June 27, 2007 by Mark.

I just got word that Bjarne Stoustrup, the creator of C++, will be giving a lecture at University of Toronto. This is such a great opportunity for anyone in the area to see this man in person. Although, the topic of the lecture is still up in the air, the sheer fact of meeting a legend amongst the coder community is thrilling. This man has been an inspiration to many people, including myself and many of my colleagues at school. Here is the Information:

Event: Bjarne Stoustrup at University of Toronto
Title: “C++0x Support for Generic Programming”
Host: IEEE Toronto Computer Chapter
When: Friday, July 20 at 6:30pm
Where: Bahen Centre for Information Technology, University of Toronto

I will post more details as I get them.

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June 19, 2007 by Mark.

Fridrich enlightened me on the ways of using the Linker environment variables and my libsvg woes have been shelved. So, my coding progress as afoot again. here are the results of my current test to get lines working. The scaling is a bit off (which I’m trying to fix at the moment) but if everything works as planned, I should have the majority of the functionality finished by the midterm review.

My output is available here.

Original output is available here.

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June 17, 2007 by Mark.

My OO.o work is relying heavily on the SVG library (libsvg) for parsing unfortunately. And currently, that specific library is not being cared for and has sat at its current version for a while now. I believe the last major update was sometime in 2005. So either its a shining example of perfect programming or its forgotten about. Remarkably, this is where the majority of my problems lie!

First off, the library itself does not accept streams and therefore requires direct access to a file, which may or may not be local to the user. Secondly, it requires the JPEG library (libjpeg). While I was building libsvg, it linked to the JPEG library correctly and without incident. But, when you try to link to the libsvg library, it freaks out saying that it cannot find libjpeg. Now the question is weather to continue developing and trying to fix the SVG library or modifying the code to use the internal XML parser inside of OpenOffice [Pastebin’d Error: http://pastebin.ca/570784]. Eventually, according to my mentor, libsvg will get replaced with the internal parser, but when this will happen, I am not sure.

On the other hand, while casually looking around for a solution to the above error, I actually got a nice chunk of coding done. I added functionality for line drawing, as well as some other minor things. Nothing too spectacular, but once the compile bug is fixed, there will be some visual feedback. Joy.

Tea is needed in vast Quantities!

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June 14, 2007 by Mark.

Lately, I’ve been integrating some of Kendy’s code into my own. I’m still not sure if I have the initial reading of SVG files right; the extension still doesn’t show up in the File Types list when I try to open a file. It is really hard to see where I am going wrong because I do not have enough experience with the code to actually determine the cause of my mistake. The code itself relies on so many different objects and name spaces that it is easy to get lost in there.

Regardless, I have received one of the crowning moments from my paintball trip. Check it out here.

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June 12, 2007 by Mark.

So, I forgot to set an environment variable while building some of my code and it turns out that the ESP Package Manager (EPM), specifically the version that comes with the SRC680_m211 build of OOo, has a bit of a buffer overflow in it. If your using long file names or paths that have more then 255 characters in it, you will get a nice warm and fuzzy segmentation fault. I never noticed this before. Also, apparently the newest version of EPM (4.1) fixes this bug.
Lovely.

Anyway, I’m still trying to get auto-recognition of SVG files to work. I’m lost in a sea of code. More on this later.

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June 9, 2007 by Mark.

I’ve been having fun poking through code but its about time to plug some of my changes into the build. I managed to put together some files that will allow OpenOffice to know that *.SVG files can now be imported even though the actual logic for importing them is not there yet. Nevertheless, I plugged them into the build and…failure. I don’t see the extension being registered inside the File>Open dialog. One reason why this might be is because of the fact that the tags and attributes in the *.xcu files I wrote were basically copied and pasted right from some site. Also, the meaning of those tags and what they do is beyond my level of understanding, at this point. Am I missing something? I hope there is a page on the wiki that explains what they mean…somewhere. Another thing I noticed is that the code inside OpenOffice reaches so far deep into other sources files, that it would probably take one man a thousand years just to understand it all. Its like trying to straighten out Christmas lights that are tangled up into a web the size of several football fields.

It’s time to blow off some steam. 14hr work days are starting to take their toll on me and I have an itch that needs scratching. An itch that can only be fulfilled by blasting paint at others. Thats right! Paintball.

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June 7, 2007 by Mark.

While building OpenOffice (ooo-build), I noticed somewhat of an easter egg. Who said developers only drink Coke and Coffee?

…
Checking for source packages in /home/markp/ooo-build/src
Looking for src680-m211-core.tar.bz2 … ok
Unpacking OO.o build tree - [ go make some tea ] …
Unpacking src680-m211-core.tar.bz2…
…
You don’t argue with a script, you do what it says. Tea was good.

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June 5, 2007 by Mark.

It took a little bit of massaging but it runs. OpenOffice runs! I had a few problems with some of the settings on Hera that took a bit of digging to fix. When building upstream, its important to note that the RPM macros (mainly %_rpmlock_path) are set inside your local directory (eg. ~/OOoInstall/.RPM_DATABASE/__db.000) or else it will complain about file locks. One thing that I noticed when asking for help, different people will give you different ways of building and installing OpenOffice. This is probably true for many Open Source projects that are as large as OOo.

Behold OpenOffice.org, its all its glory!

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June 4, 2007 by Mark.

Turns out building OpenOffice is not the most pleasant adventure. Currently I posed a question on the OpenOffice IRC channel about some odd feedback that I received from the OOo install script. The contents of the output can be seen here. I have a feeling that I probably skipped a step or messed something up somewhere. A fellow that goes by the handle ‘hub’ has been helping me solve the majority of problems, he is a great sport. Thanks hub. In any case, compiling is not a problem anymore.

On another note, this week I’ll have a chance to talk to Chris Tyler, a professor at Seneca College, about his upcoming OpenOffice hacking course. Some of the things that I am doing now might help him create the curriculum for the September semester.

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June 2, 2007 by Mark.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday writing (the beginnings of) a physics engine for work. In fact, there is probably more blood, sweat and tears in those 300 or so lines of code then in anything I have done recently. There are diagrams, math books, and crazy formulae scribbled on napkins all over my room, laid out in an almost symmetrical circle around my chair. Lets just say the engine is far from finished. The lack of any sensible code would probably make physicists around the world weep. Regardless, the engine does what its meant to (thus far) and makes it appear that the programmer that actually wrote it, knew what he was doing. I still have a few bugs to flush out and if Anand finds it in his heart, there might be a neat demo available.

On to the real work.

Dave has been kind enough to supply me what a fairly fast machine for all my OpenOffice hacking needs; and I am the more grateful. The box runs CentOS 4.5, which is perfect for compiling OpenOffice, if you know what your doing. I must admit, I am not as Linux savvy as some of my friends are, so many of the tasks that are ahead of me require many hours of looking up on Google. Contrary to all my problems, the OpenOffice community has been very helpful as well as all my friends on IRC. More so are my coding efforts. Ive been digging around the source tree, looking through code, and I believe that I have found a suitable spot to put my filter. Hopefully in the next few days, once OOo compiles, Ill be able to write some test code. Hello Cruel World!

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