Older blog entries for hub (starting at number 203)

Had lunch with sdodji before going to an interview for a job. I also met former co-workers because he works in a company I previously worked for (he arrived after I left).

Abiword

Committed the patch for the nasty RTF bug, and I started to work on a nastier one. And this time I really want to do it: rewrite the importer. This bug really shows how screwed the whole beast is. RTF parser should be recursive and parse depending of the context. Some keyword can be found almost everywhere in the stream, etc.

gPhoto

I talked on #gnome-hackers with rml about libgphoto2 and libhal integration. It appears that he really wants libgphoto2 to handle the "Get pictures" action when we connect a digital camera. And I really want to use libhal. One of the main problem is that he wants us to handle USB Mass Storage devices, which we don't.

In fact, there is an old trick, coming from the ancient ages where gPhoto was a single Gtk+ app: the Directory Browse camera driver. In fact this is a pseudo driver that just allow fetching files from file system directories. It should do the trick as long as we get passed the mount point. I think I hack camera detection of USB Mass Storage cameras in this driver to have it handle automatically. This will bring a BIG number of cameras supported, and this will stop questions from the users that did not read the manual. libgphoto2 will be the universal camera access hub.

Time to write a script that will generate code from the XML used in Digicam Support on UN*X. That was a really good idea to use XML.

Not much code today. I did not feel motivated, event though I started to debug a nasty RTF bug in Abiword

Job

It is Wednesday. I was supposed to get back from the company that interviewed me last week on Monday. Not encouraging.

On the other side I have 2 more interviews planned.

Fixed some RTF bugs. There is a lot of nastiness in this RTF importer. I really need to largely rewrite it.

Finally committed my patch for Dia. Properties dialog now show the preview for Arrow Style and Line Style. Also fixed a SVG export bug. This one was trivial.

Abiword

Unbroke the UNIX build of Abiword after GR_Graphics refactoring. Still need to finish to unbreak MacOS X tree as well. I still need to handle a bunch of crashers. 2.0.4 release is close, featuring fixes for Windows.

Job

Was supposed to get an answer today. Got nothing. I feel screwed up. I know why it is hard to get a job these day. I got from a reliable source that posting a job offer for a C++ software engineer, and you get 120 CVs / week. What country am I living in ?

Did not do much since Friday because of real life. Went to an exhibition on Friday, and visited a brewery in Roubaix on Saturday.

Dia

Committed a patch to get rid of GNOME menus because the API is deprecated. In fact Lars started to comment them out, even though he did not get my e-mail on the mailing list asking whether anyone objected. This will clean up code and stop us having to maintain 2 menus layouts. Definitely a win-win situation.

I wondered why I couldn't use Straw: new feed where not loaded due to a name resolution problem. In fact my nameserver configuration was screwed up.... and Straw only use the first entry from resolv.conf. Commented bug 6885

Abiword

Committed 2 major bug fixes in import/export, related to the use of languages that use non-ASCII charset.

Updated by GUADEC4 gallery. I think I still miss a few. Need to find and scan the last box of slides.

Abiword

Minor fixes to the code. Buf I have a serious fix for RTF import/export that I wrote in the train. Not yet committed, needs more testing.

Jobs

I'm not sure about the results of the interview today. We'll see. And not much positions to be found.

Pictures. These are scans from negative film. Who said that traditionnal photography took time. FOSDEM ended on Sunday. The gallery has been put up on Monday.

Life

I didn't do much today. I don't know why. I've got an interview for a job Tuesday, in Paris.

Live from FOSDEM 2004 in Brussels strider, DV, sdodji, fcrozat and lot of other folks. I also met sh, softkid, dsandras and lot of other nice people I'm probably forgetting to mention.

Great conference, great people. That give a lot of idea for new things to do. Using HAL for gPhoto is amongst them.

DV did a presentation of libxml in the KDE developer room (no GNOME room :-( ). sdodji did a presentation of MlView.

Dia

I also found some time go forward in that patch for dia, but there is still some work. I committed a few minor fixes for the UI.

Today's paradox: Evolution 1.4 is unable to import its own folders. I have a ~/evolution from my slow desktop machine, and I want to merge its content to my laptop evolution database. Couldn't find a way :-(. Nor did the folks in #evolution, but import mboxes one by one (not really convenient).

I filed the bug.

Dia

Started to GUI inconsitency fix. For example, in the toolbox, you can select line style and arrow style using visual representation of these. But in the properties dialog, it is only text label. I'm working on making them look like in the toolbox since the widget already exists.

Abiword

I committed XCode project files that way on can build on Panther (MacOS X 10.3). Question du jour: why do the hell software vendors change everything at each versions ? I think I'd better to finalize the autoconf build system to work with Cocoa build, that would be smarter.

GNOME for users

Today I used GNOME to do what an average computer use would do: home-made business cards. I installed glabels and used that. It works great ! Off-course, kudos to gimp-print developers because CUPS recognized my Stylus Photo 750 without any problems.