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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Major site reorganisation and rewrite this month. The codeworks section has headed off to its own sub-domain at CodeWorks and the old links should get redirected over there.

Treks and Travels already have their own subdomain.

Plus the Westhost Tips and Tricks have had a major rewrite, especially the email and spam section, check them out at Westhost Tips and Tricks.

So, finally I’ve put together some pages of photos and travelogues detailing our various travels in wild parts of the world. There are still a few to go up there, but I’ll take a break from scanning and gimping photographs for now…. there are a few hundred photos up there and it takes a while. Take a look at Treks and Travels and enjoy!

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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In this article I will provide some background to character sets and character encodings. The focus is on what is needed to work with XML parsers, as a preliminary to further articles in the series. For this reason there are some areas (glyphs and representation for example) that have not been covered.

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SnipSrv is a small PHP script to extract a piece of text from a file (which I assume is a quote, but could be anything) and return it. You’ll find it on its own page here.

I’ve added a slab of articles related to running a website on Westhost (where we are hosted). They’ve been through a hard patch recently with a rather, er, rough upgrade and the forums there have been buzzing with people trying to keep their systems going. A lot of good ideas put out, and I’ve collected some of them here.

Check out the Westhost Tips and Tricks pages.