GNOME Office

I've spent the spare time of the last weeks hacking on something intersting I found in the net.

Sun Microsystems has been developing a handwriting recognition framework (so you can load recognition engines into your applications) several years ago (14). They even included a sample recognition engine implementation with it (based upon a talk from 1991, GPL source code).

Wow, this has been a very successful weekend so far. I started to work on criawips again this week (motivated by the engagement of the other contributors) and see what I did. I have had three local development trees on my machine, so I went ahead, fininshed the new debugging code (#1), checked it in, finished the rendering re-organization (#2), check it in too and I have been looking for a bug in my tree dedicated to the reintroduction of glade for the main window (#3). The bug got squashed, the code checked in and I have only one development tree (aka HEAD).

In the meantime Ezequiel made some progress on the save operation which is pretty cool, though it showed up a bug in libgsf which has been fixed in CVS. Unfortunately Jody just released a new libgsf version some days ago (including the "gsf gnomevfs can follow symlinks" patch), so I will wait for the next release to depend on.

Unfortunately I realized that my gdb on the Powerbook (Ubuntu Hoary) is broken, I should provide a bug report for this. First I thought that it might have been some broken memory stuff, but a reboot (the first one for 24 days) did fix only other issues.

Now it's time to relax because I had a very hard day, hacking to 3am, sleeping to 8am, doing sports, hacking, going to bed now.

Released 0.0.8 and 0.0.8a last week. Started to refactor the rendering code to become more performant and to become easier extensible. Committed the first pile of changes today, will cleanup the second pile tomorrow and commit it then.

Nice side effect: some crashes in one of my local criawips-fucked-gnome-canvas branch have disappeared. I need to rename the branch to broken-gnome-canvas now, maybe tomorrows pile of changes will make that code work (which would be pretty cool for maintenance as we could reasonably use glade for the main window - at least for everything except menu and tool bars).

I still hope that I get the refactoring done and start working on slide editing to be able to release 0.1.0 this year. Lets see...

I got an email from the CERT. I still wonder why they contacted me.

Today I started to check out why the criawips bug that strider found two days ago. I got at it, hunted it and killed that nasty bug (don't trust one line fixes, they tend to break whole applications).

Later I started to go on clearing my criawips 0.1.0 todo list. My next stop is much refactoring to get the handling of some internal classes more flexible and to reduce the code size by merging two classes. I think this can be done until the weekend (days are for university this week). I'd love to spend the weekend creating my rendering class which is supposed to be used by the SlideEditor (the nice working thing in the main window) and by the SlideShow (the fancy thing that needs to be fixed until LWE in Frankfurt for me to have my GNOME talk there); this one's also supposed to kill huge amounts of duplicated code and to reintroduce a working SlideShow.