Tuesday, May 29, 2007

A new release for Archimedes

Hello,
I'm amost late AGAIN. At least this proves me something: I surely prefer tons of things before writing down to this blog. Sad but true, I'm not a writter, I'm a programmer.
Anyway, yesterday I've released the latest version of Archimedes concentrating several features I've been talking about such as Text, dimension, layers, etc...
We already found about 6 or 7 bugs during our demonstration to the architects that help us but this is only a proof that we should release unstable versions and have more people testing it. I hope make this possible by using maven to control Archimedes build and tests as well as the deploy system. Don't know for sure when this is going to happen but I will work on it in July.
I've tried to test the install system and the zip files on all three platforms and I believe everything is working fine but PLEASE tell me if something goes wrong.

Changing the subject, I've found out today how to write google gadgets and how fun this can be. I felt the need to find a gadget that would show me a UVa problem from the ACM contest each day so I could train a bit more since I wish to show a better performance on the local contest here in São Paulo this year. Looking up on their search system gave me nothing so I decided I could write my create my own gadget since Google has been asking people to do so since they renamed the personalized home to iGoogle. Checking out that feature I discovered it is only a very limited gadget factory aimed to non programmers but there I found the link I added at the begining of the paragraph.

I understood how the system worked (quite simple, it is just xml parsed into HTML code with javascript) and wrote my own gadget. I used google's users page to upload my gadget and there you go: http://nightao.googlepages.com/uvaGadget.xml. I still wish to add tons of features such as a user id preference that would make the gadget load only problems you haven't solved. Maybe parse the site to create 3 tabs with description, input, output and maybe another one to submit a solution. I got tons of ideas and with Javascript, almost anything can be done (although it is very hard to design and debug it). For those of you who use google's personalized home, I do suggest you take a look on how to build your own gadget because I can bet there are gadget you would like to have that does not exists.

That's it for now,
Bye bye

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'd like to have a look at the source,...

Thanks for the new release. I am eager to accomplish something for you guys and your initiative too ;)

Architect in Rethymno Greece, programming as a hobby,...

Hugo "NighT" Corbucci said...

Hi "Herodes"?
You are very welcome for that release. We hope to deliver some more work by the end of June too. Make the software somehow decently usable (enabling save and open) and adding some more features.
For the source code, you can always follow our ongoing by our subversion tree:
https://incubadora.fapesp.br:8043/svn/archimedes

Unfortunately, all the comments on revisions are in Portuguese. Other than that, you can download any source you want and in the old project (folder 'archimedes') you can find some UML to help you. Of course, if you need any help, please ask me.

Basically you will need to download eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) if you don't have it and the rest should work by importing the projects.