I'm happy to announce a new long-expected experimental release of DokuWiki plugin Diagram that supports arrows! Other notable change is a reworked processing engine and a new layout for decreasing amount of XHTML code (I plan to continue development in this direction). A plenty of changes has been made so I decided to break the line of stable releases and create a separate branch. Fresh code needs some testing, you know...
The documentation was updated so feel free to download and try out the new version. As an example I've equipped Kennedy family tree with arrows. Finally, I want to show you how the diagram from the documentation looks in the Firefox browser...
Nikita Melnichenko.
... then this post is for you. I used to utilize three scripting engines — Script-fu, PERL-fu and Python-fu, and now I wish to share my thoughts about their advantages and disadvantages.
It was started when I was asked to create a website with a special figured font applied on headings and product captions. If you're web designer then you know what my problem was — support of arbitrary fonts in different browsers is still up in the air. And that was a few years ago... In short, it was decided to make a bunch of images with captions and to put them on a page. In spite of a small size of the site, it was insufferably dull to make all these images by hand, do the same operations every time. So I started to look for automatic methods. I had no luck with ImageMagick, but it was not so hard for me to learn how to write GIMP plugins.
Nikita Melnichenko.
Saving of operating system state could be very important sometimes. If you ever faced with a problem that you needed to find out which updated component caused a strange behaviour of some program then you know what I mean. Over the last few years I've been using my own backup program that creates reserve copies from different data sources. It also stores the system state as a set of config files and reports. History of changes is tracked by a version control system so each change is described by a system administrator. My program is not ready for publication yet since it should be improved in order to be used by other people. But I will share some of its components periodically. Today I'll tell you about report that contains list of all packages installed on Gentoo GNU/Linux including their USE flags.
Nikita Melnichenko.
Sometimes I receive messages that Lyrics Manager can't find files in Amarok collection. There is no way to process requests without database search since the module reads tags and lyrics from it. I can't reproduce this bug by myself, maybe it is concerned with a special mount point configuration or file systems used. Recently I received email from Max, who uses Amarok with LVM. His database investigations made collection search algorithm more flexible. Let's say thanks to Max! He wasn't lazy and wrote a letter about problem and possible solution to the author.
If you see errors that file does not belong to collection while it does, you should try to update plugin to the most recent version from the project homepage.
Nikita Melnichenko.
«Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.»
Dennis Ritchie.
The UNIX philosophy is not just a set of rules. It is ideology that is used everyday 'cause it's really useful and simple. Sometimes it's hard to explain the concept but I'll try to do it with the real example — the problem I have to solve recently.
I needed to keep my eye on temperature of processor and graphics card. The temperature applet that is bundled with KDE didn't show me anything. I've spent some time trying to breathe new life into it but hadn't succeeded. Well, it's not a problem, let's «cook» a new applet! Actually I know how to find out the current temperature of different devices so I only need to show this information on a desktop.
Nikita Melnichenko.
Diagram plugin has been updated. There was added support for text alignment within a block and for internal indent of a text. To see examples and to download the latest version visit the homepage.
Nikita Melnichenko.
