Older blog entries for hub (starting at number 215)

I partially installed GNOME 2.6 from Debian experimental distribution (PowerPC). Thanks to seb128 for the apt-get tip to fetche GNOME 2.6 automatically out of experimental. Nice Debian splash.

Abiword

Fixed a long-timer bug in the cross-platform framework: the lack of support for Shift modifiers in shortcuts. In the mean time I did make menus a little bit more HIG compliant, for both MacOS X and GNOME.

Abiword 2.0.6 has been released. Thanks to uwog for the release job.

This week-end has been busy with real life.

XPLC : I don't think pphaneuf needs my help. XPLC compiles right out of the box on Mac OS X and make tests succeed.

Abiword

I need to rewrite clipboard code in our framwork. It currently sucks because it does not abstract at all. And MacOS X version suck even more because it is a half hacked UNIX version. While fixing a crash in it, I found that it was time to rewrite it. Perhaps should I stop diverting and return to my RTF rewrite first even though this would benefit to all the platforms (I'd fix GTK/GNOME build as well)

I also fixed a couple of UI bugs on the Mac. I should note that the Mac release had at least a good acceptance. I only received love later. No hate mail. Anyway, I'm still not satisfied with it and as I already stated, a lot of work to go.

Job

After 2 interview and a I have had a formal job offer from NITI in Montréal, Canada. I'll actually move there from France.

After reading Daniel Glazman blog and having a good laugh (sorry it is in French), I want to refresh my memories. Where was I 10 years ago ? I was still at university, first year, studying CS. I was also discovering UNIX, and falling in love... (I met my wife the following year... and fell in love too, but not the same way) At that time, my main computing platform was an old Mac LC475 running System 7 (MacOS). I have had already heard about Linux, but not tried yet. I was willing to try NetBSD, but my hardware was not supported at that time. And I had no money to buy a PC as well.

Abiword

Finally implemented dynamic menus in MacOS X version. Thanks to Camino folks for the tip in their source. I don't know why I did not thought about that: subclassing NSMenu. Otherwise, I had API only in 10.3 which I don't really want.

Also backported an RTF fix sunk into larger patch for the 2.0.6 release, committed templates changes for plugins, and other things I forgot.

frehberg: I also found these tutorials worthwhile. Even more that when I needed them, GNOME website was down.

As says uwog, w00t !. More on that later.

Abiword

Fixed several MacOS X bugs. I also built a MacOS X 10.2 compatible version. Looks like MacOS X builds are released faster that Windows'.

pphaneuf: touché. Yeah, I'll start coding on XPLC now.

DV: congrats for your new position. Hacking GNOME for living ? What a great job.

markonen: more than a year ago I requested libpng to be bundled in MacOS X (was 10.2 at that time). I got declined. The reason was "use the AppKit". Nah! The AppKit includes it inside, why not sharing it. They already do it for libz. Other projects like Camino and Mozilla use it. I finally had to bundle it with Abiword.

MichaelCrawford : I would not recommend buying Sigma SD9 for only one reason: its file format is proprietary. Unless you want to throw away money. If you really want a DSLR, pickup a Nikon or Canon. Both works with Linux as well (as USB Mass Storage, PTP or proprietary, but gPhoto handle that). As for JPEG, this is not really an issue. Always use maximum quality, and you'll not notice quality loss. Trust me. As long as gPhoto supports the device you can consider it as a long term investment (even given how quickly digital cameras become obsolete).

(update) Advogato seems to have a bug. If you have 2 entries the same day, only the later appear on the recent diaries page. Here is the one you are missing.

Abiword

Mac news websites seems to spread the word about the MacOS X release. I should have told that I stop working on it to have news spread faster. This is the way the Internet seems to work :-/

Did a few backports to the STABLE branch in order to provide better support of 64-bits architecture. At least amd64 and alpha users are not forced to patch out the code.

Fixed a few Cocoa bugs. More to come. Bugzilla is filling up.

Job hunt

I had the second interview for NITI in Montréal, Canada. That would involve moving there, but I'm ready for quite some time and still highly motivated. Remember the Boston story (wow, re-reading my blog from 2001), I just hope it'll end the same way.

I'm still waiting for a reply from that other software company in Paris, but in fact, I'm no longer in a hurry.

Abiword

Committed the huge C++ template patch to HEAD.

Abiword 2.1.1 got released just before (kudos to uwog for the release work) and I build MacOS X binaries for the first time in the project life. More than 2 years that I have been working on this port. It should have been sooner, but that's life.

I started to rewrite RTF importer this week-end. I hope to redesign it well enough to work better.

Job

More interviews. Still nothing.

GNOME

Huge bug: my PowerBook switched off while going to my in-laws (3 hrs drive). It shouldn't have. The clock was reset to January 1st, 1904 (the Mac epoch). I ended up not being able to login because Bonobo or whatever else was crashing.... preventing applets and lot of other GNOME 2.4 things to startup. I sill have to find out why the clock was reset... (I hate hardware)

Not very productive this week-end because of real life.

AbiWord

Finished my jumbo patch to templatize our UT_Vector class. This is the first step toward change for hashes and stacks that will get the same thing. One of the motivation is that we used void * to store int32, but that breaks to some extent on 64-bits arch. Even more: in some places we pass an UT_uint32 * casted to a void **. The crash (of course, because sizeof(void*) != sizeof(UT_uint32) on 64-bits arch). I need one of these boxes.

mx : have you tried AbiWord ? Surely not perfect, but it is a good alternative (ok, I'm biased).

Office Wars

There seems to be sort of a competition beetween OpenOffice and GNOME Office. Of course, this is not an armed conflict, but currently OpenOffice seems to have won a big battle as it seesm to have won recognition in the IT world. One of the reason is that it is backed up by companies like Sun and Ximian/Novell. The other is that it has a decent feature set and offers fairly good compatibility with the de-facto monopoly files, I name Micrososft Office.

I myself prefer using GNOME Office. One of the reason is that it is not a behemoth like OpenOffice and that my old machine is not brought down each time I start it. Gnumeric is probably the jewel of the suite. I use it exclusively since 2001, without any problem.

When it comes to compare Abiword and OpenOffice's oowrite, I must say that OpenOffice did a lot of progress, and the program is far from being slow.... beside startup time. I have done a comparison, and, for example, opening the RTF spec in Abiword takes way much longer than in OpenOffice. We have a real problem here, and much to learn from competition. And face to face, OpenOffice has a much better feature set. I know understand why more people seems to use OO and not Abiword.

Abiword

Fixed some 64-bits compilation issues. Hint: don't interchange void * and long. I started to confidentially spread a pre-2.1.1 MacOS X build for Panther. Feedback seems to be positive. Cool. But there is so much work to do to have a polished product.

etrepum : thanks, I already know that. And this is what I'm doing. But that does not make me hate MacOS X dylib less. I wrote shell script to work around the problem. RTFS.