Romain Lenglet's old web page

The JSPS has published on their web site a presentation I made at the Takasaki High School last October. That talk was in the context of the Science Dialogue program, in which JSPS-funded post-doc scientists like me give talks to high-school students.

The subject of my talk was a general introduction to the education system in France and to my research domains: software engineering, software architecture and systems management. This was kind of a refreshing experience. I went with Pr. Chiba as a translator, because my Japanese is too minimal to give a talk in Japanese. ^_^

In the photo on the left, you can see students in front of notebook computers, during the discussion session after my talk: I made them type commands in Windows' shell, to experiment with Internet protocols (nslookup, ping, etc.). The student standing up is the one who volunteered to impersonate an IP router. I had brought Ethernet cables with me, and made students impersonate a TCP stack, an IP stack, etc. and made them exchange packets in the form of paper envelopes. That was fun. ^_^

My Autoconf macros for Erlang applications configuration have been committed into Autoconf's CVS repository. The final macros are a little different from my original proposal: all macros now have the AC_ERLANG_ prefix, instead of the ERLANG_ prefix.

These macros will be included in the next release of Autoconf (version 2.95c). Until this version is released, one can use the CVS version, or use my macros with previous versions of Autoconf. In the latter case, beware to use the latest version of my macros, and to install them following my instructions.

If you are running Debian GNU/Linux, you can instead simply install the Debian package (named autoconf-erlang) that I have made to install the macros, by adding the following two lines into your /etc/apt/sources/list file:

deb http://www.berabera.info/oldblog/lenglet/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://www.berabera.info/oldblog/lenglet/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

and by running:

> sudo apt-get update
> sudo apt-get install autoconf-erlang

I will update Autoconf's documentation to describe the macros very soon.

I have refactored gtkNode, the Erlang interface to GTK+ 2, which I have been “playing with” recently. The most significant is that I have used GNU Autoconf and Automake to redo the configuration and build framework. I have used my Autoconf macros for Erlang in gtkNode's configure.ac configuration file, to simplify configuration.

To compile the source archive out-of-tree:

> tar xzf gtknode_0.1.orig.tar.gz
> mkdir build
> cd build
> ../gtknode-0.1/configure --prefix=/usr
> make
> sudo make install

By the way, the “autotoolization” of gtkNode should make it compilable on Windows / Cygwin. Could anybody try?

After this refactoring, doing a Debian package of gtkNode was trivial (this was my purpose and motivation for the refactoring anyway...). I have setup a private APT archive for this package and all my future Debian packages. To install gtkNode, simply add these two lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list (or in a new /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rlenglet.list file, as you prefer):

deb http://www.berabera.info/oldblog/lenglet/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://www.berabera.info/oldblog/lenglet/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

Then, update your local APT package list:

> sudo apt-get update

And then you can install the gtknode package:

> sudo apt-get install gtknode

I have compiled the binary package for the i386 architecture only (that's all I have for developing), but it can surely compile on any other architecture (it compiles at least on the sparc architecture on Solaris according to Mats Cronqvist, gtkNode's author). Please try building the package on your own architecture, and report me if something goes wrong:

> mkdir /tmp/gtknode-pkg
> cd /tmp/gtknode-pkg
> apt-get source gtknode
> apt-get build-dep gtknode
> cd gtknode-0.1
> debuild
> sudo dpkg -i ../gtknode*.deb