Tam and I embarked on our honeymoon last week. We took a 7-day cruise to Alaska that was jam-packed with excursions. Pictures of it can be found on my Picasa album.

Juneau
Our first stop was in Juneau, where we took a nice float plane tour. We got to see a number of forests, mountains, and glaciers up close. The blue glacier ice was especially visible in Juneau. Eventually we landed at the Taku Lodge. We walked around the forest trails there for a bit before getting treated to a delicious salmon feast and learning the history of the lodge and its past owners. When all was said and done, we took another float plane ride back to Juneau.

Skagway
Our next stop was in Skagway, which unexpectedly became the highlight of the trip. Our excursion here was booked with Packer Expeditions. After taking a short train ride on the Yukon Route Railway, we were dropped off in the middle of nowhere next to the Tongass National Forest. Our guides led us on a 3 hour hike across some mildly rugged terrain. We hung back a little bit with Brooke, one of the guides, who pointed out various off-the-trail paths to explore, great photo spots, plants that could be eaten, and general information about the trail. It felt a bit like having our own private tour of the forest.

My favorite photo was from this excursion, for those who don't feel like looking through the 300 pictures in the album:


Ketchikan
After Skagway was Ketchikan, easily the town with the most charm and character of the three we visited in Alaska. Other than the harsh winters, it was the one we could see ourselves most enjoying if we lived there.

In Ketchikan, we did a kayaking/float plane combination excursion. We kayaked around a bit and our guide found and handed us various starfish and talked a lot about the surrounding forest and the necessity for conservation. We also saw a pair of bald eagles guarding their giant nest up in the trees.

Afterward, we had a nice salmon and hummus lunch on the boat before a float plane landed and pulled up. After boarding the float plane, we were flown around the Misty Fjords National Monument. The cliffs and waterfalls were gorgeous and we briefly landed at a small float plane dock to take some pictures. Out the windows of the plane, we were able to see a few pods of orcas at various times during the flight.

Victoria
Our last stop was in Victoria, B.C., where we visited Butchart Gardens, a garden built on top of a former limestone quarry. One of the largest limestone excavation sites was turned into a two-story-deep pit of flowers and plants called the Sunken Garden. Other parts of Butchart are parceled out into theme gardens, such as the Rose Garden, the Japanese Garden, and the Italian Garden. It rained for most of the time we were there, which allowed Tammy to capture some gorgeous close-up shots with water droplets on the flower petals.

Seattle
We got back into Seattle at 8am and our flight didn't leave until 11pm, so we decided to check out the Seattle Aquarium and Woodland Park Zoo. On our way to the zoo, we ran into a Seattle gay pride parade. We hung around for awhile, enjoying the costumed revelers, casting aspersions at the protesters and their "God hates fags" signs/rhetoric, and enjoying the absurdity of the anti-protester protesters and their "God hates fun" and "Marching is a sin" signs.

We also noticed several people running for office marching in the parade (one for Mayor of Seattle, I believe), which was surprising to me. Linking yourself to a gay-pride parade would be a death sentence here in Florida.


...so that was our honeymoon in a nutshell. We both had a blast and it's the first all-about-us extravagant vacation we've been on. I'm hoping it's not the last. This trip made me want to get out of Florida that much more.

A few days back MoLinux, the GNU/Linux distribution sponsored by the Castilla la Mancha government in Spain, released Molinux version 5.0.

As part of the different customizations and enhancements that they do to Ubuntu, they introduced a new program called El Sabio Frestón. The program is named after a character in El Quixote that was a smart guy. If you read the Quixote and cannot recall the character, do not worry, a friend of mine that spent five years doing her degree in Spanish Literature could not neither.

El Sabio Frestón is a gbrainy fork. I'm pretty happy about this because I think that one of the cool things about free software is that people can extend, modify and distribute the software beyond the original author capabilities and interests. These guys have just done this. Revamping the user interface to make it less nerdy and more child friendly, adding additional puzzles categories for literature, geography and verbal analogies. Probably this game will make it into another regional Linux distributions in Spain (gbrainy is available in all of them), since they usually share packets.

Unfortunately it will be difficult to leverage on their work for gbrainy, since most of the work that they have done can be hardly internationalized. On top of this, they used a year old version of gbrainy. However, I hope that better collaboration in the future could drive gbrainy to reuse their work.

I was also told recently that the city hall of Zaragoza is using gbrainy in memory workshops for senior citizens. As most researchers do, I believe that most of these games, if not all, do not provide any tangible benefits to a player's memory or mental ability. However, I'm sure that they will have fun playing and they will socialize more, things that are good too.

Here we have Mistelix 0.21. Mistelix is an open source DVD authoring application with also Theora slideshow creation capabilities for GNU/Linux systems.

Lots of stabilization work goes in this version that introduces 11 bug fixes and some updated translations. It can be download it from:

http://mistelix.org/files/mistelix-0.21.tar.gz
MD5SUM: 6b75a5a1a96169f7366223859278eae3

And it is already packaged from some distributions. If you test it and have questions, you can use the public forum. If you find bug, do report them.

This is the version that I will be showing during my lightening talk at GUADEC next Saturday 4th of July and later at GUADEC-ES, still to confirm if it will be the 7th or the 8th of July.

8 years after I filed bug 1349 in AbiWord, I implemented it. Definitely something that should have been done sooner.

It is about JPEG support. AbiWord has been able to import JPEG images for a good while, but it always converted the JPEG to PNG for internal storage. This is IMHO wrong, but at the time it was debated that it was the right tradeoff to allow using AbiWord on embedded platforms (I'm too lazy to dig up the archive). Anyway.

Tuesday I sat down and implemented the JPEG support, removing cruft, and cleaning up the rest. Basically when import and bitmap image, if the format is JPEG, the JPEG stream is kept as is, otherwise we convert to PNG, as usual. It hit SVN last night. The bonus is that a file with a JPEG in it will open properly in AbiWord 2.6 (and likely older), so even the issue I had with compatibility isn't.

This is probably the last real feature implemented for 2.8, and it will be in 2.7.6. Back to bug fixing.

I've almost forgotten about LJ ever since finally joining Facebook.

Tam and I started our long-awaited honeymoon vacation. We flew into Seattle yesterday and today we'll be boarding the Norwegian Pearl for a 7-day cruise of Alaska.

While taking our bus to the hotel, we noticed what most Floridians notice when they visit anywhere else in the world... elevation. There are hills everywhere and downtown Seattle is built on a pretty steep hill. Driving in, we had Puget Sound on the left, while on the right were skyscrapers arranged like stadium seating at a movie. Every single street seems to be lined with trees and many of them are marked with posters declaring them protected. Seattle takes its nature preservation pretty seriously.

We're staying at the Hotel Max, which is even more interesting than I'd hoped.




It is decorated with hundreds of works from local artists and each room has unique pieces displayed.




The front door of each room features a different local performance artist. We're right next door to the Darth Fiddler room, which is right next to the Spoonman room.




Even the key cards are decorated.


When dinner time came, our concierge recommended we try the Palace Kitchen for dinner ("It's a Tom Douglas restaurant, the guy who won on Iron Chef"). While we were eating (delicious!), a pig roast was being set up on the corner across the street for a wedding party. It was a bit surreal.

Afterward, we made the requisite stop at the Space Needle and took tons of pictures. You can see the trees lining the blocks (and a random park taking up an entire block). Very cool and very worth the cost of admission, but it's one of those things you'll see once and then never need to revisit.








I need to learn Photoshop to fix my closed eyes in this pic...


We stayed up late to adjust to Seattle time, but I ended up rising at 4am anyhow. Today we get checked in on the ship and depart for Alaska.

This is starting to get boring, as I’m turning the planets into freshmeat. But let’s just pretend we have some actual users that care about this news: there is another AbiWord release! With improved printing support (landscape printing actually works again, how 1992!), working copy/paste on Windows, and improved OpenDocument support, this seems like a very nice development release. We’re inching closed to 2.8.0 every day.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

I just uploaded Gnote 0.5.0.

Get it from GNOME FTP

Read up the announcement on the new mailing list for a detailled changelog.

Beside the bug fixes, the new feature is auto import of Tomboy (and eventually Sticky Notes) notes at first run. Also I reduced a bit the dependencies: no more libxml++, no more boost.regex, but pcre instead.

AbiWord uses Itex as it's math composition language. We then use Itex2MML to convert this to MathML and GtkMathView to display this within AbiWord. Having created this MathML we can export it to HTML, which together with a cool piece of javascript written by Sam Ruby, enables this to be displayed in firefox or any other MathML compliant browser.

Behold a cool new feature for AbiWord-2.8




Click to see the image in it's full glory.

The source *.abw file is here.
The complete exported *.html is here.

BTW these files are the reference documentation for Itex commands. As you can see, Itex and MathML are very expressive and allow a very wide range of Mathematical expressions. AbiWord supports a significant fraction of Itex but unfortunately not all. We need to work GtkMathView and itex2MML to get complete coverage.

gbrainy is a brain teaser game and trainer to have fun and to keep your brain trained.

I have just released version 1.11 that is a minor release that introduces the following enhancements:

• Updates Italian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Basque, British English translations and introduces a new Czech translation.
• Full screen mode support
• 3 Bug fixes

gbrainy 1.11 is available for download in source code from:

* http://gent.softcatala.org/jmas/gbrainy/gbrainy-1.11.tar.gz
   (md5sum 8bc371035ab114945293d6eaa9af8da4)

Additionally, gbrainy is available for all major Linux distributions.

Enjoy!

Crashers and non-WYSIWYG behavior are so last week.

Yesterday, I saw a nice little application landing its first release on ftp.gnome.org. Its name is contacts. As I love challenges, I spent some time in my evening porting it to Windows®. You can see the result here.

It has a very basic user interface and I had to disable the bacon stuff, because I did not manage to finish its port, but it basically works and interacts with your local evolution address-book. Read and write.

Marc released AbiWord 2.7.3 this week-end. I used the release to update the packages from Maemo since I fixed many of the issues that were filed against it. It should appear in the tablet's Application Manager if you have the extras-devel repository.

Note: there won't be any update to 2.6.x, as 2.7.3 should already be much better. Only Maemo 4.x is supported (only tested on 4.1 aka Diablo on a N800).

Update: if you don't have the extras-devel repository, you can install it. Diablo (4.1)

Update 2: and please, DO file bugs.

We just released AbiWord 2.7.3. The most visible addition to this release is the return of our Maemo support (packages were already being built I was told). Also AbiWord will now be able to gracefully handle and repair a bigger set of corrupt documents. Finally we fixed a bunch of crashers while working towards the next stable release.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

Back in March, Burn Notice, easily the most enjoyable of the relatively few shows I watch anymore, closed out season 2 with a very satisfying finale that could have worked just as well as the series finale.

This week, three short months later, season 3 started. I wish some of these other shows that take a year or longer to pick back up would figure it out already. I've already forgotten what most of Lost was about, save the last few episodes.

Someone asked how I achieved my fitness goals and the answer was too long to fit in the microscopic reply box. So I'm linking to my answer here instead... cut for those not interested.

First and foremost, I haven't achieved my fitness goals yet. I've lost over 20 lbs from where I was back in August of last year (and even more than that from my high back when I was drinking all the time). However, I've still got about 100-120 lbs to go.

So instead, I can tell you how I got to the point I'm at now: eating better and exercising.

Eating better
We switched our eating habits over the last few years. We rarely use butter, occasionally some olive oil, but mostly Pam and non-stick skillets. We've cut out creamy, calorie-dense items and started making healthier versions of the recipes we like. Pastas are almost always whole grain. White rice has been supplanted by brown rice and we haven't missed it one bit. We always eat a vegetable (or at least a side salad) with every meal... steamed broccoli or green beans & mushrooms are sides in just about everything we eat.

I tracked my food intake meticulously for few months and started changing the things I ate. I started eating tons of fiber and trying to get more protein. I cut down on salt wherever I knew I wouldn't miss it. As we started eating healthier, I began to lose my taste for junk food. Potato chips are just too greasy now, even the Lightly Salted ones I used to get just aren't appealing. My old best friends Take 5 and M&Ms taste a bit fake and processed now. I rarely add salt to anything at the table. My fat & carb intake were(/are) a bit too high, so I've tried to cut down on them while increasing protein. I began increasing my fruit intake... I eat 3 apples a day, typically. Blueberry yogurt is yum. A banana a day helps with muscles on workout days.

Tracking your food will open your eyes to how even things that seem pretty good for you are really just empty calories. No need to cut back from junk completely (I still occasionally have Cookies 'n Cream Skinny Cows for dessert), but there are probably things you can find satisfying substitutes for or won't really miss when they're gone.

Exercise
The weight started coming off more noticeably as I began to exercise, particularly cardio. Couch-to-5K is great for helping beginners ramp up on running. Especially when you're not conditioned for it yet, running will burn tons of calories! Robert Ullrey made some very nice podcasts to go along with the C25K plan that tell you when to start running and when to stop, so you don't have to keep watching the clock.

I struggled with the plan at first and failed a few times, but eventually I was able to plow through it and run 25 minutes straight. If you only do one thing, make it C25K. I think it will be the fastest way to see (and feel) results, which will help keep you motivated. There aren't many 5Ks going on with the oppressive summer heat, but later in the year sign up for 5Ks at Track Shack. Even if you walk most of it and only jog for a few minutes here and there, you're still getting good exercise. That they're scheduled events makes me stick to them, vs just trying to run on a particular weekend morning. If you have a competitive streak, increasing your time will motivate you to do better and stick to something like C25K. And hey, free t-shirt.

I also do strength training. Many women used to be afraid of lifting weights, thinking it'd give them bulky-looking guy muscles, but I think it's becoming more common knowledge that that's just a myth. Women typically don't have the testosterone to build bulky muscles. Instead, you'll build nice lean muscles. Even if you gain muscle and don't lose fat, the muscle helps tighten up the overlying areas and firms parts up so they're not as saggy. Everyone seems to be jumping on the P90X wagon and it looks pretty intense, but something like that where you're doing a different type of exercise each day helps.

Challenges
Luckily I don't have much of a problem controlling what I eat. My biggest challenge is making the time for working out. I work from home so it seems like it should be easy, but I usually get sucked into one emergency after another with my clients. When Tammy and I used to workout together, it made us accountable. It's a lot harder for me to say "eh, I'll get to working out later. for now i need to fix this bug" when someone else is expecting you to workout.

To work around that now, I have an awesome, inexpensive personal trainer that I go to every Tuesday and Thursday morning. That rigid structure keeps me on track. She also shows me good form, explains what I should be feeling where, and she switches up my routine regularly so I don't adapt to any particular exercise. I still have problems getting around to doing cardio or yoga on my off days, but I'm still working with it.

Holy long post! That's about all I do. It's not any groundbreaking insight, but when I do cardio, my weight goes down, when I don't, my weight starts to float back up.

Friday

• Installed the Maemo Diablo SDK (only the FLOSS part). This involved installing Scratchbox, disabling some SELinux, and so on. Also Xephyr crashes. Filed bug in Fedora. And last but not least, I had to reinvent diskspace as both / and /home are more than full. 60GB HDD ought to be enough.
• Some issues with getting Gnote dependencies for Maemo. Will bother later, even though that's one of the reason I installed the SDK.
• Built and fixed AbiWord 2.7.x for Maemo. At least I share the tree with the regular desktop build. Got it running, but the built-in input method just eat the "return" key presses therefor making it hard to use AbiWord in the SDK. Will need to investigate that.

Saturday

• Working on building AbiWord packages for Maemo. Fortunately 2.6.8 almost build out of the box. I struggle more with disk space than anything else. The previous packages pre-2.6 were build with --enable-debug that spew asserts almost all the time (this has gotten better, but released package must not use that option) and is actually much slower.
• Mental note: after doing a new install, don't forget to tune2fs your / filesystem to set the reserved percentage to 1 instead of 5.
• Apparently there are several bugs in AbiWord 2.6.x that only manifest on the device.

Although Australia is a First World country, to our shame, many indigenous Australians, particularly those in remote communities, have far fewer choices and live a marginalized existence.

It is great to see that OLPC Australia has set a program to help indigenous Australian children and is apparently already making a difference.

http://www.olpc.org.au/news/27May09.shtml

Also great to see that they've lined up a major corporate sponsor, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to support their work.

Stories like these make all those hours hacking away on AbiWord and Write worthwhile.

Just released Gnote 0.4.0.

Dependency changes: now libxml++ 2.26 is REQUIRED, because of nasty bugs in older release. Upstream itself said it was unusable. Also, if you are a packager, be aware that libxml++ 2.26 break the ABI silently. You must understand that before doing any upgrade. See bug 583825.

I already have a branch that just remove this dependency, I'll merge it after this release.

Download it

New features:

• Handle command line argument --version and --search
• Backlinks addin.
• Addin to export to HTML.

Fixes:

• Hard require on libxml++ 2.26. Should prevent some bugs (Bug #583807, Bug #583808, Bug #579292, Bug #579316) See git
• Note is now trackable. Should avoid a crash related to signals. (Closes #581618)
• Remove obsolete UTF-8 keyword in .desktop (Closes #581623) (Robert Millan)
• Fix build with LDFLAGS="-Wl,--as-needed" (Closes #581559) (Priit Laes)
• '-' in note title was mistakenly doubled in the menu. (Closes #581643)
• Fix crash when entering an URL instead of a host name for the bugzilla icon in the bugzilla addin (Closes #581080)
• Stop calculating the status icon menu position by thyself.
• Fix UI for InsertTimeStamp addin (Closes #582788) (0.1.1)
• Fix inconsistency in search dialog selection causing drag and drop and delete to mis-behave. (Closes #579107, Closes #582757)
• gnote-applet is in libexec. (Closes #581631)
• Fix markup error in German localization (Closes #582975)
• Fix error on first run in German (de_DE) (Debian bug #528930)

Translations:

• Added translations: - Bengali India (bn_IN) - Hungarian (hu)
• Updated translations: - Arabic (ar) - German (de) - Japanese (ja) - Spanish (es)
• Added Greek manual.
• Added Spanish manual.

Just released AbiWord 2.7.2. This release adds support for uppercase, lowercase, and capitalized character styles, and comes with a Windows release.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

Here we have Mistelix 0.2, two months after the introduction of version 0.1. Mistelix is an open source DVD authoring application with also Theora slideshow creation capabilities for GNU/Linux systems.

What's new in version 0.2:

* Better aspect ratio
* Shows default image when no preview available
* Better previews (showing the image as it will be shown)
* Effects
* Select resolution for Theora videos
* Redo project properties in tabs: General, Transitions, DVD, Theora
* Vorbis and MP3 audio support for Theora slideshown authoring
* More clear report of dependencies
* Basic preview of slideshows
* Use alpha when selecting color for texts and buttons backgrounds

Mistelix 0.2 is available for download in source code from:

* http://mistelix.org/files/mistelix-0.20.tar.gz  (md5sum a43c44286c6befaa1e2c1eac01726a4a)

Additionally, Mistelix is already packaged for some Linux distributions. 

New source control management and bug track system

On the last weeks I have switched Mistelix's source control system to GNOME Git, which made possible to integrate it in damned-lies translation track system. I started to use GNOME Bugzilla to track Mistelix's issues.

Contributions

In this version, Mistelix had the following contributors that I want to specially thank:

• Dani Hernandez, slideshown preview, bug fixes and BarnDoorWipe extensions.
• Jordi Irazuzta, Quality Assurance, point out bugs and working on extensions.
• Adrián15, Quality Assurance. Many issues reported.
• Siegfried-Angel Gevatter, packages for Ubuntu/Debian.

I would like to thanks the GNOME translation community for the following translations: Spanish translation by Jacinto Capote Robles, Norwegian Nynorsk by Torstein Winterseth, Brazilian Portuguese by Duda Nogueira, Slovak by Jaroslav Ryník and Swedish by Daniel Nylander.

And finally, also thanks Alessandro Decina for this help solving some GStreamer related issues and saving me at least a weekend.

How to contribute

There are many ways of contributing to Mistelix. However, let me highlight three:

• Check ideas for contributing if you are a software developer.
• Help making Mistelix available to other languages (see current translations). If you are fluent in other languages, with four hours of work approximately you can translate Mistelix and make it available to more users.
• Help to test and improve it. Mistelix is about users, give it a try and provide your feedback.
• Create slideshows transtions or effects extensions.

Questions or comments?

If you have questions, you can contact visit Mistelix's project web site where I maintain a FAQ. There is additionally a Mistelix Google Group forum where you can also send questions or comments.

Ubuntu Development Summit 

During next week there is the Ubuntu Development Summit in Barcelona. On Thursday 28th, at 16.15 I will be attending to the session Include a true video editing software with DVD creation capabilities, to learn better what people expects from a DVD authoring system. I will be there if you want to chat about DVD authoring in Linux or Mistelix in particular.

Finally, I have been diagnosed RSI in my right wrist. This is making me to take things a bit more easy, including less typing, cycling and other activities.

libpanelappletmm 2.26.0 has been pushed out of the door.

The main reason for that was the removal of libgnome* causing 2.22 to not build as is with GNOME 2.26.

It is available on the GNOME FTP

Another quick release: libopenraw 0.0.8, because I found a crasher when updating gegl RAW support.

Changes

• includes missing for gcc 4.4
• Fix crash in or_get_file_extensions()

Get it !

Fridrich is awesome, and I released AbiWord 2.7.1

It is normally a rule for the community not to do any big and potentially risky changes in OpenOffice.org months before release. UI-freeze, feature-freeze are dates that if you miss them, your feature or fix will have to wait for the next release, or eventually for OOoLater tag. This is always true ...

... unless you are not the community member, but Sun employee. In that case, the rule starts to be a more flexible one.

To cut the thing short, if you are community member and are building ooo310-m11 with Windows and cygwin (and maybe only with Visual Studio 9, which is what Sun uses), you will realize that something changed and your build will consistently crash in the python module. The binary that will crash is the vcbuild.exe binary. What happened? Just our friends from Sun upgraded the python version of OpenOffice.org from 2.3.4 to 2.6.1 between release candidate 1 and release candidate 2. Theoretically, only show-stopper fixes are allowed in the RC phase, but since the rule is flexible depending on which side you are sitting, this could happen.

So, if you are on the wrong side of the flexibility, here is what can bail you out:

--- python/makefile.mk 2009-05-05 08:58:50.745625000 +0200
+++ python/makefile.mk 2009-05-05 08:59:45.261250000 +0200
@@ -117,11 +117,7 @@
 # Build python executable and then runs a minimal script. Running the minimal script
 # ensures that certain *.pyc files are generated which would otherwise be created on
 # solver during registration in insetoo_native
-.IF $(SYSBASE) != ""
-BUILD_ACTION=$(COMPATH)$/vcpackages$/vcbuild.exe -useenv pcbuild.sln "Release|Win32"
-.ELSE
 BUILD_ACTION=$(COMPATH)$/vcpackages$/vcbuild.exe pcbuild.sln "Release|Win32"
-.ENDIF # $(SYSBASE) != ""
 .ENDIF
 .ENDIF

But given the way this was rushed through, don't be surprised if you have other problems later.

BTW, it is not like this problem was not known about beforehand.

Game, set, match for "Quality through process" approach.

UPDATE:

As pointed out on IRC, it is true that many people worked hard to make this - as agreed necessary - change possible at the late stage. I did not intend to offend them and stand to be corrected. The point here is that such changes are pretty risky at the late stage of release cycle especially because upstream does not use the same build environment as community. In the times where I was still bothering to push updates for libwpd upstream, I was often a victim of many procedural hickups. So, seeing a fast-track risky change in last moment is reminding me of all the hours fighting the bureaucracy. But, again, not intending to offend anybody.

We’ve just released AbiWord v2.7.0, which is the first development release towards our stable v2.8.0 release. Changes include Annotation/Comment support, Smart Quotes, Multi-Page View, true SVG/WMF support, use GTK Print in favor of the deprecated gnome-print, improved collaboration support, tons of import/export filter improvements, and more…!

Some first reactions are in: “Ohhh, it’s pretty!” - unnamed source, “It’s so innovative!” - unnamed source, “I want one for my kids!” - unnamed source, to list a few. Go get it to see what the people are talking about (free copies until we’re out of stock)!

Sometime the shit hit the fan. Good thing I have the EEE PC. The bad thing is that I might be slow replying to email as I dont have a mail client here, nor do I have my ssh key.

Update: wow this post has the number 666.

Since tomorrow I'll be in Montreal for LGM, today will be release day for Gnote 0.3.1 "Five-One-Four". Next week should be back to the regular schedule. This is a bugfix release, and it is available on GNOME FTP as usual.

The changes are:

Fixes:

• Missing header in src/addins/inserttimestamp/inserttimestampnoteaddin.cpp
• Don't crash when deleting a note (Closes #579839)
• Plugged various memory leaks.
• Cleared up a few Gtkmm warnings.
• Applet was trying to use an icon named "tomboy" (Closes #581226) (Robert Millan)
• .desktop file didn't have the version (Jonathon Jongsma)
• .desktop has improper XFCE category and should have OnlyShowIn entry for GNOME and XFCE (Closes #580481)
• Help didn't work in the Note windows. (Closes #581200)
• Notebook addin toolbar button was inconsistent. (Closes #581213)
• Delete notebook now works in the search dialog. (Closes #581222)
• Popup menus in the search dialog now appear.
• Output options at the end of configure and fail if D-Bus is enabled.

Translations:

• Added translations: - Japanese (ja)
• Updated translations: - Arabic (ar) - Catalan (ca) - French (fr) - Spanish (es)
• Fix format causing crashes. (Closes #580868)
• Fix a typo in the gconf schema description (Closes #581239)
• Fix small translatable strings (Closes #579197)

Our favorite local steakhouse, Barney's, shut down last month. I won a restaurant.com gift certificate for Barney's about 9 months ago that we never got around to using. Contacted restaurant.com customer service and they gave me a $25 credit the next day.

While shopping around, I noticed they had added a lot more local restaurants we frequent. I also found a 50%-off Mother's Day discount that expires tomorrow. Between the $25 credit and the 50% off my order, I managed to get a $25 Taste (tapas restaurant) gift certificate, a $25 Melting Pot cert, 2 $10 Urban Flat certs, and 2 $10 Maria Bonita (our new fav Mexican restaurant) certs, all for $11.

If you want some dirt cheap gift certificates to local restaurants, check restaurant.com out soon. The 50%-Off Coupon Code is "MOM" and it expires tomorrow.

On my list of "Games You Never Want To Play": Find The Mess

The game starts when the sound of a cat puking drifts down from upstairs.  The objective is to figure out where the pasty pile of partially digested cat food is.

So far, I'm losing this round miserably.

I bit the bullet and installed Fedora 11-BETA on my only machine, to replace openSUSE 11.1. Let's see how it goes. I don't think there will be any big issue.

I need to figure out the package building though.

I was happily chatting away with my great friend uwog (Marc Maurer) on #abiword this morning, when my 15 year-old daughter looked over my shoulder and asked:

"How come you talk like a teenage girl on the internet?"

Well that kind of blew me away and I thought about it and realized that that..

Teenage girls talk like us!

All those LOLs, ROTFLs 313313 -speak etc came from us :-)

So no matter how much cool free software we make, at least one substantial impact we've made is to influence the way Generation Y talks on the internet :-)

Wednesday is release day for Gnote. Version 0.3.0 is now available on GNOME FTP.

Here is the changelog:

New features:

• Applet support (Closes #578979).
• Print addon.
• Insert Time Stamp addon.
• Bugzilla addon.
• Implement addin preferences.

Fixes:

• Should now build if Gtk+ 2.16 is present but not Gtkmm 2.16.
• Should build with Gtk+ 2.12 and Gtkmm 2.12 (Closes #580250) (Robert Millan)
• Fix a typo in gnote.1 (Closes #580211) (Robert Millan)
• Desktop file reflect XFCE and bugzilla component. (Closes #580481) (Ritesh Khadgaray)
• Missing accelerators in link context menu (Closes #580443) (Mário Machado)
• Reference bugzilla component in server file (Closes #579198)

Translations:

• Short descriptions in shema must not end with a '.' (Closes #579337)
• Added translations: - British English (en_GB) - Czech (cs) - Portugese (pt) - Spanish (es) - Thai (th)
• Updated translations: - Arabic (ar) - German (de)

Just a quick note to mention that I released libopenraw 0.0.7 to fix a nasty memory leak. I recommend the upgrade.

It has been long time since I blogged for the last time and quite things changed since: My daughter and my son took one more year and my wife is every day more beautiful and younger.

It is not that I was not having things to blog about, but the main quality of many FOSS hackers, lazyness, is the reason of this relative quietness. But now there is something really really cool that pushes me to blog again: At the end of 2008 and in the beginning of 2009 I was trying to come up with a repeatable and dependable way to build GTK+ and GNOME software for Windows.

I, myself, maintain several libraries and I build their Win32 versions on my Linux box as I described it here. So, the cross-compilation came as a natural reflex. I inspired myself by the infrastructure that the Fedora mingw project used and started to go through the usual cycle of while (!tired()) { build(); debug; }. And last night, I reached a milestone. My package repository hosted by openSUSE Build Service received its package number hundred.

Why am I saying all this? In fact, these packages are not only there to be a decoration. Many times, people that know about my work ask me for packages of different libraries. All the stuff that I build (or almost all can be found there). People asking for win32 version of the GTK+ port of Webkit can be interested in the mingw32-libwebkit package. Those that would gladly try to use Evolution as their mail client on windows, can find the updated mingw32-evolution package useful. It is enough to add the repository to your installation sources and lauch zypper ref; zypper in mingw32-evolution mingw32-tango-icon-theme and the rpm dependency resolution mechanism will pull all you need for you. After that, you can just zip the content of /usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root/mingw directory and you can unzip the resulting package on your windows box. As simple as that!

For developpers that would like to cherry-pick packages and use them to develop their own, it is the best to to fetch them from the openSUSE 10.3 version of the repository. For later releases, openSUSE's rpm uses lzma payload and it can be a bit more tricky to uncompress the packages on a typical windows machine, although 7zip should know what to do with them, I guess.

As a technical information for developpers, all the binaries are stripped of unnecessary sections and the debugging information can be found for each source package in a separate package typically named mingw32-%{name}-debug-%{version}-%{release}.noarch.rpm. Uncompressing them in the same prefix as the corresponding binary packages will cause gdb.exe to use their symbols and you can produce meaningfull traces.

I still contend that the best way to use those packages for developping your own software is in an openSUSE installation. And the side benefit is that in this way one gets not only nice development environment for Windows development, but also the arguably best operating system in the world as a host.

I might take some more courage and write about Windows porting of software when I rest from writing this blog entry. While waiting, it is worth to read this little collection of slides of my distinguished colleague and incontested master of win32 porting, Tor Lillqvist. Everything I know about win32 is because of sitting at his feet.

I'm a month late with it, but I finally met my goal of running a 5K in under 40 minutes this morning. Chip time was 38:50, a new PR for me.

People frequently ask me how I manage to collect and input the data that is used by hbus.ca, given Metro Transit’s intransigence. The “bike and GPS” angle is well known by now, but what about the rest of the process? How do I get the data into a format that hbus.ca can consume?

The defacto standard for the interchange of transit information is Google Transit Feed (GTFS). This exceedingly simple comma seperated value format is now supported by a plethora of software, including Google Transit, graphserver, as well as my very own libroutez (used by hbus.ca). It was obvious to me right from the beginning that the first step to building hbus.ca would be to create one of these feeds.

Manipulating a GTFS by hand is probably not a great idea. It’s basically a dump of a relational database, and is pretty inscrutable from the point of view of a human being. What I really want to be able to do is be able
to manipulate things on the level of stops, service periods, and routes– and let some kind of abstraction layer take care of the low-level details. Fortunately, the awesome engineers at google created a python library called Google Transit Data Feed, which can help with creating one of these things by providing abstractions of the key elements of a google transit feed (stops, service periods, etc.). You can then write a program which uses these abstractions to create and save a GTFS.

Of course, providing the library appropriate information is easier said than done. Metro Transit’s PDF schedules are not readily computer parsable (being designed to be printed out, after all). I needed some kind of semi-automated way of converting a Metro Transit schedule into GTFS, or this whole project was
going nowhere fast.

As an initial step, it turns out that it’s quite possible to extract textual information from a PDF using the open source popplar library. From there, it’s possible to extract the stopping times for an individual bus route. Let’s give an example. For example, let’s take the case of adding the 60 (Portland Hill’s route), something I’m currently working on. All I had to do was download the PDF file from Metro Transit’s site and then run the following on the command line:

pdftotext -raw route60.pdf

The raw option basically makes sure the raw strings are dumped to disk, and that no attempt is made to preserve formatting. The result is a text file with content like this in it:

842a 847a 855a 858a 903a 906a 912a -
857a 902a 910a 913a 918a 921a - 925a
910a 915a 923a 926a 931a 934a 940a -
940a 945a 953a - 1000a 1003a 1009a -
...and every 30 minutes until
210p 215p 223p - 230p 233p 239p -

This type of format can be parsed easily enough. To create a proper transit feed though, schedule information isn’t enough: you also need to know the locations of the stops, names of routes, etc. After some deliberation, I came to the determination that I needed some kind of intermediate format to store the above schedule information and this additional information. It would be readable both by humans (to ease its creation) and machines.

The obvious markup for something like this is YAML (if you’re still using XML to store structured information, run, don’t walk, and look at YAML: you can thank me later). Simple, clean, effective. GTFS is still the better choice for using the information in another application as its representation is much more amenable to being stored in a graph. Here’s a few examples of my YAML format in action:

7 (Robie to Gottingen)
10 (Westphal)

Besides the scheduling information, the other main interesting component of a GTFS is the location of the stops. As anyone who’s used a Metro Transit schedule has noticed, only major timepoints are covered in the PDF schedules. What of all the stops in between? This is where the bike and GPS come in.

What I did was take a standard GPS from Mountain Equipment Co-op (The Garmin GPSMap 60x), get on my bike, take the readings of individual gotime numbers and positioning information, of the individual stops between the major timepoints. I then took this device back to my computer and, using a utility called GPSBabel, dumped out the stop information in a format called “comma seperated value”. It looks like this:

44.65825, -63.59252, 6785-21-31-33-34-35-3-7
44.65982, -63.59452, 6768-21-31-33-35-86-3-7
44.66113, -63.59659, 6782-21-31-33-34-35-3-7

The first two items are latitude and longitude, providing the positioning of the stop. The last item is a gotime number, followed by the set of buses which pass by the stop. Turning this into YAML is a matter of applying
the following regular expression to the input:

\([0-9]+.[0-9]+\), \(-63.[0-9]+\), \([0-9]+\)- -> - { name: xxx, stop_code: \3, lat: \1, lng: \2 }

To get an actual name for the stop (i.e.: “Gottingen and Young”), I wrote a simple script which finds the nearest intersection close to the stop in the GeoBase dataset. I then (at my discretion) corrected it based on my on-the-street knowledge of the layout of Halifax as well as adding certain details to help the user (e.g. bus stops on the way to the south end of Halifax are marked “south bound”).

With these two elements in place (a format for creating human-readable transit information and a library for creating GTFS), the only thing left to do is create a program which bridges the gap. Behold, the magic of
createfeed.py. With all of this in place, creating a google transit feed for Halifax is a simple matter of typing “make”.

Is this a ridiculous amount of work? I wouldn’t say so. The vast, vast majority of my work on hbus.ca has been in creating the pathfinding code and geocoding functionality. This is work that can be translated to many different municipalities, and can easily be extended and made more useful in a myriad of ways.

What does seem a little intimidating to me is completing what I started. Capturing bus stop information for the Halifax peninsula is one thing, but covering the outlying areas (Bayer’s Lake, Sackville, etc.) is quite
another. There’s a lot of biking involved there, more perhaps than what one person can reasonably be expected to do. It was my hope that the initial release of hbus would validate the model of community-developed transit software to Metro Transit and they would see the benefit of releasing their internal copy of this data to the public, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to have happened.

Getting that problem solved seems to be more a political problem than a technical one, and it’s not my specialty. It really does make me wonder if I shouldn’t reconsider the option of crowd sourcing, which I had
rejected earlier.

I started working out with my new personal trainer, Kat Fieler, a few weeks ago.  When she's not making me do thousands of squats, lunges, and crunches, she's busy with much more noble ventures like leading free fitness classes for women recovering from breast cancer.  She's quite selfless and inspirational.

I've made pretty good progress so far, ramping up quickly in weight and reps as well as flexibility in our yoga cool-down sessions.  My calf cramped up pretty hard last Thursday though and it's been nagging me here and there ever since.  I had no problem running 20 mins on Sunday, the calf ache going away after a few minutes, but today it just kept throbbing and I gave up before getting 12 minutes in.  My hope for our 5K this coming Saturday was to be able to run as much of it as possible, finishing in under 40 minutes.  Now I'm not so sure that's going to happen.

I just released Gnote 0.2.0. Here is the changelog:

New features

• Now support addins (Bug #578980): - Fixed Width
• Show addins in preferences.

Fixes:

• Can now close the template note opened when the Preferences dialog is open. (Close #579105)
• Check for Gtk+ 2.14 or later and include gtk/gtk.h in src/utils.cpp (Close #579240)
• Fix wrongly highlighted URLs and a crash when inserting in some situation. (Close #579225)
• Fix offsets on WikiWord (similar to bug #579225)
• Initialize gettext properly (Close #579520)
• Properly check for libxml2.
• Drag and drop of notes to a notebook (Close #579637)
• Fixed hang when changing the title of a note (Close #579362)
• The open state of notes is now saved properly.

Translations:

• Update comment to reflect format in strings. (Close #579209)
• Ensure the spelling of Gnote.
• Some strings shouldn't be translated. (Close #579197)
• Date format are non localizable. (Close #579207)
• Properly use plural forms (Close #579412)
• Remove markup from translatable strings (Close #579453)
• Added translations: - Swedish (sv) - Greek (el) - Arabic (ar) - Catalan (ca) - German (de) - French (fr)

Many thanks to the translation teams and the people who provided feedback.

The tarball can be downloaded fronm GNOME FTP

There is more to come: the addins (I had to rewrite an addin system based on Glib::Module, which I hope will be generic enough ; I'll see when I integrate it into Niepce), the synchronization (I have a branch locally that I need to test thoroughly, for which I also needed addin support), and what not.

I just released Gnote 0.1.2. Here are the changes:

• Don't return containers on the stack.
• BUG: Pinning notes now work.
• BUG: Fix a potential crasher in PrefsKeybinder in the gconf callback.
• BUG: Fixed typos in man page.
• BUG: Remove the use of gettext calls that are only in glib 2.18
• BUG: Fix Note search that didn't work. (Close #578956) (Wade Berrier)
• BUG: Fix the position of the menu in case of popping upward. (Close #578958)
• NEW: Imported the manual (Close #578982)
• NEW: Addin preferences. (TO FINISH)
• Clarified some (c) notices.

You can find it on GNOME FTP

Gnote is now in GNOME git repository.

http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnote/

All you need is to pull from there.

It also has a bug tracker in GNOME bugzilla.

Update: is seems to be misunderstood that the URL above is for the web git interface. The git URL is git://git.gnome.org/gnote

I joined a weight loss support community on LJ last week to help stay motivated and post my accomplishments, but it turned out to be a lot of plump women being overly LJ-dramatic and catty.  So instead, you guys get to hear it instead.

Today I had two very empowering fitness victory...

The first was making it to the 20 minute straight run of Couch-to-5K and completing it without much problem.  I'm only running at 5mph on the treadmill, but it was still 1.67 miles straight which is more than I've ever ran continuously in my life.  Our next 5K (and probably our last of the season as it gets unbearably hot) is in two weeks.  If I'm able to keep that slow-and-steady pace for 3.1 miles, I should be able to easily beat my 40-minute goal and finish the 5K in under 38 minutes.  The Florida heat may have other ideas.

The second victory was weighing in on Wii Fit, our glorified scale.


I hit 261 lbs today, my lowest since I plumped up from the boozing days years ago.  My highest was back at the end of August 2008 when I got up to 282 lbs, so I've shed almost 7.5% since then.  I'm 1.00 BMI away from being able to drop the "morbidly" off my "obese".  I'm feeling a little braggy today. :)

I take random surveys to get Seasons 52 Gift Cards.  I took one last night with the following question:


Apparently "Broccoli" isn't the correct answer; I was disqualified from the survey after choosing it.

Next weekend 18th and 19th of April we will be having the Openbravo World Conference in Barcelona. This is an event focused on Openbravo ERP and Openbravo POS projects. There is already 300 people registered for the event travelling from 30 different countries. This year they keynotes would be given by:

• Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho, talking about Open Source and business opportunities.
• Matt Asay, Vice President of Business Development at Alfresco, talking about The Community Imperative and the benefits of open source collaboration.

There are presentations from companies like IBM, Canonical, Sun, Talend, Pentaho, Alfresco, Jaspersoft and many other companies in the open source space that are working with or building solutions around Openbravo. The final agenda for the conference has been already published.

Even if you do not work with Openbravo technologies, I think that is an appealing event for everyone interested in open source and business. If you are interested in attending, the communities days are open and free, you only have to register. I will be there all days (I'm actually one of the organizers) so Gil Forcada.

The unavoidable bugs arose, mostly build bugs^[1]. So if you had an error on BOOST_FOREACH, it is fixed. Bye-bye, gone.

Thanks do Dodji for the testing.

I released Gnote 0.1.1.

Download

Be wary when using the in-store kiosks at Walgreens photo centers. I brought in the high-res version of this image to be printed on an 8x10 (two copies on a USB drive... one landscape, one portrait orientation):


I unplugged and replugged the USB drive several times to confirm the pictures copied over correctly.

When I tried to print the images using the kiosk, the photo specialist pulled the pictures up on the print lab to see which version looked proper and both were screwed up. The landscape version clipped off some of the bottom of the picture, replacing it with a gray bar:


The portrait version clipped off everything except the top of the image, replacing most of the image with a gray bar:


When I got home and looked at the images on the USB drive, I found that the kiosk had overwritten my files with the hacked up versions of the photo above, blowing away the originals. So make sure to back up the contents of your USB drive before bringing your photos in... whoever wrote the kiosk software thought it'd be a good idea to silently overwrite the contents of the drive.

Following my April 1st announcement, I ironed out the last detail I deemed necessary for a 0.1.0 release of Gnote.

It should build on recent systems. I welcome any feedback or patches. If you have a build failure, I at least need the compiler errors.

Source tarballs - Homepage

PS: it is known to not build on Debian etch because of an antique version of boost.

Switching my service from T-Mobile to to Net10 can now be officially declared "a good idea". After the initial battery charge, my phone went two weeks before finally needing to be plugged in today. With most of my phone calls being business-related and happening in my office, using Skype for unlimited outgoing calls for $3/mo means I've only spent about $6 for half a month of service.

I found an inexpensive personal trainer with her own home gym setup, so I've decided to start doing that to try and lose more weight. I lose motivation too easily, but having some rigid, scheduled appointments with someone I don't know will make it harder to say "eh, I'm not in the mood". When I *do* put forth the effort, the weight comes off slowly but surely, so I have high hopes. The money saved on my cell phone bill and the Sprint card for my laptop (purchased back when I actually left the house regularly, before working for myself) will cover a little less than half of the monthly cost, so it's totally worth it.

Today was Tammy's first day back at work after spring break. Our camping trip was great, in spite of the water gushing out from the kitchen wall upon our return. When we arrived on Saturday, we set up shop, fumbled around for an hour before the campfire finally caught, had some yummy grilled chicken and veggies and smores. As we prepared to retire to the tent for the evening, it started getting stormy. No sooner than we had zipped up the tent did it start raining. We woke up in the middle of the night with a thunderstorm hanging out right above our tent. Lightning, thunder, and torrential downpour is REALLY LOUD in a tent, and we eventually sprung leaks.

We spent the next morning draping our blankets/towels across the car to dry in the sun. Tammy managed to clean up the muddy mess in the tent with a ton of elbow grease. The thunderstorms from the night before took all the bad weather with them when they rolled out, so Sunday was cloudless and in the 70s. We did some relaxing canoeing on the dinkiest lake ever and took 3 mile hike on a few scenic nature trails that went up, around, and through a huge ravine in the park. The evening was spent relaxing, smoresing, grilling steaks and corn, and some riveting "Guess Who?" action (fun for exactly 3 rounds). We ended the evening huddled up in our sleeping bags against the 48 degree night.

Overall, it was a vacation win. Now it's less than 3 months until our Alaska cruise. We took some time after camping last week to finalize our plans, research and book all our excursions, buy all our tickets, etc. At this point, there's nothing left to do but stare at the calendar, waiting for June 20th to arrive. We've got two floatplane tours lined up, a kayaking adventure, a hike and railway ride through the Sawtooth Mountain Rainforest, and several hours to roam around a 50-acre floral garden in Canada. Thanks to everyone who contributed to our honeymoon registry and helped make all of that possible!

In my attempts to fight my own boredom, as an unemployed hacker^[1], I took on myself to do something: porting Tomboy to C++. It is actually not that hard, just a lot of work to do manually because there is over a dozen of thousands of lines of code. This show me that the door is open to reimplementing Gtk# software (or parts) in C++ with not too many problems, making it easy to have them available for C applications.

Nonetheless there are still some challenges:

1. Garbage collection: I replaced this with a combination of Gtkmm memory management, std::tr1::shared_ptr<> and stack allocated object. Seems to be working so far. I could also be using a garbage collector, but it seems to be unecessary.
2. String and file path utilities: Boost has string algorithms and Boost.Filesystem
3. XML: while XML parsing is not a big issue with the various libraries available, APIs have enough difference to make it non-trivial. I also had to write a convenient wrapper of xmlTextWriter to make my life easier.
4. Add-ins: I don't have the support for generic addins as found in Mono. No big deal, I implemented a factory in a few lines with a couple of macros. Some core features are actually implemented as add-ins, so I had to do it. Dynamic loading shouldn't be too hard.
5. regex: some of these core feature use regulars expression. Not a big deal if it wasn't for apparently different syntax.

To help all of this, I have implemented a small library (in the same tree) called "sharp" aimed at helping port from Gtk#. In addition to boost, I also make an extensive use of Gtkmm and libxml++.

Of course the code is available. I have set up a repository on gitorious. There is not tarball yet as I still need to iron a few major bugs. On over 13KLOC of code, there are to be some :-)

Tam and I had an awesome camping vacation this weekend, only to return home to a clogged kitchen sink that eventually turned into an exploded pipe in the wall that leaked all over the floor.

The plumber ended up having to cut away a good chunk of the exterior concrete wall to get at the pipe...


The t-fitting had two rather large holes in it and we now have a nice hidden passage into our storage closet from behind the fridge. Hate this house.

More fun with PayPal

Until recently, I've been relatively happy with the service I've been getting with PayPal. I have an account set up to accept donations on behalf of AbiWord. We've received a few thousand US Dollars in contributions from satisfied users and well-wishers, and we're very grateful for their financial support. We've used the money to buy hardware, sponsor meet-ups, fund bug-bounties, patch prizes, and the like.

In the past few months, though, things have started to turn sour. We've gotten more than the usual number of $5 donations, which is curious given the economic downturn that many major world economies are in. Perhaps not-unexpectedly, the majority of these payments have gone through PayPal's chargeback/dispute resolution process, and perhaps more should go through still. I think that we had ~1 chargeback over the past 5 years. We've had about 5 per month these past 2-3 months.

Though well-intentioned, PayPal's dispute resolution process is unnecessarily opaque to the "seller" - little to no information was given to me regarding the nature of the charge-back. The sole exception has been a case where I was informed that the buyer's credit card issuer initiated the chargeback. Given this little information, I can only fathom a few possibilities for the disputes' causes (in increasing order of malice):

• People are reneging in droves on their donations to a small, volunteer-run project
• The "buyers" have stated that we didn't deliver an item to them, which is preposterous, given that the account is used as a tip jar
• People are stealing credit card information, and using the stolen cards to make small donations to a F/OSS project. Why on earth one would do that, and why AbiWord/I would be picked as the target, boggles my mind. Occam's Razor, though, leads me to believe that this is the case.

Besides being time-consuming and (unnecessarily) frustrating (which I'd grudgingly accepted as the cost of using the PayPal service), the chargebacks also sometimes come with fees, making the tip jar cost us both time and money. In effect, we're being both inconvenienced and robbed because PayPal accepted a stolen credit card and then transferred a small amount of money to us, minus their processing fee. Anti-donations, if you will. PayPal is not the one committing the alleged fraud, so I don't expect them to absorb the costs. But neither am I.

In light of all this, I've closed the tip jar and recommend that other F/OSS projects not use PayPal (or at least be warned of our recent ill fortunes), at least until their dispute resolution process is vastly improved.

So I opened up my baby, hbus.ca, to the public last week (though traffic only really started to pick up yesterday, after a positive article in the daily news). This site, a trip planner for the Halifax Regional Municipality, was the cumulation of about 6 months of part time work on my part, between contracts for my awesome company, Navarra.

I’m debating on whether or not to start a seperate blog for hbus. At the moment I’m leaning towards no: my thinking is that most people don’t care about the inner workings of a site like hbus. They just want to figure out how to get from point A to B. Those who do care can read the rest of what I (and my part time co-conspirator, Peter McCurdy) have to say.

The most glaring limitation in hbus right now is that its route coverage is woefully limited. Trips on the main Halifax peninsula are generally planned pretty effectively. If you’re travelling to a suburban area like Bayer’s Lake or Burnside, not so much (unless you’re lucky enough to be starting/ending near a bus timepoint). What is to be done?

A frequent suggestion I get from more technically minded folks is that I should “crowd source” the missing information. This basically implies creating a wikipedia-like architecture such that people could contribute their favourite stops, routes, etc.

It’s a tempting idea. Such sites as OpenStreetMap show that this approach can be very effective for gathering large amount of geographical data. I’m frankly not convinced it’s the right approach here though. The fact is that Metro Transit MUST have a complete set of stops, route schedules, and route plans internally. There’s no way they could plan their operations halfway effectively otherwise. Why should I burden the public with the task of recreating something which has already been done?

I may be crazy, but I think the best avenue for the moment is to try to convince Metro Transit that it would be worthwhile to make this information public. I paid for the generation of the information with my tax dollars, why shouldn’t I be able to make use of it? The preferred format for this information is Google Transit Data Feed, but I could make use of information in just about any representation (Arc GIS, etc.). Just give me what you have, and I’ll take of the rest. Over 20 of the most successful transit agencies in North America (many of them much bigger than Metro Transit) have opened up their information to the public, with only positive results.

The most obvious use of this information is a trip planner and, yes, I know every agency and their dog has (or will have) one of these. But maybe someone has a cool idea on how to make a trip planner easier to use (compare hbus.ca with Tous Azimuts). Or what about transit maps that help people figure out where to live? Or iPhone and Blackberry applications? Or cool screensavers? Or or or. The possibilities are truly endless once the data is out there. Come on Metro Transit, you have nothing to lose and the eternal love of your ridership to gain.

AbiWord 2.6.8 has been released a few days ago. It include some memory leak fixes and other that I backported from trunk. Thanks to all the contributors.

Also this year, again, AbiWord take part of the summer of code. See the list of suggested ideas.

I had a rather terrible experience with Net10 when I first tried to switch to them six months ago. After two DOA refurbished phones from them, I gave up on them and stuck with the carrier I already had.

After another spat with f-ing T-Mobile, I decided to try switching to Net10 again today. This time I just ponied up for a new phone at Best Buy. It activated without incident and my number was ported from T-Mobile in about an hour. This evening I've been finding all kinds of ways to avoid using up minutes. Looking over my cell bill for the last month, most of my calls were to 800 numbers while sitting at my desk. While Net10 still charges airtime for calls to toll-free numbers, they're completely free with Skype. That will shave about $13/mo worth of minutes off my bill.

For times that I do need to make long calls to non-free numbers, Skype offers $0.02/min calls and the new 4.0 version has improved call quality. I've already been slowly moving incoming business calls away from my cell and over to my SkypeIn number so I can use my headset while typing notes/researching code. I've also started using the "click to call" feature most business websites have where I can plug in my SkypeIn number and have them call me to avoid further cell charges.

In the end, it looks like my monthly cell usage will drop to about $20/mo from the $54/mo I was paying with T-Mobile. The more I work the numbers, the more I'm glad T-Mobile was boneheaded to the point that I left them.

Also, it seems every new phone is now intentionally loaded with the most obnoxious ringtones possible in an attempt to get you to buy a decent one from the carrier.

We're back and looking for students to mentor in AbiWord hacking for Google Summer of Code in 2009. Thanks Google! We really appreciate your support.

Here is a screencast of SVN AbiWord demonstrating Multipage view. The core of this feature was implemented by James Denton for his AbiWord GSoC 2008 project.

Warning 55 MB ogg!



This document is the 226 page RTF Specification, imported from RTF format.

Our list of suggested projects for 2009 is here. Feel free to suggest your own cool ideas too!

Just released AbiWord 2.6.8. This release contains a good number of fixes, most notably fixes to the auto-save function, improvements to the OpenDocument filters (thanks NLnet!) and a good number of memory leak fixes.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

As part of my master degree in computer science, that I completed last February, I had to do a final year project. I wanted to do a project that could match the academic requirements of my university and could also be useful to others and published as free software. After considering a few ideas and work out a few issues with the university, I decided to write a DVD authoring tool for GNU/Linux.

I think that Linux is still missing a few important tools in the multimedia area which I consider key for end users. I could not find any tool that could match iDVD alike user friendly and easiness. I have not obviously been the only one noticing this. The target audience for the final year project were end-users that required an easy to use tool for authoring DVD or slideshows for personal use. My mantra when writing the project has been:

• It is easy to install and use
• Written in a modern platform (Mono and C#)
• Built on top of GStreamer multimedia framework which allow to extend its capabilities
• It is highly extensible with extensions and themes

This is how Mistelix was born. My intention is to continue to further develop it and I hope that users and developers will find it interesting and will use it and contribute to it.

Oh, for those that wonder were the name Mistelix comes from. Mistelix is the result of the combination of the Catalan word Mistela and the ix part of the name Unix. Mistela is a traditional wine in Catalonia made by adding alcohol to non-fermented or partially fermented must.

 

Mistelix screenshot. There are more available at the project site.

Project status
I started to work on Mistelix 10 months ago (see some ohloh statistics). From the NEWS file what version 0.1 offers is: 

• Create slideshows from a set of images
• Include videos in your projects
• Create new slide transition effects using extensions
• Publish your projects into DVD or Theora videos
• Localizable to any language
• Save and load authoring projects

This version is able to produce DVDs and also slideshows for Theora. As a matter of fact that I produced already some DVD for my family, however version 0.1 is far from being feature complete or be ready for demanding end-users (no audio support for example yet).

The next steps are defined in the roadmap for version 0.2, mainly to rework the current Theme backend to empower users to do really cool projects easily, to add audio support and allow to do effects as extensions for the slides.

Download
You can download Mistelix from the download page, it is even already packaged for a few distributions. There is also a quick start use guide that shows briefly how to create a project.

The source code is available for now at Google Google Mistelix's project space. There are instructions on how to build it from sources.

Legal issues
If I had to define the current software patent system it will be something similar to the organized crime for which individuals, small companies, and free software projects are among the victims. The whole commercial audio and codec area is just a minefield. The MPEG-2 video compression format, required for DVD authoring, is protected by patents under United States law and international treaties. Most of the Linux distributions have currently no support for MPEG2.

Mistelix by default is packaged for several distributions. These packaged versions support only Theora slideshow authoring to make Mistelix compatible with the distribution of free software. However, installing a specially built gst-ffmpeg you can enable the DVD authoring functionality.

How to contribute
There are many ways of contributing to Mistelix. However, let me highlight three:

• Check ideas for contributing if you are a software developer.
• Help making Mistelix available to other languages (currently only available in Catalan and English). If you are fluent in other languages, with four hours of work approximately you can translate Mistelix and make it available to more users.
• Help to test and improve it. Mistelix is about users, give it a try and provide your feedback. 

I want to thank Jordi Ceballos my tutor at the university for the final year project, Jordi Irazuzta (early feedback working on the first extensions), Siegfried-Angel Gevatter (Ubuntu packages and early feedback) and Universitat de Lleida and Softcatalà for the hosting of the project web.

Questions or comments?
If you have questions, you can contact visit Mistelix's project web site where I maintain an early FAQ. There is additionally the Mistelix Google Group forum.

This year's GUADEC is two hours by plane from home. I hope to be able to go and be able to get together with other people interested in contributing to the project.

How you know that your wife rocks:

It's Friday the 13th, and she's giving her PhD dissertation in a few hours. At the last minute, she decides to slip a picture of her holding a sawz-all, looking all psycho-killer like, and the title music from "Friday the 13th" into her presentation.

Good luck Ruth!

Over the past few weeks, I've been trying to plow through Ayn Rand's enormous and verbose "Atlas Shrugged". I was finally starting to see some of the main mystery forming with industry grinding to a halt, the composer who vanished but still somehow composed, etc. Unfortunately, most of Colbert's program last night revolved around the novel and ended up giving away the plot before I got to it.

Need to pay better attention to my "spoiler alert" instinct.

Here we have gbrainy 1.1, six months after the previous version. gbrainy is a brain teaser game and trainer to have fun and to keep your brain trained. It provides the following types of games:

• Logic puzzles. Games designed to challenge your reasoning and thinking skills.
• Mental calculation. Games based on arithmetical operations designed to prove your mental calculation skills.
• Memory trainers. Games designed to challenge your short term memory.

What is new in version 1.1 from the NEWS file:

Version 1.1
* 4 new games
* Use Mono.Addins for extending gbrainy
* New translations
* Bug fixes

gbrainy 1.1 is available for download in source code from:

* http://gent.softcatala.org/jmas/gbrainy/gbrainy-1.1.tar.gz
      (md5sum 2c2ec926ad461c6f1a6da391615824ca)

Additionally, gbrainy is available for all major Linux distributions.

On top of the already existant translations, in this version debut the Chinese Simplified translation by Gan Lu and Brazilian Portuguese translation by Flamarion Jorge and Jonh Wendell. 

gbrainy virtual appliance

Jordi Massaguer has put together a virtual appliance for gbrainy 1.0 built with OpenSuse Studio. It boots into it, in fullscreen, and you can train your brain with multiple exercises.

gbrainy extensions

Starting with version 1.1 you can extend gbrainy easily with new games that you develop as independent extensions. These are external assembly files that gbrainy recognizes at runtime. The extensibility capabilities are provided by Mono.Addins framework. You do not need to recompile gbrainy. In gbrainy project's page you have more information on how to build extensions.

At gbrainy source code repository there is a directory called sample extensions that contain three sample extensions. Extensions are cool because empower any users to extend gbrainy with his own games. If you have questions building extensions, suggestions or you have a cool extension to share, let us know in the gbrainy public group.

Thanks to everyone that has given help or feedback to this version: Siegfried-Angel Gevatter, Sanjeev Nath, Jorge Gonzalez, Wolfgang Stöggl, Jaroslav Ryník, Núria Pedrola and Jordi Irazuzta. You guys rock.