Older blog entries for RyanPavlik (starting at number 31)

Summer of Code begins… with Psion import?

So today was the official start of the Google Summer of Code, which I am thrilled to be a part of. My first task is to get the AbiCollab collaboration plugin running on Windows, and getting a GUI on it. There has been no work on AbiCollab on any platform except Unix (and Sugar/OLPC), so with regard to building, I had to create Makefiles from scratch. As our Windows build uses a “diving Make” system instead of Autoconf/Automake like the other platforms, I have to figure out how exactly those makefiles work and how to create new ones to build AbiCollab properly.

This is a little bit of a challenge, since the problem is actually dual: we both have a new/untested build system, and code that might not actually even build at all on Windows in its state. As I was working on cleaning up my build instructions, I realized that some time ago, I had disabled the Psiconv (Psion Word) plugin since it was causing some problems, not working very well, and used the old “peer libs” mechanism for compiling. I figured I may as well get that going again (providing a binary distribution for ease of use), and I unknowingly got myself into a bigger project than I anticipated. (I hadn’t remembered it ran as a peer lib, and so I installed it as a system library in MinGW) That was alright, though, because it provided an exercise in Makefile-fu necessary to proceed in the AbiCollab project. I had to change bits of the makefile from the old peer lib setup to a new system installed setup using pkg-config (and I made the pkg-config file for psiconv). The cool part is, I was successful! If I comment out a debug message (since there’s something telling it to be a debug library even though I want just a regular version), the plugin builds and runs, and even imports the sample file that came with Psiconv!

An unusual start, perhaps, resurrecting an old plugin, but useful to some end users and definitely useful to me as an exercise. Thanks, Google!

Syndicated 2007-05-28 21:49:03 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

Windows Build Instructions - now from SVN!

For anyone who wants to get their feet wet with building an AbiWord binary or even installer packages on Win32, I’ve updated my build instructions to include how to check out the latest version from Subversion!  I’ll be updating my own nightly builder (on Uwog’s VM) soon so that those who don’t feel like following the instructions can nevertheless have a clean, bleeding-edge build to test with.  Get the instructions at http://cleardefinition.com/page/Windows_Build_Instructions/

Syndicated 2007-05-26 19:00:23 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

And so it begins…

This summer, I’ll be working on AbiWord for the Google Summer of Code, in the AbiCollab project (”Systematically breaking and fixing AbiCollab”). Though the Summer of Code doesn’t officially start for another week, I thought I’d ease into it with a brief evaluation of the current state of AbiCollab. I had worked with the plugin a while ago (before the big rewrite), but hadn’t gotten it built recently.

Well, I can proudly announce that that’s changed. Thanks in part to the joy of virtualization (running both a Jabber server and the second AbiWord instance), I have the latest AbiWord (from SVN Trunk) compiled and running with the XMPP (Jabber) backend of the AbiCollab plugin. As the screen shot shows, it does work! I did run across a few issues already, but I definitely feel more capable and comfortable with the code now. And, I’m sure my mentor (master?) uwog will be glad to oblige my requests for explanation

Syndicated 2007-05-22 04:10:39 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

25 Jan 2006

AbiWord, or, I’ve given you a couple of days
By now, everyone seeing this post though P.A.C or Advogato or some mystery aggregator should have upgraded/installed AbiWord 2.4.2. It’s pretty slick, isn’t it?

Programming Languages, or, Python meets C++ STL
I was chosen to work on a research project at my college involving shape approximation and other things. It’s a mathematical as well as a computational problem, and as one of the two students on the project, I’m the “computer science guy”. However, this is probably more background than strictly necessary. Yes, this is the main point of my post, I just felt obligated to plug AbiWord above

It’s probably no secret that I’m a fan of the Python programming language. Some slick list tricks, the incredible efficiency with which I can whip out short programs, classes, and even slightly trickier stuff means that when I’m not programming for class (then the required language is C++), I will at least seriously consider using Python. I did so for this project, because at the early stage that I started pushing code, I decided it was best to figure out the proper algorithm than get it completely maximized speed-wise. Fair enough - I cranked out a mostly-working program (just mainly one bug in the algorithm which I knew the solution to). However, because others have to deal with this code, I was asked to convert it to C++. Not an unreasonable request by any means, but it did mean that I’d have to enhance my knowledge of C++ to get away with what I was doing in Python.

I immediately decided against using a homemade list template from class, as I knew of the existence of STL and decided whoever wrote that code certainly was a better programmer than I. Cracking open the book and Google, I went ahead and looked at the STL container classes. Since I was using the features of Python’s lists extensively, I decided to go ahead and use the STL list template.

One particular feature I liked (usually ) in Python was the fact that “for” was actually more of a “for each” which iterated over a list. Since I had to do some “item-by-item” (and segment (two items) by segment) processing, I used this extensively. Unfortunately, the section in the book that I read about the iterators was not rather clear. Initially I found myself using a boolean flag (to say if we’ve gone though the loop once) and a do-while loop to ensure that I processed each item. I had missed the sentence the first time through that said that list::End() returned an iterator past the end of the list (rather than the last item in the list).

Since I had to do segment processing (on a list of points in a polygon), I also realized that (hopefully) the easiest way to do so is to ++ a second iterator started at ::Begin() and incremented once before the loop. To circularize this iterator, I test at the top of the loop to see if it2==mylist.End(), and if so, reset it to .Begin(). In theory this ought to work, but because my code is still about half Python, I haven’t actually compiled and tested it yet. If someone knows of a decent way to implement a circular linked list with STL (more elegantly) aside from writing a circular list myself, an email at the account listed in Advogato would be greatly appreciated. However, assuming that this trick actually works, I’m not terribly dissatisfied.

I went into this Python to C++ conversion project with a bit of trepidation, but it’s pleasantly surprising me. STL lists are actually fairly understandable, despite mutterings I had heard to the contrary. We’ll see if I still am singing the same tune after I try to insert points into a segment without losing all semblence of sanity (and more importantly position in the loop). Might have to do what I did in one version of my Python program - return a new Polygon instead of modifying the current one.

Wish me luck! Until next time, may Abi the Ant be with you!

Syndicated 2006-01-25 04:17:24 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

17 Jan 2006

AbiWord, or Pity the Foo running 2.4.1
All of you folks running AbiWord 2.4.1 or earlier, now is a great time to upgrade. 2.4.2 includes completed OpenDocument export and a lot of fixes for memory leaks. All of you running OpenOffice.org - now is a great time to upgrade from Writer to AbiWord. Give AbiWord a shot! www.abisource.com

Joke
Normally, I like treating everyone equally, but really, this joke is rich. Greatest Blonde Joke Ever

Syndicated 2006-01-17 18:19:56 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

6 Jan 2006

AbiWord , or Progress mixed with “Isn’t That Strange…”

So as 2.4.2 is prepared for release sometime soon, I found it necessary to reboot over into Windows and do my duty with the compiling. I don’t have a CVS-STABLE tree checked out, so I rely on only gentle changes occuring to stable (which is generally just fine), and in case of some major problem surfacing at a tagging point, we can just fix it and re-tag, since tag comes before release.

So this time, as I’m getting the binaries completed, the notorious “hang during documentation build” occurs, and the matching “cause random processes in Windows to run away with CPU” symptom surfaces. Through some careful priority management, I get the build to run again, and correctly. Alright. Log off, and log back on, time to install. The install works great, and aside from a strange plugin conflict (now resolved with a stop-gap measure), it all looks good.

Well, almost all. For some strange, strange reason, the background color of the drop down boxes on the toolbars (style, font, size, and zoom) is grey, rather than white as expected. It all works fine, but the boxes look almost disabled, even though they aren’t.

I have no idea what caused this, where it came in during development, or how to fix it. I don’t recall it occurring in 2.4.1, but neither do I recall any commits that would affect the Windows front end’s coloring of drop-down boxes. Go figure.

So there’s my mystery. Any ideas?

(Yes, I’ll file a bug next time I boot into Windows.)

PS. I <3 VMWare, and as soon as it’s financial feasible and sensible, I will get Workstation instead of installing Windows on top of an installation of Fedora Core in VMPlayer. Qemu has been officially been blown right out of the metaphorical water.

Syndicated 2006-01-06 01:38:12 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

22 Dec 2005

AbiWord or, behaving maintainerly

I now have some deal of free time to work on AbiWord. I figure that before I start work on the Unicode things that will be done for 2.6, I should at least work on being able to build CVS HEAD, since some significant (at least win building-wise) changes have gone in. Most difficult is that we now use the “system wv” library, and depend on wv 1.2.0, which has to be compiled separately against some of its own dependencies. Starting with my detailed instructions to build 2.4, I am working on a set for CVS/2.5/2.6. The first thing I am doing is breaking down the dependencies and finding out exactly what is the minimum needed to complete any task (build wv binaries, build mathview binaries, build linkgrammar binaries, build abi, tools, or imp/exp), since for the previous version, that was all in one monolithic list of dependencies. That will also help me know when I can upgrade these in upstream versions without inducing breakage.

Right now, I am strugging to build wv, which is a strange thing. Everybody (well, uwog) has said that it’s fairly straightforward, but as I’m starting again from a clean install of MinGW/MSYS, with the aim of documenting everything, I need to know what incidental voodoo made it easy. The first trouble was that without the MSYS DTK (which was removed from the build environment instructions for 2.4 due to some mathview problem which may or may not have been caused by it), autotools won’t work, even though I install them manually and have a working install of ActiveState Perl. At the moment, I can ./autogen.sh and get partway through ./configure –prefix=/mingw, but it stops when it says it encounters an error with GLIB. I have installed GLIB 2.6.6 from TML, and this shouldn’t be a stopping point, but it is at the moment. If anyone has any clue why this is, pointers would be greatly appreciated. (Yes, I tried an older glib version, though apparently wv 1.2 needs a recent glib, so looks like we’ll be upgrading across the board for abi 2.5/6 to glib 2.6).

When I feel sufficiently motivated to reboot out of Ubuntu AMD64 back into Windows, I’ll poke some more at it. I could really use VMWare, now that I think of it. If anyone cares to give me a very expensive Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice gift, that would reduce the trouble of working on Windows

Till next time, enjoy using AbiWord! (Keep your eyes peeled for 2.4.2 - it will apparently rock one’s socks right off, or darn near.)

Syndicated 2005-12-22 23:09:32 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

5 Nov 2005

AbiWord

Well, as of a few days ago, I’m the new Win32 maintainer… quite a rush. A lot of responsibilities, but I will take them gladly. I really believe that AbiWord is a great program and I will cherish being able to help provide Windows users with the great choice in word processing that AbiWord is.

The other day, I found out that one of my friends here actually used AbiWord before I told him about it - he had even just updated to 2.4. I think I may find a fair few people here that use AbiWord and can provide some great feedback.

And, Sum1 returned to keep everybody legit and accountable for the stability of AbiWord - this combined with a lot of code cleanup recently, look for a great 2.4.2 sometime in the future, and enjoy 2.4.1 right now until then!

Thanks for reading!

– Ryan Pavlik, new AbiWord Win32 Maintainer

Syndicated 2005-11-05 19:44:21 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

4 Oct 2005

AbiWord 2.4 Released!

Get it now!

Months of hard work by everyone involved with AbiWord have resulted in this, our latest stable release. For those who are using AbiWord 2.2, updating brings you new features and stability. For those of you who tried AbiWord before but did not continue, now is a great time to try it again. For those of you who have never tried AbiWord, now is the perfect time to try out the state of the art in open source word processing.

From Ryan Pavlik, the AbiWord Windows developers (Sum1, Tomas, Marc, and more), and the entire development team, enjoy!

Syndicated 2005-10-04 01:10:46 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

19 Sep 2005

AbiWord - 2.3.99 Released - Last Chance to Find Release Showstoppers!

Welcome, all readers, to what will likely be one of the last entries I make before the release of AbiWord 2.4! Tonight, we pushed out AbiWord 2.3.99, which is quite symbolically the last release before 2.4. This time, I did get both tools and import/export plugins built successfully, so those will be posted as soon as Marc wakes up and looks at his computer, and finds enough binaries to update the web site. Until then, here are the installers for Windows. (Please check the official location first though to enable us to better count downloads…) Please download the tools plugins to test Math and Grammar support as well, since these are among the major features of 2.4. Thank you!

And, since it appears that it is fashionable to suggest a release name, I will throw my suggestion into the ring. Going along with my splash screen for 2.4, I suggest that the release be named “Your Keyboard Is Trying To Tell You Something”, since all distinguished keyboards work best in AbiWord.

Short entry tonight, because I’m busy and I want to leave you with enough time to run the download count on 2.3.99 up! Later!

Syndicated 2005-09-19 03:07:16 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition