BLARGH in 2009

So I decided to haul my lazy ass and continue working on BLARGH Text Editor. I've successfully ported my code to the new devkitARM release 24, and libnds 1.3.1.

Just get the file save/load working, and its already a full-fledged text editor. And now that there's some official sample code on how to get libfat working, it'll be easier for me.

Next major features needed are some unfinished text editing features (cut, copy, paste, search), and multiple text files opened via tabs. But I want to concentrate on file save/load first.

Unicode support would require me to create all those characters from foreign languages. I'd be willing to make ones for accented english letters, but that's about it. I sure as hell won't be doing all those Chinese characters. Perhaps the Japanese Kana letters, since I'm learning them, but definitely not the Chinese Kanji.

Dictionary lookup will perhaps be the last on the list.

BLARGH Text Editor File Save Dialog Box GUI

This is a mock-up concept of BLARGH's File Save GUI that I've made so far. It should work almost like a standard file browser program. While in the File Save GUI, the upper screen should still show the text editor, and you can still switch between other opened text files.

Kamen Rider Kiva

I watched Kamen Rider Kiva Episode 1 and I have to say, I had hoped it'd be something I could watch in earnest, but these shows are still mainly for kids. But since its only the first episode, I'm willing to watch more of it first.

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BLARGH Text Editor is moving along at a slow pace, only a few bugfixes and refactoring being done right now. A lot of things being done under the hood.

In the meantime I am thinking of:

• saving/loading files to/from a pc via wifi (using libdswifi, and perhaps somehow porting UFTP to ARM executable NDS code)
  
• additional on-screen keyboards: OPTI and Quikwrite
• dictionary lookup, using perhaps code from NewDictS. The GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English  packaged in  StartDict format is roughly 150 MB big when uncompressed¹ (and NewDictS needs it uncompressed), so I want to improve it by compressing the .dict file in either QuickLZ or LZO.

These are all only ideas for the future though. The text editing and wiki editing functionality will come first.

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¹This is odd though. The version of GCIDE from the GNU ftp server (latest version 0.46) is about 53 MB in size when uncompressed. In contrast, the version that comes in the StarDict website is 156 MB when uncompressed, about 103 MB bigger (about two-thirds bigger).

The stardict version reports its wordcount is 174,222 words (coming from the .ifo file). The version from the GNU ftp server reports its wordcount is 125,445 words (coming from a grep -c "<hw>" cide.*). The StarDict version has 48,777 more words. Its quite odd though that the additional 48,777 words would take up 103 MB (approx. 66% of the file size) while 125,445 words would take up only 53 MB (34% of the file size). So it probably means other than the addition of 48,777 more words, more content have been added to the old words.

Coming from the .ifo file, the stardict version was last modified in 2003, May 13 (most likely outdated information), while from the GNU ftp server, version 0.46 was last modified in 2002, April 15.

This is making me think that the GNU ftp server is probably outdated. A certain Linux dictionary reader software has a GCIDE version 0.48, released last 2007, December 20.

QUONG now hosted in sharesource.org

Its now in http://sharesource.org/project/blarghtexteditor/

QUONGKeyboardDS or BLARGH Text Editor, is a Nintendo DS homebrew text editor program that makes use of HexInput and QUONG

The source code repository is not up yet, but a snapshot of the source is available (using the head revision 62).

I want to port it to Mercurial, but hg convert crashes on Windows XP, and hg convert on Ubuntu doesn't work since the python-svn bindings is outdated (requiring a complete recompile of subversion to update it, which is beyond me).

So it'll be in SVN format for now. However, I can't import my repo to sharesource, since there's no such feature yet, so you guys will have to wait.

Quong

Some more development is done. The new link is http://www.pinoyforum.net/v2forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=1796.0;attach=684

Now I'm thinking of hosting my project in http://www.sharesource.org. To my dismay, the site was Yahoo!ed, bought by Yahoo corp, now its got red letters all over its front page. ZOMG!!!! Shit man, I can't believe I've been April-fooled on that one. I'll use it since it supports a Mercurial back-end, although I'll host my code in other free Mercurial hosting sites too.

This means I'm going to learn Mercurial and use it over Subversion, which I'm currently using. Open source projects get to make more use of decentralized version control systems.

This also means I'm making my project open source. I'll use GPL v3.

Now if you didn't understand any of the bullshit I've been saying so far (it happens to me too sometimes), it simply means I'm just setting things up.

QUONG

I've started to make use of a unit test library UnitTest++. Its really nice, just after a day of adding unit tests and I've found bugs I wouldn't have otherwise. I recommend it to anyone making code in C++.

QUONG

That's only a rough concept of what I'll be making

Quong Development

I'm working on the proper moving of text cursor  for the non-monospaced text. It's turning out to be more and more difficult the more I code it.

More Quong

The only significant changes I've made to the Quong keyboard demo is that:

• it displays a bitmap of the on-screen keyboard in the lower screen
• it now displays non-monospaced text (not shown in image), but its incomplete (no word-wrap yet).

More Quong DS Development

I've made a small demo for the hex keyboard, the problem is I haven't gotten around to how to render the keyboard graphics yet. Should I use a large bitmap? That wouldn't make it reconfigurable. Should I use the hardware-accelerated sprites display? If only there were more up-to-date documentations and tutorials for libnds.

If anyone wants the .nds file, post a comment and I'll host it somewhere.

Quong, and the ever elusive ideal firearm weapon for the gunner

Look at that. Look at that weird beehive looking... thing, which most of you will probably not bother looking at anyway. Its the quong hex keyboard layout but modified a bit 'cause I felt like it. I've been making up the code to make a hex keyboard in the Nintendo DS. Soon enough, I was outlaying a simple GUI library for it. That pic's just the concept layout though.

Ultimately, I want to make a homebrew app for the DS that's similar to Tiddlywiki: some sort of guerrilla wiki for the DS.

Moving on, I was about to make animations for the gunner soldier when I realized he doesn't have the props. So I've been making new concepts for fictional guns/rifles (which I will not show yet). So much reference images I've downloaded from the Web, and yet its still pretty hard to be creative when you're lazy, and prefer to spend the weekend fapping to porn instead, which means I'm not finished yet.