So here I am in America, currently on day two of the Mono & Gnome Festival of Love, enjoying myself immensely. America is a lot like Europe, only hotter, wider, with more police, more manual labour doing menial tasks and a penchant for writing words on roadsigns instead of pictograms.
The view from the NERD centre.
During the first day we all got cracking! Jared is working on a MonoMac interface for our Tomboy library, and I’ve been working on the library itself. All our current unit tests are greenlit, so in theory we have the ability to build a Tomboy client that works for storing notes locally without sync. In practice I bet we’ll have a lot more bugs to fix as Jared starts using the library in practice, later today. In the meantime I’m working on the difficult nut that is getting online sync to work properly, liberally using code from Tomboy but doing a lot of my own stuff as well. Fingers crossed that this won’t take all week…
This lovely hackfest has been made possible due to the generous contributions of our sponsors:
Last night, Cameron White and Johnathan Morlock finished up all the packaging, uploads and release notes for Pinta 1.2, so now it’s officially released! New releases are always great, and this one has a bunch of bug fixes and general improvements. Head over to http://pinta-project.com/ to download the newest packaged awesomeness. I almost said “the latest and greatest”, but that’s not strictly true because new improvements for Pinta 1.3 have already started landing in our git master branch!
Pinta Statistics
Pinta 1.1 was released about a half a year ago, and I’ve had a look at the download statistics we have on hand from our Github page:
The Windows installer has had 12 483 downloads.
The source Zip file has had 3,436 downloads.
The source tarball has had 4,470 downloads.
In addition to that comes all the downloads through the package managers of various distros that we have no statistics for. But lets assume the number is a lot! I think that’s a reasonable assumption because when you have eight thousand people willing to compile it themselves there are probably a whole lot more who are willing to let someone else compile it for them.
The Mono framework is what lets us make Pinta multiplatform.
An interesting point is the strong Windows download numbers, despite the fact that Windows is the platform that carries Paint.Net, Pinta’s ancestor and role model. It’s no problem for me to admit that Paint.Net is still ahead of Pinta on Windows, but obviously the fact that Pinta presents a consistent user interface over several platforms in addition to being open source (which Paint.Net no longer is) means we have carved out a good niche for ourselves.
Sadly, in this release we have had to postpone a Mac version once again because we don’t have hardware to test it on. This pains us quite a lot, and it’s also the reason 1.2 has taken a while to come out because we’ve been hoping to get it fixed before releasing. In the end, we had to prioritise getting new features out to those users we could reach. But read on, because potential good news is coming!
The Gnome/Mono Festival of Love 2012
Fingers crossed, if all the star signs align correctly and so on, I will be attending this years Boston hackfest for Gnome/Mono products! (Which will also be my first time visiting the land of tea parties, star spangled banners, and McDonalds.) The plan is for me to work with Jared Jennings on a new core library for Tomboy, and to hack away on miscellaneous improvements for Pinta. I know that there will be several participants there owning the vaunted hardware from Cupertino with a half-eaten apple on it, and I plan to pester them into helping me solve Pinta’s most major Mac issues. With luck, we can again have a working version of Pinta for Mac by midsummer. Then we can make at least a interim Mac release, but personally I hope to have enough done by then that we can justify releasing Pinta 1.3. (At any rate, I plan to lobby my co-developers to do just that…) Here’s hoping for the future! Update: Like masters of magic, Cameron White and Jonathan Pobst have managed to come up with a working Mac edition (As yet known to be working under at least one configuration of Mac+Mono) within 24 hours of me writing this! So it looks like I’ll be able to put more time into other aspects of Pinta at the hackfest, although hammering out any Mac-specific issues that may appear is still a possibility. Looking forward to it!
I'm going to Boston! Tea may be drunk, parties may be had, any revolutions will be strictly computer-based.
Today I added a documents section to the website, and I started off by adding a poster from a previous project that was accepted for display at Geoforum 2011, and my project report regarding a testing framework for indoor positioning systems from the autumn. I believe that since university is all about discovering and sharing knowledge, and we in Norway get it all paid for by the state anyway, there is no reason why one shouldn’t share as much as possible of what one produces as long is someone might find it interesting to read. (And I know that several people in the Norwegian geomatics community agree with me on that.)
Sometime soon I also hope to post a paper I wrote last year on ownership transfer in open source projects which I was quite pleased with, but it needs a bit of updating and polishing first. So stay tuned!
They say that every contribution to open source software starts with a developer scratching his or her own itch, and this is probably true. (It certainly is for me!) The problem is that as a project grows in popularity and users, you have to start paying attention to other people’s itches. A common type of itch-scratching, which is important both because it can make your program more accessible to new users and because it draws in new contributors, is translation.
Lots of lovely people spend time translating various programs to their native languages, but often they don’t have the programming knowledge that’s needed to make changes to the actual program. Which means that whenever you as a programmer add a some text to the program that is untranslatable because you forgot to call the translations or concatenate it in some way that hinders translation lookups, you are hindering them from scratching their itch and new users from getting a completely satisfactory experience.
Personally I’m horrible about this, probably because I think in English and always have my systems set to English. It’s a time-honoured tradition that whenever I add any new feature to a program, be it Pinta or Tomboy, I forget that someone has to be able to translate this. This leads to extra work for testers and translators because they have to find my mistakes, and then again for me because I have to fix them. The other thing one might do is to not realize that a particular piece of text can mean different things depending on where it is. An example from Pinta is “Open Images”, which in one context is a command to open several files at once, but in another context is a description of a list of already opened files. For some languages there is a distinct difference in words depending on the context, which again means more work to either clarify the context in translation notes or find different wording.
So if you want to be a tidy and efficient programmer, there’s one more thing you have to check before you commit: Go over what you’ve written and ask yourself “Is this technically translatable?” and then “Can this text have multiple meanings depending on context?”. Think of the translators!
Putting symlinks (on Linux) in your data_dir does not work. (At least not for GeoTiff images.) But you can use absolute paths from the Geoserver control panel if you want to.
Native JAI Image-IO needs to be ver. 1.1, not 1.0. Otherwise, geotiffs will not render. However, you don’t get any warnings other than the log files informing you that a method is missing and blank tiles being returned.
A couple of months ago I joined the Pinta team, a very exciting experience for me! We set to work fixing bugs and adding features, and we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved for version 1.1. However, the actual release has been delayed a couple of weeks now because of the tedious details involved in making a release. As a developer, using the newest Pinta is easy for me. All I have to do is open the freshly compiled executables I always have lying about. (The bleeding edge!) But for Average Joe User, they need to be packaged in to a nice and easy installer and that’s what we’ve had trouble producing.
First we had trouble producing a reliable Windows installer, during which I learned about the difference between .Net 3.5 and .Net 4. But we eventually got that licked, not least because we all have access to various Windows systems to test on. However, none of the current developers have a Mac. (Personally, I’ve never liked computers I can’t open up and mess up on the inside.) This makes it hard to debug to say the least, as we are dependent on sending test installers to gracious testers on the mailing list and interpreting what they report back (and copy from their terminals).
Adding to our troubles is the fact that Apple has made a habit out of completely breaking stuff like Mono and GTK# when they release Mac OS X updates, which means Mono and GTK# needs to be updated to meet those changes, so now there are a bunch of different versions of Mac OS X and GTK# mixed up among our users. Conducting a thorough investigation of what works with what and with Pinta 1.1 is hard enough to begin with, even when you’re not doing it via email with (lovely and awesome) volunteers.
Therefore, sadly, the release of Pinta 1.1 will probably be a beta version for Mac users. (But final for the other two platforms.) We will continue to try to fix the Mac installer with the help of user feedback so that we can hopefully make a 1.1 final release for Mac, but in the meantime all of our other users need to be able to use the latest and greatest Pinta.
PS: If you happen to know a developer who knows C# and has a Mac and some spare time, please don’t hesitate to point him our way!
Recently I installed Windows XP in a VM for some Pinta-related work, and started by installing Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4. When I then tried to install a couple of necessities like Git Extensions and GTK#, the installers errored out telling me that I did not have .Net 3.5 or greater installed. This surprised me, because last time I checked four was greater than three and a half.
However, it turns out that you can have .Net 4 installed completely independently of .Net 3.5, so .Net 4 does not set the registry keys for .Net 3.5. And since WiX-based installers check those registry keys, they think there is no .Net at all. (WiX is an open source installer framework for Windows, and therefore is very popular for open source projects.) The easy fix is simply to install .Net 3.5 alongside, for a more complicated version you can always try some trickery.
Disclaimer: This review is written by a longtime Ace Combat fanboy.
Here’s a trailer of the game in order to set the stage and give you a little on what to expect:
Second disclaimer: If this trailer full of awesome explodeyness and allround adrenalin-pumping didn’t get you interested, you probably have no interest in the rest of this review.
Ace Combat has always been about flying awesome planes around in awesome aerial combat whilst shooting down others in at fist-pumpingly awesome manner, and this game is no different. However, they’ve had a go at spicing it all up with some new stuff that wasn’t in previous games and shaking it all about. Gritty dark reboot type thing, like Batman Begins.
Here’s some of the new stuff:
Moving from a parallel dimension to more or less our dimension. Previously, all AC games were on a sort of parellel earth with different geography and countries (although always vaguely reminiscent of real countries), but all the same plane manufacturers as we have in our world. That allowed us to have great mixes of planes without having to think over why someone had Russian and American planes in the same air force. Since they had developed it over several games, I felt a rather strong attachement to it and was concerned that putting things in the real world would make things more boring. However, they avoided this by completely disregarding boring stuff like politics, economy and logistics which is a bit silly at times but generally rather fun. Also, doing battle over cities you recognize from the real world is kinda awesome and gets automatic bonus points from me since I study geomatics.
Helicopters! (Aw hellyeah-acopters.) For the first time in AC you get to hover if you want to, but then you’ll probably get shot down by a PRG-toting maniac on the ground. Quite fun, but some issues with control and general playability. Still, it’s fun to ambush armoured columns by waiting for them to drive onto the Moscow boulevard you’re hovering at the end of.
Miniguns! You get to stand behind a minigun and blast the hell out of people on the ground. Makes for a nice distraction, but glad it’s not the entire game.
Strategic bombers and AC-130s ! What’s not to like? Eminently satisfying one-off missions, just the right amount of this kind of gameplay.
Dogfight mode. As seen in the trailer, you can initiate dogfights where you get up close and personal. To begin with I thought it was kinda silly, but by the end I had really warmed to it. Adrenalin-pumping excitement which really gives life to encounters with enemy aces and lets you fly through some ridiculous setpieces.
The new stuff is generally good, and the old stuff is classic Ace Combat, the kind of game where when you get shot down you pound the sofa pillows and shout “I’ll get you next time, Markov! AGAIN!”.
Third disclaimer: This kind of behaviour may worry girlfriends, boyfriends or anyone else within hearing distance.
Also, there’s a bunch of online stuff which I haven’t tried yet, but it’s probably a bit less off the hook and considerably harder. (But still fun, no doubt.) I would recommend this game to anyone has enjoyed previous Ace Combats and anyone who thinks a video game directed by a Japanese Michael Bay sounds fun. All in all, I give this game fanboy/10.
The short version: Buy it, read it, and do what they say!
The long version: This book is well written, easy to read and very convincing. The authors lay down a number of simple rules for you to follow in order to create the best programs possible. When you read the advice, you’ll see how much sense they make and you’ll probably hear this book in your head the next time you sit down to write a program.
After reading this book, I made a conscious effort to follow their advice on my next big programming project. As time has passed and changes needed to be made, I am very glad I managed to follow as much of the advice as I could, because it really become a lot easier. For my next large programming project I’m definitely going to try to follow these rules as properly as I can. As an added bonus, telling other people the rules you’ve read in this book makes you look smart and experienced. Buy this book and thank me later.
Surprisingly little, actually. Recently I had the experience of working on a server where the hard drive went past 99% full and all the way to 100%. The first thing I knew about it was when I was trying to start a Java process and it gave me this incredibly obtuse error:
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
# SIGBUS (0x7) at pc=0x00007f3e0c5aad9b, pid=17280, tid=139904457242368
#
# JRE version: 6.0_24-b07
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (19.1-b02 mixed mode linux-amd64 compressed oops)
# Problematic frame:
# C [libc.so.6+0x7ed9b] memset+0xa5b
It turns out that this error shows up when the there is not enough space in the temp area to write anything. (Less than 32 KB left, I think it was.) See more about this problem here.
Apart from that, the server was fine. Everything was chugging away and responding nicely. Somehow I have my doubts that would work on a Windows box.
