OpenOffice.org

Twelve pounds of muffins, one rejection letter, half a ton of computers, and thou...

2007-03-30T05:00:00Z

I meant to write things all week for my blog, but I never seemed to get around to it. Very annoying to say the least. But, a summary of the week is: twelve pounds of muffins, half a ton of computers, two CD's, and one rejection letter.

Well, this has been an interesting week. The most notable was the twelve pounds of muffins that Fluffy bought. She didn't know they were twelve pounds when she bought them, but we ended up getting 55 muffins mail ordered, sitting by our front door earlier this week. We also got some Weight Watchers stuff, she wants the snacks available for her when she went on her two-day vacation.

It was a week of deliveries. Yesterday, we got 1,400 pounds worth of IBM equipment in a single rack. A really nice machine (8 cores, 1.65 GHz, 4 TB of disk) Took us about forty minutes to get it up into the elevator, drag the lift up the stairs, take the machine out of the elevator (nothing else would fit in there), and put it into the place. Now to get enough power running through the server room to really enjoy it. I.e. turn it on. And I got to play with the tilt sensor and figure out how to reset it, which is not reasonable with it still attached.

Last night, I also checked my mailbox. Still can't find me keys, but the guy was there and he grabbed my packages and letters. The package was good, an Amazon purchase for Smile.DK (I love Butterfly) and Bond: Classified. I was surprised that I really like Bond, I would call them pop/classical. Someone once mentioned them to me, but I also remember seeing them in XXX: State of the Union and wanting their music. Someone else finally told me they were Bond, so I snatched up a copy. Really great CD, would be perfect for working out.

The bad news also came in the mail: Writers House rejected me. A lovely form letter, not personal at all, but with the "keep trying!" paragraph. I was sad, but not really upset. Makes me doubt if I'm a decent writer, of course. I'll send out the next query probably Sunday.

Oh, and today I get to meet some FBI folks! They are investigating something only slightly related to our company, but it's one of those "that's interesting" things. I'm also hoping to see what a government ID looks like, mainly for writing purposes. It's not like I'm going to get another chance to see one.

I did spent a good hunk of the weekend programming. Worked on my plugin library because someone asked for it. I should have that cleaned up in the next week or so, though I really need to write documentation for it. I also merged my ODF (OpenOffice.org) library into the Borg library, hopefully I can do a "release" in the next few weeks.

On the Exalted front, I created a new 11"x17" combat tracker. Hopefully I can get that printed off today for gaming on Saturday. I also worked on my Scroll of the Lands, got two new versions out and two people commented on it! And one of them wasn't even in my gaming group. This next adventure is going to be a mess, I just know it. Technically, I'm going to be trying rather hard to kill off the players, mainly because of the situation they are in and the fact they pissed off the person trying to kill them. Statistically, they'll win though. They have the numbers and I'm still not used to having seven players; you have to throw larger groups at them since they pretty much slaughter anyone they gang up on.

I guess we'll find out how it works out.

So, that is my week in a summary.

Mapping Layers and Dropped Projects

2006-06-09T05:00:00Z

I spent yesterday working on layers for my mapping program. I decided to arrange it so every layer has the display and color rules, and you add the layers individually. I'm sure something won't work out, but it seems to match a CSS approach (each layer is a class, well sets of classes). If I was feeling fancy, I'd do something with stylesheets, ala Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org. But, for the time being, I'm just going to stick with styles.

I'm also going to be dropping the flash card program. There are enough of them out there and I found three that did what I needed them to. Why reinvent the wheel? Not to mention, I really want to spend my energy on other projects that obviously need more of an itch resolved.

And, I can maybe work on the hiragana and katakana stuff again. I found an set of applets that helps with those training.

Actions in Balance

2006-05-30T05:00:00Z

Managed to get actions into the generation of the game system. Now, you can use the "New Action" menu item, create, and edit actions. You can also use the ODF parser to just put in: "Action: Melee Attack" and it will include the action block in standarized form right in the OpenOffice document.

I also had to spend a bit of time with MfGames.OpenDocument to get the parsing and processing of lists working properly. I think I need to convert the entire library over to C# 2.0 for a decent set of generics. Then, I have to decide how much I prefer C5 over System.Collections.Generics. I don't think OpenDocument needs set mechanics, so it might be okay just to use the internal, but C5 is so much nicer than SCG.

I also found a minor little bug with automatic styles when combining them together. Because the automatic styles are generated, the use the same name but may have different purposes. So, when I combined a document with a list style "L1" with a document that doesn't have one, the list stuff is lost because I don't merge stylesheets properly. I'll have to fix this for the MfGames.OpenDocument library, it is really nice having the ability to combine (via sections) one or more files automatically and without starting up OpenOffice.