Tassos Bassoukos

XMLTV grabber for Greece, take 2

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:39:21 +0200

I had previously written an XMLTV grabber for Greece that had several shortcomings (problems with character encodings and scheduling of programmes after midnight), and left it there. Now, a from-scratch rewritten version is available: XMLTV grabber for Greece.

This version uses the improved XMLTV api, hence it should be available in applications that use tv_find_grabbers. Currently it extracts the following items from the Nova site:

Program title
Program description
Start time
Repeat status
Rating
Categories

Optionally, in slow mode it also extracts the following items if they are available:

Synopsis
Image
Credits
Year of production
Duration

I would be interested in hearing from anyone that uses it in non-UTF8 environments (e.g. Windows users). Note that you may need to pass the results through tv_sort in some cases.

Many thanks to vrypan for providing the motive for completing this.

Status of Java Closures

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Mon, 4 Feb 2008 04:34:28 +0200

Since before Java SE 6 came out, a discussion has been going on in the Java community future directions and extensions of the Java language, with the most energy directed on closures. There are currently two major camps on this issue, the BGGA proposal and the CICE proposal.

CICE

Concise Instance Creation Expressions by Bob Lee, Doug Lea, and Josh Bloch favor adding simple syntactic sugar for anonymous inner class creation, where

List ls = ... ;
Collections.sort(ls, new Comparator() {
  public int compare(String s1, String s2) {
    return s1.length() - s2.length();
  }
});

can be written as

List ls = ... ;
Collections.sort(ls,
  Comparator(String s1, String s2){ return s1.length() - s2.length(); });

Additionally, it allows capture of and access to the local variables of the enclosing block(s). In general it's a small proposal, with few warts, that simply provides for small gains in legibility.

BGGA

BGGA is the proposal by Gilad Bracha, Neal Gafter, James Gosling and Peter von der Ahé, which is much more heavyweight, providing for true closures, function types and user-defined control abstractions. The above example could be written as

List ls = ... ;
Collections.sort(ls,  {String s1, String s2 => int  s1.length() - s2.length()});

However, this proposal leads to some weird interactions with expected behaviour:

...
System.out.println("1");
{=>return;}.invoke();
System.out.println("2");
...

The previous snippet will not print "2", as the return is interpreted as a return from the defining method, not the closure; a new type has been added (java.lang.Unreachable) so that the previous code should not compile. What happens tho if you store the closure and invoke it after the defining method has returned? See the Joshua Bloch presentation at JavaPolis 2007 for a recap of the present problems.

All in all, while BGGA adds new powerful concepts and new problems to the Java language, the community is still undecided on whether the inherent problems with closures are justified by the expressiveness they enable; several voices advocate leaving Java unmodified and switching over to JVM-based languages that have them built in, such as Scala.

Grub Error 17

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 05:25:43 +0300

If you ever stumble upon the error message

Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition

while attempting to install GRUB, do take a look at the partition table of the disk you're using, as the partition type in the table may not match the actual file system of the partition. While the Linux kernel doesn't pay much attention to the partition type, GRUB does - and fails with the above message.

This happened to me while trying to install a system to boot off an USB stick, where I forgot to edit the partition table types.

How's that for timing?

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 04:48:31 +0300

Our brand-spanking-new 4-way server has arrived today - just in time for Feisty! It's quite a fortunate coincidence, since if it had arrived here yesterday I might have gone with Etch. I'm currently waiting for the CD-Writer to finish, which for some reason has dropped the writing speed to 12x apparently just to spite me on this single occasion - hell, the download was faster than that!

Speaking of speeds, I'm currently seeding for the i386 and the amd64 versions of Ubuntu Server 7.04 ISOs, and it has struck me that the amd64 ISO uses on average 1.2 times the bandwidth of the i386 ISO; I had the impression that amd64 wasn't in that widespread use in the server domain.

P.S. The new server thinks that it's a vacuum cleaner...
P.P.S. The CD was borken, need to burn another - gah!

Second Life has bigger GDP than 13 countries!

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 02:46:40 +0300

So, Second Life apparently has an estimated GDP of $150M. Some digging in the CIA World Factobook shows that there are 13 countries or areas with a smaller GDP...

To be really honest, for a population of 800,000, that comes out at about $187 per capita. On the other hand, if you consider that the estimated number of persons working 'full-time' within Second life is about a hundred...

Using GWT modules in not-so-bright frameworks

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:57:55 +0300

I've recently had to use GWT to implement a module for a PostNuke installation. Two problems came up with that - first, the HTML head tag was in a static file somewhere, and I could not modify it and second, the URL that would call the module was not the URL for the files of the module.

To add a GWT module to a static page requires three things:

A module specific element, which usually has a specific id attribute, where its contents will be replaced by the modules controls,
A META tag in the HEAD of the page, specifying the modules that will be loaded,
A SCRIPT tag linking to the gwt.js file.

Requirements (1) and (3) are easily met by modifying the actual HTML page, or in my case, emitting via PHP the HTML elements; however, requirement (2) is a bit harder to implement when one does not have access to the file that contains the HEAD element. Since we're doing AJAX anyway, a Javascript snippet will help us out a bit:

<script type="text/javascript">
   var headTag = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
   var metaTag = document.createElement('meta');
   metaTag.setAttribute('name','gwt:module');
   metaTag.setAttribute('content','com.example.Module');
   headTag.appendChild(metaTag);
   headTag=null;
   metaTag=null;
</script>

Inserting that code before the tag for (3) will ensure that our module appears at least in the DOM. However, we aren't done yet, as the files for each module are resolved by GWT relative to the current location of the browser - which isn't that useful when your URL is something along the lines of "http://example.com/index.php?module=this&q=that" but your GWT modules reside in "/gwt-modules/example".

Googling around did not give any insight on the issue, so I delved a bit into the innards of GWT, and found an undocumented feature that allows one to rebind the base URL for a GWT module: simply use

<meta name="gwt:module" content="http://example.com/gwt-modules/example=com.example.Module" />

instead of

<meta name="gwt:module" content="com.example.Module" />

Obviously, this also allows for modules in different locations.

Infosystem 2006

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Mon, 2 Oct 2006 04:12:33 +0300

I went to Infosystem 2006 on Thursday, and came out predictably disappointed. It was only a shadow of its former self, with several major Greek IT players absent, the expo itself taking up about half the floorspace of 2005.

Several people attribute this to the declining IT sector in Thessaloniki and Greece in general; some have pointed out that ~~COMDEX~~ DTE in Athens has siphoned off exhibitors; one or two have mentioned that even DTE is experiencing a modicum of trouble, hence the name change.

New toy!

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 03:49:11 +0300

Hah, my new toy has arrived! I'm looking forward to start poking it on my copious free time. Yeah, it was an impulse purchase, but I really look forward to do some low-level hacking.

However, It got stuck at the customs office for a day or two, and the import fees, dues and handling expenses (not shipping & handling, that was reasonable) were another 80% on top of the original price, which is a total rip-off. Note to self: next time, order from an E.U. state....

Life goes on and on and on...

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 03:28:17 +0300

Two things have been keeping me quite busy the last six weeks: I'm now properly employed, and I got married on September 16th!

To be honest, the marriage thing has taken a lot more time and energy than we expected - at one time I joked that my vacations really started when my 2-week leave ended - but in the end it was all worth it. Expect photos to be available on our wedding blog sometime this week. The last week we've been recovering from the party, and I've only now got some courage up to write about it...

On another side, I'm now a full-time emnployee of Aristotle University, where I'm partially the sysadmin for a computer room/lab for students (oh, the joys of Windows systems). This also means that I can expect to retire as a public servant, holding the same position for the next 30 years (and doing the same stuff, too...).

One Laptop Per Child

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 03:39:30 +0300

Infoworld reports that the Nigerian government will buy one million OLPC machines. Unfortunately, the first thing that comes to mind is the proliferation of 419 scams that will flood the internet in 2-3 years...

On another note, it seems that there is also some traction in Greece for the OLPC concept, as seen in this call for participation.