Moving innovations

Yesterday was a grey and drab cold winter day, but with not much wind and not much precipitation it actually was not that bad. Besides, what better remedy for the Christmas festivities than a nice brisk walk outside in near-freezing conditions. Given that we did not have to rely on public transport we took the opportunity to explore the aera in between the main rivers in the Netherlands, the Land van Maas en Waal. Due to the cold and the flat light there were not that many photo opportunities, the picture belongs really sums it up quite well.

Finally I’ve pushed almost all pending patches and fixes for XEmacs into portage. XEmacs 21.4.20-r1 fixes a recently uncovered crash when playing wavs using linux native audio on 64-bit systems by trying to cast an int into a size_t. Even though this stops xemacs from crashing after trying to play a sound, something still isn’t quite right as the sounds sound very funny. Therefore I have also added the esd USE flag so that esound can be used to play the sounds.

In addition to these XEmacs changes a whole set of packages have also been released. Most of these have been in pre-release for several months, so it’s good to see them finally released. All of these have been added as well. Most of the packages only have minor bug fixes, except for app-xemacs/calendar which got a lot of new functionality added.

I suspected that this would happen in the end: getting sucked further into Gentoo and not being able to just tend to the XEmacs packages. But not to have it happen so soon, even before committing all the XEmacs bug fixes that I have pending. Not something I expected, but there you have it: gtk-gnutella 0.96.3 is now in portage. To keep my sanity I tell myself that this is only because I’ve been involved with upstream for this package for a long time.

That argument goes out the window, though, because I also took net-misc/drivel under my wing, committing version 2.0.3. I’m using it right now to write this blog post. And for good measure I also version bumped dev-ruby/rmagick because all the versions currently in portage got broken by the most recent ImageMagick upgrades. RMagick 1.14.1 is now in portage to remedy this, which is a good thing because we use RMagick quite a bit at work to create icons automatically.

Fortunately I also got to do some work on XEmacs. Version 21.4.19-r1 now installs a desktop icon and offers a few more USE flags to enable specific functionality,

This weekend I’ve added the last few missing XEmacs packages to Gentoo, so that Gentoo now carries the complete set of lisp packages as they are supported upstream. Actually, there are still a few packages that need sorting out. app-xemacs/ess does not seem to be packaged anymore upstream, even though the package source is still in CVS so that warrants some investigation.

The app-xemacs/liece package will be removed and is currently in package.mask, because it is no longer developed and no longer carried upstream. The liece author suggests to use app-xemacs/riece instead. liece will be removed at the end of the year.

The sumo package (xemacs-packages-sumo) has not been updated yet. This package basically contains all of the other packages in a single archive, and for Gentoo it makes more sense to turn this into a meta-package. This still allows all lisp packages to be installed from a single Gentoo package, but it avoids carrying all lisp packages twice, and the inclusion of a whole set of blockers on all these packages (because the sumo package and the individual packages install the same files). Work is currently underway to create such a package,

Next stop: cleaning up the XEmacs editor ebuild and adding fixes for its many open bugs.

One of the major annoyances in being the financial guy in our office is the accounting software we use. I would normally use something like GnuCash if it was just about keeping the books, and in fact I do for my personal finances, but with a company things are more complicated and it makes sense to use the same software as our accountant so that files can be swapped easily. This works fairly well in general, but the accounting software is really the laughing stock of usability in our office.

Let’s put the blame where it belongs: we are using Unit 4 Multiverse Lite. They kindly offered us a year-long free license, so perhaps I should not look a gift horse in the mouth, but really… In a way it is a shame I don’t teach usability classes anymore, this software alone would have made wonders for course material. Normally I would just rant and bother my co-workers, but since I’m working at home I’ll do it here. We just got a new version of the software which does some things a bit differently, and some a bit better, but let me tell you about two things I ran into today.

First of all I had to import an electronic bank statement and process it. It was the usual mix of bills we paid, bills other people paid to us, and some transactions from our debit card. After handling all this I clicked on the save icon, and nothing happened. I tried to close the window, but no, there are unsaved edits, and would I like to save? Yes. Nothing happens. Would I like to save. YES! … Anyway, with some careful debugging, walking step-by-step through the procedure and saving each step, I finally found that in one of the sub-windows I did not enter an amount, which it provided by itself in the previous version. It let me happily close that window, and it did not tell me that anything was wrong during saving, let alone tell me what. I wonder how normal people, i.e. without an IT background, solve these problems.

So than the next thing on my list was to pay some more bills. Not a fun thing to have to do in the first place, but at least this time it got interesting. Paying bills is a two step process. First you enter them and then in a separate step you can actually pay them. So I entered a bill, went to the second step, and clicked the bill to pay it. Happily the application informed me that this was going to be a foreign payment, and how would I like to handle this. Except it wasn’t a foreign payment. Again some careful debugging and manual reading let me to the solution. The way bank account details are entered got changed a bit, and I entered all the data I assumed the application expected, including the country code. “Aha!”, the application though, “This bank account has a country code, so it must be foreign.” Well, no, because I’m in the same country, dummy. After removing the country code things worked fine again.

Don’t worry, there are plenty more stories like this, but I’ll keep the other good usability horror stories about Unit 4 Multiverse LIte for another time.

This weekend I finally got to work on Gentoo after getting my access all set up last weekend. So, after two days of committing a lot of changes, most of the 118 XEmacs packages are now up-to-date again in portage. Not everything is done yet: some new packages still need to be added, and I have some minor keywording issues to be resolved with some of the other packages. But it is a good start towards getting XEmacs back in shape in Gentoo.

Finally my recruitment process has been finished and I am now an official Gentoo developer. Today I’ve started by setting up common stuff such as email, herd, bugzilla searches, etc. Next on the list is updating xemacs and related packages. I’ve begun to remove some old xemacs packages from the tree to get a better understanding of how things work. Especially repoman is a tool that can’t really be practised with, as is true for some of the special portage features. I’ve only seem to have messed up once, checking in the wrong metadata file, but that was easily fixed.

Next step is a mega-update for xemacs, consisting of most of the fixes that have been sitting in my overlay for quite a while. I’m currently sorting all of it out, so that all the associated bugs can also be closed.

I figured it would be nice today to spend an hour or so to add an ICS calendar to the HCI Index listing all the events in the HCI Index. This allows you to easily import HCI events into your own calendar. Each event also contains the conference URL so that it is easy to get additional information quickly. The calender is in standard iCalendar format (or so I hope), so it should work with most calendar applications.

I haven’t added deadlines yet and I’m not sure whether that is useful or not, so feel free to leave comments about that.

Every fall I try to plan a hike so that I get to walk on a carpet of fallen leaves, kicking them up on occasion, and listening to the sounds that makes. Yesterday was such a day. It would have been even better with a bit more sunshine and some dramatic dark-grey clouds in the sky being swept by by a stormy wind, but at least it didn’t rain.

We hiked in the Gooi area, just north of Hilversum, about half forest and half parkland belonging to some estates, with some smithereens of moorland. The forest was varied and especially on the way back had some really nice leaf-covered paths. The parkland was varied with open fields, water features and beech-lined lanes. Recommended.

8 months ago I dislocated my shoulder while skiing. During the last two months I finally got full motion back in my shoulder, so today I figured that skiing would be a good idea to test this. Actually full motion in the shoulder isn’t really needed for skiing, but anyway… Testing my new ski boots was another good reason to go skiing, or so I told myself, so I’ve been to the indoor ski track. The girl at the ticket counter warned that it was icy, and boy was she right. No problem, though, as I got back into the movements really quickly, and even at the first run I was flying confidently on top of the snow.

Even though it’s just an indoor track it made me realize how I missed out last holiday, and it reaffirmed my idea to go skiing in the Alps for a long weekend in December, provided a decent amount of snow falls before that time. I did try to make a picture while in the lift, but it wasn’t that good. Actually, it was so bad I’m not showing it here in the blog.