Slaad's Programming Stuff

So, some of you may have read some news regarding the IM Kit and moving to OS Drawer: this is in fact, correct.

The upside of this, along with some nice project support features, is that the project has become a little more active. Of interest to some people might be a recent check in by some weird Australia which mentions something about updated MSN protocol support. Who knows what that's all about!

Pier Luigi Fiorini was asking me about the Feed Kit the other day and if he was able to make use of it. As a result I had a look over my notes and figured it was mostly ready (with the exception of an annoying crash when downloading several enclosures at once). As such I have posted it on OS Drawer. At this stage it's only been tested on Zeta... but I believe it'll work on any BeOS operating system. It's structured in much the same way as the IM Kit. The server has a requirement for CURL and the parsers (RSS and Atom at this stage) both require libxml to function.

I'll look to putting a build up on BeBits in the next few days for people to try out in a nice and easy way.

In the mean time I present a bunch of screen shots. Not all of these are current screen shots, but they'll give you the general idea of The Feed Kit

InfoPopper integration: Downloading a Feed and an Enclosure

Anchorman: The 'main' client. This is an older screen shot from when it was temporarily called TreeClient. The view on the left has changed to a BColumnListView so that it can be sorted and customised by the end user. The area with the photo in it is an embedded NetPositive window. The moment someone writes a decent browser that can be embedded I'll switch to using that. NetPositive is horribly broken for most sites.

Deskbar integration: The Deskbar client will indicate the overall status of your syndication (server isn't running, no new items, unread items). It can also be configured to show all items, unread items or current unread items in the popout menu.

So, as of March 31st 2008 you may have noticed that the SoundPlay InfoPopper plug-in ceased to download cover art. The service it used was officially turned off (having been closing since early 2007). In all that time I'd not gotten around to porting it to use the new Amazon AWS. This has now been completed... unfortunately, I've forgotten my OS Drawer password and the site is flagged as an open relay, preventing me from receiving - or sending - from OS Drawer. As such, if anyone knows hows to contact the site maintainers of OS Drawer, I'd appreciate it if the message was passed along that they are running on an open mail relay, and that they should fix it.

Pier Luigi Fiorini has just informed me that InfoPopper now "works and runs on Haiku". Now you can be notified of all sorts of snazzy things whilst using Haiku. Neat!

Updated code is available from the OS Drawer InfoPopper site

Something I've wanted to do for a long time is to get rid of the InfoPopper. It's not that I don't like it - I can't live without it - but it just doesn't belong in the IM Kit repository any more. I see it as having a life of its own. What's the point of this? Well, I'd like to keep both "applications" (IM Kit and InfoPopper) as simple as possible. I want the barrier to developer (and user) entry to be as low as possible.

Pier Luigi Fiorini (Who I don't have an URL to link to) had set up a project on OSDrawer.net for the InfoPopper. Having been given access yesterday, I've just finished importing some requirements from the IM Kit repository and fixing the makefiles.

I'll leave the InfoPopper in the IM Kit repository for the next few weeks in case anyone with outstanding changes (Hah!) would like to commit them, and I'll move them over to the OSDrawer project. After that time I'll delete the InfoPopper from the IM Kit repository to avoid confusion.

So in that previous post of mine where I claimed I was going to spend at least a day over the weekend on BeOS projects? I lied. I realised about 3 hours after that post that my capstone was due on November 23rd. That is; tomorrow. Since that day I've spent pretty much every weekend working 9am - 12:30am on it, taken about a week off work to work on it for similar lengths of time, and several post-work 6pm - 11:30pm nights. All this work has left me looking, in the words of The Wife "Like shit."

The good news is: I sent my capstone to the printers for binding last Monday. I'll be picking it up tomorrow and handing it in. Once I complete my defense next Thursday I will have completed all the requirements for my degree. Pending a pass, I'll graduate. Woot!

At this stage I'm planning to continue working four days / week, which will allow me to work on various projects; including my BeOS ones.

Earlier today I sent off the abstract for my capstone and indicated I would like to be assessed for a Distinction / High Distinction. I still have a lot of work to do on my capstone, but writing the abstract really helped give me a road map of what I want to do with it and how to get there.

What's the got to do with BeOS? Not much. But The Wife is out of town this weekend and like I'd predicted in a conversation with Koki, I bought pretty much a new PC for a MythTV box. There's two upsides to this; First the MythTV box can now flag two shows for commercials at 60fps, whilst recording two, and watching a pre-recorded show without batting an eye lid. Secondly; My previous MythTV / Media box was my perfectly good BeOS machine. I've since reclaimed this. So I have a 100% functioning BeOS (Zeta) machine: Proper disk I/O, accelerated video, sound, etc. So I'll be spending at least one day over the weekend working on BeOS projects. Yay!

And on that note: back to my capstone prototype.

In light of an disheartening response rate after my "Help!" post (ie: None) I did some searching around and found a suitable video card. So I've ordered a brand spanking new Radeon 9000 PCI card. I'm somewhat offended at paying $50au for such an old card but figure it's worth having dual head (again) and the ability to drag windows around on screen without tearing.

I'm also vainly hoping that the new video card will somehow fix DMA disk access getting disabled after several minutes. I'm very doubtful it will, in which case, I'm gearing up to buy a 400gb PATA drive for BeOS. I figure I have no need for SATA in BeOS / the drivers are buggy so I can move my current SATA drive to being a Windows drive... where the SATA will probably be utilised a little better.

With the girlfriend out of the state for a few days I took the time to catch up on some nerd house keeping.

You may recall in the last instalment that I was unable to boot BeOS successfully on my machine. Well... I've over come that. It turns out it was some corrupted settings - presumably as a result of frequent unsafe shut down due to unsupported video. So I can now boot BeOS successfully, but I still have one tiny problem: an unsupported graphics card. Now, I'd normally cop it sweet, and run in VESA mode, but it seems my graphics card doesn't appear to support VESA in my LCD monitors' native resolution (1440 x 900). On top of this, it's painfully slow when dragging windows. Not the snappy experience we all know.

Is all hope lost? Why, no, a new hero enters, stage right; You. So, how can you help? Well, I'm after suggestions (or donations) of a secondary video card exclusively for BeOS use. As such it doesn't need to be very fancy. My requirements are;

• It must be PCI, PCI Express x 4 or PCI Express x 1 (I have no AGP slot in this computer and my PCI Express x 16 slot is used by my gaming card)
• It must support 1440x900 at 16 bit.
• It'd be nice if it supported dual head, with both heads running at 1440x900
• Obviously it must be supported under Zeta / BeOS.
• It must be cheap (< $80au) - this is a secondary card after all

So, with that, I'm all ears. Any suggestions (or donations) are appreciated.

So you may have noticed I've not been very active lately, what gives? Well there's several reasons for this

1. I've been rather occupied with a cute young strumpet.
2. I've only recently returned from a three week holiday to Italy, Switzerland and Germany.
3. I upgraded my PC and can no longer boot BeOS / Zeta.

Whilst I have no need for help in rectify those first two reasons, I do with the latter. So, to that end, if anyone has any tips on getting me up and running in BeOS / Zeta land, I'm all ears. I'm running an Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core CPU, ASRock AM2V890 motherboard and a Radeon 1950. A couple of things to keep in mind;

1. I'm currently running Windows XP if you're considering suggesting some form of emulation
2. I need to access my old data which exists on real physical drives (SATA).
3. I'd like some measure of stability.
4. I'd like the speed to be responsive enough to actually use

And with that I await suggestions.