jsPgnViewer & stuff

I noticed that there have been couple of hundred downloads of the TRUNK version of jsPgnViewer. I decided to make it into a release. Compared to the previous version:

• Feature:There is a link to download the PGN as a file.
• Handling of broken (unmatched parentheses in comments) PGN files
• skipToMove feature
• Updated to obfuscator – Fixes problems with Opera

Head off to the downloads section and grab 0.6.4.

I got a comment about Yahoo chess game format is not supported by jsPGNViewer. Its true . There are about 3 converters out there that convert the yahoo format to PGN. The support request had the game attached and I tried all the 3 solutions. None of them worked. The webbased javascript versions either produced JavaScript errors or did not produce any output. The standalone application run through wine just did not work.

I’m happy to support the yahoo game format (although the name clash, jsPGNviewer ). If anybody out there has a large collection of games in yahoo format I would be interested to use them as a testbed for the new functionality. Drop me a line in the comments…

I found a cool plugin couple of weeks ago, Ergo by Channing Walton. It monitors the shortcut and menu invocations usage of Eclipse.

I soon discovered that I’d like to know what shortcuts other users use. I whipped up a patch that would let the plugin users specify a reporting URL. Channing liked the idea, open-sourced the plugin and gave me access.

Last week I had the plugin enabled and now I produced a page of the statistics. The stats show that I was pasting all last week .

I was also introduced to the EPP’s Usage Data Collector. I have not checked if it also monitors actions’ invocations. If it does not we’ll try to propose a patch of some sort.

I’ll be uploading my stats for another couple of weeks and compare to my colleagues and see if I can find anything interesting.

If anybody is interested in seeing their stats they can download the plugin from the project’s page and use “http://tom.jabber.ee/reporting/” as the URL. Every installation is generated a UUID and if you specify the reporting URL your workspace/.metadata/.plugins/com.stateofflow.ergo/commands.properties will be reported to the specified url every 1 hour. The stats can be seen from http://tom.jabber.ee/reporting/result.php?uuid=YOUR-UUID

The only fix in the new version is the correct handling of NAGs (Numeric Annotation Glyphs). So the ?, ??, !? and so forth get correctly displayed now.

I’ve also updated chesspastebin.com. The site has a feed for new games now. Just subscribe to http://www.chesspastebin.com/feed to keep an eye on games added to the pastebin.

I’ve made all the URLs at www.chesspastebin.com more readable. Instead of ?pid=view&id=132 it is now /view/132. Let me know if any of the urls are broken.

This is the third time I googled to find Firefox betas. Mozilla hosts everything on their ftp site, ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/. You can even get nightlies of trunk. How does 3.0b3pre sound? Its there.

Is firebug the reason not to migrate now? There is an experimental version at http://fireclipse.xucia.com/.

I got excellent bug reports from Jan, providing PGN files that were not working with jsPgnViewer. I launched them in my test environment and no errors. I tried in a WordPress installation. Sometimes they worked and sometimes not. It boiled down to couple of “features” of WordPress and tinyMCE:

• There is a HTML entity for “…”. The “…” is used to denote black to move, e.g. 43… Ra8 in PGN files. Well, WordPress editor thinks that the three dots should be replaced by the entity for no apparent reason. Thus parsing broke.
• When pasting games to the WordPress editor and saving the blog post, WordPress or tinyMCE thinks its pretty cool to shuffle the <pgn> tags around a bit and add one extra just to be sure. Well, this breaks the regexes that expect the tags to be intact.

What about a solution? The first problem is easily fixed by the new version of the plugin, which replaces the entity back. The second problem is addressed by letting users use ###pgn## # (three prefix and suffix # marks, the space is because I have the plugin installed) to denote the start of a PGN game and a %%%pgn%% % to denote the end of a PGN game. tinyMCE or WordPress does not shuffle does around, yet.

A issue was reported that certain FEN combined with some moves produced no board. This issue fixes this. Also themes added in the meantime have been bundled with the release. The default WP theme has changed to Zurich. Here is a sample:

Head off to the downloads section and grab 0.6 and to the issues list to add feature requests. Chesspastebin.com has also been updated with the latest version.

The latest development snapshots of JavaRebel include support for the Eclipse platform. This means that plugin developers can launch an Eclipse Application to test their plugins and make changes to the source code and see the results in the already opened Eclipse instance. No need to relaunch Eclipse instances to see changes happen.

More information at the ZeroTurnaround blogpost that has a screencast showing off the new integration.

I’m running Debian Unstable and every now and then I have some problems after dist-upgrade. Couple of weeks ago I pumped into gimp-data reconfiguration issue and all I got was “subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1″. As I was in a hurry I just edited /var/lib/dpkg/status to mark the packages not installed.

Today I got the same error for Liferea and now I had the time to investigate. Firstly to turn debugging on for dpkg is a matter of dpkg -Ddebug_level_no. More info with dpkg -Dhelp. Next I ran dpkg -D10 –configure liferea and saw that the post installation configuration is held under /var/lib/dpkg/info. There was a script liferea.postinst.

In that script the line gtk-update-icon-cache –force –quiet “$dir” was failing with a message “The generated cache was invalid.”. I did not start debugging why this was happening. As the list of installed gtk related packages is quite short then I just installed gtk2-engines-pixbuf and the cache update started working. Lucky guess

Disclaimer: I’m affiliated with the product and this might be taken as a commercial but nevertheless things will start to change.

Before moving to Java (mostly JEE) I did couple of years PHP development. The thousand levels of abstraction, tons of third party libraries and most importantly the ever taking change-check cycle were something difficult to accept. I was so used to getting feedback automatically and could not even imagine that one day I will even have to re-traverse some application just to store some state.

For the past months I have been working on team battling the change->compile->redeploy cycle. Today there is a release. It is called JavaRebel and the product brings the cycle down to change->compile->check. Classes loaded by the container can be changed and JavaRebel inbetween will load these changes (adding/removing/changing fields, methods etc.).

When I was working on my Google Summer Of Code project I had to buy extra RAM just to be able to run couple of instances of Eclipse. I was not willing to buy a new CPU to make the restarting these instances of Eclipse faster. JavaRebel does not have Eclipse support but it is in the roadmap.

There is a screencast up that will demo some features of it. Java development will change.