As reported in a previous blog, I've spent some time working with Taras Glek on Dehydra and Treehydra.

It is stabilising and getting to be easier to build. However I thought I'd show a simple example of actually using GCC and Dehydra to check for a policy decision, along the lines of the things that EBN does.

Based on a comment from Taras Glek on my feeble attempts to get a GCC plugin going, I did some work on Dehydra / Treehydra. Its an interesting approach, and one that benefits from the GCC plugin API.

Its been a while since I did anything productive in KDE land, so thought I'd try to do something in a morning. Its hard freeze time, so that should be bug fixing. Bug 185532 was something I'd been thinking over for a while.

In a previous blog entry, I discussed some initial work on GCC plugins. Since then, the GCC gurus (in particular, Rafael Avila de Espindola) have made sure headers get installed correctly.

One of the new features proposed for GCC 4.5 is the ability to use plugins.

I'm a big fan of plugin architectures, especially in open source software. I think that plugins provide a really nice starting point for potential developers. So you can start with something simple and well defined, and grow into the rest of the system. Personally, the idea of understanding all of GCC is just overwhelming. But perhaps I could do a really basic plugin that can do an additional static check.

I was happy to see both KDE and OpenChange (and some lesser projects ) were accepted for this year's Summer of Code project.

My talk from linux.conf.au 2009 is now available for everyone to see on video:
http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2009/Friday/72.ogg

The slides are also available in PDF and ODF.

Rodney Gedda of Computerworld Australia has written an article about my talk at linux.conf.au 2009.

You can see it at http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/274883/openchange_kde_bring_exchange_compatibility_linux?fp=16&fpid=1
and

One of the many things I learned at linux.conf.au was about ack. Thanks to Paul Fenwick for bringing it to our attention. Spend a few minutes with me on this...

If you are a fan of grep (especially with -drecurse), but hate seeing the .svn directories and contents of the object files, you need ack.

Colourised outputs, highlighting, nice organisation, awesome configurability are all bonuses. Even has documentation.

Packages exist for at least Debian and Fedora. Portable (perl), installable using CPAN.

On Friday, I gave my talk at linux.conf.au 2009.

I'm sure the slides (and the recordings will be up on the conference web site at some point), but you can get them from my site in ODP and PDF versions.

Thanks to all those who came along - much appreciated.