Older blog entries for sdodji (starting at number 55)

Long time since my last diary.

Misc
I am getting more and more overworked these days. I definetely need some vacations.

The general economic conditions are getting worse and worse. I really don't know where we're going. A lot of companies are still laying people off. Tough time.

Hacking
Released MlView 0.0.2 last night. It fixes a couple of bugs since O.O.2-rc4 and adds a lot of new features since 0.0.1.11 .

An article of unixreview talks about MlView :) . That's great. Anyway, as always, a huge amount of things still need to be done. But unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day.

I've also started to work on a suite of tools to manipulate java class files... nothing to do with xml edition but still interesting. A lot of things to do on that front too.

Hacking

I finaly got a somehow working version of my gtkdoc2doxygen.pl perl script. I have then converted the gtk-doc style comments of MlView into doxygen style comments. The extracted documentation is available here. I still need to achieve a _huge_ amount of work on it to make the documentation complete. Oh my, that's boring no end but very usefull if i want other programmers to understand and reuse the code... busy coming weeks

Misc

If you are a software dev manager and you are planning to buy a software versioning system, STAY AWAY FROM CLEARCASE . This product is _really_ a piece of crap written by true wimps. It is damn bloated, unstable (when it hang, it is likely to totally hand your system), needs an army of administrators out there to make it run and last but not least, it heavily relies on your network to work properly. On unix, they have a crappy merge tool that you are _obliged_ to use ... (yeah, back to stalinism).

You would better ask you developpers to know what tool they prefer before spending that much money into such a dollar sink. One think is sure : don't listen to clearcase sales people. Ask your programmers instead. If they don't know clearcase, they should stay away from it.

Hacking

Started to write a perl script to convert the gtk-doc's style comments into doxygen/javadoc style comments. From now on I will use doxygen intead of gtk-doc to generate MlView's documentation. Doxygen is _really_ a nice tool.

Misc

Brazil has won the soccer world cup. The match was great. Germany did very well. I whish an African team has the german rigour one day. That's what the African lacks most today ... rigour. Germany was tactically and physically all right ... they just didn't succeed in scoring. On the other hand, the guys from Brazil who are known to be the _true_ offensive artists on earth, were also very strict in defense and physically ok.... that was a great final.

Congrat to both teams.

a tip: watch Germany during the next world cup.

fxn : yeah, you are right. I don't understand the point to rate diaries. I thing rating articles is more "valuable". But if the code is there, I guess it can be used to rate something else. That's good.

MlView Hacking

No hack yesterday. Released 0-0-2-rc4.

Life

Have a day off today. I should dedicate it to paper work. I have to deal with a couple administrative thinks. I also have to prepare some stuffs related to the FSF stand for the NEXT RMS speech in Paris.... hhmmh busy day.

MlView hacking

Did some good hacks this night. Closed two bugs. 0-0-2-rc4 is coming soon.

Have to go to bed now.

hacked a bit on mlview this morning before going to work. I am writing code to fix bugs for the 0-0-2-rc4 release.

No hack yesterday. I was too tired. I 've just slept. Yesterday was definetely a non productive day for me :(

MlView Hacking

Went forward in writting MlView internals. I am using exclusively mlview to edit the docbook xml document. I use intensively the element name completion feature. This feature is definetely key because:

• I don't know the docbook dtd. For each element of the document, i rely on MlView to propose me the children/sibling elements i have the right to create.
• when i add an element, MlView automatically appends the subtree required by the dtd if any. That helps to insure the validity of the document during the edition.

Something also usefull is that i can just switch validation off and edit the document wihtout taking the dtd in account... no stalinism there.

Writing this document is _really_ a good testbed for mlview. I am submiting a couple of bug reports in the new mlview bug database provided by savannah.

MlView hacking

Started to write down a doc about mlview internals. It is on the cvs.

It appears that mlview seriously needs a new type of view to edit dtds. That would allow the users to define new entities such as parameter entities that are very usefull when you write big documents.

hmmmhm, i think it will take some other two or three months of coding. Yeah, normally, it shouldn't take that long but unfortunately i write mlview during my spare time ... and i am getting to the conclusion that their are only 24 hours in a day... i know ... that is hard to admit some time.

Their are other numerous things that mlview lacks and that would seriously ease xml document edition. I should write these things in an other doc somewhere.

MlView Hacking

Spent two days of intensive debugging of mlview. Released 0-0-2-rc3. This release is more stable than the 0-0-2-rc2. Still buggy.

I have now to go forward in the mlview internals documentation writting using mlview itself with validation set to on. It definitely appears to be a serious testbed.