Older blog entries for samth (starting at number 6)

Nothing much happening here. Our website, the only really interesting thing I've done here at work, should go live later today.

Started working on the page numbering stuff for AbiWord. It's the last really missing feature before 1.0 (well, maybe lists too). Other than that, life is dull.

Well, AbiWord is making progess toward 0.9 (and then on to 1.0). The Jobs List (with apologies to Alan) that I posted was well recieved, and it looks like there are just a few more features we need before we can go into a feature freeze. The most important of these is a GUI for adding footers, otherwise known as page numbering. Really, this also involves writing the back end for inserting footers into the document, so it won't be that easy.

I haven't been hacking nearly enough recently. With my job (dull as it is) taking 9 hrs every week day, Ultimate Summer league (5-1 so far) eating two evenings a week, and partying wildly every weekend, there just aren't enough hours in the day. I've got to get some coding done, though, or I will go nuts.

My summer league team is looking good, although we have lost our best player, a kid from Carleton A (the national runners-up). Also, our captain is injured for the next week. This contributed to our first loss on Tuesday, but we redeemed ourselves yesterday by going from down 3-7 to winning 15-7. I've been playing really well this week. It helps a lot to be faster than almost everyone else, and be in better shape, which is certainly not true at school.

I haven't been doing a good job posting these reguarly, but I will try to do better.

Gosh, I haven't written in a while.

As I write this, I am at work at the Bates College IS department, here they have currently run out of things for me to do. I don't know if this bodes well for the rest of the summer or not.

I managed to survive my exit from school intact, although just barely. I got all my finals done (all one of them) and just barely managed to make my plane, after the van to O'Hare airport left 10 seconds(literally) before I caught it. Fortunately, the driver an hour later decided that we were in Montana, instead of Illinois, and drove like a bat out of hell.

I haven't done nearly enough work on AbiWord recently. Work takes up time from 8 to 5, and now that I have to get up, it's hard to stay up late coding. We are almost done with 0.7.10, though, and hopefully this will be the last of the 0.7's. We really just need someone to code footer insertion into the GUI (it already formats if you hack it into the XML file). Then we will have page numbers, and be ready to go to just bug-fixing before 1.0 :-). However, our BeOS port is seriously lagging. There hasn't really been much development on it lately, and lots of dialogs are missing. We have one promising candidate for a BeOS maintainer, though. What we really need is to clone Thomas Fletcher, who wrote both the BeOS and the QNX port. Impressive.

It's good to be back playing Ultimate, in summer league. Our team looks good this year, especially with a kid from Carleton A (national runners-up). Should make for some good times.

Just finished watching the Lakers/Blazers game. Too bad the Lakers won. Not that I care about either team, but I just like to root for the underdog.

My room is covered with stuff to pack, and my walls are bare. It is very strange to be leaving after only 9 months. Oh well, the life of a college student.

The U of C administration is trying to screw everyone over with regard to registration. They have a new online system for course registration, which would be great except that not only is it running asp, but it moved so slowly that I think it was running on a 486 somebody found in a closet. So when I tried to register on the last day (of course) the thing was jammed so tight no one could even get in. So I didn't get to register. They nicely provide a phone number to call if you failed to register, thought, but it just tells you to talk to your adviser. Your adviser then tells you that you can't register at all, and that I will have to add courses in the fall. I'm going to bitch at the registrar tommorrow.

I still can't resize my root partition. I suppose there are good data safety reasons for that, but it is annoying that I can't move my 9 gigs of MP3s (96% legal) to a seperate partition. So I can't get debian till I buy a new hard drive. Oh well.

I started a big debate on the AbiWord developer list about the STL. I think the C++ phobia that so many in the open-source community have is just dumb (not that AbiWord people have it). Templates are well-supported by virtually every C++ compiler in existance, and good STL implementations exist for them all too.

Turned in my final paper yesterday. Now I just have one exam, and I'm home free. Kind of weird.

I got Helix GNOME a few days ago. It really looks nice. I still can't get Sawfish to work, though. I guess it just hates me. Oh well. I'm going to convert to Debian soon anyway, so it won't matter.

Well, it looks like Sourcegear is stepping up their involvement in AbiWord again, in order to get a 1.0 release this summer. It's good to see the familiar faces (so to speak) back on the list. And development should pick up also. With the multiple new developers (Mike, Jesper) and renewed commitment from Sourcegear, Abiword looks to be moving along nicely.

Well, after sleeping into the afternoon, it appears that I committed myself to restructuring the way the rest of the AbiWord code interacts with the formatter.

I watched Dead Poet's Society tonight. Great movie. I just hope I would have the guts not to cave in, if that happend to me.

On Guns: Last night, at about 4 AM, I saw an infomercial by the NRA on cable. They are serious lunatics. They were going on and on about the global conspiracy, led by the UN (ha) to confiscate all guns. I really wonder how their side seems to attract all the total nuts.

Only 13 days left in Chicago (at least till the fall). I'm not sure if I'm happy about that or not.

I've been doing lots of work recently on AbiWord. Mostly this has been in the importer area. I've got working (although not particularly good) importers for XML (just strips tags) and XHTML going.

I've also been working on my Resources page for AbiWord developers. It now keeps sources and builds archived (at the request of Mike Nordell, a new developer). I've also got a CVS archive for pending AbiWord patches.