It’s been almost a month and a half and my blogging has been quite absent. Here’s what has been happening…
Life
Our trip to San Jose (last month) went great. We had 4 days to bum around Silicon Valley and the surrounding areas. Since this was a vacation, we decided not to do too much and really only did one touristy thing: we went down to Carmel and 17 mile drive for a day. It was fun and it was a really beautiful area. And the driving out there wasn’t too bad. The Dojo Developer Day (which is what I went out there for in the first place) went great as well.
Dojo
Dojo has been taking off recently. Last month, we released 0.3.0 and about a week ago we released 0.3.1. For the 0.3.0 release, I refactored/rewrote the effects portion, James Burke wrote a cross-domain loader, Tom Trenka added a Google and Yahoo! maps interface, and Torrey Rice added the new widget theme. There was more, but those are the ones that stick out in my mind. We had about 50k downloads in the month that 0.3.0 was out. For 0.3.1, the cross-domain loading has been improved and we have a cross-domain package now, plus AOL is now hosting Dojo on their CDN, IBM is actively helping with a11y, and Sun just announced they are going to start developing widgets for Dojo. All-in-all, it’s been a good month.
Ok, so I said I would keep up with this blogging thing, but I’m not doing a very good job. It’s been over two months since I last blogged. What the heck is my problem? So here’s the run-down of what I’ve been doing:
Work
I’ve been steadily plugging away at Master Packing’s web site over the last two months. I’ve been trying to implement interactive features to some fairly boring things. Once its up, I’ll highlight what I’ve done, but until then, I’ve got to explain. On the mechanical packing page, I’ve used the Tree widget from Dojo to let you figure out which style of our mechanical packing matches other companies’ packing. Also, you can compare the temperature, pH, and speed ratings on all the mechanical packing we offer using the SortableTable widget. On the rail and marine page, you’ll be able to search for a partial or complete EMD number and the server will show you what part number we sell that part under and also suitable replacements. This search feature is something that isn’t available anywhere else in the EMD aftermarket industry. We should have it up and running by mid April. I’ll definately post when it’s up.
JavaScript
For the last month, I’ve been delving deep into the world of JavaScript for SitePen. It has taken me a while, but I think I’ve gotten the hang of the prototype-base inheritance that JavaScript uses. I think I’m past the fact that you can extend the prototype of any class so if you want a new method or want to modify an old method, you don’t create a new class. You just “mask” the old method on the current class. Coming from C++, that blew my mind.
Coaster
Development has pretty much stalled. I’ve been so busy with life, music, Dojo, Django, work, contracting, and everything else that I haven’t had time to sit down and code on Coaster for a long time. Also, the success of programs like Serpentine have shown me that other people are more motivated than I am. If someone wants to take the coding portion of the project over, contact me or Sean Harshbarger on the Coaster mailing list.
I’d like to point out that yes, I know that version 1.3.2 of Drivel supports the MovableType API. I checked out CVS head to do my hacking because 1.3.2 was sending integers for the blogid and postid and the MovableType API wants strings for those values. If your blog software accepts 1.3.2 posting to an mt blog, then its probably not adhering to the mt API which probably means that it is broken. That is all 
.
I’ve hacked Drivel to work with the MovableType API (and I filed a bug as well) so hopefully I’ll be blogging more often. I continue to work on audio support in Coaster, so look for a release sometime in the next month!
The Coaster site is down. Sean forgot to renew our registrar stuff and the result is what you have now. For now, the Coaster tarball is located here. Sorry for the inconvenience.
This last week I started working on audio disc support in Coaster. It has been interesting trying to figure out the Gstreamer library and how to get it to interact well with Coaster without using a wrapping library (to save you guys the hassle of another binding dependency). So far, I have some test programs that read in the information I need; next thing to do is to get an audio store, layout, and view up and going.
Version 0.1.4.2 of Coaster is here. Here is what I have changed/fixed in this release:
Changes:
- Added French translation (thanks Samuel Mutel).
- Updated libegg from CVS Head.
- Changed some labels to be more HIG compliant.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed crashes on amd64 (#165711).
Version 0.1.4.1 of Coaster is here. Here is what I have added/fixed in this release:
Changes:
- Added German translation (thanks Daniel Holbach).
Bug Fixes:
- Patched libegg with fix used in gedit for the recent files bug (#165655).
Version 0.1.4 of Coaster is here. Here is what I have added/fixed in this release:
Changes:
- Updated libnautilus-burn wrappers to work with version >= 2.9.0.
- Bumped gtkmm dependency to >= 2.5.5.
- Removed dependency on bakery.
- Moved all store transformations to within the store.
- Added base classes to make it easy to make more layout types.
- Implemented the tray icon instead of wrapping libegg’s version.
- Added a progress dialog to show files that are opening.
- Added screenshots in the help file.
Bug Fixes:
- Checkbox issue in chooser (#158662).
- Detachable toolbar always on (#158655).
- Wrong rename accelerator key (#158658).
- ISO’s deleted (#162733).
- Unhandled exception with missing icon in gnome theme (#163188).
- Crashes in gconf dialogs.
As Murray blogged about earlier, the API for all the *mm projects is frozen until the next release cycle. I think we got all of Glib and Gtk+ wrapped this time around and we fixed some things in Gconfmm (setting lists).
I have updated Coaster to use the new API such as Gtk::AboutDialog, Gtk::FileChooserButton, the ellipsize properties of labels and Gtk::CellRendererText’s, and I have created a history combobox (much like GnomeEntry) for the find dialog. This means that Coaster will depend on Gtkmm >= 2.5.5 and Gconfmm >= 2.9.2. I also updated my wrappers on nautilus-cd-burn to the new 2.9.4 API. I should have a release out by tomorrow, but, if you know my record on releases, don’t hold your breath .
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