Older blog entries for hilaire (starting at number 6)

I'm finaly back from Portugal to Taiwan, the trip was 30 hours long. My soon is very brave to support that!! He is now running with it's electric car in the appartment, he can't get sleep, so this gave me the opportunity to write some diary :)
The last two months in Europe were quite productive, thanks to a nice gift I made to myself before leaving Taiwan: an Acer TravelMate 345T, quite an impressive machine that gave me the opportunity to work on:

• the first draft for a free library managment software (there)
• to build up freeduc a database to categorize free software useable in education, the goal is more to allow to package software than categorize, so that software can be easily deployed.
• to work on Dr. Genius and finally to implement some old stuff of a todo list (well there weren't in the todolist): doublebuffering when moving a figure and a specific toolbar per category of DrGeniusMDIChild. Actually only DrgeoMDIChild use it. The last things may need some more work as it works well only with one GnomeApp. The DrgeoMDIChild toolbar also come with volatile sub toolbar.

Beside that, I was at the LSM event, a very cool non commercial event.

The school will start in one week, it will be paintful to slow down coding but I have decide to implement a database to register and categorize math. exercice, the final goal of the stuff is to allow teacher to build up quickly exercice sheets from exercices in the database. Of course the exercices have to be coded in LaTeX, DrGenius will be very helpfull to design geometric figure in LateX or eps. Oh well this will be a french specific stuff as I'm teaching in a french school. Finally I got a very good excuse to keep coding during this school year :)

Almost finish writing a Latex exporter for Dr Genius figure. All but the text is exported. This is cool so I will be able to produce high quality figure to put on student tests.

At least I finish - almost - to code the new geometric engine. I merge it on the HEAD last night, this was really weird as I need to edit the adminstration file - commitinfo - to get the merge accepted. Apparently a missing .sh extension on the file /cvs/gnome/CVSROOT/check-po-commit block the commit.

Lately, I'm rewriting the geometric engine of Dr Genius. It really needs some clean-up. Also i must credit Ilya Baran for its project Kseg, an interactive geometry free software under KDE. I don't get a chance to try it but looking at the source code, I saw very kind idea that I will use in Dr Genius. Good luck Ilya in your project (http://www.mit.edu/~ibaran). It seems we get very low activity in Dr Genius since one month. I hope my recent commits will remotive the team.

I decide to use GOB, the Geroge Lebl GTK+ builder system, for the Dr Geo MDI child in Dr Genius. So now, all of the MDI child in Dr Genius use the same system, this will make life more easy when it will come to save all in XML. I've also indent the drgeo code to the Gnome style instead of the GNU style.

In France, at the APRIL (french association to promote the GNU philosophy) we are at the point of creating a development group targeted to education. Of course it will use as much as possible Gnome.

Finaly we release Dr Genius 0.5.0, an in the same time Aaron has join us, he will take care of the Plot canvas of Dr Genius, there is already a nice demo of 3D plotting. Now I will work on the save-all-kind-of-data-in-XML feature. Actually multi-figure & multi-macro can be saved in XML.

At least open the Dr Genius web page (http://drgenius.seul.org). However there is no release yet. I plan to finish the macro-construction reimplementation and a first release should come out.