bodom_lx at task3 dot cc

For those that chose ext4 as default file-system type for their boot partition, and are having problems booting their Slackware 13.0 distribution, I built a .tgz package containing the latest Grub 2 release (currently 1.97-beta4).
It also contains a default grub.cfg file.

Please download the file here: grub-1.97~beta4-i486-1.tgz for Slackware 13.0

It should also work for Slackware 12.x and 11.0.

Enjoy!

P.S. The package is based on the one created for Grub-1.96 by user mbvo on linuxquestions.org. I simply adapted it for Grub-1.97. I also provided a new description for the package and a simpler grub.cfg file.

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BD-review is a dynamic website to allow people to review releases (albums, demos, EPs, singles) of (young, unsigned) music bands. The project is the outcome of the Internet Technologies course at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bolzano. The requirements of the project were to build a website using a small subset of JavaEE technologies, without the use of web-frameworks.

The project is not really meant for production use. It was made as a strong, working and correct base for studying JavaEE academically. It should be useful for every student (also non-student) willing to have an overview on JSP and study it. The code is well-written, uses MVC, and the whole project is documented in detail in a 20+ pages report.

Read more on the project page, download the sources and play with it! Please let me know about your experience with BD-review code.

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It took me about one year to find some time to enhance my project BD-incollo. I worked hard for 5 days and to add new features and fight the (huge) amount of spam that was wasting my database space. Now I’m very proud to announce bd-incollo 0.9, a free, light, speedy, anonymous Pastebin clone written in Python Django. This version introduces a lot of new features, including the possibility to make diffs between pastes, and fights spam using Akismet. Read more about the features on the project page and on the new News section on the website that makes use of BD-incollo, incollo.com .

BD-incollo 0.9 is free software as always, under the Gnu Affero General Public License 3.

Currently, you can:

• Copy, Paste and store a text / source code snippet to the system
• NEW! Give other people the possibility to discover your Paste (make a Paste either public or private)
• Decide to colorize the syntax of the Paste
• Share it using its URL
• NEW! Enhance Pastes! Create a Paste starting from an old one
• NEW! View differences! Makes use of the powerful diff-match-patch by Neil Fraser to see differences between two Pastes
• NEW! Antispam protection using Akismet and akismet.py by Michael Foord
• Download it as plain text
• View it as plain text
• Search something interesting through other pastes!
• Report abuses to site admins

It also uses a very smart hash system that automatically re-computes a hash key in case of collision.

Here is an example of Paste: http://incollo.com/f341e6a4b
Here is an example of enhancement of the Paste: http://incollo.com/ba22929ac
Here is a full-screen diff of the Pastes: http://incollo.com/compare/f341e6a4b/ba22929ac

Play with them! Use incollo.com, spread it!

Road to 1.0

1.0 development will start after my next examination session (on September) and will surely include:

• Some asynchronous improvements
• The possibility to teach Akismet about Spam and Ham in Pastes (when admin user is logged in)
• More cleaner code
• The possibility to associate a user to its Pastes via a Cookie (always anonymous) and let him delete them
• Comments to snippets?
• What else? Contact me if you’ve got ideas!

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If you are running Debian Sid (i386) and are trying to install Gnome using

apt-get install gnome

You will probably might be disappointed because of problems regarding gnome-desktop-environment, ekiga, ptlib (libpt2.6.4) and opal (libopal3.6.4). Everything seems related to a missing 386 version of libpt2.6.4 on Debian Sid. Also libpt2.6.4-plugins is missing. Packages are also reported to be broken.

Well, I was tired to wait for the right solution of Debian’s Gnome maintainers (respect to all of them!) and have just built my version of ptlib with built-in plugins. If you download it, install it and try again to install gnome, everything works fine.
Obviously, there are reasons behind the absence of a i386 version of libpt2.6.4 and libpt2.6.4-plugins from Debian Sid repositories. My workaround is surely not the right way to fix the problem, as I don’t know the reasons of the blocks on those packages. It may be either serious technical reasons or “simpler” political reasons. You might prefer to wait for the heroes to fix the problem in the Debian way. You are advised, anyway.

If you feel brave and just want to see your Gnome Desktop Environment appear on your Sid box then follow these steps:
1) Download my libt2.6.4 Debian Sid package. It provides libpt.2.6.4 and libpt2.6.4-plugins required by Ekiga, which is required by gnome-desktop-environment
2) Install it:

dpkg -i libpt2.6.4_2.6.4-1_i386.deb

3) Try again to install gnome:

apt-get install gnome

Stop here if everything is fine!

If it doesn’t work:
4) Try first to install libopal3.6.4:

apt-get install libopal3.6.4

If it works, go back to step 3.

If it doesn’t:
a) Try first to install Ekiga:

apt-get install ekiga

If there are still problems with libopal:
b) Download my libopal3.6.4 Debian Sid package. It provides libopal3.6.4, which is also required by Ekiga.
c) Install it:

dkpg -i libopal3.6.4_3.6.4-1_i386.deb

Go back to step 3.

Good luck!

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Elements and Concepts – A brief overview

---

Download PDF version of the whole document. You can browse the article online but I encourage the download of the PDF since it is written with accuracy.

---

Introduction

This document contains some basic concepts and definitions about software testing. It has been written for studying a part of the Software Engineering Project course at my University. It is composed by a summary of the intersection of more than 10 different sources, all of which are cited. If you feel that some contents of this publication belong to your intellectual property and it is not cited, please contact the author who is willing to correct any mistake.

The first part of the paper focuses on the definition of the most important key aspects of software testing. Then some information about input partitioning are given. What follows is a research about code coverage and two useful and famous tools, Control-flow coverage and Data-flow analysis. A complete example on using those tools is then given. The second half of the document also contains the definition of the most important software testing practices.

The goal of this tiny document is to clarify key terms and therefore become a base start for the reader to go in deep with the interested topics. Another goal is to give a simple but clear example about data flow analysis, as I realized that not all the people understand the examples around the Net.

Software Testing

Software Testing is an empirical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test, with respect to the context in which it is intended to operate. Software Testing also provides an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks at implementation of the software. Test techniques include, but are not limited to, the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs. It can also be stated as the process of validating and verifying that a software program/application/product meets the business and technical requirements that guided its design and development, so that it works as expected and can be implemented with the same characteristics. ¹

Read more…

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For people having Intel graphic chipset under Gnu/Linux, performance using 3D applications or Compiz-* window manager effects has always been a problem. Intel drivers for Xorg never gave problems but have also never been brilliant. I always looked around searching for xorg.conf tuning configuration entries.
Today I was simply browsing Ubuntu Wiki and discovered the UxaTesting page. I wanted to know something about UXA and Intel drivers, so I found a Wikipedia definition:

In computing, UXA is the reimplementation of the EXA graphics acceleration architecture of the X.Org Server developed by Intel. Its major difference with EXA is the use of GEM, replacing Translation Table Maps.

Yeah cool, the official Xorg Wiki Intel Graphics Driver page Gives also some more information, so if you’ve got one of these chipsets (you can verify using lspci | grep VGA ):

• i810 and variants thereof
• i815
• i830M
• 845G
• i852GM
• 855GM
• 865G
• 915G and variants (GMA 900)
• E7221
• 945G and variants (GMA 950)
• 946GME
• G33
• Q33
• Q35
• 965G/Q
• G35
• G41
• G43
• G/GM/Q45

You may want to try out the new acceleration method by adding this line


Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"


To your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, in section “Device”.

Please note that:

1. UXA is not yet stable as EXA. Try it out, signal your experience on the Ubuntu wiki page and fill out a bug if necessary
2. You will need at least Xorg server 1.6.0
3. You will need at least xf86-video-intel-2.6.2 drivers
4. I don’t think this is mandatory, but please tell me if you encounter differences when updating to 2.6.30.x kernel. I already have 2.6.30.0 on Sid so I don’t know if with a previous version this is working

On Debian Sid I just had to add the Option line to my xorg.conf file.
The performance differences are noticeable and incredible. Everything runs faster and smoother.
My glxgears output went from 60 FPS (using EXA) to 425 FPS (using UXA).
This is a 700% performance improvement!

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