Inspectfs relies on libudev for querying device information but I wrote some C++ wrapper classes because I want the project to contain as much C++ and as less C code as possible.
Soon you’ll be able to find the code and more on github, and if you want to join me, post a message here!

And actually, I’m very excited about it. The thing is, next September I’m going to give the master Biomedical Image Sciences a try. Maybe as soon as next week, I’ll have an appointment with the programme coordinator and see how I can get started.

That also means that I’ve to look out for an additional job to earn myself some money to pay for the tuition fees so if any of you have any idea’s, you’re welcome

Wat Phra Kaew, Bangkok

Panorama from Vertigo, Bangkok

Waterfall at Erawan National Park

Muay Thai matches in Chang Mai

Giant Panda in Chang Mai Zoo

Wat Mahathat, Chang Mai

Idyllic view from our guesthouse in Koh Pangan

And that’s it. Completely for free for you to get jealous about.

As for my thesis: it’s finished and ready for delivery next Tuesday, June 2nd. On June 15th I have to defend my case and I think I’ll be fine. After that my last but very long holiday begins in which I’ll be backpacking in Thailand with two friends and I’ll make sure to post some nice pictures over here

I must say, I learned a *lot* during the last five months. Not only about pure software development, but I also learned to take a little more distance from my own work and review it like it was someone else’s and it’s actually pretty difficult to not go native when reviewing, for example, my own thesis. I also thought about what kind of programmer I’d like to be the most. The answer is definitely a backend programmer. Another thing I’d like to do is teaching. I simply love the idea of trying to teach someone something and afterwards see the successful results. Maybe that’s a boy’s way of thinking just as much as it is with programming: you create a toy and it works and you are happy.

I’m curious what the next couple of months will bring me with regard to jobs and stuff but I think fate and I will handle those things fine. Up to the next milestone!

I sort of finished the backend of my model translation tool (It reads an Enterprise Architect Class Diagram [/buzzwordalert] ), and now it’s time for the client. The problem with that is that I always get bored when the interesting stuff is done. In this case, The Interesting Stuff is figuring out how the Class Diagram parts of UML fit together and how to translate that to usable interfaces so that it can be transformed into code.

Luckyly for me, another interesting part is coming up: I have to create an Eclipse plug-in that uses the backend and produce kick-ass quality Java code of it. And reverse engineering, ofcourse. Not that I’m willing to be a rival of any other tool like, say, for instance the Eclispe Modeling Framework. I just want to know how stuff like that is done and what problems are encountered while creating code for that purpose, and I secretly hope that I will be able to contribute to the EMF after my graduation internship because after reading only the beginning of the Eclipse Modeling Framework I’m very excited about it.

I also ordered a book on creating Eclipse plug-ins because I couldn’t find much of a tutorial so I’ll be reading a lot, the next couple of weeks. But until that time I am a little off my game here with translating models and all. Lost in translation.

As it turns out so far, Visual Studio provides a Class Designer tool, but that’s not as extensive as I’d hoped. On the other hand there are the DSL Tools which enables me to create a Domain Specific Language that provides the necessary functionality. In fact, one could create a DSL that generates Java code – or whatever language, but that’s an obvious property of any DSL.
The Eclipse Modeling Framework has way more functionality, but can – as far as I know right now – only generate Java code.
The third tool, the Enterprise Architect, is an UML modeling tool that also provides very basic code generation. Unfortunately I must say that I’m not satisfied at all with the generated code by the Enterprise Architect, and even less satisfied with the plug-ins they provide for Eclipse and Visual Studio. In the generated Java code, enums and interfaces are apparently ignored; in C# code, the namespaces are not created and class methods are generated but getters and setters are neither recognized nor generated (this also goes for Java).

So I have decided that I’m going to write at least an Eclipse plug-in that reads the model from Enterprise Architect and creates decent hand-written-quality code for the domain classes. And given time, I’ll also create a Visual Studio plug-in that does the same. After that, the next step would be to extend these plug-ins with functionality to generate persistence and GUI code. Another thing is that it should be possible to alter the code after it’s been generated and send the changes back to the model. I’ll incorporate that as well in the first version of the plug-ins.

That leaves me with a lot of work todo, so I won’t get bored the next couple of months

Although these things all have a high nerd factor, I’ve a plan that can top that. In the summer holidays, I’ve decided to go to Hacking At Random, which will be in The Netherlands this year. I think that my friends and classmates (who also will be there) and I will have a *lot* of fun. As a matter of fact, I promise to show you some pictures afterwards.

While I’m thinking about it, my learning-by-cheating idea didn’t go as well as I thought: I didn’t finish that little project (but alas, that’s one of many). What did come out of it is Sentry. The Sentry core is actually nothing more than a library loader, but is has some nice features. Each plug-in (or library) can provide a number of hookpoints, where other plug-in commands can hook onto. Nice thing about this is that you can create a completely event-driven application, and anyone is free to create their own plug-ins. At this moment, I’m using it to create an IRC bot that is kind of able to control what’s happening in a channel and also to give my c++ knowledge a boost If you’re interested: you can take a quick look at my websvn subdomain, the repository is sentry_cpp, and it’s also possible to svn co it from the svn subdomain.

That’s all for now, happy 2009 y’all!

Some time after I finished the part of high school we call ‘brugklas’, I came across a teacher who, to my surprise, encouraged using cheating notes. As I soon would realise, the man ment for us to create cheating notes before the exam, and not use them during one. That way, he said, you learn to summarize the things you need to study for that exam, and you’ll remember it, too.

The man was right. So, now that’s all behind me, I can use this story to do some cheating, while pretending to learn from it as well The cheating is about a trivia channel on irc. I’m writing a bot in Java that can parse irssi logfiles, and is also able to learn from the questions the trivia bot asks. The things I’m hoping to learn from this: How to simulate a human being that answers the questions (that means, among other things: do not answer every question correctly, but also that is makes some sense), and what is the nicest, most efficient way to learn questions; how do I determine the correct way to answer, etc.

So: $learning_by_cheating++

A classmate told me to use valgrind to test Skaar for memory leaks. Valgrind is a suite of tools for debugging and profiling programs, so that should work, and there I went:

valgrind --log-file=./valgrind.log --leak-check=full ./skaar

After shutting down, it turned out that Skaar had left something behind, and not that modest (43Kb) either. It’s actually not that simple to prevent memory leaks, I learned. The obvious cases seem to scream: free(3) or delete me, but the not so obvious cases keep their mouths perfectly shut..

Obvious case:
char* line = (char*)malloc(513);
memset(line, 0, 513);
strcpy(line, "PRIVMSG #mychannel :foo\r\n");
...
free(line);

Not so obvious case:
// in RFC1459.cpp
JoinMessage* joinmessage = new JoinMessage(this, line);
return (AbstractMessage*)joinmessage;

// somewhat later in Skaar.cpp
AbstractMessage* message = protocol->translateIncoming(rawmsg);
...
delete message;


I’m wondering if this is the right way to end the AbstractMessage*‘s life, by the way. Who’s responsibility is it to get rid of the message? I could go with this solution, that says: “Here is your object, have fun”. I could also create a function in the protocol that destroys the message, something like RFC1459::destroyMessage(AbstractMessage* message), that says “Here is your object, but you have to let me take care of it’s end. Actually, I have no clue which one is the best choice, if there is a best choice here..

But, back to business: all I have to do now is just test every possibility to see if there are any leaks. Or I could just watch it when I write code, which also sounds nice.
Another tool that I’ve come to value is gdb, The GNU Project Debugger. This tool allows you to see what happens ‘inside’ the program while it executes. And yes, I stole that line from gnu.org
To start using gdb is not very hard, just type gdb yourprogram, and that’s that. To actually start executing you program, type run once gdb has started.

At first I was disappointed that we had to switch back, but now that I’m there, I feel home again. So, instead of our previous plans, Mattijs, Guy and I are going to try and do some research, and the results will be implemented in a now-not-so-ready-but-workable my.hunix.nl.

The idea is to find out (for both students and lecturers) what the current problems are while doing project-oriented assignments. For example, students have not one, but multiple places where they have to leave their work logs, and on top of that no decent templates, because every lecturer has his or her own definition of them, so student have to meet different demands, etc.
After we’ve determined a solid set of problems and solutions, we will create a portal for both parties, where they have a nice and easy overview of what they’re actually doing at that point.

Nice thing about this for me is that I’ve time to assist at the preHBO again, because I now don’t have to study until midnight and later to keep up with the courses

You guys have no idea how lucky I was this time, because my girlfriend also brought stuff to sleep nice and warm, so I didn’t have to go back The only thing I have to do next time is prepare (as in creating a list of things that I have to bring, and actually take them with me).

That’s all for now folks, see you next time!

today I decided that I have been ‘offline’ long enough, and that I must write a final post before I leave for my holidays: so here it is.
Actually, I have *a lot* to tell, but I’ll stick with the 2 weeks to come, for the sake of my peace of mind and stuff.

Tomorrow at 22.00 local time, we will arrive at Lissabon Airport, from where we will be driven to our bungalow. This year, we (as in my girlfriend and I) decided to go on holidays together with another couple. The first week we’ll spend together, and the second week we will split ways and see each other again at the airport to fly back home.

I think my girlfriend takes a camera with her, so there will be lots and lots of pictures taken, including nice civil looking ones with me in it. As I do not want to bear that burdon alone, I will share some of that pictures with you after I get back, so be prepared!

After we get back from our holidays, the fun begins again at school: I am going to do a minor at the University, as I told before. The downside of that is that once again, I had to change the composition of the courses because some idiot over there found it neccessary to switch some of the courses.
So my actual, final list of courses (at this moment) is as follows:

• Graphics
• Concrete math
• Human Computer Interaction
• Logic and Set Theory

I really look forward to learning all that stuff, because it brings me up to speed for the master I will take after I graduated for my BICT (some kind of BSc).
So folks, that’s it for now, I’m out until August 21th. Good luck and farewell until then!

After a while at the HULK I think I have learned a lot about the Linux OS and its inner workings. I found out how the Linux Standard Base is organised, how C, C++, Perl, Python, PHP and bash programs (and some more) all work together to build a fine Linux based system. But in the time to come, I would learn more about working with Linux, the administrative part. That doesn’t interest me as much as writing some cool C programs, so I have decided to expand my knowledge in Computer Science in another way.

Out of eight courses, I choose four of ‘em:
- Concrete math
- Distributed programming
- Algorithm (design)
- Logic and Set Theory

I’m very excited about this course, and even more because two of my classmates are also taking this minor, so we learn all this coolness together! Tomorrow, I’m going to apply for the minor, so as of September this year I will be busy doing whatever it is these courses provide me with

The HUbuntu project started last week (actually, it hasn’t gotten off it’s feet for a few weeks), and at the moment we are thinking about how to implement easy access to our own repository. In this repository students will be able to find all the software they need for the courses given at the HU, and we want to make that process really easy for them. We already came up with the principal of meta-packages, and today I did some research in that area. The idea is to create a meta-package for each course and determine the right dependencies for that course. I think that a lot of work has to be done, but the general idea is finished. Yay, isn’t that great?

I also made some progress with my or-mapping. For mattijs’ peace I will post a link to the Object class, just as he asked me to: link. It is password-protected, but if you ask nicely, I will provide you with an account. If you create an Object containing an array of Objects in it, the intermediate tables that are needed are now automagically created, but I still have to build that for arrays of primitive PHP types.

After starting up the HULK for about a fortnight, we started to bring up ideas for projects (so if anyone has an idea…). Actually, while I’m writing this I realize that I haven’t told you anything yet about the HULK (hmm.. weird).
Well, HULK stands for Hogeschool Utrecht Linux Kennisgroep, and consists of a few classmates and yours truly, who try to give Linux a shot in our university, the Hogeschool of Utrecht. The website is in Dutch, so if you want to follow up on it, you have to be able to read it.

We thought about some really cool projects like building our own Ubuntu distribution, HUbuntu , setting up Linux on mobile devices, teaching Unix, and also some smaller projects like building a logbook to keep track of what we’re doing and to provide student services (SSH access, web servers, database servers, etc.). Apart from that, I’ve started learning c(++), and for practice I’m building an IRC client, called skaar.

Next week, together with Mattijs, I’m starting on the logbook which will be built in PHP, so that we can start logging quickly.

Keeping you posted!

a new notebook (Acer Aspite 5630; at least, that’s what it says). My old one (HP Pavilion dv1000) has served it’s time, and it is time for it to move on to the museum.

I also bought a brand new blue ray dvd player for only 160 euro, which is really not expensive The only thing I have to do now, is compile a custom kernel because the current kernel I use (2.6.22-14-generic) does not yet have built-in support for UDF2.5, which is the file system for blue ray dvd’s. After that, we’ll see if it works as I want it to.

For now, that’s the latest news about my cool stuff. I will be back!

Before I started to write on this code, I divided it in three parts:

1. Creating Objects
2. Updating Objects
3. Deleting Objects

I finished a test version of the first part today. Basically, this is how it works: There is a class Object that should be extended by every class that has to be in a database. If you create a class extending this one, it will also be created in the database (if it doesn’t exist yet) as a table. For example, see this class:

 

/**
 * foo
 * bar
 * @table_name=__TEST__
 *
 */
class Test extends Object {    

     /**
     * @nullable = false
     */
    private $firstname; 

    private $lastname; 

    /**
    * @type = string(12)
    * @nullable = false
    */
    private $dateofbirth; 

    private $city; 

    function __construct() {
       parent::__construct();
   } 

    public function getFirstName(){
   	return $this->firstname;
   } 

    public function setFirstname($firstname){
   	$this->firstname = $firstname;
   } 

    public function getLastname(){
   	return $this->lastname;
   } 

    public function setLastname($lastname){
   	$this->lastname = $lastname;
   } 

    public function getDateofbirth(){
   	return $this->dateofbirth;
   } 

    public function setDateofbirth($dob){
   	$this->dateofbirth = $dob;
   } 

    public function getCity(){
   	return $this->city;
   } 

    public function setCity($city){
   	$this->city = $city;
   }
}

Will result in this table:

Pretty cool, huh? I still have to do some work, but the base is there. As you can see, you can also use some kind of annotations to set the information for the table and the columns in the database, but there are also default settings if they are omitted.
Enough for today, I’m going to celebrate my weekend and “Oud & nieuw”, as we call New Year’s Eve in Holland Soon more about this!

Strangely enough, at that time there was no framework or abstraction layer available for PHP, so I started building one myself. The idea was for it to work like EJB, and the result was satisfactory. Then doom hit me, because I lost all that code So now I’m going to start all over again, with a slightly different angle: I am going to write a framework that communicates with the Zend Framework, but with a little extra: the Zend Framework does not provide creation and automatic querying for your objects in the database, and that’s what will be the extra in my framework.