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What do you think this picture represents?

Answer: Felt.

Hey

I haven’t updated the blog in quite a while now…I’ve got a big list of things that I need to write about so I’m gonna try to make it happen soon.

There are a few major things like starting work and passing the cpa exam–I’ve also got a couple stories that I think are kinda funny.  Check back soon!

So, I was looking on the IMDB Top 250 list the other day for some movies to watch and I came across Blade Runner at #103.  I heard about the movie before but never had much interest in it because I’m not a huge science-fiction fan, but I was bored so I decided to watch it.  Oh my god, Blade Runner is one of the worst movies I have ever watched.  Be forewarned, some of my criticism may spoil the movie.  Then again, you might want to thank me for saving 2 hours of your life.
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Okay, so I got lazy again and haven’t posted an update in a while…sorry.  Since my last update I’ve posted one more patch to the mailing list.  The new patch added or updated import and export functionality for six basic commands:

• set text
• set area text
• insert/delete column/row
• clear selection
• format selection
• resize column/row

The patch is available for download here.

After posting the patch I got an email from Morten giving me a list of some things to work on.  Most of them were pretty quick fixes, but a few of them required a little more work.  He mentioned that he was concerned with the amount of code required for the functions, which I agree with entirely–it doesn’t seem like what I’ve got so far is very elegant.  So I thought a little bit about how I might auto-generate the functions, but I haven’t really come up with a solution for that yet.  I spent a day or so looking at how MS Excel 2007 and OO Calc export their change tracking data and comparing it to how I’ve done it so far.  I put my findings into a page that I created here.  I haven’t posted a patch in the last two weeks (horrible, I know), partially because I took the last part of the CPA exam a week ago, and partially because my changes have been pretty minimal.  I should be posting a new patch in a day or so though.

I just realized how close we’re getting to the end of the GSOC program and I’m not nearly as far along I had hoped.  I still haven’t really added any of the Audit functionality that I proposed.  I think I need to work on the user interface by changing it completely or at least adding some dialogs so that it’s more user-friendly and useful to someone other than myself.  There is still a lot to be done: saving change tracking data with the actual workbook data, making it possible to view changes (export to a new worksheet), adding functionality for more commands, XML signing (maybe), and much more.  Should be a fun couple of weeks…

And now the third installment of my GSOC Update series. For my third patch, I started working on importing a log file of exported commands. As of this patch, I only have the set text command working both ways, but I guess that’s still progress. As simple as it looks (my dad and brother weren’t that impressed), I think it’s cool. As I said in my post to the mailing list, I also changed some things around so that previously-written functions are used when possible. The patch is available for download here.

Things to do:

• At this point only a CellPos can be extracted from a target attribute, even when the attribute defines one or more Ranges. I need to change the way the attribute is handled so that I can make a list of Ranges from the string.
• Need to change some other things so that importing additional commands will be easier.
• Think about a way to make command persistence (aka change tracking, aka logging) “lighter” so that we don’t end up storing an infinite undo queue.

Last night when I was trying to compile gnumeric to test out the start of command importing, I kept getting the following error:

./.libs/libspreadsheet.so: undefined reference to `go_doc_control_set_doc'

The only place that function is called is in workbook-control.c, which I haven’t changed. Since it’s a function from goffice I figured I’d go recompile goffice and make sure there weren’t any problems there. Turns out there were some issues:

In file included
from /usr/include/glib-2.0/glib/gmacros.h:36,
from /usr/lib/glib-2.0/include/glibconfig.h:9,
from /usr/include/glib-2.0/glib/gtypes.h:30,
from /usr/include/glib-2.0/glib/galloca.h:30,
from /usr/include/glib-2.0/glib.h:30,
from go-file.h:23,
from go-file.c:25:
/usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.1.3/include/stddef.h:152: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘typedef’

That’s odd I thought, I’ve never even touched the gcc files, why would that all of a sudden start causing problems? So I took a look at go-file.c and sure enough, my problem was there–I had accidentally typed the letter ‘g’ at the beginning of the file. Oddly enough the compiler sees that as a problem with stddef.h. One freaking letter cost me at least an hour in tracking down problems (frown).

Time for another update on my GSOC progress. Again, this is being posted a bit after-the-fact so it’s not as detailed as I really would like, but it’ll have to do.

Second Iteration

After posting my first patch, I got a response from Jody about what I should work on. Basically, everything I worked on for the second patch was based on his suggestions. I made the export functions accessible through GnmCommandClass so that every command accesses the export function uniformly (like klass->write_cmd() ). I also made the exporting of borders and PangoMarkup work. I changed the xml file structure a lot so that more attributes are used instead of elements. Another major change to the xml was changing the way cell positions and ranges are stored. Instead of having separate attributes for startRow, startCol, endRow, endCol, a range is now stored as one string like “A5:C12″. I also made it so that SheetView’s are treated similarly to regular Sheet’s.

I know all of what I just said is just a repeat of what I posted to the mailing list but it’s better than nothing. If you’d like to download the patch, it’s available here.

Another update is in the works…

As you’ve probably seen around the site by now, I am participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code program. For a lot more detailed information on my project look here. I should have been posting periodic updates since I started the project, but since I just got around to working on the website the other day, I haven’t. I guess I’ll do one post now that gives some idea of what I’ve done for the last month.

In the Beginning

After hearing I was accepted, the first thing I did was get on the #gnumeric IRC channel where I met both my mentor, Morten Welinder, and Jody Goldberg, the lead maintainer of Gnumeric, for the first time. They told me to get setup to build gnumeric and goffice from source. At that point I figured that would be an easy task. I was wrong. Finding, downloading, and installing all of the dependencies was a much bigger deal than I expected. I think it took me 1 or 2 days to get things to compile. Then, just when I thought I was safe, gnumeric wouldn’t run. The error was with the libspreadsheet-1.9.0.so shared library. After a bit of searching, I realized I had the file, it just wasn’t in the correct directory. So, I made a symbolic link from the file to where it was supposed to be. Then gnumeric worked beautifully.
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I like to think of myself as an avid music listener (there’s got to be a better term for this), so I think I’ll try to update the site with what I’ve been listening to from time to time. In general I think my tastes fall within the Alternative, Folk, Jazz, Rock & Pop genres, though I’ve been known to listen to country every once in a while. I try to listen to artists who sound as good live as they do on the cd–all of these studio-magically ‘good’ musicians make me a little mad. So, without further ado, here’s the first music update for June:

Amos Lee - Last Days at the Lodge

I downloaded this beauty yesterday as soon as it was available. I’ve been a fan of Amos for quite a while now and this album is a continuation of his great pop/folk/soul sound. I think my favorite song on the cd is What’s Been Going On, but there are some other gems like Jails & Bombs and Baby I Want You. Truthfully, every song is really really good…I’m sure this cd will be on repeat for a while. If you download it from Amazon like I did, note that the underlying mp3 files for Tracks 8 & 9 are swapped. I just changed the filenames and mp3 tags and it’s fine and dandy. The song called Kid should have “you know how hard it is to keep your head up, kid” as lyrics. Makes perfect sense, right?

I just checked his tour dates, and damn my luck, the day he’s in Atlanta is the day of my one and only final for this semester. I’m sure he’d be just as great live…I saw him on that Austin City Limits show that comes on public television once and it was really good. I dunno, I might be able to make it…my exam is at 4:15 central time, the show is at 8pm eastern, so if I can get done with the exam in 45 mins or less I’ll be golden.

Four more albums to check out below the fold…
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Hello there loyal readers! (*crickets chirping*) Check it out, I finally got my act together and I’m gonna do this blog thing. A lot of the reason for doing it is to try and track my Google Summer of Code (GSOC) progress, but I hope to keep it up to date even after GSOC ends. The category links over there on the right should give you a pretty good idea of what I plan on writing about.

I made this template all by myself (my parents are so proud) so let me know what you think…I might even add little changer links on the right so that you can see different color schemes depending on what you like. How cool would that be?!

See the about me page if you don’t know me and want to and shoot me a line if you get the urge.