Finding the language for a xkb keyboard

During the last days I was working on keyboarding issues on Linux. In our app we want to display the (xkb) keyboards that the user has installed and that are visible in the gnome panel. Displaying them is relatively easy, but then I also needed the language that is associated with the keyboard.

Cross-Platform Development and Data Type Sizes

One of the problems when developing cross-platform apps is the question how long the intrinsic data types are on the different platforms. A while ago I created a table with the sizes of the different data types on 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux, both for C++ and C#/.NET.

Lost Menu in Monodevelop in Unity

Recently I got a new desktop computer on which I installed Ubuntu 11.04 Natty with the Unity UI. Yesterday I compiled Monodevelop 2.6 beta 3 (using the scripts described here) which worked fine – only when I run monodevelop the menu can’t be found anywhere: there is no menu in the monodevelop window nor in the global menu bar. Since it’s pretty hard to do any work without a visible menu, I decided to try to get this fixed.

Location of special folders on Linux

One thing that always confuses me is how the special folders of Environment.SpecialFolder translate into real directories. Some are really obvious, especially on Windows, but on Mono on Linux it’s not so obvious. So I wrote a little app that tells where those folders are.

Applications menu disappeared

This morning when I turned on my laptop I noticed that the Applications menu in Ubuntu 9.10 had disappeared – well, not completely, it was still shown in the panel, but when clicking on it it only showed a tiny little rectangle instead of popping up the application list.

Firefox suddenly doesn’t resolve names any more

After returning from vacation I was confronted with a really strange problem on my laptop. Firefox wasn’t any more able to load pages from certain domains. After a reboot it worked, but sooner or later it stopped working.

Fingerprint Reader Working Again!

I had some problems with my fingerprint reader for quite some time, probably since upgrading to Jaunty. It took multiple attempts to read my fingerprint

Upgrading to Jaunty

Recently I updated my laptop to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty.

It went pretty smooth; the only drawback was

Debug.Assert and Mono

On Microsoft’s .NET implementation on Windows a Debug.Fail() (which is equal to a Debug.Assert(false)) when run on a debug build displays a dialog box with the options Abort, Retry, Ignore. When run in the debugger it also displays the call stack.

On Mono however no dialog box shows; it behaves the same as when the user pressed ‘Ignore’. What’s worse is that it doesn’t display the call stack by default, even when run in debugger. This doesn’t give any hint if an exception happened.

IME and TSF and bugs when typing Chinese

Quite a while ago I investigated some problems we were having with Chinese IME with one of our applications. Since that was new stuff for me I made some notes but never came around to finish this blog entry.