Bulbcalculator print subsystem update

 My Software  No Responses »
Mar 312012
 

As stated in the previous post, the work on BulbCalculator is restarting. The first activities, aside some little bugs fix, were the implementation of a better system to print the project along with some minor rework of the gui, mainly the Print menu.

Now BulbCalculator is aware of the paper size and of the page orientation, which where the first steps to be able to print the linesplan not grouped and with some reference point, which I suppose will make easy to print the lines and build the bulb.

 

Bulbcalculator new home page

 My Software  No Responses »
Mar 282012
 

Since I will resume the development of BulbCalculator, I just moved the home page away from the wiki on gitorious to a new home page on the wordpress platform.

I am also moved the official git repository to github which has a issue tracker. For now I am using Bugs Everywere, but it has not a real web interface, so I will continue to use it for my development but I will sync the BE repository with the github issue tracker.

Some fix to BulbCalculator

 My Software  No Responses »
Dec 312011
 

The need to design a bulb was the reason for a first round of fixes to BulbCalculator. There was left some bugs that were annoying also if basically inoffensive. Given the bug fix, I also done some fix to the look&feel.

I am planning a new release (2.0.1 probably) in the first days of the next year, but first I need to fix some others minor glitches.

 

Deploying Flask application

 Linux, My Software  No Responses »
Dec 162011
 

As part of my activity with a modeller group near home, I maintain the site of the group (www.footy.it, italian only) and someone suggested that it should be nice to have a list of  yacht that we own/use. So flotta.footy.it was born.

The site itself is a very simple interface to search for someone that has a footy yacht near you, but it is not this the point of the article. It is developed using the Flask python micro framework and mongodb database.

After some weeks of working in the free time, I come up with a pretty decent site, at least for what it need to do, and I have the problem to deploy it, using nginx as webserver. After a bit of research, I fount that a simple way to deploy the site was to use this configuration:

#
# Flask application
#
server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  [your_site];
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5000;
        proxy_set_header Host $proxy_host;
        proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
    }
}

which basically say to forward all the request on the port 80 for [your_site] to the proxy_pass address, where the flask application is running.

After that, I just needed to start the application and test the site. The application was started using the nohup command, but I suppose there are some better ways to do it but I will think at this another time (for now the site is in the testing phase).

Back to KMail

 Linux  No Responses »
Nov 282011
 

So after ranting at Akonadi and Kmail, I give a try at the 4.8-beta1 version of kdepim (installed with the beta 1 of KDE).

All in all now it is usable again, the developers do a nice job. 
There are still some problem, sometimes it crash, but it is far bettern than the 4.7.x series
I have is still a problem with a specific folder I imported back from Claws Mail, but I suspect that this may have to do with something bad in a message of this folder, since I imported some folders with far more messages in them.
And also the desktop seems faster.

A nightmare called akonadi…

 Linux  No Responses »
Sep 152011
 

I finally restored all my mailboxes, after an encounter with akonadi.

Background story: I am an kde user from version 3.0 and a kmail user since then. It happen that in about 10 years I accumulated some thousand of mails, about 35000, from various mailing lists and projects I follow/followed plus my personal emails. So aside all the mailing list messages, there are about one thousand personal mail that I cannot lose (yes, I backup my data of course ;-) ) and until kmail 4.6.x I never had a problem while upgrading.

Now enter kmail 4.7 and akonadi and let the nightmare begin.

For some reason the kdepim developer decide that all the personal information of the user should be saved in a database using akonadi. Nice approach, if it only works.

I see the logic of the decision: if I can store all my personal data in one place and I build a layer to manage them, every application that need to know, for example, my email address just need to call this layer and ask for it, without the necessity to reimplement some type of mechanism to store the information. (I think that akonadi is a lot more, but, as I understand, it basically do this) But you must build a layer that work really well.

After the upgrade to kdepim 4.7, the first “stable” release of the suite to use akonadi as core, I find myself with a system where I basically am not able to use kmail  in the way I used to do, run it after the login and close it just before the shutdown, and luckily I just use kmail and not for work related projects.

There are a number of problems I run into, but these seems to me the worst:

  • after the upgrade from kmail 4.6.x and the conversion of the data, kmail itself crash on start. Why ? No reason, or better, wrong conversion
  • after recreating the akonadi db, things seems better, the mails are where they are supposed to be and I can read them, but wait, why the system is so sloppy ? After running “top” for 10 seconds the reason is clear: the load average is between 3 and 4, main reason the akonadi agents.
  • why akonadi download the mail even if kmail is not running ? Answer: because the pop3 agents of akonadi, by default, are active also if kmail is not running. The feature is a good idea, but IMHO it must be enabled by the user, not to be enabled by default and without telling it to the user
  • where are saved the mails ? Why it decide that is must be a certain directory that must not be visible to the users  ? (something like .local/share/.local-mail-folder/.mailbox) How can I backup my mails if I don’t know where they are ? Let the user decide where to put his mails is a so bad idea ?
  • ok, I deleted the old db, copied the mail in a backup folder and switched to posgresql, a better database. Now it is time to import them, but wait, where are now my emails ? Answer: is some hidden directory.
  • I recreated again my db, configured  a correct local mail folder agent, but where are the mails ? Why the local agent cannot just read the files in the directory ?
  • after that, I finally imported the old mails, using a second local agent, and now I’d like put every mail in the appropriate mailboxes, right ? Wrong, just filtering about a thousand messages imply about 10 minutes of work and not always the process ends. Let imagine how many time if I filter all my mails. And just for comparison, Claws mail filter the same amount of messages with the same filter rules in about 1 minute. This can also be a problem of kmail itself, since it seems that it has something to do with the message list refreshing for each message moved
  • why akonadi need about 20 or more database connection also if there are just 5 or 6 agent configured, some of which are not running ?

These are just the worst, as I said, but there are a number of minor problems that I don’t write down that are really annoying (one for all: after the conversion, kmail does not send mail anymore, until the agent are recreated)

Now, I am not in the position to tell anyone that he did and orrible work, of course the KDEpim developers are far better than me and they do something, nor I have a solution or the time to work out a solution, but reading forums give the impression that the kdepim developers made the same mistake the kde developers done with the release of version 4.0 of KDE, they release a software stack that is far from being stable and usable on the day-by-day work. (Look, after years where I was able to run kmail and make my work with it open, often on low-end machines, I find intolerable that on a decent machine I cannot do it anymore)

The downside of this “akonadi nightmare” are that I temporarily switch to Claws mail, loosing the KDE integration, and I loose about 2 weeks of my spare time to try to work out a decent solution and recover the mess.

First Android program

 My Software  No Responses »
Aug 042011
 

I finally completed software for Android. Nothing spectacular, is something like a calculator I will use to calculate the safety timer of my battery charger.

All in all, Android seems to be and interesting platform, but I am not used to write java code. I think that for a probable next try, I will give a look to SL4A, to try to write some python code.

Now it is time to find something more complex to write, I will see what will come up.

BulbCalculator 2.0 released

 My Software  No Responses »
Jul 292011
 

I am pleased to announce the avaibility of BulbCalculator 2.0

BulbCalculator is a software to develop the bulb of radio controlled sail yacth, with the possibility to view a 3d preview and print a lot of usefull information.

The actual version is a port of the old BulbCalculator program, developed by Marko Majic who handed me the original source code, to some more modern tecnologies. It is now developed with the Qt4 Library to be cross platform, it can run on Window (xp, Vista and hopefully Seven), Linux and eventually also Mac.

It as a number of new features, some of which are:

  • a completly new user interface
  • the 3d view of the bulb
  • a complete lineplans printing capabilities to help to print the designed bulb
  • a wider range of weight for the bulb

More information on the new homepage of the project

To directly download the software there is an appropriate download page

I wish to thanks Marko, the original author, who handed me the complete source code of the old version, along with really usefull information and a continuos support.

A look at the Android platform

 Linux, My Software  No Responses »
Jul 212011
 

Out of curiosity, I am looking at the Android platform with the intention to begin to hack on it. The pretext is to have an alternative way to calculate the minutes to set the safety timer when I recharge the battery of the model boats I race, other than using the calculator given with Android itself.

Since all  I need is to input the capacity of the battery and divide it with the curren used to recharge  (calculating also a safety factor given by the maker of the battery recharger that is fixed) it looked as a good “first program” to write.

For now I was able to easy install the development tools on Archlinux and build and test a sample application in just a couple of hours last evening, so it seems to be not so hard to begin to hack on it, I will see what happen now.

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