The case of the GF

Lately things with my gf has been going great, then again it has always been something similar of an artform. Our relationship is deep but is not strong, actually I tink is very fragile.

Saying the bad thing on the wrong time can bring our relationship to a hault. I guess this is ok, since we haven’t know each other to appreaciate the defects vs. qualities. At the same time external factors can also make our relation stumble specially when we have no say on the circumstances.

Then again I am really enjoying this relationship and learning quite a few things about managing relationships. Is not easy and is far from safe. Actually is quite complicated and a lot of times I have proven myself wrong. I think this is more of a female relationship since I have needed to change a lot regarding her even if is not really the way I naturally am.

URE announced

Today the UNO framework would be separated from the OOo program. I have thought about this for a while and it sounds exciting. Imagine having office-like application development that share the same API framework. This will be interesting which at the same time we are looking for native widgets and making it look more natural to the enviroment.

So my point of view is how easy will it work with other frameworks such as XUL(XPCOM), COM, CORBA, etc which are other object models that will make the current desktop programming a whole universe of objects and stuff.

This will make it good for developers that have seen binding between languages and objects in stuff such as Mono to generate a interoperative enviroment. The funny thing is that .NET bindings are also the same for UNO bindings with languages such as Perl, C++, Basic, Java, Python etc. So I would go ummm… for some period since UNO seem very obscured and a lot of things have to be discovered.

Parsing OOoCalc with Python-SAX

Today I really felt like a developer…. well… almost.. 🙂

I actually went to the site of ActiveState and read a script for parsing the native XML file in MS Excel and modifiying so it will parse data from OOo Calc.

The result was great:

I got the data in both forms doing a simple modifications to the script. I did have to bang my head on a couple of things, one was the indentation and the other was the proper renaming of the tags.

I also could learn the difference between both MS-XML and OASIS XML. I did found that MS as always ignore W3C recomendations about keeping the tags on lowercases and also having a more straight forward xml construction which might be proven limiting on the long road.

I still need to test this solution in case the spreadsheets get complex and include formulas and fields. However so far it was a rewarding excercise and good PyXperience. 🙂

UNO components

Robert Voljta has started to get more techie about the Wavelet PyUno examples and he explains some of the basic syntax and components involved with OpenOffice.org.

He goes on explaining the way Jobs are declared from uno components/libraries. Is interesting when you see that the menu’s are based on xml and the way it integrates into the toolbar using a file called Addon.xcu.

I looked in the OpenOffice.org site about what are this xcu and found this link.

Webcast and SRC860

After a few days of having the complete OOo source code on my machine I have been able to look at it and see what’s in and what’s out. I most confess I havent really learn even a 10% of the tree structure, and I am looking desperately for some advice on how to read the tree. But for now I have seen some organization on this mass amount of files.

As I coment last week I saw many files from different languages working together on the same branch. I was amaized to see java, perl, cpp, XML and more, combined to generate our beloved OOo.

I have seen some orger in which every folder has a cvs/ some of them even have a res/ folder which holds different amounts of specifications.

One of the folders I really was excited about was the Webcast which is for impress and is dedicated to do some real streaming of presentations. Unfortunately Impress just do Perl and ASP. No PHP nor Python and I think it’s missing on a lot.

By the end of the day I’ve tried to fix some of the icons in the toolbar. They get deformed when a mouse is on top because they tried to go invisible and then you can see some holes actually perforing some of the images and pixelating most of them. However I have no luck and I will apriciate to get some answers on this.

More problems in heaven hell

So this complexity of troubles have combine to tie down and bring down the traineship to a complete hault. Now I am looking forward to see what other things I can do in this continent and if it’s worth it.

With people inviting me to western union and me finding not much in my current state, is it time to move on?

When I first came in, I had the vision of making a difference and even increase my general knowledge of technology. I found not just that but much more. Unfortunately some of that more is not necesary good much. I have found myself fighting uphill battles with work, gf, immigration, roomate and open source.

Yes sometimes I create my own crypt but the combinations of constant fights has weared me down a bit and I think I will soon find my way to a new enviroment.

So the good things out of all this experience, I guess is not to trust too many people and just learn more stuff than the average people. Finding information is tricky business and even if I have computers and communiation right now, I still have stuff to come forward with.

Use the SRC680

So I just download the SRC from OOo and I found out that well is bigger than life. At least bigger than my HD as I had to wait for almost 1 hour after the tar -xvzf to just find out my HD has run out of space. Still itneresting stuff was found between folders and files written in cpp, perl, java, etc.

The next thing would be how long will it take to compile which is something much more scary. I guess it will come the day when I have to do this eventually but I am not sure when exactly will this happened.

Man of No Land part 3

Some of the latest episodes of the Man of no land series. I have been working hard fixing my visa status. But the game raised up since the last time. Now I found myself in budapest struggling to get my visa worked out. The visa papers were valid but the Consul didn’t thought so and I found myself in a trap and griying to make sense and what to do according to this events.

Now I finally worked out something that looks more like a jigpuzzle where I will require intense logistic and working through the process of going back and forth mantaining legalibility with an expense of 60 fucking euros and a total of about 300 USD total.

Finally I will be arriving back in Rumania on saturday morning and will return to my apartment but the walk wouldn’t be over until I can send my passport and get it stamped in Mexico.

Confusing? I know… Messed up… definetly…

Michael Meeks in LUGRadio

A lil bit late but I listen this week to LUGRadio which invited Michael Meeks to talk about the state of the development of OpenOffice.org and what is looking in the horizon for the OOo.

I liked the interview for the most part, but I do agree with some communication Issues around the OOo community. Until the leaders that the mailing list is not the ideal way to manage a community and also promote the community changes to the larger community is not functionable functionable.

Instead we see the leaders attacking projects such as SpreadOpenOffice.org which is created with the intend exactly to promote the OOo as a product and as a community.

While other communities like the Mozilla already going to the next step making announcements using the Flash Video and similars.

Still OpenOffice.org people have come up with interesting animations which I safely guard on my HD and show it to my friends whenever I have the chance. I think that once we start accepting the potential of PodCasting, and RSS and using them to a larger degree we will be able to enhance this community and hopefully make it grow more and more.

Most of the topics of the interview were interesting such as the importance of the UNO flexibility and bridging to modern languages. I do hope that Python developers help the pyUNO speed up it’s integration with OOo and solve the logistic problems. If you think you can help please check the UDK mailing list.

Bloq finally working…

So after the server upgrade and the temporary halt of my blog, I am back with some interesting news about what’s going on. I got mad stuff to do regarding my visa issues and deal with the MVP of Romanian Bureacracy as well as some updates on the INGOTs site.

Fortunately, I also have some good news about last week as the week with my gf turned out to be excellent and I might see more of these days comming if everything goes like it has been in recent days.

I plan to get more into PHP as I recognize that the OOoXtremo has come again into a halt due all my Internet related issues and more.