Moments with Twitter..

I was recently playing with a few tools, that let you have a look into your past tweets. All My Tweets is an interesting service, that lets you view all your tweets in a simple page, from the beginning. Interestingly, another service, named Twitario gives a view of all your tweets, as a diary. Though Twitario provides a nice interface to find the tweets easily, based on the calendar, it doesn't support Unicode characters, which is surely a minus for those who tweet in Unicode languages. "All My Tweets" include the link to the original tweet itself, where Twitario provides the option to delete the tweets. Having analyzed these tools, I should mention that these tweets were really useful, and brought a few interesting memories back.

Now time to look into the trail of my tweets. Here are some of my tweets, since the 26th of March, 2009.

is finishing the documentation. Mar 26, 2009
It is notable that my first tweet is on documentation. It was probably on the documentation on the project done during the internship. I have always been a supporter of good documentation - It helps the blood flow of open source.

Abiword Cross-compiling using wine successful on Ubuntu. Apr 16, 2009
At that time, uwog was still completing the MSVC build for AbiWord. I found Cross-building useful, since it was complete and gave me a usable AbiWord build for Windows, with no issues. This was indeed a remarkable point, which gave me further confidence to work on AbiWord Windows API, using Ubuntu as my platform.

Summer Love with Abiword... Apr 20, 2009
This was a happy announcement of me getting into the Google Summer of Code 2009. This was my first Google Summer of Code, and I was pretty much excited. AbiWord community was super-friendly, and I am proud to be a member, since then.

with Anjuta.. an IDE similar to Visual Studio... for Linux. May 08, 2009
Anjuta DevStudio is a Gnome Integrated Development Environment. I have mostly used Anjuta as a syntax highlighter for my C/C++ projects including AbiWord development. For compiling and building of AbiWord, I just use make directly.

needs a mute option and filtering for facebook messages. Any suggestions... Jun 01, 2009  
At that time, there was no way to opt-out from the Facebook notifications from the photos that we commented, or to remove ourselves from the facebook threads. I was annoyed, when someone sends group messages directly to inbox. It is great to see that these options are now available for facebook. Now we can remove ourselves from the messages. However, filtering is still not possible. Neither muting (receiving the messages, but not getting the notification of that red one for the new message, for the uninteresting thread).

#AbiWord Turns 11! Happy Birthday to dear Abiword! Happy Birthday to you... Jul 16, 2009
That was remarkable to mark the 11th year of AbiWord, since it started as an open source project in the year 1998.

My computer never complained abt me repeating the same build million times, and I've never complained abt its time delays. We <3 each other. Aug 17, 2009  
Some romance with my computer.. ;)

10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone http://theoatmeal.com/comics/phone from @oatmeal Feb 23, 2010  
Oatmeal never fails to amuse me. Many of its posts deserve a tweet.

my #javascript has gone wild and bigggggg and GO #bananascript GOO.. http://www.bananascript.com/ Compress it.. :) #fb Mar 03, 2010  
Bananascript is a nice online tool to compress javascript files.

A periodic table of visualization methods http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html Apr 04, 2010  
Each of these visualization methods deserves a blog post on its own. Visual-Literacy.org provides interesting learning resources, such as an introduction to argumentum. I have also enrolled to their online courses, full of study materials.

I should create some of my own thought experiments as well.. :D http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment/ Jun 06, 2010  
Thought experiments are fun, and it enhances your ability to think, weird. ;) Follow the above link to realize that. Again, each of these thought experiments deserves a post on its own.

GSoC welcome package once more. Special thanks and love OGSA-DAI, OMII-UK and Google. Reminds me the lovable days of GSoC2009 - Abiword too. Jun 19, 2010  
A blog post that happily announces my second welcome package from Google. Yes, this was for my Google Summer of Code with OMII-UK.

Also make sure to read Moments with Twitter - II, the successor of this post.

How to build Abiword for Windows from the source

Now you have two options that are working and tested.
1. Cross-building
2. MSVC2008

1. The traditional cross-building using wine has been tested for Ubuntu 8.04 / 8.10 / 9.04.
Details can be found here.
Dependencies packed by robsta (here, or here(same copy))

When cross-building with the above dependency pack, it will demand libtool, automake, and fribidi, unless you already have them installed in your Ubuntu. A simple sudo apt-get install of these three will solve the issue (for Ubuntu).


2. With uwog's continuous effort, Microsoft visual C++ 2008 build has been made stable and complete. Just checkout http://svn.abisource.com/abiword-msvc2008/trunk/ and build using MSVS2008. (Express Edition 2008 is fine).


Seems these two options are in a higher demand than the traditional MinGW/MinSYS building, nowadays! The MSVC build is, surely going to grab more Windows developers into the Abiword community.

libtool: link: cannot find the library `' or unhandled argument `Version'

When I was building again after some minor directory changes, build failed.
Oh.. Then I found, this 'libtool' is considering 'Version' in the directory name (Working Version mm) as an argument. :)
Removed the white spaces from the directory name. *Issue resolved*!


libtool: link: cannot find the library `' or unhandled argument `Version'
make[4]: *** [opendocument.la] Error 1
make[4]: Leaving directory `/home/pradeeban/Desktop/BackUp/Working Version mm/plugins/opendocument'
make[3]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/pradeeban/Desktop/BackUp/Working Version mm/plugins/opendocument'
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/pradeeban/Desktop/BackUp/Working Version mm/plugins'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/pradeeban/Desktop/BackUp/Working Version mm'
make: *** [all] Error 2
pradeeban@pradeeban-laptop:~/Desktop/BackUp/Working Version mm$

Crossbuilding AbiWord for Win32 using Ubuntu / Wine

Provided that you have Wine installed on Linux, you can follow these steps to build Abiword for your windows. 

(1) Install mingw. 

On ubuntu you need the packages mingw32, mingw32-binutils and mingw32-runtime 

$ sudo apt-get install mingw32 

 This will install mingw32 with the other two (mingw32-binutils and mingw32-runtime) dependencies. 

(2) Get all the dependencies in place.  

Robert Staudinger has packed them and made them available here. 

If this file is moved to somewhere else, when you are trying, you can alternatively download it here. 

Now unpack it in /opt. You will get /opt/win32 as base dir for the win32 stuff. 

(3) At the time of writing, I faced some problem in src/af/xap/xp/xap_Module.h 

The issue is solved here. 

An update (May 10th 2009): This issue is resolved now in the trunk. 

(4) Now use the commands to finally crossbuild:

1. source /opt/win32/bin/mingw-env.sh Go to to source tree and run 

2. CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/win32/include" ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/abiword --host=i686-pc-linux-gnuaout --target=i586-mingw32msvc *** when cross-building with robsta's pack if it demands for libtool, automake, or fribidi, a sudo apt-get install of these three will solve the issue (for Ubuntu). 

3. make 

abiword.exe will end up in src/. You need to copy it to /opt/win32/bin to run it under wine, or alternatively copy all the required DLLs to src/. 

Now you can take the directory containing abiword.exe to your windows machine to run Abiword.exe, which you have built just now!  

The Original Research by Robert Staudinger can be found here.

Abiword Screenshots

I have recently built Abiword using Wine/Ubuntu and using MSVS2008 apart from the typical Linux build. Since Microsoft Visual Studio build has not been completed yet (The sub menus missing yet, and hence currently under development), it seems cross building is a good option for building Abiword for Windows.


Snapshot 1: Abiword built using Wine, running on Ubuntu



Snapshot 2: Abiword.exe built above is now running on Windows



Snapshot 3: See the difference of Abiword built using Ubuntu (the standard build process), and using Ubuntu/Wine cross building, running on Ubuntu

Building Abiword Using Wine on Ubuntu

--- src/af/xap/xp/Original_xap_Module.h 2009-04-03 18:55:06.000000000 +0530
+++ src/af/xap/xp/xap_Module.h 2009-04-16 12:16:01.000000000 +0530
@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@
// we want to have C linkage for both
// this and for all of our required functions
extern "C" {
- typedef ABI_EXPORT struct {
+ typedef struct {
const char * name;
const char * desc;
const char * version;





After applying the above diff file, Abiword is successfully built using wine, and now happily running on Ubuntu!

More information can be found here.