Advogato blog for steintr

3 Apr 2000

Mon, 3 Apr 2000 15:24:52 GMT

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. :)

18 Jan 2000

Tue, 18 Jan 2000 09:04:50 GMT

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...

17 Jan 2000

Mon, 17 Jan 2000 08:52:44 GMT

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...

14 Dec 1999

Tue, 14 Dec 1999 18:26:01 GMT

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...

1 Dec 1999

Wed, 1 Dec 1999 07:58:43 GMT

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. :)

30 Nov 1999

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:04:06 GMT

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. :)