Older blog entries for msevior (starting at number 15)

Video Captures

I finally satisfied all the dependencies and got gvidcap going.

http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/

This allows you to make mpeg movies of your screen. I've been wanting something like this for a while so I can show off some of AbiWord's cool interactive features. Here's the first of these:

http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~msevior/abiword/VisualDragAndDrop.mpeg

Showing off visual Drag and Drop of text. (mplayer does a great job with this. Other players may not. YMMV)

It's occured to me that now broadband is more prevelent, that these sort of movies of software in action may well become as popular as screenshots are now. Frankly they show off our new features better than words or screenshots do. I expect we'll use them them a lot when release AbiWord-2.2

Hooray! Hooray! Hub's OK :-)

AbiWord
Lots and lots of bug fixes. sum1 is so cool. Tomas is so cool. New developers are so cool. uwog is so cool. AbiWord-2.2 will be fantastic.

Physics beyond the Standard Model?

Our first results from the Belle 2003 - 2004 data set were announced to the World last week at the ICHEP conference in Beijing along with our competitors/collaborators measurements from BaBar at SLAC.

The combined results from Belle and BaBar find a 3.5 sigma deviation from what is expected averaging over a variety of CP violation measurements. If we (Belle and BaBar) have estimated our uncertainties correctly this would mean that our measurment has less than one chance in 500 of being a downward fluctuation of the Standard Model. Which would mean we have discovered an effect of New Physics (a new type of particle or force) not in the Stardard Model of Physics.

However Particle Physics is littered with results where the investigators under-estimated their errors (both experiment and theory) so the bar for discovering "new Physics" has been raised to requiring a 5 sigma deviation.

So we'll just have to keep on collecting more data, refining our experimental techniques and and keep measuring to reveal what is happening in Nature.

AbiWord

Lots and lots of bug fixes.

Life
My mother has made excellent progress since her heart valve operation. She is in excellent spirits and will go back to her house in a couple of days.

I'm really impressed at the progress of medical science. This incredibally invasive surgery is now considered rather routine.

My mother will no whave new lease of life. Without the surgery things would have gone downhill rapidly for her.

AbiWord
I've spent the last week implementing text wrapping around positioned objects. I was going to wait until after 2.2 to do this but once I saw the solution I couldn't help going for it.

It was all done in less than about 500 additional LOC I think. I reuse all the cool code we already have and it all just works nicely now.

Here a screenshot for posterity :-)

http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~msevior/abiword/wordWrap.png

I'll fix some more of those bugs sum1 has presented me with next.

AbiWord
Just when I thought I was safe from bug fixing for a while, sum1 produces about 12 extremely well explained bugs.

Ah the benefits of the really good QA guys :-)

AbiWord
Tomas Frydrych committed a bunch of fixes for Revision Marks. It's great to have his help again. I hope we can get this stabilized in time for 2.2. Im particular his work with document histories and merging of versions is really cool and innovative. With luck we'll get the issues sorted out and available for 2.2.

I committed some more fixes for Ms Word import of tables that cleared up a long standing annoynances I had with it. I kept thinking "I'd better fix that one day". Finally one day arrived :-)

The result is that now Microsoft's MS Word doccument describing the RTF specifications loads very nicely indeed.

I still have to make some tweaks to the Table of Contents import though. One day Real Soon Now I'll do it :-)

Damm I'm finding I'm pasting word from AbiWord to epiphany so I can spellcheck this blog. I gotta get that AbiBlog plugin written too :-)

Work
So much to read and criticize...

AbiWord
I love our users and QA guys. Yesterday I got this great bug report.

ttp://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7155

A nasty bug that came and went until he nailed it down for us.

Fixing this fixed the same bug manifest in totally different way that I was stealing myself to tackle.

Divifund
Finished the modulization and classification. Now I need to do a bit more infrastructure work to support Linux distributions. Then I can get on with the next big feature - import quicken and MS Money.

AbiWord
Luca committed a whole of of code for AbiMath. I'll look to see what he's done.

We got our first Indic language transation (Tamil) from Vijay Durairaj.

http://www.ece.utah.edu/~durairaj/abi_tamil3.jpg

I have no idea how well AbiWord handles Tamil typing but xft2 sure looks nice.

I made extensive use of visual drag and drop text again at work. It's very nice. I think we need to make animated GIF's or mpegs to show off our features. Open Office is sooo 1990's by comparison.

I could really have used text to table conversion though. I'll get to that Real Soon Now.

Hmm if I keep up with blogging I'd better get to that abiblog plugin too :-)

Work
I have a lot of reading and critising to do...

Divifund
I worked out how to make python import modules from directories at configure time.

I'm now in the process of breaking out code from the big main script into a number of modules. These can all be precompiled which will spead up load up time and enable the project to continue to scale.

I'm also classifing the functions. The first new class is a generic export to Gnumeric class. This takes a gtkTreeView and turns it into a gnumeric file. This should be very useful for other applications.

I'll do the same for the AbiWord exporter. (Turn a GtkTreeView into a *.abw file with each cell of the tree placed into a cell in an AbiWord table.)

Both these modules are quite small and should be easy to use.

I've been surprised and disappointed that other developers have not made more use of AbiWord and Gnumeric. Their file formats are really easy to use. Their bonobo components are really easy to use. They provide a big powerful chunks of really useful code that can convert some small programs into apps that are genuinely useful and do new things.

(look at Divifund).

Maybe these python modules will show people how to these things and developers will be inspired.