Category Archives: Uncategorized

New T-shirt design

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#!/usr/bin/env perl


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                                                '&'|'@';$,=('[');

Desktop backgrounds

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Usually I'm really busy with $work to do, that sometimes, maybe once every 2 months :-) it's just relaxing to take a break and go searching for some new desktop wallpaper.

I can suggest to take a look at our very own wallpapers here on MyOpera. Recently I found out this site that has a nice collection of space pictures, among my favourites.

This incredible picture of Orion is my current wallpaper.

It's taken from this even more incredible site. Caution: don't open it if you need to do something urgent in the next hours :-)

Dr.Dobb’s Journal and “the Broken Web”

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Last week I was invited to a "Webinar" organized by Dr. Dobb's Journal about software engineering, "The Future of Software Delivery", sponsored by IBM. I was curious about this so I registered for the event.

On the registration page, there was a link to test your system to see if it met the technical requirements. So I took the test and, guess what? Only Internet Explorer and Firefox were admitted to the party.

So I wrote an email to the guys:

Subject: Dr. Dobb's Webinar event. Required browsers.
To: webcast@techonline.com
Regarding this event:

http://event.on24.com/eventManager/presentation/html.jsp?profiletype=customHTML1&eventid=25571

I'm using Opera 9.5 and I think it's perfectly fine
for streaming purposes. It runs both RealPlayer and
Windows Media Player.

Is there a reason why Opera shouldn't work for this event?
Thanks!

I was trying to send out the message "Strange. Opera should meet the requirements, because it seems we aren't talking about browser here, only video plugins. Can you explain?". Certainly not something like "You suck. Why isn't Opera your first preferred browser, you morons?"

A few days later I received an email from TechOnline.

Hello Cosimo,

You must use either Internet Explorer with Windows Media Player (preferably) or Firefox with RealPlayer to view the webinar. It will not work with other browsers.

Best Regards,
Lenda

Lenda Carter
TechInsights | TechOnline
lcarter@techinsights.com

Uh… This isn't serious.
Something's rotten in the state of The Web.

Open the Web!

OLPC: Getting Skype to work with video

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The most recent Skype version usable is 2.0.0.68 from the Fedora repository.
Follow the instructions at: the OLPC news forum.

The only thing that doesn't work is the video out, that is, when you want to send your webcam video signal out to others with the video call.

I'm working on this by:

  • Modifying the gstfakevideo sources and trying to understand why some ioctls fail
  • Trying to upgrade the linux-uvc module on the XO, by grabbing the kernel sources and compiling linux-uvc.

I will let you know… :)

Perl Club

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The First Rule of Perl Club
You do not talk about Perl Club

The Second Rule of Perl Club
You do not talk about Perl Club

Third Rule of Perl Club
A laptop crashes, breaks, runs down. The hack is over

Fourth Rule of Perl Club
Only two programmers to a pair

Fifth Rule of Perl Club
One bug at a time

Sixth Rule of Perl Club
No Java, no VB

Seventh Rule of Perl Club
Hacks will go on as long as they have to

Eighth, and Final Rule of Perl Club
If this is your first night at Perl Club, you have to hack

From dave.org.uk

IE8 Beta

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Now that I work for Opera Software, I am somewhat more interested in browsers, standards, W3C working groups and so on… We also have a CTO that worked on (invented?) initial CSS specs.
Of course, new things about competitor browsers are immediately subject to discussions and opinions inside Opera.

The breaking news this morning was that Microsoft released a beta version of Internet Explorer 8. But the really surprising thing is that it seems to pass the ACID2 test, and without any doctype-switching or faking trick.

They just seem to have switched to standards-rendering by default.

Seems impossible?
Let's wait for the final, then… :-)

Win32::API v0.52 released to CPAN

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I just released version 0.52 of Win32::API. It should be available at your local CPAN mirror very soon.

This version should play nicer with CPAN testers, since it checks if the OS makes sense before going through Makefile.PL, so no more failures with Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, and such are expected.

Please note that I published 0.51 one hour ago, but it's broken, so I have already scheduled its deletion. Please don't use 0.51.

Enjoy and please report to me any problems you have.

UPDATE: it seems that I screwed up again the META.yml and the dist resulted as UNauthorized because of my inclusion of Devel::AssertOS. Oh well…

Here's a list of latest changes:

2008-03-01 Win32::API v0.52 Cosimo

– Devel::AssertOS was not properly set up in 0.51.

2008-03-01 Win32::API v0.51 Cosimo

– Cleaned up API.pm pod docs and clearly stated Win32::API license
– Fixed $$/pid tests for Cygwin
– Now uses Devel::AssertOS to check that we are on a Win32 or Cygwin system. This should ease the work of CPAN testers.

2008-02-23 Win32::API v0.50 Cosimo

– Fixed RT#31702 http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=31702
Thanks to RUrban for supplying the fix.

2008-02-20 Win32::API v0.49 Cosimo

– Fixed the stack cleanup assembler statements for GCC in API.xs, I hope.
– Fixed a Borland C macro definition in API.xs
– Fixed META.yml (stupid me)

2008-02-20 Win32::API v0.48 Cosimo

– Finally applied the cdecl/stdcall patch available since long time
from http://www.xs4all.nl/~itsme/projects/perl/.
Now Win32::API *can* work with cdecl DLLs.
Fixes RT#32424 http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=32424
and RT#24685 http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=24685
Thanks to Willem Jan Hengeveld (itsme at xs4all.nl) for his great work. Thanks to JimK for a test case and to BrowserUk and others at PerlMonks for providing me useful information and complaints. :-)

However, still missing some GCC assembler magic for stack cleanup. Any help?

– Clarified licensing info. Yes, Win32::API is available with GPL 2 / Artistic license.