We’ll be switching planes at London Heathrow on our way to San Francisco and back. When booking the flights I was still looking forward to using the new Terminal 5 to escape the traveller’s hell that Heathrow can be. Little did I know about the chaos that would arose at the day of its opening. Hope it will have settled once we are arriving there.

Anyone in for a spontaneous conference visit: please get in touch with us as we can provide reduced and free passes for the conference and exhibition area, respectively.

While demonstrating Squish in web demos and at conferences I often get asked about keyword driven testing. Due to the powerful scripting features of Squish, this is quite easy to do with Squish. Now that I created such an example for a customer demo later this week, I thought I’d publish the perpared test so you can have a look at how simple it is to do a keyword driven test in Squish.

You can download the test suite from http://www.froglogic.com/~reggie/suite_nomadpim.zip. It contains three tests and some shared script files.

The first test case is the test script with hardcoded data but already abstracted into several functions (which will later serve as keywords).

The second test cases is the same but in a data driven fashion by using an external data file.

The third test shows how to turn that into a keyword driven test where the test steps and data comes from a data table and the script (keyword_driver.js) is completely generic.

So far there is not much documentation available for that but the tests and shared scripts are quite self explainatory.

Maybe we get around to create a nice tutorial out of that for Squish 3.4.

BTW: The test is for a standard Java RCP application which you can download from nomadpim.sourceforge.net

Matt’s Bargain Basement Summer Of Code is privately funded which I find quite impressive. Matt is offering bounties for fixing issues in several components of software he is using every day. If you are interested in working on one of the tasks contact him. If you want to discuss some details do so. I can confirm that he is open to suggestions.

The Acid3 fixes that are marked as DONE have be “earned” by Germain, Maksim, Allen and me. As we would have been working on KHTML and KJS anyway we have so far managed to resist to take the money. Maybe I should propose Philip Hazel (author of the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions library PCRE) to get a part of the reward. KDE’s JavaScript engine uses libpcre for its RegExp implementation as do other programs like Exim and Apache. Now, JavaScript regular expressions are based on those from Perl but in differ in some tiny details. In the long run the incompatilities would have made a fork inevitable (like done by Apple for Safari) but we found a better solution at least for now: we approached Phil and he was quick to add a PCRE_JAVASCRIPT_COMPAT mode switch for PCRE 7.7 that changes the Perl behavior in three cases. After enabling this mode in the 4.0 and 4.1 branch this increased KHTML’s Acid3 score by two points as can bee see in these screenshots:

Anyone not wanting to wait for his distributor to ship the new version here are the steps to fetch it yourself:

cd /tmp
svn co svn://vcs.exim.org/pcre/code/trunk pcre


As the SVN version of PCRE does not specify .so numbers by itself I changed the libtool version entries in configure.ac to the following which will result in a libpcre.so.3.13.0 library.

m4_define(libpcre_version, [16:0:13])
m4_define(libpcreposix_version, [16:0:13])
m4_define(libpcrecpp_version, [16:0:13])


This was required to give precedence over my system’s 3.12.1 library. To my surprise it got loaded into memory by other KDE libraries already. The resolution of this mistery: libpcre is used by Gnome’s utility library GLib. And as that one is (optionally) pulled in by QtGui most KDE users on X11 systems have it in memory already anyway.

mkdir obj
cd obj
/tmp/pcre/configure --enable-utf8 --prefix /opt/pcre
make
su
make install


To let CMake pick up this new version remove kdelib’s CMakeCache.txt file and set the pkg-config search path

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/pcre/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/pcre/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH


before running cmake and make again.

Several weeks ago I finally found the ideal solution for me — at least from my current experience it seems to be the ideal solution: Viki. This is a vim script that adds wiki functionality to vim.

Now I can keep my notes semi-structured (i.e. cross-referenced) — and my todo list. I even started organizing my web browser bookmarks with Viki (you can invoke an external link in your web browser from within vim with the Viki scripts).

I also use Mercurial to put my notes in a revision control system. This allows me to easily distribute my notes across different computers and keeping them in sync (with the side-effect to get light-weight backups).

The Carbon gvim is not that great so I sticked to the console vim version. But with the new MacVim, I now have a GUI vim that not only looks much better but also has additional features:

• It has a fullscreen mode.
• Vim’s tab feature uses real tabs instead of ASCII-art tabs.
• There is an ODB input manager that adds an “Edit in MacVim” menu entry to all applications (see Edit in SubEthaEdit for the principle).

There are probably other things, but those are the three I really like. With the “Edit in MacVim” feature, I can now easily write my mails from Apple Mail in vim. Unfortunately, the feature does not work for me in Camino.

Soup is a Tumblelog and they explain in the beginning that the concept of a tumblelog is to propagate really short blogs. To cut a story short: the problem I have with writing blogs is that i don’t feel like writing full-fledged articles all the time (I am a somewhat lazy person). But now I realize that it is not needed at all and I plan to write more often blog entries with some short info or tips (they won’t be as short as tumblelogs, though).

So stay tuned. This blog is not dead (although it almost looks like it is from the frequency of articles lately).

The script is called ‘ilc’ (which originally stood for ‘integrate last change’ but it actually integrates any revision you specify) and can be found at http://ktown.kde.org/~frerich/ilc. It’s a little Bash script which expects you to have separate checkouts for the different branches (so it doesn’t integrate the change “in place”).

For instance, in my directory layout, there’s the KDE trunk checkout in ~/src/kde/trunk and the KDE 4.0.x branch checkout in ~/src/kde/40. I usually work in the trunk branch, but every now and then I want to backport something (usually a bugfix) to the 4.0.x branch. So after hacking away, I eventually do this:


frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$ svn ci
Sending settingsdialog.cpp
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 765024.
frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$


So SVN gave me the number of the revision I just committed. Using the ilc script, all I need to do to integrate this change into the 4.0.x branch is


frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$ ilc 765024 ~/src/kde/40


The script will make sure that the affected files in the 4.0.x checkout are up to date, then apply the patch, and finally it’ll let me inspect the patch it did, abort the merge, or commit. When committing, it’ll use the original log message plus a prefix like “automatically merged revision 765024:” so that I can lateron still see that this commit was actually a backport of something else.

Since there wasn’t much time left for Sven to organize the whole thing,  I was (more than) sceptical that there would be an actual party (with lots of people, beer et cetera) taking place. Turned out that I was wrong, very much so. When we arrived at 7:05pm (or something like that - the party was scheduled for 7pm) two nice ladies were waiting downstairs and crossing names out of a list. I didn’t know that we had to sign up for the party! Luckily, it seemed that Harri sent them our names, so one of the two ladies led us via the elevator to the party area. 

Amazingly, the room was already quite full when we arrived there. I would say there were about 30 people at the time we arrived and at the peak of the party there were about 50. I was pleasantly surprised! The freiheit.com people have a nice flat-screen display embedded into the wall of their cafeteria so we were able to view the live feed from Mountain View all the time. However, it was virtually impossible to understand anything which any of the speakers said simply because it was quite noisy in the office. I can’t say I missed the sound of the live stream very much, given that it can be viewed on youtube later (so I’ve been told).

All in an it was a very nice success, showing that one can certainly pull such OSS parties off in the HH area.

The number of people showing interest to come after the announcement necessitated the installation of an online registration. Quickly the max capacity was filled up. Many - like myself - learnt about this only in the last minute but were still lucky to end up on the list at the receiption. I later learnt that others were less lucky and could not enter anymore. Sorry to hear that! But the room was really jam-packed. Good news is that after last night a local event organizer has shown great interest in hosting bigger events (like Akademy) in the future.

The groups of attendees was a mix of KDE as well as Gnome developers and users. Provided for many interesting talks including a reunion with aRts author Stefan Westerfeld. Hope to receive some pictures to publish soon. Thanks for everyone who came and demonstrated that the Hanseatic City of Hamburg has a lively Free and Open Source Software scene.

Harri.

* Public transport is free here tomorrow. An attempt to repeat the car-free Sundays from 1973. Just (still?) voluntary this time.

To the main topic of this post: The city of Hamburg will join the choir of KDE 4 release parties taking place world-wide later this week. Sven Reumann has organized the local version for Friday, January 18st, 19:00 o’clock at freiheit.com, Straßenbahnring 22. Our new office is nice but the landmarked, refurbished, former streetcar depot occupied by freiheit.com is just impressive. We stick to supporting the culinary aspect.

Everyone with involvement or interest in KDE is heartily invited to join. Use the chance to meet with former, current and future contributors and users of our and other Free Software projects. Knowing the reliability of computer software we also count on being connected live with other places around the world.