I decided upon lookiung through the documentation for the latest version of libvtemm that the running of the build commands needed a revamp. Previously the build output just plowed on regardless of whether the previous command succeeded or failed. This as you would guess is bad, you want to find out things have fallen apart as soon as possible without the follow on errors that are caused by an early command failing. Lucky for me the latest version of libvtemm (0.20.2) makes this very easy to do.
While stopping the build from running is a good start there was still more to be done, namely some way to indicate to the user the status of the build. To deal with this a bit more of a serious refactoring was required, this substantially changed the code of the build output class to such a degree that it no longer inherits from the same widget as it did before. Thankfully though it allowed for non-obtrusive place to add feedback to the user. With this in mind a progress bar was also added so that a user could tell how far along the build was at a glance.
Perhaps the most sane part of the change to build system is that now when the a build is initiated the if the build output is not visible it will be made visible, something that is should have been doing from the start. Finally a couple of pictures to show how the new build system looks in various states.
As I mentioned earlier tonight here is my coding related post, since the 14th I haven’t really worked on gIDE until today. I finally got the build system all finished and integrated into the rest of the application. You can now happily define and run the commands needed to build your project. The following images show gIDE building a test project and the other shows the dialog for defining the build commands. I am currently not very happy with the properties dialog but am yet to think of anything better so what I have will have to do for now.
gIDE building a C++ Autotools test project
Defining the commands to build your project
I’m happy to have finally gotten this finished as it was the big feature I wanted done before I would eat my own dog food and use gIDE to develop gIDE. I also took this oppurtunity to port gIDE from vte to vtemm which made the task of the code to set the commands a lot easier than a previous attempt I had made with vte, this does mean however that there is now a dependency in gIDE that is to the best of my knowledge not included in any distrobution. I do not see this as being much of a problem however because the primary audience for gIDE is developer most of whom would know how to build a library from source.
In a small return to blogging I thought I would start off with some transformers news. Earlier today I saw some new transformers footage over at Seibertron so I thought I would share it with you all.
The footage is originally from Michael Bay’s website, I’m also giving a link to the Seibertron story as well because there are a lot of still shots there. Hopefully later tonight I should be making another post about more coding related stuff.
Edit (~approx 5:50pm NZ): Well I took the video off of this post because I didn’t have permission to show it, which is a bugger but meh. You can see the footage either here or here.
Edit 2 (6:10pm NZ): It would seem that the official versions of the video are being pulled from everywhere seibertron no longer can show it and there is no sign of it anywhere on Michael Bay’s site. luckily though I found it on youtube, who knows how long this one is going to last though.
So lately I’ve been doing little to no work on gIDE, which while it is not unusual it is a little disappointing as I had hoped to have made at least one release by now. With that in mind and the fact that I don’t have anything planned for this weekend I sat down and listed all of the features that I needed and wanted to have before I made an initial release. The plan is to sit down this weekend and knock as many of these things out before the weekend is over and make a release, will I hold true to this? I do not know, my track record of promises similar to this (which you should be able to find in the archives of this blog) is not stellar. Heres hoping I follow through on it this time. Now onto the important part of this post the lists:
Of the things that is on these lists the one that I am not really sure about is the moving from vte to vtem, while vtemm would fit in better with the rest of the application it is currently not packaged with any of the major distros. This leads to the problem which is more important the design of the application or the ability of people to run the software? I’m sure I will have some comments about this in the next couple of days.
All going well I should hopefully make a blog post after I finish each feature, or for a couple of less screenshot worthy features I might just save them until a screenshot worthy one is finished before making a posting.
Close to a month ago now I wrote about what I got up to on my holiday and I said I had started a new project Cuttlefish - a syntax highlighting text box for .Net. I also said that I would post about in more depth later, so far that hasn’t happened. This is mostly because I haven’t actually finished cuttlefish and I haven’t a lot of time to code lately. The other big reason is I recently picked up a copy of Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries and found that my little project needs a quite a bit of refactoring to be compliant with these guidelines. I hope to get started on the compliance work tonight, once that refactoring is done it shouldn’t take to long to finish it off. With all that in mind it hopefully won’t be to long before I am able to show cuttlefish off.
Those who read my last blog (which all got wiped when I moved to the new server) would know I am a huge fan of the Transformers, I’m mostly G1 guy (though Beast Wars and Animated come in tied for a close second) and at the moment my preferred continuity is the IDW universe. In this mornings wandering around the internet I happened across the super bowl spot for the next transformers movie and all I can say is GLEE it looks awesome and I’m told that Soundwave and Ravage will appear (I’m pretty sure that Ravage is in the spot). Anyway I thought I would share the video with you all on the odd chance you don’t happen across it yourself.
So I think I’m becoming addicted to statistics, for those of you who have either been reading my blog for a while or have gone back through the archives you will have noticed that it wasn’t until recently that I started posting frequently. I’m going to come out and say that I think that this is because I’m now collecting statistics about visitors to this site. I recently installed StatPress Reloaded largely out of curiosity to see what sort of data I could get from it. I made a couple of posts here and there to see what sort of traffic I got, from there it has turned almost into a craving to see the graph peek after each post like a junkie seeking their next hit.
I find it odd that my motivation to blog wasn’t triggered by the urge to show off the work which I have been doing, but instead it’s by a group of coloured boxes that vary in height and I wonder slightly what that says about me. Whatever that does say about the kind of person I am it has the good side effect of I’m now doing more work on my personal projects, due to the more work I do the more material I have to blog about. It has thrown up a couple of interesting facts that I wasn’t expecting as well such as - currently I get over 4 times more referrals from Windows Live search than what I get from Google (which was perhaps the biggest surprise), that some of the most requested pages don’t actually exist and it’s mostly Canadians that are requesting them (I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there).
I’ve been back at work a couple of days and once again settling back into the daily grind. I had originally decided to make a series of posts once I got back from holiday called ‘Holiday Hacking’ which would detail the coding that I got up to during my time off, as it happens there was just one small hitch in that plan - I didn’t do much coding in my time off. It would seem that I choose to relax these holidays rather than try and chip away at my to do list for gIDE. While I didn’t work on gIDE this holiday I did however start a new project: Cuttlefish. I plan to go into this in more depth in a later post so for now just let me say that it is a syntax highlighting Textbox component for .Net written in C#.
I have been doing a little bit of work around the site as well, mostly involving integration with my facebook account (which I’m intending to give more attention to this year). For those that haven’t noticed (or read this via rss) a link to my profile now appears in the in the sidebar and all of my posts should hopefully be appearing on said profile. This has the added side effect of some of my friends who hadn’t noticed it before get to see how truly geeky I am. For those who are interested the two plugins I am using for the integration are Wordbook and Facelook.
Today is my last day of work for this year, I have three weeks of holidays to look forward to. I’m going to see family for Christmas and it is looking increasing likely that I am going to end up at some random lake to catch up with a few friends for new years. The downside to this is thanks to my current living arrangement it means I’m going to all but drop off the internet for those three weeks, this isn’t a necessarily a bad thing though as it is going to give me a lot of time to work on gIDE.
I was hoping to have the first release of gIDE done before Christmas which is looking increasingly less likely, so much so that I’m not going to bother with it any more. There isn’t a lot that I have to get done before I’m happy to make a release, these will also be the first things on my list of things I am going to work on during my time off. In no particular order the features are:
Find/Replace
Project Properties
Generic Build System
Document split view
I’m also considering implementing a limited subset of vim commands, though I think I will wait until after this release in the hopes of getting some user feedback on what they think would be the most useful commands to include.
In other news I recently saw The Day the Earth Stood Still. To be honest I was not that impressed, the movie seemed to trying to get a message across but not succeeding, at times I even felt that the movie wasn’t overly sure what that message should be. The casting for the movie however was spot on, especially with Keanu Reeves. Also a couple of days ago I recommended that you go read Pictures of You by Gibson Twist, from there I got linked to another webcomic of his which I enjoyed. So if you enjoyed Pictures of You you might also want to check out Our Time in Eden.
