Older blog entries for richieb (starting at number 22)

Last week I spent at the TOOLS USA conference in Santa Barbara. TOOLS is a small conference (about 200 or so attendees) that tends on the technical side, rather than marketing and hype.

Here is a quickie summary of events I attended: workshop on computer science education, tutorial on Java/DB programming, Eiffel Summit, Eiffel Design and Coding Fest, and refactoring tutorial. I saw all the keynotes by people like Bertrand Meyer, Kent Beck, and Martin Fowler.

I gave a short talk and a demo at Eiffel Summit showing eGTK and glade/eglade. I was the leader of the Extreme Eiffel Design and Coding Fest. This turned out to be a great event. See this report for more details.

The other really neat side of TOOLS is hanging out in the evening with some very smart people arguing about all sorts of things...

I'm writing this from the exhibition room at the TOOLS USA conference in Santa Barbara. Today at Eiffel Summit I gave a short talk about eGTK. I also saw a Mico/E demo that used eGTK. That was pretty cool.

Right now I'm drinking some wine and I'm getting ready to go to dinner.

Wahoo!! eGTK 0.3.5 is out. Now I can get ready for TOOLS USA and not feel guilty.

Well, eGTK 0.3.5 is almost ready for release. We had some last minute changes in the code that handles interaction between Eiffel's garbage collector and GTK+ memory management. It seems to be working for me.

Now I have to update the TODO list and then do the actual release. The new eGTK contains a cool Gnome example - I think this is the first Eiffel/Gnome paring.

I spent this Friday and part of Saturday in Lock Haven, Pensylvania, at the Sentimental Journey Piper Flyin. This event, which takes place every year, is a gathering of Piper airplanes at Lock Haven's Piper Memorial airport. This is where the Piper factory was for many years and this is where my airplane was built.

This year the weather was great, so that we could fly our airplane there on Friday morning, camp out at the airport overnight and then come back the nex morning.

From New Jersey the flight to Lock Haven takes about 2 hours in our airplane (PA-12 Piper Supercruiser). Going there we had some headwinds, so the trip took two hours and fifteen minutes.

On the way out, my partner flew the airplane and I was a passenger and navigator. Although, with the Loran we have navigation was pretty easy. Still, it's fun to follow the progress of the flight on the chart.

This year, the flyin's featured airplane was the PA-12, so we were among the "honored guests".

One of the nicest things about the Sentimental Journey flying is that in the evening when the weather quiets down you can take your airplane up and fly around, even you just stay in the pattern and practice take offs and landings. I did that Friday evening. Around eight o'clock, just as the sun was setting over the mountains I went up for some pattern practice. I used the temporary grass runway, which was little mushy from Wednesday's rain. Consequently take-offs were bit tricky - I got to practice on a real soft field.

Landings on the other hand were real easy. On my second landing everything worked out just right, and the wheels kissed the ground, in the perfect 3-point attitude. It's nice to get one of these landings every now and then.

Other than that we just hanged out at the airport, we spent an hour waiting in line to get some roasted corn. We slept in a tent, our sleep was interrupted by passing freight trains. My partner counted six trains. I must've slept better, because I only counted two.

We were woken up at 5:30 in the morning by the sound of a Kinner engine from a low flying Fleet biplane. In case you wonder what a Fleet biplane is, remember that Amelia Erhart learned to fly in a Fleet.

I was the pilot on the way back. We left our gear at Lock Haven, to be brought back in a friend's car, and we took a passanger we us, someone who needed to be back in N.J. on Saturday.

In the first part of the fligt the air was so smooth that we felt as though in a jet at altitude. The low level haze in between the ridges of Pensylvania made this illusion stronger. At 3500 feet the airplane flew hands off.

We stopped for fuel at Arner Memorial airport which is 20 miles north-west of Allentown.

We got back to Old Bridge, NJ. around noon. After putting the airplane away, when I got in my car I felt as thought I had come back from a time travel trip. In the previous two days I had spent over 5 hours flying an airplane that was built in 1946 and was at an airport surrounded by old airplanes and the sounds of old engines.

It felt funny to get back into a Toyota.

BTW, here is a website I found of someone else who has been at Sentimental Journey. Check out his impressions: http://www.vsk.cape.com/~cruiser/lhv.htm

Well, the work on eGTK is progressing slowly. I've pretty much got the code ready for 0.3.5 release, but I'm having problems with running the Gnome example. Luc, who developed it, has been away at TOOLS Europe and I guess on vacation, hasn't had time to check.

Last weekend was very hot on the East Coast of the USA. On Saturday we had a Young Eagles Day at the airport. This is a day when all the local pilots get together and give free airplane rides to kids that show up. We gave about 30 rides.

I flew two young eagles and one old eagle. A friend of mine, flew in for a hotdog, and I took him up in the J-3 Cub.

The event was fun, but it was too hot and when I got home I was too exhausted to do much else for the rest of the weekend.

Oh, BTW, the bug I thought was causing an infinite loop in SmallEiffel wasn't a bug at all. I just didn't wait long enough.

I was off last week and did some coding, some flying and some house fixing. Our basement has been "finished" - meaning it's been converted into rooms with walls and carpets - and now I have a server corner to set up. I need to buy some networking stuff (cables and a hub) and set up a dial out server, so that finally my son and I can share the internet connection (still dial up - no DSL here yet).

Meanwhile if you like to see some pictures I snaped during one of my flights last week take a look here.

On eGTK front I pretty much finished the GTK_TREE example and moved on to filling in some other code in order to put together a 0.3.5 release.

Last night I've discovered a weird problem in the SmallEiffel compiler. It goes into an infinite loop when compiling one of eGTK examples. More research is needed.

The beginning of May is very busy time in my family, several birthdays, Mother's Day and few other special occasions pretty much ate up all my free time.

But now it's all done and I have little time to work on eGTK. I got lucky, just as I got to the point where I needed GDK_FONT class, someone (thanks Jim) implemented it and send me a patch to integrate. The timing could not have been better.

Meanwhile Oliver is adding more stuff to GTK_CTREE and I'm almost done with the GTK_CTREE example. After that I just want to finish GDK_EVENT classes and I need to create a new subdirectory for Gnome stuff that was written by Luc.

I hope that in a week or two we will be able to release eGTK 0.3.5.

Today is my birthday! Happy Birthday to me... :-)

This was a busy week and a busy, non-programming weekend is coming up. But I'm going to have a week of vacation in the second half of May, so maybe I'll get to do some catch up with eGTK. Tonight I worked a little more on GTK_CTREE example. Slowly it's moving along.

At work I've been fooling around with PHP3 and MySql. Fun stuff.

I'd like to release eGTK 0.3.5 soon. There are too many differences between 0.3.5 and 0.3.4 already.

Found out that DSL is still not available in my area, although it's getting closer.

Unfortunately I'm too tired to code. tonight.. must sleep....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Quiet week on eGTK front. I added several easy callbacks to GTK_CTREE example. I still have one bug I cannot figure out.

Got the sound sorted out on my RH 6.2 machine. Now I can play MP3s again. Now I just need a faster modem. Downloading MP3 files at 28.8 takes too long.

Finally did some flying today, after several washed out weekends. The weather was clear, but there was a gusty cross wind so after several takeoffs and landings I stopped. It was a good cross-landing practice session.