Robert Marcano's blog

Amazing work teammates

robert — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:08:19 -0300

It is very rewarding to coordinate a team of developers, that are able to migrate a third-party application to Linux, working without access to the central Host the application requires, and that when We deploy it to the testing site every module works amazingly well, no major bug found yet, only little things that are being fixed in minutes

Addicted to Mercurial SCM

robert — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:19:09 -0300

While I was learning how to use Mercurial in order to contribute to the Mozilla platform, I became addicted to it, and with the migration tools now I have access to my repositories with full history on the go, without need of permanent connection to the CVS or SVN server. I can even do offline commits to my local copies.

I had not found a nice GUI for it yet, but being restricted to the command line is not a big reason to not use the powerful offline features. ummmm OpenJDK is stored on Mercurial, and Netbeans 6.1 finall will have support for it.

Why Smalltalk

robert — Wed, 02 May 2007 11:38:06 -0300

Reading the onsmalltalk.com, found the article named Why Smalltalk, and I share the feelings of the author, you must try Smalltalk to understand why we Smalltalkers think that way. I still dream with an opportunity to teach Smalltalk in an academic environment, because as the article says "Object oriented programming means something entirely different to a Smalltalker than to someone doing OO in another language"

Do anyone need a seasoned Smalltalker demonstration?... hahahaha

New life for HTML against Flash?

robert — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:30:14 -0300

According to Mykzilla, according to Bernzilla, according to SimpleBits, according to MTV Labs, mtv.com has switched back to an HTML-based site from the Flash-based site they implemented nine months ago. I am not a big fan of Flash based sites for a lot of reasons, I just only hope web designers take this as an example before choosing a flashy site against a productive site.

Fedora Core 6 + AIGLX + Compiz

robert — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 21:34:03 -0400

I am using a fully 3D accelerated desktop, easy to activate and deactivate with a simple preferences applet, thanks to AIGLX, Compiz and Fedora Core 6, that, in my opinion, is better integrated than the Xgl X server (using OpenGL APIs) running over the traditional X server solution. The best of this implementation is that a simple Intel integrated video card runs it without any slowdown, there is no need for the expensive video cards required to run the Aero interface on the upcoming Windows Vista, Hasta la Vista... Windows Vista

Welcome bad coders

robert — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 13:06:47 -0300

Soon, the Mono runtime will have a Portability Layer or what I call the Welcome Bad Coders Layer. This is not the correct way to do things, fix the application if you have those problems and do not hack the runtime to allow bad coding practices. What will we see next?, a new patch to the Linux kernel to fix bad implemented applications? like Microsoft has done:

"I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it"

Taken from joelonsoftware.com

I hope that repositories like Fedora Extras will not allow the usage of this ugly hack.

RubyGems packager

robert — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:20:19 -0300

I am begining to experiment with Ruby on Rails, until now I found the first thing I dislike about it, the RubyGems packaging system. I do not want to use another packaging system different that the one provided by the OS, be it RPM or Debian packages, or any other option; I do not want to have files on the /usr filesystem that are not managed by the OS packager tool, I want to be sure that running the OS update tool is enough to have my system up-to-date (yum update). So the only solution I have is to build RPM packages for the ruby libraries I need and submit them to Fedora Extras.

Temporally I have created the ruby-gems RPM package, and I am using the environment variables GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH to install ruby packages on my home directory.

I found a Debian Extras position document about RubyGems, and I agree with that position.

Subclipse added to Fedora Extras

robert — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 22:14:26 -0300

After approval I added Subclipse (Subversion Eclipse plugin) to the Fedora Extras repository. The news reached Fedora People and Planet GCC.

Free Smalltalk books

robert — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 17:17:02 -0400

I have found a list of free books about the Smalltalk programming language. The first one of the list is one of the books that has influenced more in the way I develop software.

Java-GNOME

robert — Sun, 03 Jul 2005 19:30:04 -0300

Now that many Linux distributions are packaging updated versions of GCJ, Eclipse and Java-GNOME, never has been so easy to develop GNOME applications using Java. I am using Fedora Core 4 and for this little tutorial you must have installed:

eclipse-jdt
libgtk-java
libgnome-java
libgconf-java
libglade-java

You can use yum to install them:

yum install eclipse-jdt libgnome-java libgconf-java libglade-java libgtk-java

Start Eclipse and create a Java project. Edit the build path of your new project adding the following external jars

/usr/share/java/gtk2.6.jar
/usr/share/java/gconf2.10.jar
/usr/share/java/glade2.10.jar
/usr/share/java/gnome2.10.jar

Now you can try with this example:

public static void main(String[] args) {
	// intializing GTK
	Gtk.init(args);

	// creating the widget tree
	Window window = new Window(WindowType.TOPLEVEL);
	window.setTitle("Testing GTK");
	window.add(new Button("Test..."));

	// adding a listener to detect when the window is closed to end the
	// event dispatch main cycle and exit the application
	window.addListener(new LifeCycleListener() {
		public void lifeCycleEvent(LifeCycleEvent evnt) {
			if (evnt.getType() == LifeCycleEvent.Type.UNREALIZE)
				Gtk.mainQuit();
		}

		public boolean lifeCycleQuery(LifeCycleEvent evnt) {
			return false;
		}
	});
	// showing the window
	window.showAll();

	// starting the event dispatch cycle
	Gtk.main();
}

Test the application and you will get something like this:

Extended documentation can be found on the Java-GNOME documentation page and the original GNOME documentation (C based APIs)