Qte.dk

I finally added paging to my blog archive - so readers (and search agents) do not have to load the complete blog archive (near to 100kB per hit).

I have been a long-time fan of Source Control Management (SCM) reporting tools such as the StatCVS. The Fundanemt project has for many years - and so have many of my university projects - had a StatCVS installation running to keep track of development progress.

I have updated the Fundanemt installation of StatCVS from time to time to get some of the new features that the StatCVS development team cook up. Today I decided to have a look at the newest release (0.2.4a), that (since the 0.2-dev) contains support for displaying tags on the timeline graphs.

The new graphs clearly show that it has been way too long since the last release of Fundanemt - even though we have fixed many bugs (30 + lots of untracked bugs) and developed new features. Lets hope the new year as well as the release of some upcoming cool modules and core features will result in a couple of new releases.

Although StatCVS is a cool piece of software, it unfortunately does not support SVN (guess the name explains why), and since we have used SVN for the Fundanemt 3 prototype, and the last couple of university projects we have lacked a serious alternative to StatCVS. Today I also stumpled upon StatSVN that is a fork of the StatCVS project (they are apparently working on merging again) with a new backend handling SVN repositories. The StatSVN is much slower for generating the report, due to the SVN log entries missing information on what changes were made between two revisions - information needed by StatSVN and StatCVS to create those cool graphs we all love. The generation of revision-diffs should be a one-time deal, since they are cached, and should not cause any huge delays for hourly or daily reports where most of the repository has already been cached. Maybe this would be a lot faster if run locally on the SVN repository host - unfortunately this is not always possible :-(

In the near future I will upgrade the StatCVS and StatSVN installations, since the current development versions contain some cool features that would be cool to have.

• File type reporting - this page give a list of the different file types. Very usable to determine if still have a lot of .inc or .class files around.
• Developer of the month table - A small table on the "authors" (now renamed to "developers") page, listing what developer has been most active each month.

Now if only I could get integration with the Mantis bugtracker used by the Fundanemt project - guess I will have to hack one my self.

Happy new years!

A week ago a friend and I came up with the idea of developing an xsnow clone for the compiz window manager. Since we had managed to get the compiz fork beryl to work on Eckhart's laptop we decided to give it a go at developing a snow plug-in for it.

Eckhart spent most of the weekend and the beginning of the week trying to figure out how the beryl plug-in API works, and finally managed to fix most of the bugs - with some sporadic help from me. He released version 0.1.3 of XglSnow yesterday, and it looks very nice.

The plug-in has already gotten lots of attention on the beryl forums, been back-ported to compiz, and mentioned on several other forums and blogs (1, 2).

The main issues to solve would be the high CPU usage due to too frequent draws, and implement snow landing on window and panel frames.

Visit the XglSnow project website for more information.

Tonight we finally restarted our old tradition where a group of software engineering students get together and spend some time preparing an above-average dinner (compared to the average student meal anyway). The tradition was suspended after we started on our master thesis since some went abroad, and the usual groups were split.

I found a recipe from a Fakta ad on baked turkey that we quickly decided upon. Throwing in some baked potatoes, garlic flutes, and paprika sauce made a really great dinner - even worth serving for some finner guests. After dinner, an hour of ping-pong and pool, and finally some ice cream made it really hard to resume working when I got home :-)

Tinus took a quick photo of the plate shown above.

While waiting for customer approval of some work I decided to do some random browsing and found the following two pretty funny photos of professors at Aalborg University :-)

Feel free to laugh

Control.AAU.dk professors
CS.AAU.dk professors