Older blog entries for jluke (starting at number 18)

Disclaimer: I am not for for either candidate in the US election

Since Todd enumerated why you should vote for Bush, I thought it only fair I do the same for Kerry.

Top 22 Reasons to vote for John Kerry

1.

Since it seems to have been deemed appropriate that we all become sideline political commmentators lately. I would like to point out it is not only important that you do vote, but that you think before you vote. You can spend 20 minutes finding out about where each candidate _claims_ he stands on all the issues instead of just one. I can almost guarantee you will find some surprises while doing so.

In more on topic news, I have become distracted with a new (mono-related) project that I should have never started in the first place. That whole reinventing the wheel thing that people hate so much, but I seem to enjoy doing. Anyways, "hello world" worked for the first time yesterday so hopefully it will be ready for public announcement in a couple weeks. Real world utility is probably not very high, but it has certainly been educational.

I also have 6 gmail accounts to give away.

So if you have ever written documentation for mono or Gtk# and want a gmail account let me know (john.luke@).

2 hurricanes down, possibly 1 to go. The worst part of Frances for me was missing college football when the power was out, some minor damage to my parents roof, and a fallen tree (aka Chainsaw fun). Tons of damage and flooding throughout much of the rest of the state.

Interesting to see that Todd should feel right at home in California with his political views.

So people here are still picking up their yards after the hurricane went by, a good week and a half later. It was kind of hectic because they kept making too specific predictions about where the thing would go. First, alot of people evacuated from the Tampa area to Orlando. In Daytona everyone thought it was going above Jacksonville. As it turns out, it went right through Orlando and Daytona instead. I really wish they would return to stressing the unpredictability of these things. For the most part, there was only the incovenience of downed trees, power and water outages, cancelled school, etc. around here. Fortunately, it was not a more powerful storm.

The other day I thought to myself, "I should write a quick little .xsd file to validate this XML I want to read". After visiting w3schools.com to learn what xsd was and how it works, I wrote one and then tested it. Somehow, it works differently on mono, ms.net, and xmllint, and I couldn't figure out why. Then I thought, "wow, I guess I should write a small test to see where the bug is". Of course, I could not get the test to break. Then I thought, "Ok, I need to try to write a .xsd for something else and see if that works." So I started to write one for monodoc (which only has an out of date relax-ng one), because I always wanted to be able to validate the newer slightly modified format. So I did that, and a little validate.cs file and it works also (at least for all the Gtk# docs so far). So now I will have to walk away from the original .xsd, and come back to it when my mind is fresh to figure out what went wrong on that first one. At least monodoc will have a working schema soon after I get the last kinks worked out of it, maybe it can be used to make editing more robust.

So as the latest hurricane approaches Florida, it reminds me of when I was back in high school that hurricanes were actually exciting. The chance to miss school, go surfing with decent waves, hurricane parties. Now it is just a huge hassle with people running around worried for days before and after. They issued a mandatory evacuation for the Tampa/St Pete area yesterday, when in my opinion they had no idea where the storm will go. They are actually having problems getting everyone moved out in time (like elderly care facilities) because of our horribly insufficient highways in Central Florida. Now it seems it will land near Ft. Myers which is about 150 miles south (I am on the other side of the state and completely safe). At least my nephews got out of school but they are too young to appreciate that.

In other news, monop in cvs is new and improved and should even have the much requested but never before done MONO_PATH support. For example, MONO_PATH=/some/silly/path/to/assemblies monop -r:blah.dll

Like many others I have been playing with IronPython since its release. Not having really used python before I find it interesting, at least, but it doesn't look like I will stop using C# as my preferred language anytime soon. I am just very happy that people who have wanted a really dynamic language on mono/.NET now have one. It is one less excuse in the world for not using mono.

Last week I got interested in watching the convention, which is the first time I had really paid attention to politics in quite a while. I am looking forward to the republican one so I can choose between two parties that I see no advantage in supporting one over the other.

For the people that are interested, the next Gtk# release should have a significant amount more of documentation. Not as good as it needs to be, but much better. It would be wonderful if more people spent just a _little_ bit of time to document something. If there has been something preventing or stopping you from doing this, contact me and let me know john.luke@gmail.com or mono-docs-list if you prefer that.

I fear the takeover of usability (over?)designers. That is all.

Today has seen an unsuspected turn of events. What started out as another persons licensing question, looks like it will lead to me no longer working on MonoDevelop. That is, if the original authors believe that all AddIns are a derivative work and must be GPL'ed, I wish to respect that opinion and not try to argue about it. Even though I have no plans to write one (AddIn in another license), nor know of any that exist, I simply cannot support that position. It's probably my fault for not realizing this situation myself, and I will take all the credit for that.

Currently, I feel I might walk away from it in either case. (In case it sounds like I am mad at them, I am not, they are still good people.) I am a firm believer in co-existance of software and that platforms should allow for this. Oh well, it was fun, and hopefully others will come to work on it in my absence. It was becoming time for me to move on anyways, back to Gtk# docs!

Lots of interesting things a'happenin, but nothing worth mentioning on its own.

I've been playing with gstreamer Gtk# bindings thanks to Owen Fraser-Green who delved into the gstreamer source and made the necessary changes to parse it, and fixed everything up for it to be moved to its own module in cvs: gst-sharp. I have now updated platano a simple video player, which was originally writted by Alp Toker to work with it. I need to fix a few small bugs but then it should be working as a good example. Overall most things seem to be working well in the binding.

In case people aren't aware of it Ben wrote a neat little tool called monop that uses reflection to list information about a given type. Very handy when you need quick little bits of info and don't have monodoc runnning. It's my new favorite tool.

It works like this:

monop System.String