petergunn's blog

TestGUI nears initial release

Ive been making progress on my pet project TrainGUI. First off Ive renamed it TestGUI as I have done some work on it other than during my commute to/from work. Yes I know its still a pretty name - maybe someone will suggest something better?

Ive upgraded to the latest fltk-1.1.6 and FLU-2.14 libraries and ported to WIN32 as well as DSL. Compiles under Visual Studio .NET and works great with ActiveState Perl :-)

Plenty of stuff left to do, I still need to be able to allow properties changed in the GUI to affect the controls themselves, and although Im supporting the entire FLTK widget set only a few fire any events. Still I guess I can fill in things like that later once I have the skeleton in place.

Permanent Vacation

My wife and I had our INS interview on Thursday and after successfully answering the interviewer's question as to where my wife worked and what her parents names were, they appoved our application on the spot and stamped my passport. All in all, probably less than 5 minutes end-to-end. Good stuff. Not that there should have been any problems, but since these things could effectively derail your life if they go badly wrong I guess I should have been concerned, but for some reason I just sort of new it would all work out. :-)

Yay!! Im here to stay! :-)

Its a girl

Wife had second ultrasound yesterday... its a girl! Fascinating watching the hi-res ultrasound images. Its amazing that something so unbeliveably complex could be created in such a short time. And, boy is she cute. Time to start thinking about names now. Not long until the big day on May 25 :-)

TrainGUI is turning out to be much better than I expected. Originally I wanted a simple GUI builder that I could use to launch perl and bash scripts, but now Ive got almost a complete IDE. Still trying to figure out if I want it to produce super simple code with globals for all the controls and simple perl subs for callacks or if I want to make all the controls objects that overload the callbacks. Hmmm... do people realy want to define their own controls? Guess I'll do some more thinking. One way or the other I'll probably have a working first version out in a few weeks.

Last Blog of the year

Things have been going very well recently, and Ive been having the best Christmas time in ages. My DSL laptop is running pretty smooth now, and Im carrying it about in its nice new slimline laptop bag that I got for Christmas. Only weights a little over 4 lbs all in, not bad for a freebie thinkpad thats 5 or 6 years old.

Ive been continuing to hack away at my 'traingui' perl/FLTK IDE prog during my morning and evening commute and its going pretty good. Hit a couple of fltk bugs where Fl_Text_Editor would hang on resize, but I hacked around them in the end (upgrading FLTK didnt seem to help). I reckon I might have an initial alpha in a couple of weeks once the holiday season is over.

Finally got a decent X-Server

After giving up on Xvesa I downloaded the old XBF Red Hat X-Server that has accelerators for the Neovision chipset and everything works great on my old thinkpad 560z. Fast scrolling... yeeha! :-) Looks like it uses a couple more MB of RAM but other than that it seems to start up just as fast or faster than Xfbdev. I had to remap the Delete & BackSpace keys using xmodmap, but no other problems so far.

Maybe I'll post details on the forums tomorrow if I get time. Happy happy happy! :-)

4:10pm: at work, writing 3 progs & 1 blog, 1 hour till beer

Im running DSL on an old stinkpad 560z that my friend Jeff donated as being unuseable - 7 mins to boot an old bloated win2k! 64Mb RAM and no CD. Now it boots in a few seconds into DSL from HD, not that I shut it down very often. Suspend works great outside X so I just CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE, type sync and close the lid. When I open it up again and startx its all back in a couple fo secs. Picked up a 64Mb upgrade buy.com (~$25) and a refurb Dlink DWL 122 usb 802.11b dongle from tigerdirect ($20) and I now have a pretty mean box. The dongle works on my Tivo as well so I bought a couple.

So, now Ive got my lappy with DSL on hard disk, what to do next? Time for a prog methinks. Well, actually no time. After changing job, buying a house/car and getting married in the last couple of months Ive got almost no time at all. Still there is that 35min each way commute on the train... time enough for writing some progs on my lappy using DSL & gcc1.dsl.

1POST

Doh! I read too much /.

Hmmm... it says "The body of your blog is too short. You need at least 0 words to submit your blog."... 0 words? ....

0
0x00
zero
nada

yay that did it! seems like a strange requirement, but then Im new to blogging :-)

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