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Sun, 31 Dec 2000
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Hmmmm. What did I do today? I went to church, and then put new mulch and weed mat on the front garden. I made a point of not doing any work on PandaLex because I figured I needed a break.
There was a new years somewhere in there as well.
Tried to upgrade the version of pine on my Redhat Sparc machine. It was made much harder because of the RPMs for openssl being incorrectly labelled -- the RPMs handed out are actually for x86 machines. I had to download the source and compile it, which involved manging the makefiles to give me shared libraries...
I'm now running a new version of Pine, which makes it all worth while.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Fri, 29 Dec 2000
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Nearly the end of the year. Slept until Noon (which is very rare for me), went into the centre of town (which is rare for me), and then came home. Checked my email, and decided it was time to upgrade to Pine 4.31...
Whoever organises the compiles for Pine needs their head read. God if it isn't a mess... I couldn't get it to work. Posted a message to the slug mailing list asking for advice.
It is 9pm, and I think I have goofed off enough for today... Coding time!
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Don't ask. It's all a blur that involves getting PandaScript 0.3 RC1 ready, and then beating my head against a series of bugs in PandaLex 0.3 development... People needn't be concerned about Panda 0.4 ever being released though, it is definitely being worked on...
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Wed, 27 Dec 2000
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PandaScript 0.3 Release Candidate 1 is now out. If there are no major bugs found in this version, then it will be rereleased as the stable version...
PandaScript is a scriptable PDF generation application based on the Panda PDF Generation API. It reads commands from standard input, and produces a named PDF file.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /site | permanent link to this entry
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Mon, 25 Dec 2000
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I have discovered the most boring thing in the world. I am in the process of documenting PandaScript ready for release into the big bad Internet. This so far has involved installing docbook-to-man, and then trying to work out how to write a SGML document to actually run through docbook-to-man. I have that worked out now, so it is just a case of writing the documentation...
I can understand why programs don't tend to be well documented, because it is hellishly boring to do.
*** time passed ***
I have nearly finished the documentation for PandaScript. This means it will probably be ready for an initial release (at version 0.3!) in the next few days. After this I will aim for PandaLex 0.1 Release coming out sometime in the week after that. This will allow me to have another Panda release out by the end of the month (January that it). I am hoping for it to be a little sooner than that though.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Cleaned up the house and had a Christmas lunch for the in laws. Then had my family come over for an afternoon tea. After that had some brothers and a girlfriend come along and watch South Park and look at wedding photos. Despite all of this, I still managed to get PandaLex parsing all non-linearised documents (I think)...
Anyway, back to my coding...
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Well, I finally have something to show for my efforts. This version is by no means perfect, but I believe that it is better than nothing... This version will allow you to create documents with textboxes, imageboxes and imageboxes which are rotated. It supports TIFF and JPEG images that are supported by Panda.
Why don't you download it and have a look? The man page is also online, to make it easier for you to see what is available...
If no major problems are found in the next week, then this version will be released as a stable version.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /panda/pandascript | permanent link to this entry
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Badly sunburnt. Painted some lattice and got ready for Christmas lunch (cooking and stuff). No nerdy stuff at all got done...
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Fri, 22 Dec 2000
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That I put in my linux.conf.au registration today... Work should have booked me in and everything. This was in response to the email message to the local LUG saying that they needed to be in real soon now.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Went to work today and didn't get much done. I have been debugging the installer for my Windows NT Service, and it is a case of tweaking, building an installer, installing inside a virtual machine, rebooting, and checking. Over and over again. Argh! We all got an early mark from work today, which was nice.
My afternoon was ruined by the incompetence of Telstra ADSL though. After two weeks of telling me that my application was under way and that I would have a connection by Christmas, they have now decided that 'available' means 'will one day be available', and that as soon as they have the relevant equipment in my local exchange, then I can have ADSL. This is meant to be February 2001. I am thinking of ringing the telecommunications industry ombudsman...
Had a look at PandaScript. I think all I need to do now is make up some documentation, and setup the standard distribution files... There is also the minor issue of multiline strings.
I also had a look at PandaLex, but I am still having some grief getting the lexer just right... This is holding up the development of Panda, so I am going to have to put some more time into it real soon now.
Had a really sore back and went to bed early after having some funky pain killers...
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Can it get any better than this? I'm coding PandaLex and listening to music in surround sound mode on the stereo... If only PandaLex would behave itself...
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Got up. Went Christmas shopping (I've bought all the presents now, it was just a case of making sure). Went home. Mowed the lawn. Started making pelments 1.0 for the lounge room. These are a strip of wood that goes across the top of the window which the curtain rail afixes to. When winter comes along and I care about keeping heat in, then pelmet 2.0 will be made, which will have a box over the top of the curtain, having been joined to pelment 1.0.
Setup my Sparc 10 in the machine room. I finished the cabiling of the house a few days ago, so it was just an case of getting the machines ready for the brave new world. I worked out why I had been having troubles getting RedHat 6.2 to install this time around -- it was because last timw I had used 6.1... I rolled back to 6.1 the other day in my install attempts, and it now just works. I did compile up a newer kernel myself though.
I think I will now spend some more time trying to sort out the PandaLex lexer.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Thu, 21 Dec 2000
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Started playing with InstallShield for the NT service. This product seems to have improved a lot from last time I used it, at which time it was like trying to code with the Spanish Inquisition. It's interesting to note that the scripting language is very like C, but also a lot like VB. I guess this is an obvious sort of thing to do if you want people to use your product, but it made me think about how all the new languages are starting to look just like each other. C and C++. C++ and Java. Java and C#. Shell and Perl. C and Perl... You get the idea.
Why are people bothering with new languages then? Why don't they just extend the perfectly good languages they have now?
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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I spent Tuesday this week finalising my resolution to the problems we had been having with the Windows NT Service I had written. This mainly involved rearranging some code so that it could better detect some bugs.
Rang Telstra about my ADSL connection and was told to call back on Thursday. They basically said that because I was changing from a different provider, they were punishing me.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Mon, 18 Dec 2000
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I've been a little tardy in writing for this for a little while now. What have I done for the last few days?
- Worked on the NT service and it's registry problems (it is hard to test because the bug is intermittent).
- Played golf, but the scores are not online just yet.
- Cleaned up my home machine room in preparation for ADSL
- Did Christmas shopping
- Worked on PandaLex and PandaScript
- Started writing some man pages for zlib
That's about it really...
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Thu, 14 Dec 2000
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PandaScript is a package that makes build PDFs from shell scripts easier. Have a look at it's page for more details.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /panda | permanent link to this entry
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Today I wrote a shell script to generate a PDF using Panda, and it occured to me that it was bloddy hard. To make a PDF I had to have the script:
- Generate C code with echo statements
- Compile the C code
- Execute the C code
It made me think, and PandaScript was born. Panda script is a simple engine that reads commands from standard input and uses them to build a PDF document. This makes it much easier to generate a PDF document because you don't have to go through that compilation step that I ad to do today.
I will endevour to add functionality to PandaScript as it is added to Panda itself.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /panda/pandascript | permanent link to this entry
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Wed, 13 Dec 2000
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I have been writing an NT service at work for some time now. During the process I have determined that I never want to use Borland again... The IDE is much worse than Visual Studio, and the classes to do stuff like access the registry are much more clumsy. Then again I prefer gcc and vi on a Unix box to Visual Studio -- I guess it is better the devil you know. I think it is also good for programmers to have experienced a diverse range of platforms so that they understand the world.
I think I forgot to mention that I compiled up libtiff and libjpeg for windows yesterday. This will make it easier for the windows people out there who don't have a c compiler with which to do these themselves. Visual Basic et al are also a bit disempowering that way -- a DLL or LIB is a scary thing to some of these people. The libraries are available on the Panda documentation page. The process I used is also documented there, because it was not initially obvious, especially for libtiff.
Offered to write some zlib man pages is Jen-Loup still wants some. The README file says that they do...
I will be posting a freshmeat announcement for Open Source POSIX Threads for Win32 sometime in the next week or so when Ross Johnson is ready.
I still need to consider all the stuff from the CLUG mailing list about the license for Panda. I have been real busy at work, so this hasn't happened yet. I also need to fix the getpage code so that it wokrs with FAQ entries, because the question of licensing is clearly a FAQ.
Panda is entering the prime time -- we have just started work on a series of Panda animated banners, the best of which I will ask VA Linux Systems to add to their affiliate underground program. By the way, the program itself is pretty cool (you get free stuff) -- I recommend you check it out.
Busy tonight, so not much coding is going to get done. However, I hope to finish setting up the Sparc 10.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Tue, 12 Dec 2000
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Several people have tried to convince me that decompression of LZW compressed information is not covered by the various Unisys patents on the LZW compression algorithm. This decompression would be useful for the reading in of existing PDF documents, as well as the inclusion of GIF images within a PDF document.
Having now done some research on the topic, it would appear that this is incorrect. An example is xpdf which is forced to convert the LZW compressed streams into something else before they can be used. My reading of the LZW license is also that this is the case.
Therefore, Panda will ont be supporting the inclusion of GIF images, or the the modification of PDF documents containing LZW compressed streams in the forseeable future. When the modification of such documents is supported, it will be implemented in a similar manner to that used in xpdf.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /panda/panda-documentation | permanent link to this entry
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There's been a lot of talk recently about whether the GPG functionality could be made available as an API. I did some work looking at this during last semester at university, which I can now make available.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /site | permanent link to this entry
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I just discovered the funniest thing. The kitten is confused about where he should go to the toilet, and we just watched him do his business in one of the other cats' food bowl. This might explain the growling from the other cats when X is near them...
Playing with PandaLex tonight.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Did I mention that I just got a new cat with Catherine?
Spent the night setting up my Sparc 10 with NetBSD. I'll finish it in a fews days.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Mon, 11 Dec 2000
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Sun, 10 Dec 2000
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Sunday was a productive day. I went to church, I had Doug look at my TV and debug the over heating problem, I mowed the lawn and got in some practise for golf in the hope of further improving my fantastic scores. I even got around to fixing the broken outdoor furniture...
PandaLex is starting to take a little more shape. I was rusty on Bison and Flex, so having to code some without the aid of the book is a little hard on the soul, but I'm getting there now. Thinsg started to go much better when I realised that code is included in the $x numbering scheme. It does make me wonder how much pain people go through when they change some code in a terminal though -- perhaps they simply put dummy code blocks everywhere so that they never have to change the numbering?
PandaLex is going to have a series of callbacks as the hooks for the user application, which isn't very hard to implement. Assuming I have some free time in the next week I am confident that it shouldn't take me too much longer than a week to code it up -- then again there is debugging and testing in there as well.
Anyway, that was my first day in online diary land.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Heya.
Well another day nearly over. They announced today that the reorganisation would go ahead -- I am now officially an application developer!
Had a play with the PDF parser, which I am coding on at the moment, which means it is getting ever closer. The wierd bit is that I am coding it during a Tupperware party. I'm pretty sure that means that if you have problems with the parser, then you can return it to Tupperware to have it fixed. However, please not that it is not dishwasher safe.
Uni of Canberra is also incompetent. Well, not all of them, the Professional Management Programs people keep changing my summer course on me, so I am not sure if I will ever get it done or not. Oh well, we'll have to wait and see.
Oh, and I am ordered by ADSL connection today. Telstra is cool -- they are giving me a free PCMCIA network card as part of the connection, which means I make about a $10 profit on the connect. Soon I'll have a permanent Internet connection at 512kb! Welcome to nerd central.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Sat, 09 Dec 2000
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I am a very bad golfer. My friends are very bad golfers. I figure that there must be other very bad golfers out there, so I thought I would cheer them up by sharing my golf scores with them. Have a look and see what you think.
Donations for lessons are being accepted :)
posted at: 04:00 | path: /site | permanent link to this entry
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Because my life is fundamentally boring, I thought I should share it with you. Failing that, everyone else has an online diary, so I didn't want to be left out...
posted at: 04:00 | path: /diary | permanent link to this entry
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Thu, 07 Dec 2000
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Panda 0.3 Stable has been released! Checkout the download page for information.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /panda | permanent link to this entry
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Tue, 05 Dec 2000
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I have been thinking for the last day or so, and it occurs to me that the PDF parsing functionality in Panda is more generally useful than what is needed for Panda itself. For instance, the parse could also be used for pdf viewers, pdf modification (what Panda needs it for), or anything else you can think of.
A good simple, and probably fairly common use of PandaLex would be a simple program to count the number of pages in a PDF document from the command line. This could be useful for determining if the document is damaged or something.
Therefore, welcome to PandaLex's page... This is where development work for PandaLex will occur.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /panda/pandalex | permanent link to this entry
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The PDF parsing code has been forked into the separate PandaLex project, which should make this code more useful to people who only want to parse PDF documents.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /panda | permanent link to this entry
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The PDF parsing code has been forked into the separate PandaLex project, which should make this code more useful to people who only want to parse PDF documents.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /panda/panda-development | permanent link to this entry
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The PDF parsing code from the Panda project has been forked into the separate PandaLex project, which should make this code more useful to people who only want to parse PDF documents.
posted at: 04:00 | path: /site | permanent link to this entry
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Here is the souce code for PandaLex so far. I have released this exactly as it appears in the Panda code, because this is a atarting point for people to have a look and comment on it. The following points should be noted:
- It is not perfect
- It is not a complete implementation of the PDF specification, version 1.3, yet
- The next piece of development work for PandaLex is to get the hooks in place so that people can start using the parser for useful work. I am thinking this will take the form of a series of callback functions that can be defined by the user, but I am open to suggestions...
Source (signed)
posted at: 04:00 | path: /panda/pandalex | permanent link to this entry
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Thu, 30 Nov 2000
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Please note that this is a testing release and might not work as expected. The documentation inside the release is also not always up to date -- check main.c for samples of how to use the functions. Please report any problems to me and to the Panda Development mailing list mentioned at the top of this page.
Source
posted at: 04:00 | path: /panda/panda-development | permanent link to this entry
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