Matteo Vescovi's blog

While working on NppPresage, the Notepad++ predictive text plugin I am writing, I ran into an interesting problem which led me on a journey of discovery of some useful and powerful Windows debugging tools.

The problem started occuring when testing my NppPresage plugin with the latest build of Notepad++. After exiting Notepad++, the following error message box would appear, when the NppPresage plugin is installed:

Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.

Some time ago, I began working on packaging presage for Debian. My motivations were:

• to make presage as easily and readily accessible as possible: getting presage into Debian certainly achieves widespread distribution, as it make it available to Debian distribution itself, as well as the numerous Debian derivatives (Ubuntu arguably being the most well-known)
• to learn about packaging software for Debian: I was curious and interested about the policies and processes adopted by Debian developers to package software into the distribution, and I wanted to learn the tools and procedures for myself
• to contribute something back to Debian: I've used Debian as my main OS for years (after a brief initial stint with Slackware 1.2.3), and I thought it high time to contribute some time and work to the distribution and the community of developers behind it

I am glad to announce that presage has been accepted into Debian Sid. presage-0.8.6-1 was built, signed, and uploaded on Sat, 6 August 2011.

Here's a short configure.ac example with an autoconf test to check whether the linker supports version scripts.

I spent a few minutes searching for such a check and no results popped up, so I resorted to writing my own.

The code below might be useful for others looking for such a code snippet, and can be easily adapted to suit specific needs.

AC_INIT(--version-script test example, 0.1, matteo.vescovi@yahoo.co.uk)

AC_PROG_CC
AC_PROG_CPP

AC_MSG_CHECKING([whether linker supports version scripts])
cat > conftest.map <<EOF
VERSION_1 {
global:
        main;

Our wood decking has endured a few years of weathering. It's taken its fair share of rain and wind, including the occasional rays of sunlight and downpours of snow.

The result of this continued exposure to the elements clearly shows in this photo. The wood turned to an unattractive gray colour and stubborn mould covered its surface.

The latest release of the presage predictive text entry library sports, among other things, a new and improved configuration layer which extends previous capabilities, adds new features and fills in a number of gaps and issues in the previous releases.

Prior to the refactoring work that went into 0.8.1, presage configuration mechanism was limited by the following issues:

• configuration could only be read from a single profile file

Since subversion is going to be actively used in our team at work, I gave a presentation/tutorial on subversion to help everyone in the team to get started with it.

Today I married Wala.

Visit our wedsite to find out more and see our wedding photoes.

Nokia has recently announced the introduction of the stunning n900, the evolution of the n770, n800, and n810 internet tablets. The n900 is not just an internet tablet, it is a phone!

This announcement has sparked renewed interest in the maemo development environment for the n-series devices.

Rossnowlagh. Wala and I have been there. We surfed, ate vast seafood platters, drank refined wine, walked the beaches. We spent two wonderful days there, but we still don't know how to pronounce the town's name!

What a wonderful spot it is. Just north of Bundoran, it is one of the best spots in the Irish surfing mecca that is Donegal county.

Low and behold: GNU Emacs 23.1 is out. The latest release of the greatest text editor ever written includes a number of features and enhancements.

I have built in on my GNU/Debian Lenny box and started using it immediately. It is amazingly good. I just love the traditional Emacs look dressed GTK+ widgets and TrueType font support.