Older blog entries for RyanPavlik (starting at number 36)

I SEE A DIALOG!

Hot on the tails of the midterm survey for Summer of Code, I achieve a breakthrough on the Win32 implementation of AbiCollab. I’ve made a few medium-size commits working to get the Win32 API and dialog resources in external executable images working. I had what seemed to be correct code, but I was getting a bogus (actually, 0) handle from Windows. One brief email to the Dev list later, and Dom suggests that perhaps the define for the DllMain function should be wrapped in an extern “C”. (That’s a 12-character patch, for those of you who are counting.)

Anyway, that was in fact the last piece needed: immediately after adding that and compiling, I got the following screenshot! As you can see, my very simple dialog primarily based off of the Tabs dialog is being displayed! In this shot (and SVN), none of the buttons are actually hooked up to anything, so once the dialog comes up your AbiWord fun is over until you kill the process, but I fixed that too, along with working on some code cleanups. Now that I have something workable that I can play with, development should go much more rapidly.

First Dialog Displays in AbiCollab!

Thanks go to Sum1 who helped me debug my dialog code, and Dom for the missing piece, and Uwog for being a great mentor!

Keep hacking, ants!

Syndicated 2007-07-17 21:57:29 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

Fully Qualified Paths and Paths to Solutions

(Please excuse my cheesy attempt to link the two topics of this blog post.)
First off - the Windows nightly builds (graciously hosted by Marc) have been fixed. I changed the scripts pretty severely recently when I moved them to look at SVN instead of CVS. The result is a lot nicer, more modular build scripts. However, it hadn’t been actually seeing the updates, and I had been so busy working on Summer of Code stuff that I hadn’t had a chance to figure out why. Well, it turns out I was specifying a relative path to one of my scripts, from the wrong directory. The script was the one that does the updating. Oops. Fixed that with a fully qualified path (absolute), fixed a similar issue with the location of files being uploaded to FTP, et voila - it works! While I was at it, I updated the version of LibGSF to 1.14.4 in anticipation of the progressing OpenXML support (Thanks to TML for the libgsf binaries and PhilM for the SoC OpenXML work!), so do test these builds and see if they work for you.

Now to my second topic - paths to solutions. My progress on Summer of Code has brought me into some rarely-explored bits of code in AbiWord: displaying dialogs from plugins on Windows. One plugin did this (Aiksaurus) but I am told it hasn’t compiled in a while, and its dialog code looks very little like the other dialog code in AbiWord. The failure mode is amusing, at least before you spend a good deal of time trying to figure out why it happens (Windows compilation is slow….): The Collaboration Accounts menu item brings up the Change Case dialog. I’ve tossed some debugging lines in there, and I’m told the ID that the SessionManager (in charge of registering the dialogs) is getting okay IDs, AbiWord core is just returning/displaying the wrong dialog. I’ve emailed the AbiWord developer’s list to try to figure out what is going on from someone with more experience in these parts of the code: hopefully a solution can be found soon so that my work on the Win32 part of the project can move forward.

On the other part of my project, I’ve worked on some “thinking and documenting” parts, which are showing up at my Summer of Code page. Marc has been doing some pretty serious work on the conflict resolution for OLPC, and so I’m waiting on the code part of this project component until that seems to settle a bit, giving me time to analyze the situation without being keyboard-addicted. I’ve also started working on a “gremlin” plugin which will eventually be used to run fully-automated torture testing of AbiCollab and its conflict resolution by making random changes to the document. After hurdling a few difficulties (who knew that nextgen.sh and autotools would have such a hard time with DOS line endings?) the basics of that plugin compile and run on Windows and Linux, inserting a one-off secret message into your document upon execution.

If anybody has any ideas or advice to offer based on what I’ve talked about, please feel free to email me. My username is abiryan, and the domain name is that of my company, ryand.net. I’ll let you figure that out, so I minimize spam… (In a pinch, I have a spammy address listed on my company page…)

Till next time, keep hacking, ants!

Syndicated 2007-07-09 05:27:13 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

N800 Synchronization - Nearly Demystified!

So through the graciousness of a developer and their donated code, I have a Nokia N800. It’s an awesome device: I cannot overstate the value of using the same software on my desktop as on my portable device. I refer to it as my laptop replacement: with a new Bluetooth keyboard, it can essentially do everything my outdated laptop did and faster, except for slide presentations.

Unfortunately, I had been using a (slightly flaky) Palm Vx, and was hoping I could replace it with the N800. Yes, I knew when I got it that it wasn’t a PDA, and that there was no officially supported PIM software, and that anything for it was probably a little flaky, but that didn’t bother me - I never was a Palm addict and most of the time used it more to take notes on than actually organize my life.

However, I did install as much of the Pimlico Project stuff as possible, as well as the GPE PIM suite. The “hacker” synchronization of Evolution on my desktop to the Pimlico stuff (copying files from my .evolution directory) worked ok the first time, but the lack of 2-way interaction and the restriction of the system to relatively manual, calendar-only operation made it essentially not functional. (And, when I clicked on a date intending to look only at that day, it liked to add events instead, and Cancel didn’t always work, so I had random events scattered on my calendar.)

With some trepidation, I decided that I would use the GPE stuff - I believed it would be harder because it wasn’t the same data store as Evolution, but only GPE had all the features (calendar and todo) that I needed, and people had, at least in theory, synced with it before. Today I took some time and, for probably the fourth time, looked at all the OpenSync tutorials I could handle. It strikes me as very powerful software that is still very much under development. My version in Ubuntu Feisty was too old to have the GPE plugin, and the additional repo on the OpenSync site was i386 only (and I’m AMD64). So, I rebuilt the source packages from their repo for 0.22 (the latest stable version) and attempted to use it.

This brings me to the good news point - I got it to work! Basing my steps heavily on the instructions to sync a GPE iPaq with Evolution, and opting to use GUI tools instead of CLI whenever available, I was able to get syncing to work relatively well! There are a few issues, but I’ve documented them on my instructions and when I figure out whose fault they are, I will fix them or file bugs.

So, for the sheer sake of making these instructions available to other potentially frustrated N800 users: How To Synchronize an N800 (with GPE) and Evolution. It is my hope that the next person using an N800 who wants to try some cutting-edge PIM stuff will have this guide to get them started, so they won’t get sidetracked on a million and one different paths. There’s obviously some great development going on with these PIM apps, but I fear not many people end up actually syncing things anymore, and those who do know how already, so they don’t write up instructions. Hopefully these instructions will let more people take advantage of all the real work the devs are doing.

Till next time, keep it in sync!

Syndicated 2007-07-02 01:19:22 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

It Builds!

Thanks to the wonderful help of my mentor Marc (uwog) and the help of Hub who was productively loitering in #abiword at the time, I am proud to announce the following:ABICOLLAB BUILDS AND LOADS ON WINDOWS! Because I’m in favor of eliminating black magic, the build instructions are on my web site, http://www.cleardefinition.com/  for the enjoyment of anyone with some free time and a Windows computer.  I’ve definitely got a ways to go still (the dialogs are just stubbed in, etc), but this is a major milestone.  Enjoy the screenshot!

AbiCollab Builds on Windows - See the Collaborate menu?

Syndicated 2007-06-12 22:08:42 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

A Tale (Tail?) of Trailing Slashes

Well, we’re now a bit over a week into the Summer of Code program, and I figured it would be time for an update.  Over the last week, I’ve been working on getting AbiCollab to build on Windows.  Now that I have makefiles somewhat figured out (see my last post for more about that), I went ahead and created a diving make buildsystem for AbiCollab.  This may sound easy, but there was one minor complication: it looked like my include paths were being ignored!  Marc even tried hardcoding them once (instead of using $(shell pwd) ) and it still didn’t work.  Nevermind that other plugins had nearly identical makefiles with fully functioning include paths…

Ahh, but they weren’t quite identical.  I tried to shuffle around the build order for directories, and this gave me an important clue: I could get one source file to build to an object file, but only that one file.  With my spirit renewed (when your mentor is confused/stumped and everybody else says makefiles are black magic, it can be a bit difficult to push ahead), I compared the makefile from the functioning folder with the one from a problematic folder.  The only difference I could see was that in the “broken” makefile, some of the include paths (all except $(shell pwd) itself, I think) had trailing slashes, and there were no trailing slashes in the functioning one.  It seemed like too simple, but yet, perfectly logical, since the makefiles were otherwise identical and identical with functioning ones in other plugins.

After removing them and attempting a make (which was mostly successful: definitely proceeding past where it had before), I was ecstatic and shouted for joy (IN ALL CAPS) in #abiword - the weird problem that had held back my progress was now resolved!

Mind you, there are still a few more problems, but if this was easy, Google wouldn’t be sponsoring me :)  I’m definitely having a blast so far, and I’m totally pumped with how awesome AbiCollab will be.  An advantage of being stuck for a few days on a problem is that I skimmed a bunch of the files trying to figure out the problem, so I have familiarity that will definitely be handy.  So that’s where I am right now - working on more compilation fixes, currently wrestling with getting the TCP backend (with asio and boost) to build.

Till next time, keep hacking, ants!

Syndicated 2007-06-07 23:46:15 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

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!

Psion Plugin Demo

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 :-P

it initially works

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 :D

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

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