Recent blog entries for almer

Since it has been over half a year since I wrote my last entry I figured it'd be time to write one again. :-)

I did do some development on Gnumeric in October ~ November, but after that I got sucked into the development of a school project (which needed to be finished in time). That took till the end of January. At which point I started with my final internship (which means working 40h/week) which I will complete in June.

Although the internship itself is quite nice, it leaves considerabily less spare time, so I only started to code some things in March/April again.

I am currently working on writing a better text import for Gnumeric, this will take some time.

So, it has been far too long since I last wrote an entry here. To cut a long, boring story short : I temporarily suspended (since say August) doing any hacking, lots of things happened between now and then. One of the the good things that happened is, I bought a laptop, which I use now to do most of my hacking.

I am picking up Gnumeric hacking again, finally got around to implementing validation solidly (after redoing it a couple of times). There's a nice low-level framework and the UI is present and integrated in the format dialog (which I believe makes Jody happy), just need to glue them together.

It seems that the rest of the team (especially Jody and also Jon Trowbridge) have been very actively working on getting graphs done and usable for the masses, which is a very good thing (absolutely the most wanted feature). Jody is anxious to get 0.72 out which should fit well onto the most recent Guppi release. People will be able to play with graphs and find bugs.

Hopefully we'll have a solid 1.0+ release before the end of this year. I hope I can get in both validation and conditional formatting before that.

Dropped the Input Validation, even though the patch was ready it just didn't look right. Working on getting it right by starting from scratch with a different approach.

There's work being done on Panes which already look quite good although it isn't finished yet.

I returned the damaged PC and got my money back.

Just had an exam week, finally it's over :-) The consolidation went in about one and a half week ago. Input Validation is still under review.

Jody is going to release next weekend, some issues have been fixed and the new release will contain some exciting new things like better recalc performance (by Jody) and I/O progress display (by Zbigniew).

My new computer arrived two days ago, it was severely damaged on arrival and the casing was not the casing I ordered. :-(

I've cleaned up the STF a little. It's looking better now, I hope I can move it forward. Consolidaton and Input Validation are still in Jody's patch-review queue so I'll have to wait a while with those.

Anyway, Exam week coming up so I probably won't have all that much time to code. New PC hasn't arrived yet, probably next week or so.

Oh yeah, I ordered a new PC, an AMD Athlon 1200. I hope Gnumeric will compile a lot faster on it (currently have a PII400).

Mainly hacked on Input Validation. It isn't quite where I want it yet, but it's beginning to show promise.

Also, Consolidation is solidifying I am considering sending a CVS-proposal patch to Jody.

Unfortunately I have exam week from June 11 to June 16, so less time to hack. :-(

Birthday today, wrote very little code this day, but I've put considerable amount of effort into Gnumeric for the past two weeks or so (largely thanks to GUADEC which was really helpful in numerous ways). Adding features, polishing things. I've had lots of fun hacking, this is mainly due to the other crowd of hackers working on Gnumeric who are really pleasant to code with. :-)

A new release is scheduled for this Sunday. Jody told me that I can actually land the "Consolidation" feature, which I wrote a while ago, before the release, which makes me happy :-)

It was a great day today, nice weather and just overall a good feeling. Now, time to go to bed...

Was at Guadec last weekend. Quite kewl, met Jody, Jon Kare, Kenneth, Dom and a bunch of other people :-). My brother and I drove to Copenhagen together, a pretty long ride.

I've done some Gnumeric hacking this weekend, improving the parser error messages and several design related corrections.

Several other Gnumeric hackers are working on some impressive features. We really are adding lots of nice new things these days :-)

Jody is off on vacation to Rome so I did some maintainance of the bugs for Gnumeric today and tackled a couple of feature requests.

I also mailed the Free Software Directory some updates for the entry for Gnumeric. The people working on it are really nice and friendly and do a good job IMHO :-)

Did some small things to improve Gnumeric, mainly the scrollbars which offer more functionality now.

Jody is thinking about pushing out a new version (0.64) real soon now as a bug fix release. This is mostly because he wants a real stable/good Gnumeric in the Gnome 1.4 5th Toe release. I entirely agree with him :-)

It's interesting to note that mostly when we don't release for some time (say a month or so) while we are implementing new features, the next release is always quickly followed by a number of subsequent bugfix-only releases. Probably most free software projects have a similar pattern.

Jody started working on Split/Freeze panes support which is really exciting :-)