Today's tcl-guide features my incredibly simple pop3 fecther, I use to fill my needs. It is a simple script that could easily fit the text of the news to announce it. Go check it now!

See in today's tcl-guide a new addition to our skinable tk widgets collection, a volume control. As before, it shares the same bitmaps as Xmms and Winamp®, but beware not to infringe any copyright laws! This tutorial only shows the basics of such widget creation. If you want a ready to use volume control, you will have to elaborate a little more.

If you intend to give talks, courses or presentations online but can't afford a T1 or higher speed uplink, here is the solution. With you show your slides, texts, multimedia, and so on. All fully interactive, with your speech transmitted along, while you get in control of your listeners web navigators. Don't miss it! See the VebKlaso webpage for the full story (in portuguese, but with many pictures) about this amazing tool.

If you liked the first photos I made available here, you will certainly like this. Please look for the pictures at my new collection photo index.

There are many stock photography sites around, but most ask money if you intend to use their work for commercial purposes. I started to put real free, copylefted, photos for you. The collection is still small, but will grow fast. I hope you enjoy my photo album collection.

This week tcl-guide features example code on how to beautify your tcl/tk GUIs, borrowing skins from Xmms or Winamp. Yes, you don't need the complexity of Gtk+ or Qt for doing nice interfaces in tcl, nor buggy Java applets. And everything is done in simple scripts, with no C code. Read here.

I presented today a short course (slides here) "Linux sob Medida", in portuguese. You may want to get this tcl/tk script suitable to viewing those slides or any other slide collection exported as html from OpenOffice.org. For your convenience, here is a package that you will need too (required by sldshow). For the gearhead people, here is the CDROM image (==REMOVED, e-mail me if you need a copy==) of a self-contained linux system (run without any hard disk), used during the course. Create your home grown distro from it!

Here you find another talk on tclslides I'm going to present today to some customers. If you want to hear/see it live, please contact me and we may schedule for a presentation.

World Champion 2002

Still another printer that works great with my driver ml85p, the Texas Instruments Win/4. Thanks Marcel for reporting this to me! He also included in his e-mail (below) some hints on configuring printcap for LPRng. I'm still with the good old Berkeley lpd... Here is the patch he sent to me, for ml85p to work with the TI Win/4 printer. And here is his e-mail.

So you need to fetch many pages from some dynamic content page and wget don't suit well the job? Maybe its time to write your custom robot. You don't need to be scared of that. Tcl is a nice fit for the job, as you'll see at our current tcl-guide article.

I've done some cleanup at our GDI Printers page, fixing some broken links and missing packages. This is because I started to work in another winprinter, the Canon LBP-460, listed as paperweight in the Printing-FAQ (look at linuxprinting.org). I hope to increase my collection of drivers for winprinters in a few days. Keep watching, for if I find something interesting, I'll write more tutorial articles on my techniques and tools for this reverse engineering. Thanks Till Kamppeter for the nice gift (a Canon printer, of course!).

Our site is being reorganized to have a better consistency and navigability. If you find any missing links, please let me know. I hope you enjoy the new content and presentation.

As always, we don't have frames, no pesky javascripts and animated gifs, nor java applets, neither embedded flash animations. Only teaching notes and tutorials on Linux programming, and free software.

It is interesting to see old ideas rediscovered. In the 80's I have worked out a buddy allocator for my language Filia (now defunct, there is not even a web page, sorry! It was a mix of language and operating system for the old 8080 and Z80 microprocessors. I have even ported it to a PC).

I have published a paper about our implementation in a brazilian congress, coauthored by a mathematician friend of mine. Now it seems that Linux have such kind of allocator too! Truly amazing!
If you don't know, buddy allocation takes advantage on the properties of Fibonacci number series to avoid memory fragmentation.

What may I say? Welcome to the new Linux kernel memory allocator!

Here you will find slides from a C fundamentals course (in portuguese) I presented to a group of people last summer (summer here, in southern hemisphere, I mean). Someday I will post the example code (tons of small programs) of the course, if this interest someone.

Here you will find slides from my short course Linux sob medida (in portuguese). Enjoy!

Now I have my own domain and web server. I've got an ADSL connection, so updates are going to be easier. Please bookmark just http://www.pragana.net, as this the authoritative address, on my own server. In a few days, I will setup the TinyCobolWiki here too. Let's see if the hacker that crashed it wants to fight!

Here is yet another release of the Pentax PocketJet II/200 printer driver. This incorporates discoveries made by Rob Roy when debugging my code. Thanks Rob!

Here is the latest Pentax PocketJet II/200 printer driver. It is being fully tested by the guys at Pentaxtech, and seems near to completion now.

Ok, I have not much to say you in this 2001 Christmas, so here is what my son Daniel have to show you.

I have written a short article on my bookbinding technique. (in portuguese only, sorry, but full of pictures) Consider it as my gift, small but given from the bottom of my heart.

I wish you a Merry Christmas!

I'm still working with the Pentax PocketJet driver/filter, mostly on the GUI for BSD-style lpd configuration. Here is the new release of the driver. The changes are needed because of the Red Hat, which changed the way lpd/lpr works. If you run a decent Linux distro¸ you don't need to upgrade. Anyway, bugs reports are welcome.

Pentax Technologies manufacture a nice family of printers, PocketJet II and PocketJet 200. They signed a contract with me for developing a Linux driver for their printers, to be released under GPL. So they are good guys, don't you think so? I do. I'm still working on it, but here is the first public release of the driver, with graphical install and configuration tools. If you have a laptop or notebook computer, those printers are a must to have. They operate on thermal paper, so no ink cartdriges to change. And its size and weight are very convenient. I know because I use mine :^)

If you nead to give a presentation but have no laser projector available, or will show it to several networked computers (some even far away), this program will interest you. Tclslides require no other program but a simple web browser at the client side to make your presentation dynamic and full of content. For more information, read the user's manual included in the (tiny, only 67KB) package.

There are new slides (about 50) from my Tcltk training. Please, look at the links at our tcltk course notes page.

W3C, the web consortium used to be a free standards group. Now they changed their way of thinking and are commited to a handful of software manufacturers, like Micro$oft. What a shame! This is a worse terrorist attack to our freedom than that of WTC. And we know the culprits, even without any FBI or CIA investigation. Mr. Gates told us in advance he were going to "uncommoditize" the standards.
From now on, I don't want to have buttons for w3c valid html, nor follow any standard from them. We at the free software movement are going to have our own standards.

After many changes in our TinyCobol parser, including the adoption of Bison as a compiler generator, I found my little visual debugging tool broken. Here is the fixed version that works both for yacc and bison output. This is of interest most for TC developers or anyone that wants to debug a sort of yacc-based compiler, but single stepping its parsing. In other words, this don't debug the cobol code, but the compiler's code...

I have release another snapshot of TCGUI. This version supports tcl/tk8.0.x, so the guys with an old tcl/tk version may still use our tool.

I have release another snapshot of TCGUI. It will generate a graphical interface for your TinyCobol programs. Go grab it and send me the bugs you find and suggestions for new features.

Here are the slides for a presentation on my model for software development under Linux. The slide are in portuguese.

A brazilian cobol programmer, Luiz Fernando of Belo Horizonte, have asked me for a couple changes in TCGUI. He is writing a POS (PDV in portuguese) with TinyCobol and decided to edit its windows in TCGUI. Here is the newest release of the software. Enjoy!

I have presented today a talk on TinyCobol at the "I Forum Pernambucano de Linux", and here are the slides in html format (tar.gzipped) from the presentation. The language is portuguese, but the pictures are in "universal language" :^) Translations are encouraged and those slides are released under a free publishing license (where may I find such license?).