WWWalter

It seems that there have been some attempts at creating a custom gtk.CellRenderer that can render an arbitrary widget. Wait or try no more, it is here!

(Clearly I've been neglecting my blog for the last couple of months. To try and change that, I'll start with this small post, just to get the ball rolling again.)

If it is unclear from the title, the Firefox widget I'm talking about is the toolbar buttons you get in the bookmarks toolbar that pops up a menu when you click it. I just wanted to take its functionality a bit further for Virtaal: Creating a similar widget which is not limited to a toolbar.

Over the last two weeks Virtaal's code has been refactored to be more easily extendible. Changing Virtaal to a MVC architecture proved to be quite an intense and interesting endeavor (my GTalk status was "Deep hack mode" for most of these two weeks), but well worth it. And here we are! Virtaal's MVC branch is just about on par with the trunk version.

I believe that all code monkeys (should) strive to be the best that they can be. Part of doing so is adapting your own process to maximize productivity and to make things easier for yourself. This is just a spur-of-the-moment post about some of the specific things I have discovered/changed in my few months at Translate.org.za that has had a big influence on the way that I develop software.

Working with Mozilla's Mercurial l10n repositories, I have gently been forced into learning about this type of distributed VCSs, and what a revelation it turned out to be!

The first official release of Spelt is finally here!

Here is the announcement posted to the relevant mailing lists (well, it will be posted there as soon as we sort out our e-mail problems):

I'm very glad to introduce Spelt 0.1, the first official release of the program!

What is Spelt? It is a program that is used to classify words according to their roots and parts-of-speech.
For what is Spelt used? We use it in the creation of spell-checkers.

I have just completed the auto-completion and auto-correction classes for VirTaal!

OK, I know that the title is not very clear, so let me give a more complete description of the problem. I'll use the actual case in which it was used as example.

I have a gtk.TextBuffer for which I'm implementing auto-correction. As you can imagine auto-correction would involve changing the text in said TextBuffer. Then I started seeing unexpected (but understandable) behaviour caused by my handler of the TextBuffer's "insert-text" event.

A new build for Spelt has been uploaded on 22 July 2008. Here is the announcement send to the translate-devel mailing list:
Hi everyone,

Spelt Introduction (from the wiki):
Spelt is a simple graphical program that can be used to classify words in a language. It is particularly designed to identify word roots and to classify them according to part-of-speech. The initial development of this program was specifically meant to simplify work on spell checkers, but you might find it useful for many other purposes.

CorpusCatcher 0.1 was released on 17 July 2008. Here's the announcement sent to the translate-announce mailing list:
Dear list member,

The first version of CorpusCatcher was released recently. CorpusCatcher is a toolset for creating language corpora by crawling the Web. It was based on BootCaT, but evolved into a stand-alone project. Thanks to Kevin Scannell for his advice in this regard.