Older blog entries for jf (starting at number 18)

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.

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.