Smoking toooooo much PHP
Sunday 24 August 2008
Just a small update on roojs1 - I've added in-line comments to the RooJs1 documentation - so if you think a method or class is not well explained, add your comment, example code, or bug note right on the documentation. - Something I think makes a huge difference to the usability of code... Other small changes are also beginning to be added - including the fields property of a Roo.toolbar, and the new Roo.form.Hidden element, to make creating forms with hidden variables simpler. Anyway, rumors are swirling around that there is a recommendation to avoid ExtJS among certain linux distributors due to uncertainties and general lack of confidence in the license, it's continual changing and general poor behavior by Jack in not understanding the implications of the bait and switch changes. It also appears that Jack's Legal team are working harder than his coding team again, sending out threatening letters to people involved in various ExtJs2 derivative works. (which is the key reason I'm focusing on v1 - clear, definitive separation and licenses that do not allow for such shenanigans) While ExtJS2 offered some interesting new features. The significant change to the object rendering model, from my experience has been broken on every release prior to the GPL one, (and since I never tested it after that release, I suspect it's still broken). Other changes relating to a clearer heirachy of object model look like they should be a simple addition to ExtJS1, along with better support for non DOM element dependent constructors. Hence I think building on ExtJS1 appears to be a better long term move, and sounds like a few more are beginning to see that wisdom.
Sunday 10 August 2008
Since a few friends complained about adding me to their RSS feed, then not actually posting anything I thought I'd post a little something about some of the recent hacks I've been up to. See the extended version for details on - Non-blocking socketstreams in D
- Unix Sockets in D
- Rooscript updates - System, and GDC cached building.
- RooJS updates - examples in the manual
View Extended Entry
Wednesday 16 July 2008
After a little wait (~ 3 weeks), having asked ASUS to provide me with the source code for the drivers to the DMB-TH Digital TV receiver, I finally got two tarballs of the source code. One step closer to an open source friendly solution to watch Digital TV in China and Hong Kong.
It took a little persuasion to convince the technical support team at ASUS that I was entitled to the source as it was based on GPL code, but once they understood, and had asked their supervisor/ R&D department about it. It was just a matter of waiting for the R&D dept to get time to do it.
I was very impressed with ASUS in general - their tech response times for product support where pretty amazing (usually answering within a few hours). If you have the option of buying ASUS, I can highly recommend their email tech support. Friendly, positive, and responsive.
The driver modifications are all to drivers/media/dvb/*, and consist mostly of 2 new files dealing with the demodulator, and a rather unfortunate hack at db3000mc.c - Basically replacing the core of that file with the routines for the Legend chip. Rather than creating a new file (which looks like it would have been a far better idea).
Anyway, I'm going to try building these changes against a recent kernel, then see if I can sort out the db3000mc mess. If anyone want's to help out, drop me an email and I can send you the files.
Tuesday 1 July 2008
Another update on progress on RooJS (the ExtJS v1 Fork) - Form's now have CSS, so the dynamic form examples work quite well
- The CSS was created by documenting how the existing examples where rendered in ExtJS - A document describing this was created (see form_design.svg in the css folder). Then that document was used to create a brand new CSS file. I believe this can be regarded as not breaking the copyright and having a reasonable reverse engineering process.
- the x-box borders are missing, although not critical
- the HTML editor needs to be fixed.
- I have done the design diagram for CSS of the menu's and will be working on that soon.
- The doc's are improving as well, The doc's appear to be listing all the correct elements now, future work will focus on tidying up the templates.
- Most of the improvements came from replacing the Walker code in the jsdoctoolkit so that it understands scope in a similar way to the compressor. I also had to add a few extra comments in the source to give the documentation tool a few hints.
- /** @scope Roo.somescope */ -- changes the scope in the documentation engine (as sometimes it just can not guess what the scope is.
- /** @scopeAlias avar=Roo.xyz.prototype */ -- adds an alias to the parser engine alias map, so when it sees 'avar', it will replace it with Roo.xyz.prototype
- The compresser is working well, someone asked on #roojs on freenode about using it for other code, including ExtJs2.0 - There should be no problem doing that - have a look at the bundle build file to see how to set up a builder for any project.
- One thing to note is that the compresser uses hints when it sees 'eval'. The YUI compresser basically turns off compression for a large chunk of the code if it sees 'eval', I've added code to pick up a comment before the eval statement:
- /** eval:var:abcd */ will turn variable compresion back on, and exclude 'abcd' from the list of variables to be compressed (use multiple eval:var:... statement on multiple lines to exclude multiple variables)
Anyway back to work tommorow, after celebrating (eg. doing nothing) the glorious reunification with the motherland day (HKSAR day)
Wednesday 18 June 2008
CSS hackers needed.Yes, the first test version of roojs1 is built and working you can have a look here to see the old ExtJS1 examples (which where sourced from a 0.40 release licenced under a BSD licence) http://www.akbkhome.com/roojs1/examplesWarning this may break occasionally as I do daily builds of the library Most of the main layout, windows, grid and tree work pretty well, but there are some problems with toolbars, menus and forms. Basically I could not find complete licence free sources for any of them. So if you know anyone who can create CSS for the missing parts (and can illustrate reasonably well that it was not based on the original ExtJS CSS) send them over this way. That will help RooJS2 as well, as the CSS is probably pretty similar. Have a look at http://www.akbkhome.com/roojs1/css/roojs-debug.css for details on the status of the css build.. A big leap forward in building a truely free high quality JS UI toolkit. Anyway onto my geeking techo fun.Rooscript compressorAs part of the whole build toolkit, I've ported the yui compressor to rooscript (the dmdscript based Javascript interpreter), The results are pretty good. The current output from the compressor is 8K less that the ~497K that ExtJS 1.1.1 files are (built I presume using yui compressor). Along with this, it's pretty easy to tweak, and remove Files and add your own application (eg. create an all in one javascript file for your application) Speedwise I've been trying to get the compressor to go faster (It normally caches the minification result to a file and can do a 'reparse' in arround 2 seconds, but for a fresh build it takes about 6 minutes to parse all the ~100 files in Roojs1 In the process of speeding it up, I've added a few switches to rooscript - -p for a very simple profiler (gives you the total time taken for all the opcodes exculuding call/new etc. in each function) along with how many times they where called.
- -U to turn on Unicode for strings, as I've disabled it by default, although I'm not that sure now, that it produced the speed hit that I thought it might. ** mostly affect things like xx.indexOf("\n")
- -d (to show all the opcodes as they run) - old but handy sometimes...
The code is reasonably simple, so If you have any great ideas on how to improve compression, it's extremely easy to test how well they work. (rather than the usual compile/run cycle that all the Java versions have) In looking at the resulting code, one simple opmization that I've started adding to RooJs is changing the constructor code in the object from Roo.data.Connection.superclass.constructor.call(this,....) to Roo.superC(this,....) and Roo.data.Connection.superclass.somemethod.call(this,....) to Roo.superM('somemethod', this,.....) I'm guessing that's could be ~ 2K of rather wastefull code removed.. Basically since the compressor is working now, I'm going to re-look at the Docs, and sort out the bug's in those - probably replacing the scoping code in jsdoctoolkit, with something closer to the ported yui compresser version.
Wednesday 18 June 2008
A friend of mine received a letter the other day from the Hong Kong Inland Revenue Department (IRD), It was addressed to her company, and cc'ed to Her (at the bottom of the letter). The letter was titled "Notice For Recovery of Tax Under Section 76(1) of the Inland Revenue Ordinance."
Her first reaction was "This must be some kind of mistake", I'm not a boss/owner of this company, I guess they must be sending it out to all the employees.
Anyway, to help her out, I thought I'd phone up the IRD to find out why this letter arrived. It did not take long on the phone to realized that this letter was actually meant for her. So we did a little more reading of the letter. It turns out that it was a demand notice for.... wait for it....
"Notice 1" for Final Assessment for the year 1993-1994 in the sum of HK$309 (that's about US$40 or 20GBP)
To be honest I thought this was hilarious.. they had waited nearly 15 years to send out a first reminder to pay the amazing sum of HK$309.. Got to be one of the best examples of real government incompetence I've seen in a long while..
While it's not a huge issue in terms of finding the money (raid the piggy bank), I though it raised quite a few questions, some rather serious.
1) Why address demand letters to employers rather than employees?
2) Is this not over 6 years (the standard for Statue of limitations - or Hong Kong's equivalent legislation)
3) How are you supposed to challenge this? - I sent a cheque in 1993, it was cashed, you should have the payment? - nope, no human (except the IRD it seems) keeps records that long.
4) What if it had been a larger amount? one day you where happy with nice savings, looking to buy a house. Next you are wacked from nowhere and close to bankrupt with a huge bill from IRD, that you never knew about?
5) How many of these bills are there? - are all Hong Kongers going to be paying back-taxes for issues over 10 years ago? Will you get one every year?
6) Is this some kind of computer glitch?
7) Was someone pocketing the cash that long ago? and the system has only just been picking it up? Is there some kind of Superman fraud going on here....?
8) How on earth could they justify this? My friend has been paying tax every year for the last 15 years, so it's not like they did not have her address.. Oh well back to trusting our intelligent overlords..
Wednesday 11 June 2008
As I mentioned before, I've been busy getting the Ext Fork usable. still not quite there, but it's beginning to take shape.
RooScript
The fork I did of dmdscript (initially for gtk bindings) is being used as the core for all the build tools I'm working on for RooJS, so I though in honour of it's main use, I'll rename it rooscript (as it's a lot easier to google for than gtkDjs or whatever I came up with before..)
So here's a quick howto for building and testing the kit so far.
Rooscript building
First install gdc and subversion (I prefer it to dmd, as it's easier and quicker to set up and use)
#apt-get install gdc
#apt-get install subversion
decide where you want your code checked out to.
#cd /usr/src
#svn co http://www.akbkhome.com/svn/rooscript
#cd rooscript
#sh roo.lite.gdc.sh
you should hopefully now have /usr/bin/roolite
getting roojs1
#cd /usr/src
#svn co http://www.akbkhome.com/svn/roojs1
building the docsThe code is based on jsdoctoolkit, and modified to make better sense of RooJS's code. I did look at the Ext version of it, but they had used what looked like and older version of the jsdoctoolkit, so I just took some of the ideas from it. You can see a preview of the current roojs1 docs here
#cd roojs1
#roolite ../rooscript/examples/jstoolkit2/run.js \
-- Array.js Date.js Function.js Number.js Roo.js String.js \
-r Roo -t=../rooscript/examples/jstoolkit2/templates/jsdoc/ \
-d=docs/
building the js code (still under testing)
#roolite buildSDK/bundle_build.js -L../rooscript/examples/jstoolkit2
Ok, where is the project now.
- CSS/images have been recovered from an BSD licenced yui-ext-0.40 snapshot from here
http://demo.xteconline.com/system/js/builds/yui-ext.0.40.alpha1/
Most of the changes for 1.0.0 are just renaming the prefixes - The doc build is close, although still needs tweaking and checking
- The code builder is basic, (no variable replacement), but we do strip down close to dojo's hack to rhino, and I'm looking at yui's compresser for ideas on the variable stuff which should be quite simple.
- The css compresser has been ported to Javascript/rooscript, and should work, although I've not tested it yet..
- I'm pretty close to testing it by replacing the doc's backend to use Roo, rather than Ext.1.1.1
Tuesday 27 May 2008
Well, things are ticking away on the ExtJS forking project - There will be a official web site soon (I'm promised) - in the meantime head over to #roojs on freenode to see what's going on. On the global plan, this is what I've been looking at - I have found a copy of yui-ext 0.33, which was released under a BSD style licence, and includes all the CSS and Images. I've not got round to merging and testing it with the 1.1.1 code, but I can't see any major issues, as from my recollection 1.0 evolved from this.
- I got about halfway through adding all the javascript files (v1.1.1) to my subversion repo, along with modifying the headers to remove the licence link reference which is now irrelivant. The code can sit there until a shared repo becomes available.
- Made a dependancy list for the files (so that building specialized bundles should be easier)
- started testing a few javascript bundling tools (that work better than my simple tokenizer tool)
- Started looking at docs
The doc's turned out to be an interesting little intellectual challange, as I was not too impressed with jsdoc (the perl thing) Apart from being written in a "Write-only" language, it did not spit out anything resembling usefull docs from the extjs code. So I started looking at jsdoc toolkit (on google code) - It's dependancies are a bit annoying (java + mozilla js engine AFAIR) - but the thing is written in javascript - (very well designed) and looks like a better bet. My idea was to take this code, and use my dmdscript fork to run it and generate documentation without that java dependancy. My little dmdscript fork has a few benefits that make it very suited to this task - Built in File access, a built in tokenizer to start. And it's piss easy to extend. However it turned out to be a bit more complex than that. One of the major problems turned out to be that dmdscript uses digital mars's D's regex engine, which unfortunatly is seriously feature flawed. To the point that most regex's that you give it fall over badly. I did manage to hack in forgetfull matching (?:.....) but when I started finding quite a few more oddities, ([\s\S]+\s)? the whole task of trying to fix the code became to much, and I came to the conclusion that just ripping it out would be simpler. In it's place I've used the excellent pcre library by Phil Hazel (who also wrote one of the best MTA's out there.) The binding code for the pcre library was already available in dsource, hidden away in the dwin project, so after understanding the API for that, I've almost got to the point where a semi modified version of jsdoctookit can parse the Code. I still need to do some more fixes to the regex engein so it can render the templates. -But it's getting there.
Sunday 11 May 2008
I've started looking at forking ExtJS, after some considerable thought, I'm pretty close to the concluding that forking ExtJS is really option left, to retain the investment I've already made in it..
So, as I have a Zip file of 1.1.1 and it explicitly says that the Javascript code is Licensed under LGPL, (not ifs/ no but's) - I'm slowly putting the code into my subversion repo under www.akkbkhome.com/svn/extjs1 (*I'm looking at extjs1.1.1 as I have been using it and tend to prefer it, but there is nothing in the discusion below that precludes anyone helping/leadingwith the last extjs2 version that was released)
Now if this actually becomes a full fork (most forks fail BTW), It will need a bit of work, so If anyone is interested in helping out. I've no idea where this could go. But this fork ain't changing the license no-more...
The plan
I think there's quite a few things to do here... so Ideas or contributions.. -- feel free to email me, or just comment on this post. - At worst, it could form the brainstorming for anyone else actually doing this. (If you want to comment on if/should this be done - do it on my previous post, otherwise I will delete the comment)
The Code
- Tidy up Ext Js's source - see if it can be stored in one file per class, and have a simple classname->filename mapping... (eg. Ext.Dom in Ext/Dom.js) ** started..
- Sort out the CSS
- If Jack ever released any old CSS/images under a open licence (ext-yui source?) see if that can be used.?
- or Go through the classes and see what their requirements are for CSS
- Probably in batches - write a short document listing the required classes needed by the batch, enabling someone to contribute a CSS file that works.
- Posibly create enough CSS to make enough of it useable (probably with no images)
- Document image requirements (see above), then see if other open projects already have images that can be used? - otherwise see if someone want's to contribute themes..
- Break up Source into managable packages - Distribute ownership! - GIT or multiple SVN repos??
The Project
- Build infrastructure
- Create a command line tool that can compress then merge all the required components (and allows end users to do this)
- Allows source to be taken from multiple sources (so you can create builds with extensions / or without stuff you don't need)
- Forums
- Set up a mailing list! (and archived, with a search feature!) - Anyone know a good hosted one available? - or should I just go off and set the infrastructure here..
- No more 'premium' ... users! - equal, like open source is supposed to be!
- Manual
- Work out how to build a manual from the source!-- While Ext's manual is not bad, take the opportunitythis time do it right, and have a bug reporting / user comments on it....
- A name??/ - May need some thought...
The reasoning.
I have to admitafter some reflection to being pretty pissed at this change, ExtJs was useful in a number of ways, other than being a reasonably well written, the forums where search-able, so you occasionally found fixes to issues that you where having. The doc's where not to bad. etc.
But basically I've committed 1000's of hours of time to learning, and writing huge codebases that depend on ExtJS, under the basic premise that it was availably for Free, with the only Caveat that If I modified ExtJS, then I would have to give back those changes. "Quid Quo-pro" as they say.
The Change to GPL has altered that equation in such a radical way that If this was not a 'software' product, and was something physical. you would be down at the consumer council, and filing a class action against Jack for things like Breach of trust, financial gain by deception etc.And filing claims for the loss of your time, and the cost of replacing his library..
I have seen postings that appear to claim Jack plan's to 'send notice' to people using a fork, but as far as I can see, he released the Javascript code as LGPL, and from every reading I've seen of that, I have the absolute right to distribute the Javascript code, along with any modifications. - This is the purpose of the license!!! - so by claiming otherwise he is not honoring his own license, not a good omen for the future of ExtJs even under GPL!
I'm floating this, as a plan... - shout if you are interested/ have some ideas..?? - (or you can find real technical flaws - not FUD flaws please).
Wednesday 7 May 2008
I think that basically sums up my reaction to Jack's GPLv3'ing a library. For those who are not aware, As I was not, when I visited the extjs web site a few days ago to grab a copy of the old 1.1 version and found all references to download it had disappeared. Digging a bit deeper on the site, I started spotting a few comments about the new licensing.
While I can say that Jack as the author (of I presume most of extjs?) has the right to change the license to whatever he likes, I think he has probably just destroyed the project. I could not commit to writing new code with a "Library" that is GPL, unless I was working on a GPL project (which is unlikely at present - got bills to pay). And for commercial or spec projects, that are not turning revenues yet, I can't really justify my time in committing to develop stuff that may, or may-not be able to fund today's and whatever Jack feels like charging in the future for the non-commercial license.
I've seen too many people burned by this closed source dependencies that they build their businesses around, only to have the effective rental for their office yanked through the roof, and no other option than a huge effort moving to another library or software causing chaos.
All that said, I'm not sure if v2.0 and v2.1 are really worth bothering with anyway, I've tried them on 2 projects so far, and the general sense I get, is that compared to v1.1 they are a little finicky, and tend to produce slightly unpredictable results. Which is tempting me to stick with 1.1..
The problem I see though is that the community that has built up around extjs has been supported by quite a few handy tools, the wiki, the doc's and the rather nasty forum (which is a good way to waste time finding answers to issues). So I guess someone setting up a openext? (I saw something on the net about it) should probably sort out those issues first, then start solving the technical issues about how to replace all the images and css in extjs which where not previouslylicensed under LGPL.
I would hate to have to go looking at the alternatives again, So sticking with v1.1+ hacks may be the best long term plan for me anyway.
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