Older blog entries for steintr (starting at number 5)

I should have posted this yesterday, but I didn't... So imagine it was dated 02 Apr 2000.

Days with less than 24 hours really suck. I spent the better part of the afternoon fighting a bug in gnomecal which caused a crash (SIGFPE) on startup --- fussy computer, didn't like dividing by zero. :) It seems there is a special case which prevents the divide by zero 364 days of the year, but on the day when DST starts (and the assumption # of hours/day == 24 is not applicable), it doesn't trigger leading to the crash.

The tricky part was figuring out a fix: I am pretty sure the entire daylight savings time logic which was patched in a year or so ago is broken, but I need to do some more checking/testing to prove it...

On the other hand, this did show that gnomecal has users: I have now received in excess of fifteen different reports of this bug, which means that at least that many people tried to start gnomecal yesterday. :)

The iCalendar parser can load at least one trivial test file. It still doesn't handle recurrences or alarms, though, and gnomecal crashes on exit (since it can't save the file, I think).

More work for tomorrow...

The iCalendar parser for gnomecal finally compiles, although I haven't yet written enough testing code to see if it actually does anything useful. We're going to need to rewrite a large part of the recurrence engine to get this to work, so it's not going to work in the larger sense of having a functional calendar for a while. (Unless HelixCode decides to throw its weight at the rewrite, I guess.)

I also cleaned up the first patch for extending gnomecal's internal structures for iCalendar and sent it to calendar-list for review.

And since tomorrow's a University Holiday here, maybe I'll get some more hacking done. Although I do need to send out resumes and get stuff together for my girlfriend's birthday...

I did some more work on the libical parser for gnomecal, but exams this week are a higher priority, so I don't expect to get much more hacking done for a few days...

I found the wmSun WindowMaker dock applet today, which has GPL'ed code for sunrise/sunset calculations. It will take some modifications, but it should give a boost to luach (my Hebrew calendar program), so that I might actually get it finished this century. Oops- not much time left. :)

We're still in a holding pattern for a coordinated gnome-pim 1.1.0/gnome-pilot ? release of the CVS HEAD branch. Eskil is hoping to have gnome-pilot ready to go by the end of the week, so expect a release around then.

I started sketching out the design for integrating iCalendar support into gnomecal, but will probably hold off on starting coding until we release HEAD. Release, *then* introduce breakage. :)