Tero's blog

Year 2011 summary

Tero Koskinen — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:00:00 -0000

When it comes to Ada and its community, last year (2011) was pretty interesting to me. Here is a small summary what I managed to do:

I did three Ahven releases (1.9, 2.0, and 2.1). I had hoped to do yet another (2.2), but didn't find time for that.
I became AVR-Ada contributor. I started playing with Arduino and AVRs some years ago (2009, I think) and AVR-Ada is quite pleasant to use on them, after you overcome the installation issues.
Ada Connection 2011 conference in June was the real highlight of the year. I saw a lot of Adaists face to face and they are no longer only random email addresses on newsgroups and mailing lists.
Dan Eilers kindly accepted me as second writer for his papers about ACATS (and Ahven). The first paper was presented at Ada Connection 2011 and the second at SigAda 2011.
I registered domain http://www.ada-language.com/ (.net, .info, .org also). For now, the content there is pretty light, but I do have some plans for it.
My Twitter and Identi.ca client Beautiful Ladybird is progressing nicely (although somewhat slowly). Homeline and status update functionality works from the command line, I just need to do UI with Claw and GtkAda.
Jdaughter library for reading and writing JSON data was a by-product of Ladybird. It is still missing some features, but I can parse Twitter and Identi.ca feeds with it.

Finally, here some pictures from AdaConnection 2011 in Edinburgh:

The John McIntyre conference centre (rainy day, like most days that week):

Jacob Sparre Andersen giving a presentation:

I also visited Holyrood Park, which was nearby:

PS. Notice, that Ada Information Clearinghouse is showing videos from the conference. Be sure to check them out!

New year coming, new blogging engine also

Tero Koskinen — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:01:00 -0000

Like others, I am slowly converting all my documentation into reStructuredText. I did it earlier for documentation of Ahven and now I changed my blog to it also.

For blogging, I decided to use Pelican, which generates static blog pages from a set of reStructuredText files.

Nice Christmas Present from Paeae

Tero Koskinen — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:40:00 -0000

I recently ordered some Arduino and electronics stuff from Finnish Arduino store called Paeae. The delivery was smooth and fast as usual, but in addition they had put there a nice little Christmas present for me, a small green breadboard (resistor was not included):

Thanks!

Oops, I really messed up skipped tests in Ahven 2.0

Tero Koskinen — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:06:00 -0000

I managed to mess up skipped test reporting also in the XML test result reporter. I filed an issue about it.

Since the bug appears only if you skip some tests and use the XML result format, it isn't really fatal and therefore I won't immediately fix it. However, I do plan to create a bug fix release within a month or two.

Version numbers are cheap - Ahven 2.1 released

Tero Koskinen — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 15:06:00 -0000

A small but unfortunate and annoying bug slipped into Ahven 2.0 release: Ahven.Text_Runner silently ignored all skipped tests and did not report them. This is now fixed in Ahven 2.1.

Again, you can get the source from Sourceforge.

Ahven 2.0 released

Tero Koskinen — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:07:00 -0000

I just released Ahven 2.0. You can grab the source code from SourceForge.

This release includes two new features:

Test timeouts
Test skipping programmatically

When running tests, you can specify a timeout value for the tests. If test runs longer than the timeout value, the test is stopped. This is implemented by running each test in a separate task and aborting the task if the test runs too long.

The feature of course depends on code being abortable, which might not be the case always. For example, many Ada compilers do not abort task which runs in a tight loop and does some calculations, like "loop Counter := Counter + 1;end loop;".

The another feature is simple procedure called "Skip". Calling this inside a test allows you to skip the test and move to the next one. The skipped test is considered as passed, but some test runners might add extra "SKIP" info for them.

Adadomain merged to sphinx-contrib

Tero Koskinen — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:07:00 -0000

I merged my Adadomain to sphinx-contrib. This way it is one step more official extension.

For those who do not know: Sphinx is a documentation tool and it is used in Ahven. In release 1.9 of Ahven, I included the generated HTML documentation to the tarball, but I might emit the generated content from 2.0 since the Adadomain extension is now merged.

Reading I2C EEPROM with Arduino and AVR-Ada

Tero Koskinen — Sat, 21 May 2011 16:43:00 -0000

Recently, I wanted to access I2C EEPROM with Arduino. However, AVR-Ada (1.1.0) provides no support for I2C interface which many AVR processors and Arduinos have. So, I had to write a package ("Two_Wire") for it.

Example code is available at arduino-eeprom repository and below is the used circuit:

The package is far from perfect, but it should provide a place to start if someone needs to use I2C with AVR-Ada.

IPv6 support for stronglytyped.org

Tero Koskinen — Mon, 09 May 2011 14:18:00 -0000

My AWS-powered sites stronglytyped.org and Ahven's homepage ahven.stronglytyped.org now support IPv6 connections also.

This was possible after Linode started supporting native IPv6 in some of its datacenters.

Again, only Ada Web Server and iptables were used. There is no separate frontend http server written in another language. Just plain Ada all the way.

Small attiny13 development board

Tero Koskinen — Sat, 07 May 2011 15:25:00 -0000

To test AVR-Ada with small attiny13 processors, I made a little "development board" for me:

It can run hello example out of the box and blink the green led. The red led indicates power.

Ahven 1.9 released

Tero Koskinen — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:03:00 -0000

I finally managed to release Ahven 1.9 (download zip).

This is a small bug fix release only to allow Ahven compile with GNAT GPL 2010 also.

If everything goes as planned, the next 2.0 will include new features, like timeouts, improved documentation, and possibly an ability to skip some tests.

Blog engine changed to blogsum

Tero Koskinen — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:10:00 -0000

I changed the blog engine running my blog from bloxsom to blogsum.

This might cause some extra spam in the planet aggregators, I am sorry about that. I try not to do this too often. :)

The reason for the change was that I wanted to use software which works well with OpenBSD, in case I some day migrate this web server from Linux to OpenBSD.

RSS feed URLs now follow form http://tero.stronglytyped.org/rss2.xml?search=TAG where TAG can be for example ada or monotone.

Arduino Mega 2560 and Attiny13a/Attiny2313 support to AVR-Ada

Tero Koskinen — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 22:04:00 -0000

I recently got write access to the AVR-Ada repository and now I have pushed my changes there.

These changes improve support for Atmega2560, Attiny13a, and Attiny2313 processors. Attiny13a and Attiny2313 are pretty uninteresting, although common, AVR processors. I happen to use them in my projects because they are cheap and that is why I also wanted better support for them.

On the other hand, Atmega2560 processor is used in the new Arduino Mega 2560 board. This means that next release of AVR-Ada will support the new Mega board out of the box. Some bits, like support for timers 3..5 and extra UARTS, are missing, but at the moment Atmega2560 should have about same features as Atmega328p supported.

OpenBSD port for Monotone 0.99.1

Tero Koskinen — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 22:30:00 -0000

I updated my OpenBSD port for Monotone to version 0.99.1.

It is tested on 4.8/amd64, but should work with -current also

Ada bindings for cURL

Tero Koskinen — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 22:23:00 -0000

I put my Ada bindings to libcurl available at http://hg.stronglytyped.org/curl-ada/. At the moment, they are pretty simple and contain only a small subset of libcurl, but they allow me to fetch data over http/https and that is good enough for my current purposes.

The bindings should work with GNAT and Janus/Ada on 32-bit and 64-bit systems. The build scripts are less than optimal, but with some effort you should figure out how to build the bindings

Arduino Ethernet Shield support for AVR-Ada

Tero Koskinen — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 20:53:00 -0000

I finally got my code working with Arduino Ethernet Shield and put it available at http://bitbucket.org/tkoskine/arduino-ethernet/.

Only receiving data via TCP client connections is supported, but I plan to improve the library as my time permits.

AVR-Ada 1.1.0 port with AVR-GCC 4.3.2 for OpenBSD

Tero Koskinen — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:00:00 -0000

I updated my AVR-Ada port to version 1.1.0. It consists of three parts:

AVR-GCC 4.3.2 with Ada support - http://bitbucket.org/tkoskine/avr-gcc

AVR-Ada 1.1.0 runtime files - http://bitbucket.org/tkoskine/avr-ada-rts

AVR-Ada 1.1.0 library files (AVR.* packages) - http://bitbucket.org/tkoskine/avr-ada-lib

For now, only Arduino (atmega328p) is supported in avr-ada-lib package.

Documentation using Sphinx

Tero Koskinen — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 21:04:00 -0000

I recently converted Ahven's DocBook documentation to use Sphinx and reStructuredText.

I did this to make it simpler to write documentation. reStructuredText is almost like plain text, so in theory it should be easier than XML-based DocBook.

As an unfortunate side-effect, this change introduces Python dependency to the project, while on the other hand, I get rid of Java-based XSLT tool dependencies.

New blog location!

Tero Koskinen — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 21:01:00 -0000

Hello, I transferred my blog from Microsoft's live.com to here.

The blog uses Blosxom blogging engine with a few plugins.

mtn disapprove PARENT-REV CHILD-REV

Tero Koskinen — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:07:00 -0000

Starting from version 0.99 Monotone's disapprove command understands a revision range in addition to a single revision.

This means that you can disapprove bigger group of changes at once.

Of course, there are some limitations on the group of revisions. For example, there cannot be merge revisions inside the range.

This was my first bigger change to Monotone's code and along with that I gained commit access to monotone.ca, yay!.

Ahven 1.8 released

Tero Koskinen — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:22:00 -0000

Today I released Ahven 1.8. You can find release notes from here.

New Computer

Tero Koskinen — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:30:00 -0000

No new blog posts for a while. That is because I got a new computer some time ago this year and have been playing with it. It has 3.4GHz AMD Phenom II X4 965 processor, 4GB RAM, 1x 64GB SSD disk, and 2x 150GB 10krpm Velociraptors. And the graphics adapter is ATI Radeon HD 4890. In other words, it should have enough computing power for a while. :)