stupendous.net

Not sure why he’s building this …

I pity anyone who is not technical who tries to set this stuff up.

I got immediately annoyed with Meetup.com’s Message Board support, so created some forums over at the Australian RPG Dungeon, a site that I run on my server for the paltry .com yearly registration fee, rather than $12 a month through Meetup.com.

If you like playing Dungeons & Dragons, or other RPGs, head on over to the Australian RPG Dungeon and create an account. I’m hoping to create a bit of an Australian focused RPG playing community there to help people find groups to play with.

I’ve been looking around but I can’t find any decent free Mac OS X SOAP clients for Wordpress. Anyone aware of one? Preferably, one that doesn’t require much effort to post - something that you can click in the dock and it brings up a window, you write your post, attach images etc, and post would be perfect.

OK, so I’ve released a new version of NodeQuota. You can get it here: NodeQuota.

Fixes all the bugs I know about and gives you something usable. Please let me know if you find it useful.

I won’t be adding any more features until I get the interface specification from Internode, but I’ll fix bugs if you find any.

NodeQuota is a menu status bar widget that periodically checks your Internode quota and reports how much you’ve used. It’s version 1.0, doesn’t have a great number of features, but I’ll work on adding a bunch more if people like it.

Project Page

This is more of a quick test of various technologies, mostly Cocoa Bindings and NSURLRequest stuff.

I work around the corner from the Apple Store in Sydney, and I noticed that at the beginning of this week, they took the cover off the side of the building. So I took my camera with me this morning and took a photo of it!

You can see the class fronting, still mostly covered, and the shape of it. I think the building looks quite good, actually.

I bought two Acer AL2416W monitors about 2 years ago when we were in Japan. Great monitors, high resolution, good colour, and they’re pretty cheap - only 100,000 yen new at the time, now they’re down near the $450AU mark.

But a few months ago, my wife and I were eating dinner, and there was a loud POP! We looked around, didn’t see what it was, I figured just a small book fell over or something. Then again. POP! I looked around, this time saw smoke coming out of one of the Acer’s, ran over and unplugged it.

After that, nada. Plug it back in, whatever, nothing happened. ACER logo would flash, but then it would power save.

Now, this would be unexceptional - random bits of hardware do fail from time to time, and in the IT industry one just shrugs, and buys another, and moves on. Thats what I did.

Now, I’m wishing I didn’t. The SECOND monitor I bought in Japan, at the same time, both dated with build date of 2005/11, have died. The second one died in exactly the same way with the same behavior. Now, this time, I’m going to open it up and figure out what went wrong because that’s just shoddy electronics. Acer should be ashamed. Crappy products. I’ll never buy another piece of hardware from them again.

Now I have a monitor sitting on my desk, dated 2007/11, and I hope that it survives long enough for me to experience my new computer when it arrives.

Couldn’t recommend buying ACER to anyone anymore.

If you’re building gSoap on Solaris 10 (or below) you might run across this “Broken Pipe” issue with GNU bison:

make[4]: Entering directory `/home/d287582/gsoap-2.7/gsoap/src'
bison -y  -d -v `test -f 'soapcpp2_yacc.y' || echo './'`soapcpp2_yacc.y
make[4]: *** [soapcpp2_yacc.c] Broken Pipe
make[4]: Leaving directory `/home/d287582/gsoap-2.7/gsoap/src'
make[3]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/d287582/gsoap-2.7/gsoap'
make[2]: *** [all] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/d287582/gsoap-2.7/gsoap'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/d287582/gsoap-2.7'
make: *** [all] Error 2

The trick is to install GNU m4 from sunfreeware.com. It’s not obvious, but basically bison uses m4.

Posting this here because I’ve hit this 3 times now and each time I had to redo my troubleshoot from scratch as I’d forgotten what I’d done 3 months before.

I’ve been playing with GTKmm, writing some code to see how to do GUI apps in GTKmm and see how easy it is. Its not too bad, there are some gotchas. This is what I’ve learned so far. I’ll post it as a kind of a tutorial, maybe it will help someone else.

Firstly, I’d like to say that GTKmm gets a lot of unfair stick out there on the ‘net. Google it vs QT or wxWidgets, you’ll see what I mean. But my experience is showing me that its actually a good API, with good underlying design.

We’ll start off with a simple application, called “SimpleApp”. We’re going to use Autotools to manage it. Don’t be scared! Its actually not too hard.

Before you start, I suggest you install Eclipse CDT. Its not bad for a C++ editor, though I wouldn’t bother with it’s managed projects. You’ll also need a bunch of packages. As I use Ubuntu as my development environment, I’ll show you the ubuntu commands, and you’ll have to work out how to do it in your environment.

You’ll need at least the following, I think (let me know if this isn’t enough):

sudo apt-get install build-essential libglademm-2.4-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev autoconf automake

To make an autotools project, we only need a few files, configure.ac, and a [b]makefile.am[b] for each directory that contains stuff to be built.

Make yourself a project in Eclipse. File -> New -> C++ Project -> [Makefile project] Hello World C++ Project. Call it “SimpleApp”. Once it’s created, the Makefile and the cpp file it drops in there. You don’t need them.

Make a directory structure with some blank files like this:

    SimpleApp/
        configure.ac
        Makefile.am
        src/
            Makefile.am
            SimpleApp.cpp
            MainWindow.cpp
            PreferencesWindow.cpp
        include/
            MainWindow.h
            PreferencesWindow.h

configure.ac looks like this: (http://pastebin.ca/962273)

AC_PREREQ(2.61)

AC_INIT([simpleapp], [1.0.0], [You@that.place])

AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(AC_PACKAGE_NAME, AC_PACKAGE_VERSION)
AM_MAINTAINER_MODE
AM_CONFIG_HEADER(config.h)

AC_ISC_POSIX
AC_PROG_CXX
AM_PROG_CC_STDC
AC_HEADER_STDC

PKG_CHECK_MODULES(SIMPLEAPP, 
    [gtkmm-2.4 >= 2.8 libglademm-2.4 >= 2.6    ])

AC_SUBST(SIMPLEAPP_CFLAGS)
AC_SUBST(SIMPLEAPP_LIBS)

AC_OUTPUT([
Makefile
src/Makefile
])

Basically this file tells autoconf what bits and peices we’re using. We’re using glade, and gtkmm. We also want it to output a Makefile in src, so stuff can be built there. I don’t really understand it much, but its pretty easy to understand as you go, it seems.

The first Makefile.am in the project dir contains just this one line:

SUBDIRS = src

Because we’re not building anything in the project directory (as it is about to be filled with hundreds of files).

the Makefile.am in the src/ directory needs the following: (http://pastebin.ca/962279)

gladedir = $(datadir)/glade
glade_DATA = simpleapp.glade

INCLUDES = \
        -DPACKAGE_LOCALE_DIR=\""$(prefix)/$(DATADIRNAME)/locale"\" \
        -DPACKAGE_SRC_DIR=\""$(srcdir)"\" \
        -DPACKAGE_DATA_DIR=\""$(datadir)"\" \
        $(SIMPLEAPP_CFLAGS) \
        -I/usr/local/include \
    -I../include

AM_CFLAGS =\
         -Wall\
         -g

bin_PROGRAMS = simpleapp

simpleapp_SOURCES = \
        SimpleApp.cpp MainWindow.cpp PreferencesWindow.cpp

simpleapp_LDFLAGS = 

simpleapp_LDADD = $(SIMPLEAPP_LIBS)

EXTRA_DIST = $(glade_DATA)

Most of the time, you just need to edit the SOURCES line, every time you add a new source file, and then rerun the autoreconf steps (coming next). If you have any libraries you need to link against, add them to LDFLAGS. Include paths get added to the INCLUDES line. Feel free to mess with the CFLAGS to suit yourself; the defaults are designed to be sane.

Once you’ve done this, go to the project directory and run autoreconf. This will fail, with output like the following:

chrome@shuttle:~/Development/workspace/SimpleApp$ autoreconf
/usr/share/aclocal/gtk--.m4:10: warning: underquoted definition of AM_PATH_GTKMM
/usr/share/aclocal/gtk--.m4:10:   run info '(automake)Extending aclocal'
/usr/share/aclocal/gtk--.m4:10:   or see http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Extending-aclocal
configure.ac:5: required file `./missing' not found
configure.ac:5:   `automake --add-missing' can install `missing'
configure.ac:5: required file `./install-sh' not found
configure.ac:5:   `automake --add-missing' can install `install-sh'
src/Makefile.am: required file `./depcomp' not found
src/Makefile.am:   `automake --add-missing' can install `depcomp'
Makefile.am: required file `./INSTALL' not found
Makefile.am:   `automake --add-missing' can install `INSTALL'
Makefile.am: required file `./NEWS' not found
Makefile.am: required file `./README' not found
Makefile.am: required file `./AUTHORS' not found
Makefile.am: required file `./ChangeLog' not found
Makefile.am: required file `./COPYING' not found
Makefile.am:   `automake --add-missing' can install `COPYING'
autoreconf: automake failed with exit status: 1

The warnings at the start are nothing we can do about at the moment. Seems to be a slightly older version of the m4 macros installed on Ubuntu 7.10, and I can only assume it’ll be fixed eventually. Doesn’t seem to harm anything.

The rest of the whinging is about missing files. automake will indeed add some of the missing files, but not all. Go ahead and add them.

automake --add-missing && touch NEWS README AUTHORS ChangeLog && autoreconf

Phew, almost there! Its a bit arduous, but you can kind of see a structure taking place here, right? It should be pretty familiar; any time you’ve downloaded a package and built it from source, it probably has these files. autotools and autoconf give you a level of build portability (even if your source code is not) so that at the very least you don’t have to worry about whether a C compiler is called gcc on one platform, of cc on another.

Now we just run ./configure, and it will spit out the Makefile we need to build our project.

chrome@shuttle:~/Development/workspace/SimpleApp$ ./configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... /bin/mkdir -p
checking for gawk... no
checking for mawk... mawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
checking for style of include used by make... GNU
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of executables... 
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed
checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3
checking for library containing strerror... none required
checking for g++... g++
checking whether we are using the GNU C++ compiler... yes
checking whether g++ accepts -g... yes
checking dependency style of g++... gcc3
checking for gcc... (cached) gcc
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... (cached) yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... (cached) yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... (cached) none needed
checking dependency style of gcc... (cached) gcc3
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking for grep that handles long lines and -e... /bin/grep
checking for egrep... /bin/grep -E
checking for ANSI C header files... yes
checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config
checking pkg-config is at least version 0.9.0... yes
checking for SIMPLEAPP... yes
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating Makefile
config.status: creating src/Makefile
config.status: creating config.h
config.status: executing depfiles commands

There we go. Now once we’ve added the code into the source files, we’ll have a working build system to build the code with!

Rather than try and paste each file into here, I’ll link to them:

MainWindow.h MainWindow.cpp PreferencesWindow.h PreferencesWindow.cpp SimpleApp.cpp

now when you type make in either the project directory or the src directory, you should get a binary output, called simpleapp, in the src directory. If you try to run it, however, it’ll core!

(simpleapp:22891): libglade-WARNING **: could not find glade file 'simpleapp.glade'
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'Gnome::Glade::XmlError'
Aborted (core dumped)

Hopefully this should be pretty obvious. We don’t have a glade file! Thats because I had you implement the code before the UI. I think this is better coding practice btw; do lots of code first, then worry about the UI later.

So, what you’ll need is the glade file.

simpleapp.glade

Explanation: We have two windows, main_window and preferences_window. There is a single button, preferences_button on the main_window, which opens the preferences_window.

This preferences_window is controlled by the class, PreferencesWindow. It is instantiated only when we need it, and deleted when we are finished. We hook into the delete_event and hide signals for the preferences_window, so that we can destroy it, and in it’s destructor, it destroys any child widgets.

Note that the so-called “Preferences Window” does not work very well. The one tickbox option there, does not save state. This is something I’ll cover in another post; for now you simply need the .glade file in the same directory that you run simpleapp from.

There are multiple ways to control GTK windows and handle the instantiation of the glade based widgets, etc. But this is the way I’m doing it right now. Alternatives:

• Code your Gtkmm widgets directly in your code.
• Use get_widget_derived instead of get_widget to get the window object. You create a subclass of Gtk::Window and then use get_widget_derived to populate the Gtk::Window bits with stuff from the glade file. I really don’t see the point in this at the moment, I’m sure a GTKmm wizz will tell me why this is better than the way I’m doing it.

Disclaimer: I’m not a GTK or GTKmm expert. This is what I’m currently doing after about a week of messing with the library. My main project is a new bittorrent client, based on libtorrent, and thats not in a usable state yet so I won’t be releasing it til it’s reasonably feature complete But, stay tuned. (yes, I know, there are a lot of torrent clients, but it was a good project to work on to learn).