shlomif_tech [shlomif]

In an email to the fc-solve-discuss mailing list, I detailed recent work on Freecell Solver. I added an suite of automated tests, which in turn allowed me to perform the conversion of its build-and-configuration system from the GNU Autotools (Autoconf, Automake and Libtool a.k.a Autohell) to CMake. I ran into a few problems in the process of the conversion, but it took less than 2 days, which was probably much less than its Autoconfisication of Freecell Solver took, excluding the constant maintenance of its Autotools configuration and random breakages.

You can refer to the trunk for the present state of the CMake configuration and the conversion-to-cmake branch for the gradual CMakification process.

In any case, now the source archive is smaller, configuring it is faster, make runs faster, and I have a configuration GUI. In the process, I also added support for the Qt GUI to the Mandriva CMake. There are probably still some quirks in the config+build system, but all in all, I'm very happy.

I also ran into a problem that Firefox completely refused to display the https:// URLs of svn.berlios.de, without letting me add an exception. As it turned out, the certificates were probably changed, and I had to manually delete all *.berlios.de related certificates, and then add them with exceptions.

Next - yesterday I read about jdavidb's problem of finding differences in two versions of a Fedora RPM, which prompted me to find out about Fedora's packages' version control repository, which I did. Then I ran into a comment in that page about the Better-SCM comparison, which inspired me to do further work on it.

I decided to finally experiment with the Google implementation of XSLT in JavaScript in an attempt to customise the output of the XML in the client-side. I wanted to fetch the contents of the XML document and XSLT stylesheet from the server which involved doing AJAX using jQuery. It took me a long time to get right, because I didn't realise the jQuery $.get(...) callbacks were asynchronous and executed at their own time. I guess it's called "Asynchronous JavaScript And XML" (= AJAX) for a reason.

Then I got it running, but then ran into a Google JS XSLT limitation of "not implemented: key" (probably the XSLT "<xsl:key />" feature which I'm using). Still, I gained a useful experience working with AJAX, JavaScript and jQuery.

In regards to August Penguin - I don't have a lot to report, because I was too tired due to lack of sleep in the previous days and so left early, right after the opening sessions.

All that put aside, I should note that the Cooker version of Mandriva (which is its development/experimental version), which I'm using now is now relatively broken on this machine, and many applications get hang for noticable periods of time or even completely. Part of it may be due to the switch from KDE 3 to KDE 4.1.x, but maybe there's something wrong on this machine's configuration, which I cannot get to the bottom of.