parser is going to be used as an adapter by the language support interface. This makes the code more uniform and I hope we can merge some code.

All in all the language-support plugins shouldn’t manage any more the own parser part, because they can access a common parser base. Now the parser plugin itself decides which parser is used, which is then only loaded if the corresponding programming language is used.

In the last days I learned how interfaces works under Anjuta and C. Until then I only knew it from Java.

By the way you can take a look at my current code on github.

What I’ve done this week:

• Finish splitting the language-support-cpp-java plugin in an indentation-c-style plugin and a language-support-cpp-java plugin without the indentation part
• Did the same with language-support-python plugin
• Export the utils classes of the two language-support plugins to libanjuta/anjuta-utils to prevent code duplication

What I’ve done this week:

• Split the language-support-cpp-java plugin in an indentation-c-style plugin and a language-support-cpp-java plugin without the indentation part
• Read the documentation about the plugin system of anjuta

Splitting the plugin took more time and was more challenging than expected. The main problem was to understand what each method does. So I had to read much documentation. I’m not already done with this work, but I’m on a good way…

I’m accepted with my proposal on Google Summer of Code for this year. My mission is to bring clang magic to Anjuta. “Anjuta? What is Anjuta?”, maybe you wonder yourself now. Anjuta is a IDE just like Eclipse.

Clang is a compiler front-end for the LLVM compiler. With this compiler front-end for C, C++, Objective C and Objective C++ code we can get better results in Anjuta. For example if you make a simple mistake by writing code Anjuta will warn you. This can save a lot worse.

The first major obstacle is to make thoughts about the future architecture of the language support interface, so that you’ll be simple load plugins for a language feature like autocompletion or indentation. To support this purposes I’ll split up already available language plugins in an indentation part and the support part.

Since version 11.10 Ubuntu has a feature called Global Menu. This means, that window menus don’t appear in the window itself anymore but on the very top of the screen in the so called panel. Have a look at the video to see it in action:

I have the impression that Ubuntu’s UX designers are trying to mimic Mac OS X here. However, there are several problems with the solution they came up with. The Mac shares some of them, but some are specific to Unity.

The Global Menu wants to give more vertical screen real-estate to the running applications by having only one menu bar taking up space for all windows together. On netbooks this may be a usefull thing, but on computers with HD everywhere nowadays this actually makes usability worse. The Global Menu makes you “travel” large distances with the mouse from the window to the upper border, which can contribute to repetive strain injury.

Another problem is that the menus are not visually connected to the window or application they belong to. For first time users it can be hard to grasp that the menu even belongs to the window or application that is currently in focus. On first sight it looks as if the menu contains global functions. OS X and Ubuntu both try to fix this problem by showing the name of the application at the left most position.

However, Ubuntu has another big usability issue adding to the previous point. It hides the menu and only shows it when the user hovers over it with the mouse. First time users will probably have a *very* hard time even finding the menu at all. In my opinion this is the biggest glitch of them, because you can’t find the menu, without knowing that it is there in the first place and moving the mouse up there. I think this is called a vicious cycle.

To make things worse, I don’t even see *any* reason why one would hide the menu, as there is oviously enough space to display it all the time.

Ever missed your Adium contacts in the Spotlight search results? Well here is the (beta) answer to this problem: The Adium Contacts Spotlight Importer Plugin. With this plugin all your contacts become available in Spotlight and with one keystroke you can start a conversation.

You can find the plugin on our Github page. The plugin is beta software as we did not test it very much so feel free to report issues on Github or submit patches.

Some days ago we (the skweez.net team) decided to try to replace all the fancy services from Google with software on our own server. So we looked at Roundcube for a decent web mail interface. Roundcube works great but we missed one feature: to send mails with a mail address from another email provider like Google. This is important as we wanted to use our own mail server to collect all the mails from all the different providers. Thats no problem with most of the mail providers but to answer the mails with the correct email address you need to send the mails through their mail server or your mail will be detected as spam.

Enter: The Roundcube Identity SMTP Plugin

This plugin allows you to specify a SMTP server for every identity you setup in Roundcube. You can now answer all the mails you get with the correct address from within Roundcube.

The plugin is available from github: https://github.com/elm/Roundcube-SMTP-per-Identity-Plugin It is not tested very widely but it works for us so it may work for you. Feel free to leave a comment or a patch or flattr this post.

Mir ist gestern bei meinem Kabelmodem aufgefallen, dass dieses wie einige andere Netzwerkgeräte ein Netzteil mit 12V und 1A am Ausgang hat. Im Gegensatz zu den anderen Geräten wurde es mit einem Schaltnetzteil (SNT), statt so einem klobigen Trafonetzteil (TNT), geliefert. Die Stecker sind bei allen gleich.

Darum habe ich mal einen einfachen Test mit einem Strommessgerät gemacht, wobei ich nicht sagen kann, wie präzise das Gerät arbeitet. Aber wenn die Anzeige nur annähernd stimmt, dann lohnt sich die Anschaffung von neuen Netzteilen für die älteren Geräte, die ich in absehbarer Zeit nicht ablösen möchte. Eines der TNT verbraucht schon ohne angeschlossenes Gerät 7W, beim SNT zeigt das Messgerät 0 an. Mit angeschlossenem Modem verbraucht das andere TNT satte 16W, das SNT 7W.

Die ersten Fotos zeigen jeweils die unbelasteten Netzteile, die folgenden sind mit angeschlossenem Modem.

Wenn die beiden Trafonetzteile, die ich in meinem Haushalt gefunden habe, zusammen nur 10W mehr verbrauchen als zwei SNT, dann sind das bei mir im Jahr ca. 50kW/h. Das macht bei meinem aktuellen Stromtarif ca. 12€ p.a. Beim Inernetauktionär gibt es passende SNT für ca. 5€ je Stück.

Die Basisstation meines DECT-Telefons braucht auch ca. 7W. Ich teste gerade, ob es praktikabel ist, das Android-Handy mit einem SIP-Client als Festnetz-/WLAN-Telefon zu benutzen. Meine ersten Tests mit CSipSimple verliefen positiv. Das Handy verbraucht dadurch sicher etwas mehr Strom, aber bestimmt keine 7W.

Ich denke mal, die Geldbeträge erscheinen vielen lächerlich, aber mir geht’s auch eher um’s Prinzip und ich dachte ich teile die Erfahrungen mal, vielleicht bringt das jemandem was.

PS: Alte Netzteile gehören nicht in den Hausmüll, sondern auf den Wertstoffhof!

Ergänzung: Ich habe gelesen, dass es bei einigen alten Geräten zu Problemen kommen kann, wenn diese intern noch ein SNT haben. Dann können die sich gegenseitig aufschaukeln und im schlimmsten Fall kann da was zu brennen anfangen. Also wie immer gilt: Ausprobieren auf eigene Gefahr! Skweez übernimmt keine Haftung für irgendwelche Schäden.