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It's been quite a while since I posted here. So here's a little update. I'm preparing for my exams, the first one is friday. I can feel the exam stress already, which is good, because I need some stress to study. (if there is no stess, I waste my time with surfing and gaming) I've got 5 exams this semester, 3 difficult ones, and 2 easy ones (surprisingly, the easy ones are computer-related ;-) ). The 3 difficult ones come first, so after those, the worst part is over and the fun begins. :-p

Now, about that weird word 'Sauerbraten' in the title. Sauerbraten is 'Cube 2'. (I have posted about Cube before.) The first 'relatively mature' release is availiable for download here. Saurebraten runs on linux and windows. If you want to try Saurerbraten out, you should extract the .zip file somewhere on your harddrive. Linux users should go to sauerbraten/sauerbraten and run 'sauerbraten_unix'. (you might have to change the permissions of sauerbraten/sauerbraten/sauerbraten_unix and sauerbraten/sauerbraten/bin_unix/linux_client to make sure they are executable) Windows users should execute sauerbraten\sauerbraten\sauerbraten.bat. Remember that this is an early release, so many things might still change. I think the looks have improved a lot, but some features still annoy me: I hate those stupid ogre models and the other monsters. They just don't fit in a FPS game.

Oops, my break is over. Back 2 the books. >:( Cya!

I've been working on my OPluginManager lately (not too much, got to study too, and watched the Queen Elisabeth concours of course ;-)).

This is what I got now (it's my first GTK code ever, so I'm quite happy with it):

This is the "plugin" code:

#include "plugins/o-plugin-manager-plugin.h"
#include "plugins/o-plugin-manager-plugin-data.h"

#define TEST_PLUGIN_MSG "[test-plugin] "

static gpointer plugin_init(gpointer d, GError **e) {
        g_debug("" TEST_PLUGIN_MSG "Init");
        return (gpointer) g_strdup("Test plugin data");
}

static void free_data(gpointer d) {
        g_debug("" TEST_PLUGIN_MSG "Freeing data \"%s\"", (gchar *) d);

        g_free(d);
}

static OPluginManagerPluginAuthorData author = {
        O_PLUGIN_MANAGER_PLUGIN_DATA_AUTHOR_MAGIC,
        "ikke",
        "eikke eikke com"
};

static OPluginManagerPluginData plugininfo = {
        O_PLUGIN_MANAGER_PLUGIN_DATA_MAGIC,
        "test-plugin",
        "A simple test plugin",
        "This is a sample test plugin, to test the OPluginManager functionality",
        "0.1",
        "http://www.eikke.com",
        &author,

        NULL,
        plugin_init,
        free_data
};

O_PLUGIN_MANAGER_PLUGIN_REGISTER(plugininfo);

As you can see it's braindead easy to write a plugin :-)

The code is quite a mess at the moment, the UI is just plain ugly and inaccessible, there's no I18N support, but well, as you can see, one day it might work :-)

Lots of guys I know are in Stuttgart right now, visiting GUADEC. I wish I could be there too :-( Have a great time!!!

Just had a little chat with Ruben on Vim, where he suggested me to put my .vimrc etc online.

So I did, this is my current GVim setup:

(Thumbnail is link to original image)

And here's my current .vimrc. If you know any other fancy tricks I could use, please let me know :-)

A lot of useful information on configuring your Vim is available here.

Printing in Linux: it doesn't go automatic. Ok, one can say you just have to follow the Gentoo Printing Guide wich is very clear and makes installing a printer very, very easy (just a few commands), but I think we could expect more, especially more automated and integrated in gnome.

First off all, when you have a plain linux installation, gnome and all stuff you need, with no printing devices configured: printing works. You can just print a file without configuring a printer. The big problem is that the printed document doesn't look very good. A plain color is made of textures for example, looks like printing with the first color printers or with kind of colored-grayscales. Off course I want better, so I followed the gentoo guide.

What is it all about? First of all you need to have cups and foomatic installed. No problem, cups should be installed as dependency of gnome and you still can install foomatic if you need it. Maybe CUPS/Gnome could advice you to install foomatic when configuring a printer that has some benefits when having foomatic installed. If you have an HP Deskjet printer, you also need to install the HPIJS driver wich acts like a postscript interpreter between the postscript output and the printer device. Also this one could be recommened when configuring a HP device in CUPS/Gnome. That's all for software requirements. The configuration could be automated more. Normally, you have to create a PPD-file for your printer by hand (just give the model and hardware number to foomatic) or download the right one from linuxprinting.org and place it in the cups directory. I think it must be possible to grep the required information when attaching a printer device with USB. When connecting, gnome should detect the right model, generate the appropriate ppd file and install the printer in cups. Maybe a dialog box should appear informing the user that the printer is added to cups and asking if he/she wants to review the configuration or sharing properties. This would be a real integrated desktop experience.

I'm almost finished with my project work. Today I wrote the report of my project in information security. We had to develop a system to make online train ticket purchasement possible with the necessary fraud protection. The train speculator has to be able to verify the ticket in very less time without consulting a database containing the online transactions. We developed a system based on encrypted information printed on the ticket as barcode.

For the last project we just have to work a little bit on the report. It was about testing an algoritm for on the fly pitch extraction of recorded speech. This information is needed to compress digital speech as good as possible.

I also have some news about my internship. As I told you before, I've chosen a thesis where I have to work on development and testing of a fast handover system for wireless connections on trains. I also told you I had a meeting to arrange an internship with Siemens on the same subject. Now, the prof has sent me a e-mail with the good news he has contact with Siemens and they're interested in such kind of internship. If everything goes well, I can do some work on their Chantry technology. It should cover a few days/weeks working in Herentals and do some tests with the equipment in Ghent. Normally there'll be a meeting around the 17th of July or afther the examinations. Let's hope everything goes well :-D