Recent blog entries for jf

Well, things seem to be a lot better today. I am feeling a lot happier and have even been thinking about doing some gb stuff again. It looks as though FOSDEM may turn out to be good fun, with some old friends hopefully turning up.

Had a really good birthday visiting friends in Newmarket, few beers, dinner etc. Had a good time - perhaps this has helped lift that veil of depression I have been under the last couple of months, lets hope so.

Life _was_ Shit.

Now its even Shitter!!

Still - Birthday tomorrow, another year older!

Heard back from Ravi today about the patch I sent him, he should be comitting that later on. Been looking at a bit more GB stuff again today hopefully I will have some more stuff done soon. Work has been a bit of a drag recently and it looks like we will be having the pre christmas rush again this year - I wonder why people seem to rush to get environmental analysis done by christmas.

Installed Evolution 1.0 a few days ago and have switched to use that as my main mailer now. It looks very nice and so far I have had no problems with it (except a few installation problems, caused I think by all the stale files left from earlier versions I had tried out). Another nice piece of software I have tried out recently is MrProject the project management software from codefactory. I love this software and think it is great :-)

It looks as though GUADEC3 will be in Seville next year in April and the UKUUG Linux developers conference in Bristol in July, although this is only tentative at the moment. I hope to attend both of these events same as this year.

Typically mindless day at work today, although I did start on a small project prioritiser in Visual Basic during my lunch break (not that I really have one, but still!!). Not much else happening at the moment.

A surprisingly good weekend for once. Got my application for membership of the Gnome Foundation accepted, which was good. Have also been doing quite a few things on combo boxes for gnome-basic, mainly stuff I have been looking at for a while but been unable to finish due to time constraints. I have a patch ready to send to Ravi as soon as my isp's mail server starts to work properly.

Also had a few ideas for software projects at work, although it looks like we will be getting very busy again soon which will most likely put a halt on any software related stuff for a bit.

Bit of fun with gnome-basic, working on adding some methods to some GB objects. Halfway there, but still a bit of work left to get them working as I would like. Been looking at photos from the Dublin trip and talking to MikeGTN Hallski rhult with quick hellos to gman telsa and andersca on irc.

Mailed a couple of people that I haven't been in contact with for a few weeks. Just going to have a bit of a read of some xml books, part of my grand plan to 'xmlize' all of the data we have at work and increase flexibility for electronic data deliverables to clients.

Not had much time lately for updating this diary. Sent another patch off to Ravi for gb a few weeks ago, but other than that not alot. However - I have just returned from the most excellent weekend in Dublin. The cancelled LinuxWorld event that turned into a weekend of drinking, talking about Linux and Gnome, a talk by Alan Cox and a trip to a micro-brewery (more drinking surprisingly).

Spent most of the weekend with MikeGTN, Mikael, Richard, Anders, Bastien and Glynn. There was a lot of drinking and fun had by all and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I am spending today recovering from the excesses of the weekend and the lack of sleep before returning to the boredom of work tomorrow.

I may have a look at a bit more gnome-basic stuff today if I can, but fully intend to veg for most of the day.

Have been spending far too much time at work lately and consequently have got little done at home. I have been looking into a scripting interface specification for Gnumeric for Jody Goldberg, but have had little success and am waiting to hear his comments on my latest submission. Have been playing around a bit still in the gb-plugin for gnumeric and have started to get a few very simple things to work.

Planning on going to Ireland in November for LinuxWorld - but it looks as though it could well be cancelled - although I shall still be going as I have both my flight and hotel booked, the flight being non refundable.

Having finally got gnumeric to build ok with Gnome Basic support, I have now partially tracked down te reason for the seg fault. It only crashed when I tried to run the demo program (=demo()) so I rewrote the main.gba file to be a very stripped down version of the original - essentially doing nothing. This did not cause any sort of error, so I have gradually been adding commands into main.gba to see what I can do with the plugin - with a view to adding more functionality to both the gb plugin and gb itself. Adding certain commands (.Value esp) seems to cause an error, but I have not made it seg fault again yet - that will surely come later.

I dont know yet whether I can get it to build with the cvs version of gb but that is also something else to try. At least I may be able to find some time to do a little stuff at home now. I have also been looking a little at 80x86 assembly (well I have a small Hello World program written in assembly that is working - youve gotta start somewhere). Have also been looking a little at xml with a view to using it at work for marking up data that we acquire, to allow greater flexibility in data procesing for clients.

The rush at work has hopefully died down a little for the time being, so a weekend free for me. I have been meaning to get along to the Cambridge LUG for some time now and tomorrow may well be the day. I actually met a guy (Alex) in a pub in Cambridge last night and got talking to him about Linux, as I was wearing my GNOME t-shirt. He said that he would be interested in the LUG so I am going to meet up with him and check it out.

I may be able to get some coding done this weekend, what fun!!. I want to have a look at more stuff to implement in GNOME Basic and I would also like to have a look at the gb plugin in Gnumeric - so I must remember to update my versions from cvs.

Still got a bit of a hangover from last night though, and bad memories of a disagreement with some bouncers that were being total arseholes - they literally hurled someone from the pub into a group of people who just happened to be passing, or milling around outside, saying that people shouldn't be on the street outside the pub anyway, what bollocks.