Pascal's TechBlog

Monday, August 29, 2005

With Canon I Can

I finally bought a Canon PowerShot A520. It's a good 4 MPixel digital camera, with 4x optical zoom.

To put the PowerShot to the test, I roamed around my home town a bit, taking pictures of just about anything. I actually had a blast. I never thought it would be that much fun. But after getting home, I took a look at the pictures I had just made. And it occured to me just how hard it is to take a good picture. I was only happy with two or three pictures out of the fifty-something I took.

Anyway, I seriously need to read up on photography techniques.

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Google Talk ... finally

Google has finally released their own Instant Message service aptly called Google Talk. It's good to finally see a company large enough to produce any kind of market push to use the vastly superior Jabber protocol. Google also allows third party clients to it's Talk service, another first in the industry.

I fired up Gaim as soon as I could, and everything worked as to be expected.

I hope Google Talk will acquire enough momentum to replace MSN Messenger as the #1 Instant Message client in the Netherlands.

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Minosse Database System

I read about Minosse the other day, it's a very cool project, they just 'finished' a mostly SQL92 compliant database in C#. It can be compared against the likes of Apache Derby or HSQLDB, but it's still in it's infancy. But it looks very promessing.

Monday, August 22, 2005

ClamAv# pre-alpha release

I just made my first ClamAv# release. I made this release for testing/preview purposes only.

I also just submitted ClamAv# to freshmeat.net, hoping to attract some folks willing to be alpha testing guinea pigs.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Quake III Arena sources

I fiddled a bit with the Quake III Arena sources last night, I got them to compile properly. I also did some benchmarking to see whether an optimized build for my Athlon XP would give any performance benefit, but only at lower resolutions did I get a few percent higher framerate. My graphics card (GeForce Ti 4200-8x) is probably the limiting factor at the higher resolutions.

Anyway I built this binary on Ubuntu 5.04: Quake III Arena 1.32b i686.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

Developing @ 3000mHz

Today (well, technically, it was yesterday) I upgraded my development system to a AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (Barton core).

I also finally bought proper casing for my system, an Avance B031 Multi Tower, and sofar it has been the best case I've ever seen, and it wasn't all that expensive to begin with. I can seriously recommend this case!

ClamAv# CVS

Hmmm, just made my first ClamAv# CVS commit. My first experience with CVS was a bit sour, especially after having used DARCS before. With DARCS I've had an almost zero learning curve, though CVS required some trial-and-error.
Anyway I've ordered O'Reilly's CVS Pocket Reference, in an attempt to educate myself further on CVS.

The ClamAv# code now present in CVS isn't ready for general use yet, I still have tons of work to do!

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

SourceForge.net

I got my ClamAv# project approved by SourceForge. It's now available at http://clamav-sharp.pcode.nl/.

I was kind of overwhelmed by the amount of services which SourceForge provides for the open source community. They've got just about anything you'd need to do an opensource project: webspace, a file repository, a cvs repository, a simple forum, a simple bugtracker, a screenshot gallery.

Anyway I'm preparing my code for a first CVS commit... Uhm wait... I need to read up on CVS first... anyway this should be done in a couple of days...

Friday, August 12, 2005

ClamAv# cleanup

I've just severely cleaned up my ClamAv# source code and finally put it in a proper namespace...

Something else that seriously needed to be done was splitting up the source code into several logical files, instead of one big gunk of code... I've moved all exceptions into a seperate file, also the demonstration application now has it's own file.

So I'm basically moving from a proof-of-concept towards something which could be mistaken for a serious project.

Also I'm waiting for approval from sourceforge.net to get my own project page for ClamAv#.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Mono, ClamAV and P/Invoke

I've recently been doing some Mono/C# coding. Mono is actually very nice. It makes building GTK+/GNOME applications very easy. Complement it with Glade, and suddenly I don't miss Delphi all that much...

I also finally found a project worth pursueing... I noticed that there doesn't seem to be a GNOME interface for the excellent ClamAV.

So I'm basically going to try to build a GNOME VirusScanning application, which uses ClamAV as it's scanning engine. I've been reading up on the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, well, a little, and I'm going to try to adhere to them.

First things first, I needed to call libclamav from within Mono, and build an object oriented wrapper around that. Now Mono has a feature for that called P/Invoke, which is actually quite easy, but it does take some getting used to.

I really need to thank Jonathan Pryor for his help regarding P/Invoke and Marshalling.

Anyway sofar, I have a simple object oriented wrapper for libclamav working, but I'm not entirely happy with the API and the way it handles exceptions...

But it's a start... More soon...