Peter Velichkov's Blog

On 15-th and 16-th of February in a mountain hut(near Sofia) took place the first CodeCamp meeting in Bulgaria.I took part in it as a speaker and it was great experience for me. Thanks for inviting me!

Organization: Generally we had all we needed for good discussion-based seminar with few areas we can improve:

• We need a better place because this hut proved as not quite comfortable for living. Also connectivity will be great.
• For more attendants we will have to think about organized transportation.

Speakers and topics: People were one of kind! Even for me as designer/html-css-javascript-web3.0-geek there was plenty of interesting topics like virtualization, developing .NET applications with Mono and continuous integration with CI Factory. Basically because of the format of the event (a bit less formal with many discussions) it also covered many topics that were not included in the agenda and that made the event so interesting.

People who attended CodeCamp:

Emil Stoychev, Hristo Iliev, Ivaylo Bratoev, Vladimir Dimitrov, Stefan Dobrev, Deian Varchev, Martin Kulov, Jordan Dimitrov, Svetlin Nakov, Peter Velichkov (me), Radi Buhleva

and many other friends (you know who you are)

My topic was introduction to Mootools Javascript Framework and nevertheless that I’m not quite experienced speaker as most of the people there I think it came out very good. In the next couple of days I will translate the slides from Bulgarian and will put here. Also updating and fixing couple of bugs on the site is in the plan too.

You can find more information on Codecamp’s site

It was fun and interesting with lots of knowledge gained. For the next time I wish only warm weather and no accidents

Just checked out an interview with Sebastian Kuegler (KDE developer) about the upcoming features in KDE4.1 :

I think the part that most people — just like me — are really looking forward to is an improved Plasma desktop shell. It really is the most visible part of the desktop. The good news here is that Plasma, a relatively young subcommunity within KDE is really alive and kicking. We’ve already been able to fix most of the problems that were still there in 4.0.0, and if we continue to keep the current pace of development, it looks like we have exceeded feature parity in those part with the 3.5 series already by summer.

Then of course, I’m looking forward to KDE-PIM in 4.1. It will make use of the Akonadi storage framework and as such be more stable and usable as the 3.5 series. Then, just recently, Dragon Player has been merged into our 4.1 tree. Dragon Player is a very simple but powerful video player, which of course makes use of Phonon, our new multimedia framework. For non-Linux/UNIX users, 4.1 will also bring the first stable applications to Mac OSX and Windows, which is another very big thing in my eyes.

Other features include more scripting support, newly ported applications (Amarok for example seems to be aiming for a summer release as well), performance improvements all over the place, new plugins for the KWin window manager with its nifty compositing features, and many more.

This really suggests what I expect from the KDE 4 series, new, innovative and really exciting features and improvements at a steady pace. With the KDE 4
series, we’ll simply outperform our proprietary competitors in terms of speed of innovation and user orientation.

More information on this topic can be found on Sebastian’s blog

Full interview link

Update: If you are looking for patching VMware for Linux 2.6.25 Kernel - check here

Currently latest VMware Player and Workstation do not install under Linux 2.6.24 Kernel. This is a short how-to resolve the gcc/make errors that arise while configuring (vmware-configure.pl)

1. Download the latest vmware player (workstation) - currently VMware Player 2.0.2 Build 59824
url: http://www.vmware.com/download/player/ - Read the Eula before downloading

2. tar xzvf VMware-player-2.0.2-59824.i386.tar.gz

3. cd vmware-player-distrib/

4. ./vmware-install.pl - Proceed as usual when asked to run vmware-config.pl answer NO

5. Download the latest any-any patch - currently vmware-any-any-update-116
url: http://vm…s.googlegroups.com/web/vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz

6. tar xzvf vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz

7. cd vmware-any-any-update116

8. ./runme.pl and when asked to run vmware-config.pl answer YES

9. Configure as usual

10. Enjoy!

PS. Link is broken so I reuploaded on my hosting. Patch is presented as is and I don’t take any responsibility for it. All credits go to the author.

Anyway http://blog.creonfx.com/temp/vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz

There is one really nasty bug in Adobe Illustrator CS3 which manifests when trying to save a file. Everytime I tried this operation I was receiving an error telling me that Illustrator.exe has thrown exception and suggesting me to use debugger. After trying lots of stuff including installing all updates from Adobe I found the reason - my Print Spooler Service was configured to start manually and therefor not running.

So in summary: if you plan to save files from Adobe Illustrator CS3 keep your Print Spooler service running.

Today W3C released the first draft for the next generation HTML language. There are plenty of differences including lots of new semantic tags (header, footer etc) , couple of APIs (2D drawing, drag and drop, network), new events and other cool stuff. Of course the guys have done great work with revising the language structure (cleaning up some tags and attributes) and still achieving backwards compatibility. Also I liked the idea of making HTML5 a XML language.

for more info check the official pages:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/ Working Draft

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-diff-20080122/ - Differences between HTML4 and HTML5

Update:

With KDE 4.1 kicking the traffic to this page has increased dramatically. So for installing KDE 4.1 on Debian unstable you have to generally follow the same instructions (add expreimental repository to your sources.list)

More instructions on the Debian KDE Team website

Today I tried the new KDE4 on my Debian Sid distribution and decided it is still not usable for everyday desktop environment. After the full of dependency issues installation I ended up with piles of software removed and yes running KDE4.

Positive:

• works noticeably faster
• cool effects
• gadgets(widgets)
• totally new experience - live previews, funky menu, new icons and theme
• new multimedia engines

Negative:

• Some effects bugs
• not compatible with some old programs - at least were uninstalled while installing KDE4

For now I will not update my main copy of Debian Unstable

Anyway short how-to if you still decide to try it yourself:

1. Backup everything - I personally copied my whole Debian partition to another one and installed there.
2. Remove all KDE and Compiz packages that are already installed otherwise you will have plenty of dependencies problems and apt shouting various errors.
3. Add

   deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ experimental main non-free contrib

   to your /etc/apt/sources.list

4. apt-get update && apt-get -t experimental install kdebase kdebase-workspace
   extragear-plasma kdegraphics kdegames kdemultimedia kdenetwork kdeutils kdeedu kdeadmin
   kdetoys kdeartwork kdesdk

Just noticed that Google has updated their tracking code some time ago and included couple of new features to the analytics service. The transitions itself is quite easy - just follow the instructions in the Google Tracking Code Migration Guide. More information about it can be found on the Analytics Blog

On 17 Jan 2008 took place the first event in Bulgaria dedicated to Adobe Flex and building RIA with it. It was well organized by Gugga and RIABG with one exception - it was in a weekly day which for sure lowered the number of visitors.

Summary of the things that were interesting to me:

1. A sneak preview of Adobe Thermo - there are couple of videos already on YouTube
   1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XecRJgbdCtU
   2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzAKlSE_-9o
2. Adobe Flex 3 CRUD Database Wizard
3. Couple of presentations which included good explanations for Flex databinding mechanism
4. A demo of SWFAddress deeplinking utility

Of course there were some disappointments too - there was one presentation about laptop.bg which looked like payed commercial because it didn’t showed anything connected with Flex even the site itself and one more: the guy sitting in front of me took the iPod

Anyway it was a good experience, I hope there will be plenty more.

After updating to the latest Icedove (Thunderbird) package from the Unstable (Sid) repository my feeds stopped coming.

The solution is editing /etc/icedove/pref/icedove.js and comment the following line:

pref(”network.protocol-handler.external.http”, true);

After that everything works fine!

For further explanation check the bugreport

Couple of people around the forums and here commented that none of the current Internet Explorer 6 PNG scripts provide fix for the issue of using png image as CSS repeated background (background-repeat: repeat/repeat-x/repeat-y).

Therefor with no generic solution at this time I thought of three possible workarounds:

1. Use sizingMethod=’scale’
2. Use flash for rendering the png
3. Make as much as needed areas and repeat with Javascript

Here I will explain the first one since it was the easiest to try.

The idea is very simple just use filter: progid: DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(enabled=’true’, sizingMethod=’scale’, src=’the-image-you-want-to-repeat.png’ ) and make sure you properly apply the other CSS rules. This technique uses scaling instead of repeating but for shadows and other cool effects it is sufficient.

End result and demo following:

For more info see the demo under Internet Explorer 6