Older blog entries for cinamod (starting at number 3)

Wow, so apparently a lot of people read that bit about Europeans smoking. Seems that most people don't know how much I tend to exaggerate about certain things :-)

Lots of flames in the AbiWord camp - me against the other 7 or so active developers. But I think that we came to a resolution that everyone can live with an be fairly happy with.

The good news is that development on AbiWord as a whole is going at a furious pace these past few months. Nothing pleases me more. Unfortunately, feature-parity between the platforms is starting to drift apart. On some levels, this makes me happy - we're using native controls to incorporate as well as possible with the native desktop environment. Of course this means that you can't load a JPEG on windows, but since we're sticking to some standards (like only storing raster images as PNGs) we're going to be fine XP, which makes me happy.

Well, it's been a while. Well, to start off it's my 22nd birthday and I'm writing papers for my Dutch, German, CSE, and Philosophy classes - which really sucks.

I'm totally swamped with schoolwork and OSS coding stuff. Moreso on the schoolwork as I can choose to ignore coding for a while.

I'm procrastinating right now instead of writing papers, which is so much like me. It's sad, because I'm actually a quite good writer. I'd love to write O'Reilly books someday for a supplementary income.

I've been to GUADEC in Copenhagen recently. That was a lot of fun. I'll have to post links to pics there. I find it horribly amusing that more pictures were taken of the part-time windows guy who hacks AbiWord than of me, its maintainer who gave 2 speeches at GUADEC. Maybe I'm not photogenic enough. Oh well :)

From this conference, I've come to the conclusion that every European smokes, which is a shame. Everyone is concerned about not polluting the environment (which is to be commended), but they think nothing of polluting their lungs with carcinogens. It dissapoints me, to say the least.

So this whole GNOME integration with Abi thing is getting better. I did a cool GdkPixbuf hack today, patch off to Federico. Need to make a SVG loader for that too. Splat - it's on my TODO list.

Abi now has cool multi-lingual spell-checking which you can fine-tune down to a per-word level. Quite cool. Need to hack in opendict/gdict support sometime too because that'd be cool beyond belief.

Anyway, got to get back to my papers.

Today's been pretty long and busy, but some basketball in another few hours should make it all better.

I've started up re-engineering (read: designing, not coding) AbiWord's layout backend. It should be quite an endeavor. I expect it to be done and have a good bit of it coded in a few months probably.

What'll this accomplish? Well, first off everything will be much cleaner and faster if things go according to plan. Most importantly, it'll enable us to be a lot more modular and flexible. New layout primitives will be easy to define, implement, and integrate into AbiWord. For all you user-types out there, that has one immediate implication: tables.

Well, I'm optimistic and not tired for once, so I better start writing some ideas down.

Well, today I signed up for an Advogato account, so I think I'll write a bit about myself to start off. I'm 21 years old and hail from Philadelphia, PA. I'm currently a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying Computer Science and Germanic Languages & Literature. Those German authors are a little bit "off their rockers" IMHO.

So, anyways, I like to work on lots of different free software projects. I've been involved with Gnome for a while now. I have code in a bunch of their modules, but mainly I've worked on Office-related software and its supporting libraries.

Right now my most serious projects are AbiWord and wvWare.

Anyway, enuff for today. We'll see how current I keep this :)

Dom