About
jason's weblog, jason typing stuff

Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

Subscribe
RSS: Subscribe

Links
These are a few of my favorite links.

Tue, 20 Sep 2005

I'm in Trouble...
blog

I don't think I'll ever be able to say "no" to these little girls!

That's all... not much new, just cruising along waiting for winter!

Wed, 14 Sep 2005

My New App
blog

A couple weeks ago I decided I wanted to learn more about developing an app using glib + gtk. Not sure why I decided that... I guess I've always glanced at all the stuff that glib provides and thought it was kind of nice. I never really had an app that I wanted to write, so I kept putting it off. Until now!

For my app I decided to write an application that would help me out with some stuff at work. We use libxml2 and libxslt and I'm starting up a project that will expand that usage. So I thought it'd be helpful to have an application that I could use to visualize my xpath statements. That is, load up an XML file and just have a text entry area where I could try out different xpath statements and see the results.

Sounds easy enough... and honestly, it really was pretty simple to get the first version up and running. That link is a screenshot of a sample document with an easy xpath statement. It shows a few things that are still a work in progress, though... currently it just evaluates the xpath statement and hilites the document with the results of the nodesets. The hiliting was surprisingly easy with gtk's textview and some tags.

Once that simple version was done I wanted to make it more "official", even something that I'll release as GPL (make a sourceforge project, etc...). Currently it's still very much a hack... it's not organized too well and I definitely violate most conventions I'm aware of that stress separating the UI from the real work. I'm planning on creating my own gobject for the xpath stuff and I'm in the process of reading up on that. The object-oriented behavior of glib is pretty interesting... it's all C-based (although there is a C++ library) which makes some things seem like such a pain in the butt. In my very humble opinion, glib's gobject system is pretty close to being a great case-study for why you should switch to C++ :-) I'm sure once you get used to it it becomes second-nature, but it seems like an awful lot to go through (as a developer) in order to fit into the glib model. I guess it's working pretty well for apps like the gimp, though, so what do I know.

Anyhow, so that's the next step... create my own gobject container for my xpath stuff so I can use signals and re-work the UI so it's not quite as tied-in with the data. Once I do that I think I'll stick it up on sourceforge and then start adding some features, such as the nodeset list that you see in the screenshot on the right.

Oh yeah, I did set up an arch archive for the project, as well, which is kind of cool. I used to have a subversion setup but I think I lost that a while ago after switching to gentoo. So far, though, arch is pretty nice, and I recently found xtla which is a complete emacs interface to your entire arch environment. Very nice...

I also forced myself to make sure that the configure script works for gtk-xpath. I think this is the first time I've actually set that up. Actually, glade set most of it up for me, but I did add my libxml2 and libxslt requirements to the script. That seems to work just fine and it wasn't too much of a pain. I definitely appreciate glade setting it up, though... I'd hate to start from scratch with that stuff.

That's it for now... more pics when the app does more!

Google Blog Search
blog

So Google has a blog search now which is pretty cool. I did a few searches for what I'm interested in (emacs, zaurus, sawfish) and it came up with a bunch of blogs writing about those topics. I'll have to hit some of them to see if they're any good. It's nice to see folks writing about what I'm intersted in.

I was a little bummed, though, that my blog didn't come up in those searches. I only saw the first 30 or so results, so I'm sure I'm in there somewhere, just probably on the 10th "O" page or so.

Ok, now something must be wrong... I searched for "emacs zaurus sawfish" and there's just one result. And it's not mine. Bah.

This is a running commentary... I searched for 'haslup' and of course our girls' blog came up, but that was the only "related blog". So... the venerable haslup.com, which has been blogging since 1998 (in various forms), isn't listed. Probably because I use an older version of bloxsom as my blogging app. I'll have to work on that.

Ok, that's it for now. Google Blog Search. Very cool. You can even get RSS or ATOM feeds for search results.

2010 : February (2)
2009 : February (2)
2008 : January (2) February (2) March (5) April (1) June (1) July (2) October (1) November (3)
2007 : January (3) February (1) March (1) June (2) December (1)
2006 : February (4) March (4) April (11) May (5) July (7) August (5) September (4) October (3) November (6) December (2)
2005 : January (1) February (6) April (2) May (4) June (3) July (8) August (5) September (3) October (3) November (1) December (1)
2004 : January (9) February (5) March (6) April (3) May (2) June (1) July (6) August (10) September (1) October (4) November (3)
2003 : March (6) April (3) May (1) June (18) July (9) August (4) September (5) October (2) November (7) December (2)