Older blog entries for RyanPavlik (starting at number 2)

AbiWord
AbiWord HEAD (2.1/2.2) is really shaping up nicely (at least on Win32). The immediately noticible bugs are being beaten, especially by one MikeyCooper who is incredibly humble for the amount of good he does the Win32 version of Abi. Now it's just getting down to those weird little bugs that are eerily difficult to reproduce except when you're trying to complete something under time constraints. That and a few little polish things that I think I'll file tonight.

Other
I'm getting irritated with Windows, and am feeling left out of all the fun OSS stuff that I read about here now that I read Advogato diaries daily. I'm getting geared up to ghost my Windows partitions from my 40 gig drive onto the 80, so I need some advice. I'm gonna have to resize an NTFS partition from about 35 gigs to about 15 gigs. I've heard that the Mandrake installer does a good job with partition stuff, and on the commercial side, I've heard good things about Partition Magic. I'm going to look into Parted and anything else recommended to me, so let the personal biases and recommendations fly!

I'm also preparing to install Linux on my freed up space in my main box, and am thinking of doing Debian (updated with updated stuff, from unstable/testing, as soon as I figure it out) and FC2. Now I just have to hit up a friend for broadband use, since ISO's take a long time to download over dialup. :) Watch this space for updates!

Hey, wow! I'm rather surprised by the welcome with which I was greeted! Where do I start?

Thanks, hub for giving a "shout out" in your diary, that was really cool! Thanks for the certs, everyone, though I don't feel I deserve them! Let me go on to explain, after these BR from your local station.

You see, I probably should have mentioned this in my first entry, but there are two of me. Two Ryan Pavliks, both curiously involved in open-source. Both with open source and computer things on the first page of google. I even share some of his mannerisms, to the degree I wondered if I really wrote that email to the bug-ncurses list without even knowing it. It's rather spooky.

However, it would appear that my friend and partner de nom, Ryan, is a bit more accomplished than I am. I have nothing to do with Ruby, first of all. I didn't even know what it was besides "a package in Red Hat 7.1" and "that thing the other guy with my name contributes to or uses" until my friend prompted me to research it. I believe my friend may have submitted a kernel patch at one time, I never have. He's "ogmo" on freshmeat, with the project "Quickey".

I, on the other hand, am a goodly percentage newbie, still. I like to think I catch on to things quickly, but I still run Windows, so not that quickly. :) My only open source contributions have been to Abiword and GNOME Office, as far as I can remember. I do have the #1 Google hit for my name, though ;)

So as I was saying, I appreciate the certifications given to me by members here. Some of them I know from their user name or page. Some I have a sneaking suspicion I know. Others, I'm afraid, mistook me for my more well-traveled counterpart. I don't really know if you can "take back" certs on this site, but I would not be in the least offended if those who may have been mistaken would do so. I still feel rather sheepish about joining this site to begin with.

In any case, I'm writing far too much. From now on, I'm likely to post a weekly status update or whenever something spectacular happens (Aptiva1 stops being cursed, my tube amp DSP for Winamp runs in XMMS). Thanks for reading! Later, friends!

(PS: uwog, I read your 25 April entry, I know what you mean. Thank you. I'm sticking around. )

Hello, friends!

Just signed up for this Advogato account a few minutes ago, because I wanted a place where I could post my Open Source diary without cluttering up my already cluttered AbiWord open source page (linked to in my info). I had tried a Xanga blog, but the place is overridden with too many angsty teen emotions, and in general just is the wrong audience. I feel kind of sheepish signing up here, since I don't know if I, dunno, deserve to be here, but it seemed to be the right place, so it's worth a shot, I guess.

That's about it, for now. Did a lot of QA stuff on Abi last night, reported over 15 bugs (only 2 were dupes!), did some confirming of bugs. I hope CharlesGoodwin finds some time to upload my stop-gap measure web site for GNOME Office, I'd like it to be useful in some way... I'll probably find more time tonight for more QA, and maybe KJD will be able to help me with the win RC2 files for my icons!

Later!