Astute observers may note that the site has changed a little… well quite a lot really. All the articles and notes have been moved over to the Wordpress blogging software and the site slightly redesigned to accomodate that. Much of the site is based on the Kubrick set of templates.

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This is the order of loading of files when Wordpress loads up. I’m assuming a default installation and this is according to 1.3alpha4 as pulled from CVS.

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I recently upgraded the kernel on my workstation to kernel 2.6.8 and, of course, some things didn’t work as they had previously. One of those things was the ISDN card (which was previously using the ISDN2Linux tools). So, I took the opportunity to switch over to using CAPI instead. Which required upgrading KdeAm (the KDE answering machine) to read the files produced by CapiSuite. CapiSuite of course doesn’t use the same format for the audio files as vbox, nor does it store them in the same place, so there are a few modifications to be done.

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I’ve set up the krefty project on Sourceforge, an experience in itself. I’ve gained a lot of admiration for people who go through the whole process of creating and distributing software in the Free Software world. Writing the code sometimes seems like the easy bit of the work. Writing documentation, creating and testing the distribution packets, setting up a home page, creating and uploading projects on places like freshmeat.net and sourceforge takes a fair bit of work in itself.

The project is here and locally here.

I had a need for a simple, basic, easy to install PHP script for some websites to allow visitors to subscribe/unsubscribe from a newsletter. I found plenty on HotScripts but they were all far too big, complex and hard to modify.
So, I wrote my own and called it “SubberZ”. In the end I called it “SubberZ[Lite]â€? as I have ideas for making it a bit more complicated and capable, but rather than create one big set of scripts, I’ve decided to create a family of scripts, the “SubberZâ€? family. So, there will be “SubberZ[Lite]â€? and “SubberZ”. And maybe even a “SubberZ+”…

Further details available on the SubberZ page.

Today saw the first release of Krefty, a Quick Reference Application written for KDE.

A quick reference sheet is a handy look up page of all the hot-keys, command parameters, options and so on for various programs. I’ve put together sheets for such things as GNU-Find, GNU Tar and so on, there is one for FlightGear, one for Vim. The data files are standard XML files, so the hope is that some of you will contribute a few more Krefty sheets to the pile, I can distribute them from here.

Source code, krefty files and some docs available on the Krefty pages.

The first KDE application has been put up for download. Its an answering machine front end for KDE, written using all standard KDE stuff. Its called KdeAm and its available on the KdeAm pages.
Its also up on Freshmeat and at KDE Apps.

Let me know if there are any troubles installing or running the application.
Note that it does need a functioning vboxgetty backend to handle the ISDN connection (part of the ISDN4LINUX packages, installed as standard) and the SOX audio utilities for playback, again, usually part of the standard install routine. (UPDATE: now also works with Capi4Linux messages).

I’ve spent the weekend installing and testing Subversion, a version management system from tigris.org (who use to be, or maybe still are, collab.net). And, so far, so good. I’ve converted a few projects from CVS to Subversion and, once I’d got used to the different way of working, all went smoothly.

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This article will introduce the subject of parsing XML files, using as examples the Expat parser and the Xerces parser. In the process we will examine the two event interfaces for XML parsers, SAX1 and SAX2. I will assume that you’ve read the two previous articles in the series (Introducing XML by David Nash and History of Unicode by myself) and I assume that you have a good understanding of C++. The article won’t cover the design of XML documents, the samples we use will from necessity be simple and designed to demonstrate the basic facilities of the XML parsers. We will create a simple program to parse an XML file and count the characters and tags in it, showing how the program differs between Expat and Xerces.

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Over the last few years a growing number of applications and services have been using a type of text mark-up known as XML. The structure of XML, and the timing of its introduction, made it a perfect match for the new (at that time) and fast growing language Java. However, its use in C++ has lagged behind somewhat, and this series of articles is aimed at redressing the balance a little.

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