I wonder what issue tracking tool is used...

GGZ

It got to 3pm today and I decided I just couldn't be bothered battling Java all afternoon when I'd really prefer to be working on glChess. So I just went home and did that (I love being a contractor!).

So glChess is getting closer to having GGZ support...



Oh, and it really is wonderful to work on a well designed protocol like GGZ. ICS is OK if you're a human but a nightmare for a computer!

Poisonous People

I finally got around to watching my first Google Tech Talk, How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too). It's a really good watch as it both shows how to spot and avoid trouble makers but also how to give good feedback as a project member (hopefully so you're not poisonous too!).

One point of particular interest was their recommendation not to put your name in files - by doing this you are implicitly claiming "ownership" of the code which will discourage potential developers. From looking at other peoples code I think I agree with this idea and plan to remove my name from code in the future.

Gnome bug triaging

We're getting a lot of bug reports flowing in for Gnome games. I try and knock off a few each weekend but progress is still slow. Most are coming from the automated reports from Feisty users.

So here's my top 3 bugs that need to be fixed asap:

• #409172 - Sudoku crashes when loading. Haven't looked into this at all but we probably get a few reports each day


• #418427 and #412690 - Both Sudoku and chess can't find their libraries on Feisty - I suspect this is an upgrade issue only but none of the many reports have any information on how to reproduce


• #428560 - Some dubious Sudoku code that extracts an integer from label text. Doesn't work when the label is translated. (I've been bugging Joel to fix this).

We need your help!

Upgrade complete

I've now completed the Edgy->Feisty upgrade. I went to sleep at 1:30 am and continued this morning. I did an network upgrade and it took and estimated 5-6 hours. And the result is? I think I've gone slightly backwards.

• The installer failed to complete due to the poor quality of the VMWare packages. They've now been removed.


• fglrx acceleration still does not work. I've changed to the "radeon" driver which runs but is unreliable. I can get the desktop effects working (wobbly windows got annoying after one minute) but playing video stops working when the window looses focus. I noticed glChess renders both the 2D and 3D at the same time, I'll see if this is a driver or glChess at fault.


• And most annoyingly the US keyboard layout has stopped working for my second keybord. I can't type '/' or '|' which is very annoying in the shell
(the keyboard configuration shows the correct layout though).

For me both the Edgy and Feisty upgrades have been disappointing for me. I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 which I think is fairly common and I hope support gets better if Dell starts distributing Linux!

Upgrading to Feisty...

..be back in four hours hopefully with 3D support again!

I've been running Google Analytics on the glChess homepage. Looking at statistics over this period shows the visitors are dominated by the French and Italian:



Are Europeans big chess players or big open-source users or both?

Xeyes in real life

Xeyes in real life. Cool.

glChess spam poetry

Seems glChess is now a sufficiently well know term to be included in spam poetry.

The Commission has concluded that " safeguards schachclub are imposed by federal skakcomputer law and forensic science is webchess glchess practiced go chessboard schachcomputer far less efficient than openings tim krabe rochade ...


I don't know whether to be flattered or annoyed.

p.s. I found this from a feed from Google Blog Search - this is a great way to keep track on what people are saying about your project. Most people don't write to you, they just write about you...

glChess 1.0.5

So here it is:


Yes, it has (simple) timed play support. It needs some cleaning up in the code but due to limited development time I thought it best to "release early".

Notice the navigation buttons are now on the left. I liked the symmetry of them on either side but as a user pointed out when you are in high resolution it takes too much mouse motion to move between them.

The other notable change is the 2D board now rotates and you can choose (from the menu) which side of the board to view.

These changes will be in the Gnome 2.20 release.

Enjoy!

Beginners guide to Gnome Python games

In Gnome games we need more help to squash some bugs. I've been bogged down squashing Sudoku bugs which aren't too difficult - just time consuming. It's a great opportunity for you to get involved. I think it's hard to jump into development so here is a step by step entry guide to fixing bugs. Note the following instructions work fine for glChess too.

First install Gnome games. You can install this anywhere but I usually make a subversion directory:

$ mkdir svn
$ cd svn

Check out the development version:

$ svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-games/trunk gnome-games
$ cd gnome-games

Configure the package:

$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/tmp

This will get the software installed in /tmp, you might want to use ~/build or something similar instead.

For the above you will need the appropriate development tools installed. This will be distribution specific so unfortunately you're on your own here... If I remember which ones I installed on Ubuntu I'll state it here. Oh and on Ubuntu Edgy edit configure.in and change GNOME_PYTHON_DESKTOP_REQUIRED=2.17.3 to 2.16.0 because it works fine with the old (installable) version.

Install Sudoku:

$ cd gnome-sudoku
$ make install

To run:

$ PYTHONPATH=/tmp/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ /tmp/bin/gnome-sudoku

Now here's the cool part - because Sudoku is written in Python you don't need to recompile to make changes... What I do is edit the files in /tmp/lib/python2.4/site-packages/gnome-sudoku and run again. You can add print statements, make radical changes, whatever you like. And if things get too broken overwrite the install with another make install.

When you've fixed the change you need to make a patch to attach to a bug report. To do this you need to update the files in ~/svn/gnome-games. What I use is Meld:

$ meld ~/svn/gnome-games/gnome-sudoku /tmp/lib/python2.4/site-packages/gnome-sudoku

Once you've got the changes merged into the checked out copy make a patch:

$ cd ~/svn/gnome-games/gnome-sudoku
$ svn diff > your_changes_description.patch

And send that in.

Don't worry about the patch being perfect, the developers who know the codebase better will look it over and modify/suggest changes to you. It may take time to get a response because we're all volunteers but we do appreciate the work - We need more help and you're the right person for the job! The first patch is always the hardest too :)

Feedback very welcome.

Working with Java

Or should that be Working against Java...

I've more-or-less come to the end of a project refactoring a large Java GUI application for my company and I now feel I can justifiably have a practical opinion on Java. This was my first commercial work with Java and I'll compare it to C/Python/GTK+ which I have used both commercially and in open-source projects.

Java is far more complicated than it should be. Count the number of methods each class has when browsing the documentation. The complexity of the standard library exceeds the complexity of the problems you solve with it. Compare it to the Python or even C library. Instead of containing the basic tools and tools that you use frequently it's full of cruft. I think the programmer should either build up more complex functions themselves or use higher level functions from a different namespace (compare GL and GLU libraries in OpenGL).

AWT and Swing are just a complete mess. Sure this is for historical reasons but Java needs a serious replacement. Maybe SWT is it but if some leadership is not taken to make a "standard" GUI that works I cannot see vanilla Java surviving compared to something like .NET. Case in point, java.awt.Component has four variations on getting keyboard focus. And reading the documentation on each is just worring... You may not get focus, you should use the requestFocusInWindow() because it is more cross-platform. I used to work with a commercial Java developer and he described the cross-platform support as write once; test n times. I now understand.

Packing in AWT/Swing is just too difficult. The simple packing models are too simple for most cases and the complex ones create too much code. While the GTK+ model is more complex to start with I'm always surprised how my windows "just work" (try shrinking a Java window and see everything get messed up). Java needs a universally accepted equivalent of Glade or XAML.

Connecting signals takes too much code. Using Listeners requires you to write loads of empty methods to catch signals you want to and Adapters can't be inherited if you're already extending another class. I hate inline classes with a passion (so much code for so little behaviour!). Using SwingUtilities.invokeLater() (which is a really practical method that should be more central to Java) to create a runnable class every time you want to access one method later? Overkill. Why not just gobject.idle_add(method)?

Threading... All I can say is threading is an optimisation. I've seen too much excessively threaded code that is very hard to maintain. Java seems to implicitly encourage you to thread which I do not like. I don't like that a lot of the Graphics operations don't seem to have an easy way of doing them synchronously. Threading is an optimisation.

Really it's the library that lets Java down. The language is a huge improvement over C. It lacks a little in low level access (I have not really done this in Java but from a first glance it may be missing something like Pythons struct module). I dislike the lack of flexibility over Java but I do like the compile time checking for catching bugs. I must try a .NET project to see if .NET doesn't have the baggage Java does. I get the impression the dominant members of the Java community have the opinion "Don't change anything, we've got too much code" as opposed to "Keep version X stable as we have lots of code, but make version X+1 fix the big problems in X".

My opinion of Java? Not ready for the enterprise :)

Damn broken VMWare

Why are the Ubuntu VMWare packages so flaky? Every time I've upgraded the kernel (i.e. standard updates) VMWare player ceases to work. This has happened in both Dapper and Edgy and I'm surprised it hasn't been fixed as the way to reproduce is:

1. Install Ubuntu from a CD
2. Install VMWare player
3. Use VMWare player. Works (fairly - see below) well
4. Perform a security update
5. Pretty much broken from now on...
   

I was trying to find some bugs in the mess of launchpad.net and there doesn't seem to be any bug collection (?). Googling seems to show others on the forums etc have the same sort of problems...

Some clues:

• The kernel modules are not loaded on startup. If you try and use modprobe they're not found. If you use insmod they load OK.
• Running /etc/init.d/vmware-player start says neither vmmon or . I think this is because it is trying to use modprobe
• If you run the player after insmodding then it runs but networking doesn't seem to work. In general the networking seems very flaky.
  

And the last time I ran it it didn't want to quit and had to be killed. I wonder what state my image will be in next time I get it working (based on experience the first time I install Feisty!).

And why is the performance of the player so poor? Applications inside the player often pause inexplicably for a minute or more (I think it may be related to networking, for example try ifup with DHCP). Sure it's virtualised so I could understand if there was a resource problem but both CPU and IO are not active. So I just don't know what's going on.

So if anyone is wondering why there aren't any glChess packages from me for non-Ubuntu Dapper systems, now you know.

Slashdotted!

Seems like glchess.sourceforge.net got slashdotted:


Good to see the quality of the comments were absolutely rubbish. Why actually try/investigate something when you can rush and post about it! :)

Bonus points if anyone can actually confirm the dialog has bad grammar as some of the comments say.

Another sneak peak...

As usual no promises on getting this past the screenshot stage at any particular time...

Sick today...

...but every cloud has a silver lining! I have time for open-source. In an attempt to reduce the millions of Gnome Sudoku bug reports flowing into my inbox I've had a crack at some of the worst offenders. I think I've knocked about five on the head so things should be more stable now.

Unfortunately a lot of the bugs are due to a save file being corrupted. Once this has occurred Sudoku will always crash on startup. So we'll have to wait until a month or so until 2.18.1 is released to get some relief from bugbuddy...

Java + keyboard bindings

= Insanity.

I want to connect all input keys to a single widget. And I don't want to have to use 16 classes in the process. And I want all the Java library developers to get their come-uppance.

*sigh*

Python GtkGLExt

...is now in Debian Unstable. This works for me (I get to be lazy and eventually stop providing anything for Ubuntu) and good for you (it's available in all the architectures that Debian builds for). Big thanks Thierry Randrianiriana for maintaining this.

Boo's chess engine

I've just packaged Boo's Chess Engine (or BCE, or BACE, or ddlchess as it is known...) for Debian/Ubuntu adding another easily installed AI that works with glChess. I think I have some sort of addiction finding open source chess engines and packaging them :)

p.s. I found it quite funny posting the same article twice!

ASCII

The other day I happened to look at the ASCII table and was surprised that I had never read and understood the C0 control characters! For something I've used for so long I thought that was pretty funny :) Way, way back when I started programming with QBasic I remember looking at the table but all the non-printable stuff looked "too complicated" so I just ignored them. I suppose I should have looked again when they weren't too complicated any more.

In my previous job there were a number of ASCII/Binary protocols that used STX (02) and ETX (03) for framing transmission. This now makes a whole lot more sense...

Oh and software flow control seems quite simple now. I'd assumed there was some sort of escape sequences to do this but hey, there's the characters right there!