Older blog entries for cinamod (starting at number 19)

I've been distracted away from any productive AbiWord hacking in so long... The good news is that some other projects got a bit of help along along their periphery.

Was able to write GIMP plug-in loaders for the JBIG and SWF formats. The SWF plugin lets you load any frame from a SWF movie, optionally scaled/otherwise resized. Why open Flash movies inside of GIMP? I dunno. Boredom, I suppose :)

Also thinking of writing a RSVG plugin for Moz. Its builtin SVG support shows promise, but (at present) leaves much to be desired. Yeah, RSVG needs a lot of work too. I'll see what I can get to, now that most of the Sodipodi Flags work properly.

We all loved you Chema. Words can't describe how much I'll miss you.

Matrix Revolutions. Wow. Darn good movie. No tribal sex scenes. No crappy CGI. Just lots of wholesome goodness. Yum.

So today, Ruth and I were passing King's bowling alley, whose motto - "Food is Love" - is posted on an obnoxiously huge billboard outside the club. Ruth pokes me in the head and says "I food you!" in the cutest voice imaginable. Melt.

I have to say that I've been amazed at the dedication and professionalism shown by gman and others. It's been nothing short of amazing thus far, and I'm deeply appreciative of their work. They've done so much with so little. Thank you.

But, unfortunately, it isn't all roses. In the efforts to make a better conference, some people got tread on.

I don't envy the choice you made. I'm not saying that I would've made a different decision if I was in your place. The trade-off was probably good for the majority, while it hurt a minority. But because you've set yourself up in a position of authority and deliberately made a choice that negatively impacts various people's lives, you're going to have to hear about it, whether you'd like to or not. You all make your own beds. Now you've got to lie in it.

I'm very much looking forward to Guadec, including the keynote by Alan Kay (not to mention my own 2 talks and the other 10-or-so ones I'll be at). Whether it's officially sanctioned or not, though, I'm still going to give up half of my SVG talk to Dobey. It's the right thing to do. I think that the conference is going to be a groundbreaking success and I hope to see many of you there. Look me up - I'll buy you a beer.

So Martin has been working on AbiWord being an embeddable Bonobo control, which is a pretty neat thing. IMO, *NIX is missing a lot of these sorts of pluggable components that so permeate the Win32 environment and make much VB-style programming so mind-numblingly easy to do. Obligatory screenshot here.

Unfortunately, I've caught a lot of flack for this in GnomeDesktop from an AC. It's too easy to hide behind an AC and flame away. This guy might have some really compelling arguments that the Nautilus folks would want to hear. I bet they'd be great arguments if the presentation was better. Until he unmasks himself and conducts himself appropriately in the correct forum, he'll be ignored by those who can help him.

Anonymity is as much a double-edged sword as it is not. It often lends a false sense of security, or (to paraphrase Def Leppard: Behind The Music) like when the short guy gets drunk - he gets a lot bigger in a hurry. I just wish they'd realize that. It'd make my life a whole lot more pleasant.

Job Job Job Job! Job Job Job Job!

Marklar. It embiggens me to work for such a cromulent company.

Had an interview with a tremendous software company yesterday. I'm apparently one of 3 folks up for the job, and I really hope that I get it (nothing against the other 2 chaps). I walk into their office and am greeted by a sea of monitors, all running Gnome and Emacs. My eyes got big in a hurry. I hope theirs did too, looking at me. I should know in a day or two.

LibRSVG has been coming along nicely. I think I have BiDi text working now as well as a nice shiny new CSS2 selection engine. The text engine needs a lot of work, and to that end, so does Pango. But at least Pango is at the point where I don't take a 2-second penalty hit the first time I try to render some icon's text (rendering an icon with 'Ogg' or "MP3' in it could take 2 seconds longer, I shit you not). Now if only I could decompose PangoLayouts into FT_Outlines, my world would be all fuzzy. That, and if I got that job thing I mentioned above. I think CrAppligent is contesting my Unemployment Insurance claim even though they fired me for "insubordination" (read: boss' gross incompetence, but when you're the owner, you can never be wrong...) 4+ months ago. Ticks me off.

I released a new version of Abi today. Hopefully this will get the attention and fanfare that it deserves. A lot of hard work went into making this release possibly the best release of ours ever. I really applaud my team members and most importantly my right-hand-man, Martin Sevior.

I'm also having some sort of psychic abilities when it comes to the Oscars tonight. TV sucks when your best choice is the Oscars. Tonight's other choices include: War, 2 Steven Segal films, Bond, and Jurassic Park 2: Lost World. Blech.

Enjoy the OpenOffice convention. I've wanted to meet Caolan for quite some time now. I'm pretty envious of you. Take some time off, your telemarketing job sucked, and you definitely deserve it. I hope that you can come to GU4DEC too. We really didn't get to meet up at all at the Boston GNOME Summit.

Work

Being out of work for about 4 months sucks, but I guess I shouldn't have quit my job a few months after moving to Boston, where the tech sector took one of its biggest blows. But I needed to quit in order to keep my sanity. I hope that at least one of the few companies (whose names I won't mention here) finds some spare cash and hires me like they've been promising ;-)

LibRSVG

Made a Gimp plugin for this. You can now load most any SVG file into the Gimp and edit it like you could a raster image. If you want to really edit the image, go get Illustrator or Sodipodi.

LibWMF

Made a Gimp plugin for this too. Committed it, didn't tell FJF, but he's on English time and asleep now. I'll tell 'im in the morning. Now it's time to file a bug in Gimp's Bugzilla asking them to deprecate their builtin WMF loader in favor of this... I'm thinking that tml will be opposed. Can't hurt to ask, though.