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July 20, 2008
You all know the web shortcuts for konqueror, don’t you ? (like gg: or wp: when you want to use google or wikipedia in alt-f2 or konqueror).
Well, I find this really useful, but theres none for youtube (in kde 3 at least, I haven’t checked kde4 yet). This is really easy to do. Go in the settings dialog for web browsing, either from konqueror (settings/configure konqueror), or kcontrol / internet&network / web browsing / web shortcuts. Create a new shorctut using the URL:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=\{@}&search_type=&aq=f
And you’re done. Happy youtubing!
As a side note, I dont use konqueror for browsing, firefox is configured as my main web browser. But, strangely enough, when you use the web shortcuts or if you open a bookmark from the kicker “bookmark” applet, then the right thing is done and the page is opened in firefox. This brings web shortcuts to firefox as well, and I’m happy with that.
Filed under: Gentoo, KDE |
Comments (2)
July 13, 2008
PHP has the ability to send mails. Great. To do so, it can either connect to an external smtp server, or use a local MTA. Even greater!
But only on windows. As astounding as it sounds, the feature of using a smtp server is only available on windows : on linux, you need to install a full-blown MTA just to be able to send mails from PHP.
Consider the following quite common setup : you have a main vserver, hosting the MTA (postfix in my case), and a dedicated vserver for all those unsecured php-based web stuff. The natural thing to do would be to ask apache/php to send mail through the MTA on the main vserver. This is just not possible, even with the more recent php version.
You can try to use SSMTP or similar “relay only” MTA, but this wont work very well. They don’t relay headers well enough and for example the “From:” header wont go through.
The most surprising thing about it, is that the feature is here, but for some unknown reason, it is not made available under linux. PHP authors decided that linux would be a second-class citizen in the PHP world, and I don’ understand why it is so.
The solution I’ve finally used is to install postfix as a relay only, and NOT starting smptd (you need to comment out the line related to “smtpd” in the file master.cf). It would not be possible anyway, as the smtp port (25) is already opened on the main vserver (vservers share inet ports). The important steps for the configuration (main.cf) are :
- relayhost = 192.168.0.1 # IP of your main postfix server
- inet_interfaces = all #wont be used, but needed anyway
- mydestination = # nothing -> everything is relayed
Once postfix has started, you can check that no port is opened (”netstat -anp | grep postfix”) and that mails actually go through (’echo foobar | sendmail mymail@myhost.com’).
Filed under: Gentoo, admin |
Comments (5)
June 27, 2008
One of the great things about Qt is that you can compile the code under esoteric OSs (mmh?) like Windows or MacOS. Although I’ve almost never used windows, I did the packaging of yzis. I used the Nullsoft Installer, which is ok.
I had several issues with static linking, and thought maybe some of you could give some help about it. Don’t ask why I want static link, this is not the issue here.
Problem #1:
The most important one is Qt itself. I expected that to be easy, but it is not. The FindQt4 shipped with cmake 2.4.8 or 2.6 is not really aware of static lib, or is it ? Nor is the one from kde svn. I’ve tried using the one from quassel-irc, but it fails as well. If you can help me with this, the code is available.
It seems (according to #qt on irc) that it makes sense to have two different Qt installed, one static and one shared. I did that (double the space used…) and in one of them did “configure -static” and recompiled qt. Now the *.a are much bigger, and though qyzis links against those *.a, it still depends on the DLLs, according to “dependencies walker”. Gr…
Problem #2:
Then, there is the problem of gnuwin32 tools. In the lib/ directory, you can find for example
- libintl.dll.a
- libintl.def
- libintl.lib
And the DLL (libintl3.dll) is in the bin/ directory. I need to ship the DLL with qyzis, because cmake found the dll, and linked against libintl.dll.a. In a perfect world, I would like cmake to use the libintl.lib and have a static link, but i dont know how to convince cmake of doing that. Do you know ?
Problem #3:
How do you find out what kind of library a file is ? According to what I’ve found googling the web, libraries can have a wild number of different names (libX.dll, libX.dll.a, libX.lib, libX.a, all of this without the lib prefix and so on…). Even worse : libX.a for example, could be either a static lib or the stub for the DLL. Do you have clarifications about this ? Do you know of a reliable way to know which kind of library it is ? (DLL, DLL stub, or purely static).
Filed under: KDE |
Comments (3)
June 26, 2008
Ok, here it is, things have finally settled and we are happy to bring you the first alpha release for Yzis. The foundations are stabilizing, and we are now focusing on fixing bugs and porting to different architectures, OSs, and interfaces.
What you have so far :
The most noteworthy missing feature is the KDE embeddable component, we are aware of this, and this is the main thing we shall work on after 1.0 is out.
At this point, we are not yet asking for broad testing, but developers not afraid of bleeding edge are encouraged to test it out. If you can help with porting/solving bugs, this is of course even better.
You can join us on #yzis on freenode to discuss all of this.
The web site has been updated, and you should find information about getting the source from source control (mercurial) and compiling on most platforms.
http://www.yzis.org
The tarballs and the windows installer can be downloaded from this url:
http://labs.freehackers.org/projects/list_files/yzis
Below are some screenshots showing the different interfaces (qt/linux, ncurses, qt/windows):
Filed under: KDE |
Comments (10)
June 19, 2008
I’m releasing part of the code developed during my PhD. Those are tools useful in the field of convex processing, and more precisely to solve a problem called convex feasbility problem.
This is based on Qt4, and released mostly under the GPL (with an added restriction : you must cite my work if you use this). Oh.. and there are unit tests, examples, and documentation, too.
caution : rest of the post is for those mathematically oriented people, and no more related to free software.
The convex feasbility problem is to find a point in the intersection of closed convex sets inside a Hilbert space. Believe it or not, quite some real-life problems can be formulated as such, for examples some image reconstruction problems in medical imaging, or also in the field of signal processing.
There are a lot of algorithms to solve this, you can find more information about those in the bibliography of my papers, or those from my PhD advisor M. Combettes.
This code provides the necessary tools to play and test those algorithms. Besides all elementary methods on Euclidian/Hilbert Space, it provides a way to compute projections on different interesting convex sets. There are also the needed tools to experiment with tomography, which is one of the main application in my PhD. You can compute the radon transform of an image and use this as data in convex feasibility formulation.
This is of course mostly of interest for those working in convex optimization and/or tomography. I want to highligh the fact that sharing such kind of code is very rare in this community. I would have gained a lot of time at the beginning of my thesis if other people had provided such code.
link : http://labs.freehackers.org/wiki/cvx-processing
Filed under: KDE, Math |
Comments (14)
June 15, 2008
As some of you might know, I had to finish my Ph.D. and it took me a lot more time than previously planned. I’m happy to tell you that it is now finished. I’m officially a doctor in the field of applied mathematics, and I have more time to dedicate to free software.
One of my first goals is to release the sleeping code for yzis. There sure are a lot of issues with this code, and the KDE kpart is still unfinished, but I think we can release basic, working, tested applications. This would mean the curses-based nyzis and the qt4-based qyzis, both for Linux, Mac OS X, windows, and maybe some other platforms like the *bsd.
We created a project on freehackers redmine project manager to handle this new development. We expect to release 1.0-alpha1 next week-end (june 22th), and keep on testing/fixing bugs until 1.0. Then we should focus on the real fun stuff : kpart and other embeddings.
Oh, and, meanwhile, we moved the code from subversion to mercurial.
redmine project for bug reports
Yzis homepage
view yzis source under mercurial (you can also clone the repository from this url)
Filed under: KDE |
Comments (2)
June 14, 2008
I intend to use this blog to give insights about my free software development stuff, which is mainly related to Qt/KDE, gentoo, and the linux kernel.
Filed under: Gentoo, KDE, Linux kernel |
Comments (0)
