Finished!

I couldn’t resist working on ecal today. Now that its committed to OpenedHand’s svn server, it’s shameful that it doesn’t work properly – But it does now! As far as I can tell, all show-stopping bugs have now been fixed πŸ™‚ The last two major ones, which have been plaguing me for a good 2 weeks were caused by one missing line ‘priv->type = type;’. An uninitialised variable. Hours of debugging and picking up the smallest of bugs and typos, and I miss an uninitialised variable… Typical! Will see if I can get that committed, along with my ‘let things build against it’ changes on Monday πŸ™‚

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Taking DBus

Well, work on all other things has stopped as I join the guys at OpenedHand for the summer πŸ™‚ I’ve been working on porting the evolution calendar back-end to DBus, based on the address-book back-end already completed by Ross Burton (an eployee at OpenedHand). Progress is going well – I’ve learnt more in this last two weeks than I have in the past 2 years (nb: exaggeration), and its been lots of fun so far. I’ve finally made some head-way and the back-end is very close to being functional (with a little faffing, you can view calendars and events in evolution). I hope to make it feature-complete and not *too* buggy this coming week, and hopefully it’ll get committed to the OH svn, and eventually, perhaps, up-stream. It feels good to be working on my first major contribution to open-source, even if it is heavily derivative of someone else’s work πŸ™‚ Punnet did make a fair bit of progress before I started working, however. I don’t feel like releasing the source just yet, there just isn’t enough there… But I ported all the drawing code from gdk to OpenGL (using GtkGLExt) and added support for the 3rd dimension and keyboard input, along with lots of smaller features. I don’t know when I’ll have the time to work on it again, but if I see it dying, I’ll stick the source-code up. On a personal note, I haven’t had the time to catch up with all the people I meant to yet, I must get round to it soon… Also, no regrets about turning down IBM. I’ll probably apply again next year though, the experience was worth it πŸ™‚

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Holidays!

Wow, so it’s been a while since my last post… I guess exams do that to a guy. I’ve got lots of catching up to do, e-mails to write, presents to buy (birthdays), work to do, etc. Since the last update, I turned down IBM for OpenedHand (and can’t wait to start!) and started work on a new, small, spare-time project, which has been named ‘punnet’. Originally, I wanted to write an improved version of the excellent game apricots, but as often happens, things expanded. My main two goals were to get an improved, and possibly multiplayer-able version of apricots, and to get a reasonable knowledge of gtk+-2 doing so. I was going to call this ‘peaches’ (because peaches are a superior alternative to apricots). I got to talking with some friends at university, and I was put onto a nifty embeddable language, Lua. That’s when things changed – The idea evolved into a general purpose engine (at the moment, 2d, but very easily extendable to more dimensions) that uses gtk to provide an interface and drawing functions, and gives a small-ish set of c functions to lua scripts to use. A friend quite aptly named this ‘punnet’ (a type of basket, often used for holding fruit). At the moment, it has the ability to load lua scripts, which can then provide functions for the other scripts to use, and/or to be run once on initialisation, and/or to be run on every screen update. I’ve also written a fairly nice (HIG-compliant? Not totally sure…) interface for selecting what scripts you want to activate. To demonstrate the abilities of the engine, and to give myself a little start in Lua, I’ve written two scripts, that when activated together, bounce a ball around the screen πŸ™‚ At the moment, there are many missing feature, most importantly, input and network support… I have some interesting ideas for the network support, but whether things happen or not is yet to be seen. Source will be online as soon as I get input and a slightly better demo sorted. Screenshot

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IBM

Had the final IBM assessment day today… Was very… interesting. Kinda fun, would’ve been nice if it wasn’t so early in the day though. I think I did ok, I’m certainly more interested in working for them than I was before, having met some IBM employees – Very nice people. Will blog some more later in the week, too busy and tired to do so now… Regretting not taking the day off work.

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