Older blog entries for jf (starting at number 15)

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.

A lot of work over the weekend (mainly VB stuff in excel and access) so little of my own stuff got done. Clients coming in on wednesday to look at software - hopefully will be ok, still always a little worrying.

Got a nice mail from Ravi Pratap about Gnome Basic stuff and really must start sending him some more patches soon. Well not much else happening, just work.

Again I haven't done much in the way of coding for the last few days. I went out for a few beers friday night and ended up having not a few but many. I got very little sleep and then went to work at 07:00. Just when I thought I could leave, the damn mail server died and became completely unbootable (Windows NT not surprisingly), so I have just left it for now and will have to work on it tomorrow - so more fun at work, and sod all getting done at home.

Haven't done much for a few days as I have been busy at work since my boss is on holiday.

I finally managed to get gnumeric to appear to build ok with gb support. However, when I ran the demo program (enter =demo() into a cell) it segfaulted. I havent managed to track it down yet, although I had a quick look at it gdb. I dont have too much experience of debuggers but hopefully a bit more work and I may at least be able to tell why it crashes.

Got my two latest gb patches accepted by Ravi yesterday, so now I need to think of some more stuff to work on. That is what I find the hardest bit - deciding on something that interests me and is easy enough for me to be able to try my hand at.

I am also trying to build gnumeric with gb support at the moment on my laptop. Not sure yet how it is going to go, especially with tha change of library names for gb from libgb to libgbrun at version 0.0.20 (I think). Still I am trying using version 0.0.19 at the moment as that is what it says in the gnumeric README, we'll have to see how it goes.

Back to work again now I suppose :-)

Finished off a couple more patches Sunday afternoon and got them sent off to Ravi for comment. Also managed to get cvs gb to build at last, but still havent managed to get gnumeric to build with gb support which is something I really want to do. I also tried the latest evolution but I didnt have a lot of luck with it, although it looks very nice. Not done a lot else over the weekend, except try to recover from friday nights drinking - not an easy task.

Did nothing last night worthy of a mention here (except watch Buffy). Off to a leaving do from work tonight in Cambridge. Lots of heavy drinking to be done, and probably little coding tomorrow as a result, still it has to be done when someone leaves.

Got a mail from Ravi, who was apparently happy with the newly submitted patch and comitted it to cvs. I can now get to work on the next patch - I have a couple of ideas for fixes to functions that I dont think are working right so hopefully it shouldnt be too long before the next patches.

Have now got my bookcases and most of the shelves up in my machine room and so its all nearly completed now, just a couple more shelves for printers etc.

Spent tuesday evening working on my gb patch to take into account the things Ravi asked me to do. I finally got that done (I hope) and sent it off to Ravi. I also spent a bit of time trying to get gb to build from cvs (unsuccesfully) and trying to get an mp3 encoder to work (by fooling it into thinking that I had an older version of a library installed - sym linking the old name to the new lib, probably not a real good idea). Now happily ripping (using grip) and encoding some new cd tracks - Joe Strummer and the Mescaleroes - global a go go - at the moment, good album.

My dad should be coming over tonight to help finish off my new machine room, just a few bookshelves to go up and new curtain rail etc. Soon I'll be able to use my computers in the mornings, before work - I can't at the moment as the sun is way too bright with no curtains.

Received a reply from Michael Meeks about my gb patch, essentially asking me to forward patches to Ravi Pratap. I also got a mail from Ravi asking me to try to do a cvs diff and also to also to write a regression test to include with it. That will give me something to do this evening. I hope I can get it done tonight, especially as I wasted most of yesterday evening outside the pub in the beer garden. Better get back to work before the boss spots me writing this entry.