Older blog entries for sdodji (starting at number 57)

MlView Hacking. I am still busy with the isolatin1 edition support in MlView. There are many many small portions of code to modify and that can lead to many bugs if I don't care.

Question. I definitely hate working in a place were the management doesn't understand that people who write software should 1) maintain it 2)document it so that further maintenance can be made at least possible. Instead, the management only insist on the code production part which is actually the smallest part of the software lifecyle. The greater part of a software lifecycle actually being the maintenance and the evolution. But they totally ignore the good practises that will ease code maintenance and evolution in the future.

They went to an extend where they created some division where people do *only* maintenance.

Readers should keep in mind that there is *zero* code documentation ... so an incredible amount of energy is spend to fix the bugs ...

I do think that one day, the company will just collapse because of their being incapable to roll out new products beacause all the energy is spent on maintaining unmaintainable products. That is very bad.

And as time goes, things are getting worse and worse.

Does anyone share the same experience as me ? Does anyone know how to get out of this spiral ?

I Have been busy last week with some family issues. Now, I am back to work and free software hacking again.

Hacking
Started to work toward the next release of MlView which should be 0.0.3xxx .

Right now I am busy with the support of isolatin1 edition issues. In gnome1.xx I think translating isolat1 strings that come from the text widgets into utf8 before sending them to libxml2 and vis et versa will be enough to support isolat1 edition. However, a more general approach will be usefull for the truly i18n proof text widgets of gnome2 .

After that I hope I will start to work on a text oriented DTD edition view based on the GnomeCanvas. That will probably be a quit big/exciting development. Hmmm, another busy automn/winter is coming.

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.