Since I am toying with the idea of buying a new flat, I am currently looking through interior design ideas. I will collect some of what I discover on this blog. I am hoping to find an industrial building that I can turn into a loft, so the obvious place to start is the design of the walls.

I love looking through such pictures.

[Update:]

Also, this is totally my favorite interior design. I want it.

Damn, Inform 7 is a truly impressive piece of software. Knowing how hard it is for software to understand the human language, the explanation in the “syntax error” message boggles my mind.

I have created something new in the last few days - although the application is very young, I have been working on the backing components for a much longer time. It is one of those times where a long period of tedious work finally turns into something useful.

Nanny is currently a terminal with a powerful integrated desktop wiki. However, Nanny is also a starting point for creating a powerful workflow application for the GNOME desktop. Let me walk you through some screenshots. At first glance, the main window looks like a terminal:

However, after selecting a workflow…

…something is different. Yay, a wiki-style workflow appeared!

You may edit this workflow in a very simple editor with all the features of a wiki, but none of the pain of wiki markup language. Here is the editor:

Linking to other workflows is easy, and of course you also get to view older revisions. I am particularly proud of the annotation feature, because implementing that properly with all the load/restore magic was a serious pain in the ass.

The future

While Nanny is currently clearly terminal-centric, this is just the beginning. I am planning to gradually make the terminal optional, replacing it by workflows that may kick start other scripts. I will also add more “active” features where you have a workflow with an actual state, and where different wiki pages are combined into one higher-level workflow. In short, this application should evolve into a general purpose workflow application.

I am currently trying to profile a PHP application, so I tried to find a way to create a call graph. Since I didn’t want to strace() the entire Apache process (which probably wouldn’t have worked anyway) I remembered a posting that showed how to do it with Mono. So this still depended on strace, but since I liked the plot-timeline.py script from Federico’s performance-scripts, I decided to simply fake some strace output.

If you need to do the same, try the following:

1. Add this file to your PHP application.
2. Add some code similar to this:

   unset($tracer);
   $tracer = new CallTracer('/tmp/trace.log');
   function trace($_comment = '') {
     global $tracer;
     $tracer->trace($_comment);
   }
   

3. Sprincle trace() calls across your source code.
4. Pass the resulting file to plot-timeline like this:

   python plot-timeline.py -o graph.png /tmp/trace.log

The result looks something like this:

Seeing the freshmeat beta page inspired me to do some web design, and after a few hours of hacking the Freech homepage is born!

(click on the image to go to the homepage)

The last release of Freech is only two weeks old, but there have been such a huge number of improvements that already here is the followup. Some of the new features include:

Multi-forum support and a completely new front page (that may optionally be skipped if you are using only one single forum):

The design of the forum has been simplified and optimized for smaller screen resolutions. A lot of detail has been put into making the looks of different forum pages more consistent, leaving a much cleaner overall impression. In addition, all pages are now XHTML1.0 (strict) compliant.
Many other details were polished: Line wrapping in postings works even better, “breadcrumbs” (the path pointing to the current page) are shown on every page, video links are optionally embedded into posting, and a lot more.

A lot of work went into improving the administration features. Activities of moderators are logged on a dedicated page, and moderators may now lock/unlock other users. Spam handling and detection was greatly improved.

The forum renders a lot faster by allowing the browser to cache more pages. As usual, a large number of bug fixes is also included in the release.

Links:
Download
Project page
Full changelog

SpiffWarehouse is a Python module for storing objects in a filesystem in a revisioned manner. While I do not recommend using it currently because the API is plain evil, it is a required dependency of some of my other projects, so here is the release nonetheless.

Project page: http://code.google.com/p/spiff-warehouse/
Download: http://dl.debain.org/spiff_warehouse/
API documentation: http://docs.debain.org/spiff_warehouse/index.html
Handbook (PDF): http://docs.debain.org/spiff_warehouse/en/spiff_warehouse.en.pdf

I am happy to announce the release of a new version of BibShelf 1.6.0, the book organizer for the GNOME desktop. This release is mostly a maintenance release that fixes gcc 4.3.2 compatibility and adds several translations.

Special thanks go to all translators, including:

da: Joe Hansen
de: Samuel Abels
es: David Lara
fr: Nicolas Provost
ga: Kevin Scannell
id: Andhika Padmawan
it: Marco Colombo
ms: Sharuzzaman Ahmat Raslan
nl: Mark Haanen
nn: Eivind Ødegård
rw: Steven Michael Murphy
sv: Daniel Nylander
vi: Clytie Siddall
wa: Pablo Saratxaga
zh_CN: YueGuang

The updated release can be downloaded here:
http://dl.debain.org/bibshelf/

The project page is here:
http://code.google.com/p/bibshelf/

SpiffGtkWidgets is a collection of Gtk widgets (currently a calendar and an annotated text view) for Python. This release comes with a number of bugfixes and with an improved installer.

Links:
Download
Project page
API documentation
Handbook (PDF) (incomplete)

SpiffIntegrator is a small but powerful package manager for adding plugin support to Python applications. This release works with Genshi 0.5, and improves the build infrastructure to make it a lot easier to install.

Links:
Download
Project page
API documentation
Handbook (PDF)