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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June 1, 2007 by Mark.

I have been cursed blessed with a blog!

In my efforts to keep everyone informed of what I do, I have become backlogged with questions about this, that, and the other thing. So, this is a place where I will be able to spew my thoughts out in a semi-coherent manner consisting of run-on sentences and poorly structured paragraphs. More specifically, this blog will contain information about what I do, the status of various projects, and any other itches that needs to be scratched.

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