Advogato blog for grib

5 May 2001

Sat, 5 May 2001 16:58:23 GMT

Golly, who ever thought it would be so exciting to develop free software?

I am not free to tell the entire tale, but I can say this much: I don't work for Gnumatic any more, though I am continuing to work on GnuCash and am on friendly terms with all the developers and Gnumatic's management. Friendly enough, in fact, that several of them are also leaving Gnumatic and coming to work with me in a new venture. I think given recent news it's probably enough to note that Gnumatic was originally funded by these guys too.

Well, it's no secret that the business of free software and Linux is in the middle of an identity crisis. I'm planning to continue to make a go of it and I have high hopes for the future.

Luckily, since GnuCash is free software, the only real impact this will have on it is slipping the 1.6 release schedule by a week or so.

22 Apr 2001

Sun, 22 Apr 2001 15:22:15 GMT

Decided to try out gnome-guile and libglade for the audio app's gui. *That* was a good idea. No more GTK type coercion necessary! now the only thing that really has to be in C is the real-time and multithread part of the app, which is mainly the core event processing and audio stuff. I can do all of the gui and the almost all of the guts of the program in scheme. yeeha!

Now if I can just get ALSA going properly. Talk about your nightmare APIs. I don't envy those guys, though.

Gnucash feature freeze today. I wish I had more time to spruce up the check printing, but oh well. The important thing now is to knock the rough edges off the reports and get them running faster.

20 Apr 2001

Fri, 20 Apr 2001 14:15:34 GMT

man o man do I like the "tackle any part of the code that suits your fancy" phase of development better than the "squash bugs, prettify, and document" phase. The gnucash-1.6 feature freeze is upon us and that means it's time to go back and Do The Right Thing. Well, at least in this case the end product is worth it; I think a lot of people are going to be surprised and impressed with the stable release.

Assuming I can get the reports to run faster. And make the default style sheets prettier. And make the guppi charts more space-efficient. And put some real freebie services on the "GnuCash Network" to encourage people to register. And get Guppi printing working a bit better. And so on.