In Ms Word 97 binary file format, there are three SPRMs to deal with grid. They are:

Name	sprm	Property	size	Description
sprmSDxtCharSpace	0x7030	Sep.dxtCharSpace	long	Specifies the grid width
sprmSDyaLinePitch	0x9031	Sep.dyaLinePitch	long	Specifies the grid height
sprmSClm	0x5032	Sep.clm	long	Specifies the grid type

sprmSClm has four values, which corresponds to four types of grid.

Name	value	Grid type
sprmSClm	0	No grid
	1	Specify line and character grid
	2	Specify line grid only
	3	Text snaps to character grid

Today, I downloaded and installed a Chinese trial version of MS Office 2007. I was surprised that “Square page mode” is also supported in MS word 2007, which is not supported in previous version.

Below illustrates the menu entry for “square mode” setting. ( Maybe this function is disabled in none_CJK version in default).

Setting tab page:

Squared page (20 ×20):

If the “square page mode” is enabled, the page setting menu is disabled. “standard page mode” setting is not allowed, which avoids mixed page mode in a document.

I managed to get the subwoofer on my Inspiron 9400 working today. I had read in several places that I just need to add 'model=ref' to the module config file, but I'd tried that without success.

Today I discovered that openSUSE 10.2 uses version 1.0.12 rc2 of the alsa drivers, and they don't support the subwoofer. So I downloaded alsa-driver-1.0.13, configured it with ./configure --with-cards=hda-intel, ran make, and then make install-modules, rebooted my machine, and the sub was working. Oh and that model=ref line was added to /etc/modprobe.d/sound, so now the first line is options snd-hda-intel enable=1 index=0 model=ref.


There's only one slight problem - the master volume control doesn't adjust the subwoofer (shown as LFE in the mixer), and muting the sound also doesn't mute the sub. But other than that it works!

A small resume of my FOSDEM experience…

Friday evening

Departure from Italy. The plane landed in Charlesroi airport, where we (me and Laura) take a bus for Bruxelles. Once in the city it was so late that there was no public transport, so we had to take a cab in order to reach our hotel.

Saturday

Small tour in Bruxelles. As we thought Bruxelles is a beautiful city with lot of things to see, in fact there are too many things to see for a 2 day trip! In the late morning we reached FOSDEM at the ULB university.

After a long tour across the different stands I found the KDE guys and especially Jos. I met him at the Nepomuk talk. Here I discovered that since Sebastian Trueg (author of the famous K3B burning program) was ill, Jos has taken his place. It has been a really interesting talk, that “warmed” people making them more curious about Strigi. Then it was my time. Everything went right and in the end there were many questions.

The day ended with another small walk in Bruxelles and a dinner in one typical restaurant.

Sunday

We went to FOSDEM for the last time to see Jos talk. As usual Jos made a great job and all the people liked it. After a small talk with him about some technical aspects of Strigi, we leave FOSDEM and we went for another small tour in Bruxelles.

In the early afternoon we had to take the bus for the Charlesroi airport. We came back home at 10pm with some bottles of good Belgian beer ;)

In the end

It has been a great experience, I’ll try to came back to FOSDEM the next year!

You can find my presentation in the papers section.

Short abstract:

Strigi desktop integration: how to access Strigi features.

Strigi, the fastest and smallest desktop search engine, provides fast searches and good metadata extraction capabilities. It will be used by the next KDE, but it can be easily integrated in other programs.

Long abstract:

Modern humans are using more and more data every day. Keeping data organized is becoming insufficient, so finding and filtering documents have become key tasks in modern operating systems. The traditional unix tools find, grep and locate do no longer suffice for a number of reasons: The amounts of data have grown more than data access speeds, many document formats are too complex to handle by simple tools and relations between different types of data are becoming more important for a convenient user experience. Strigi introduces a new way of looking at metadata and file formats that enables the creation of very efficient tools for improving the way users handle their data. It does so by using simple C++ code with very few dependencies.

Strigi’s features can be easily integrated by other programs using two different interfaces: socket and DBus. The last one can be considered the best choice since there are lot of DBus bindings that make possible to interact with Strigi using different programming languages. DBus inter-process communication system will be used by KDE4 and is actually used by Gnome. Moreover, DBus bindings exists for lot of programming languages. Thanks to this Strigi can be easily integrated in different window manager and inside programs written in languages different from C++.

KDE developers can also take advantage from Strigi’s JStreams: a set of classes for fast access to archive files. In fact Strigi defines a dedicated KIO Slave for JStreams, this can be easily used by other programs, making archives access faster.

This presentation will show how the current Strigi clients interact with the daemon, how to communicate with Strigi and, most important of all, how other projects can benefit too accessing Strigi.

I just tried out Avant Window Navigator for the first time, after seeing Neil’s latest blog entry. It’s pretty slick, and worth trying if you have xgl/aiglx/whatever. I also wrote a Banshee plugin which makes the current track cover appear in the dock.

You can get the plugin here. Just drop the dll into ~/.gnome2/banshee/plugins.

Contiue to investigate the layout behavior when the text doesn't snap to grid.

For East Asian text, not more than one Asian character is displayed within a signle cell. The space between two Asian characters is (grid width - font height)

For Western text, The space between two Western characters is (grid width - font height)/2.

The following diagram illustrates this algorithm in brief.



Certainly, it just specifies what happens if grid width is greater than font height.

"Who needs to delete when you have over 2000 MB of storage?!" --- This is what a large internet company says about their free mail accounts.

But actually what does happen when all space is actually used up? Since I am subscribed to some high volume mailing lists with my mail account from this large internet company it happened to me already sometimes that the account was almost full. To prevent trouble I just deleted some old mails whenever this occurred to happen. Then a colleague told me that what I am doing does not make any sense because he claimed to know that the account can just be filled up further and further, even more than 100%. That sounded strange to me but seemed to be actually an interesting question.

So this is what I did when this happened again for my account last weekend: Nothing. I just waited to see what will happen. Actually he was true in the sense that nothing happened. But not about the results. Actually I suddenly got much less mail to that account. This seemed to be somewhat suspicious to me and I sent a test mail from another mail account to my own mail account from this large internet company. The mail was sent without an error. The mail never reached my mail account from this large internet company. Neither the sender nor the receiver got any error message. The mail was just silently dropped. This is definitely not the error handling you expect from a mail provider.

So, what can we learn from this test:

1. Never trust your colleagues if they tell you some strange and fantastic stories.

2. Never use free mail accounts when you have to rely on receiving your mails.

3. Never expect people to do proper error handling for a case they are proud that it will never be needed. Titanic told this already in history.

This year I’ll go to FOSDEM 2007 edition where I’ll give a presentation regarding Strigi.

FOSDEM stands for “Free Open Source Developers European Meeting”.

This is one of the most important happenings for the open-source scene in Europe. It takes place in Bruxelles, where for two days the university if full of talks, and stands of open-source projects.

Big projects have a DevRoom, a place reserved for talks related with them. And here I came… As Strigi is related with KDE me and Jos van Oever will give two presentations in the KDE DevRoom.

I’ll give a talk with the title: “Strigi desktop integration”. I’ll talk about the different interfaces you can use for playing with Strigi. These interfaces are really easy to use, this makes possible to integrate Strigi in different projects or write some cool front-end without any hassle. Finally I’ll talk about the technologies that reside into Strigi internals. Since they’re really useful, it can be smart to use them in different situations (also when information retrieval isn’t the main goal). Here you can get more detailed informations about my talk.

As usually lot of time passed since my last post on this site. Hundred of things happened in the meantime… Going in order:

1. I took my second level degree in Computer Engineering
2. I began to work in a IT company
3. I’m going to give a presentation of strigi to fosdem It’s really hard (and honestly I don’t have enough time) to give a detailed resume of all these facts. The graduation went really fine, my teacher and the other one in the examining session liked my work and I got a good score. Obviously that gave me a great satisfaction Laughing

The other great thing is that, exactly a month later my graduation, I found a good work in a IT company. In the meantime I got lot of job interviews, and I’ve been really lucky because I had lot of choices. The main office is located in Milan, a great city near Bergamo (where I live). Since I don’t like to live in Milan (for lot of reasons), I became an outlier. So every day I take a train, the subway and a tram in order to reach work. It isn’t so hard as you could thing… I’ve lot of time to spend reading and maybe coding Wink In the end, for the last point regarding strigi and fosdem, I’ll make a dedicated post.