The yo-yo

After finishing the last patch for Gecko support in monodoc I realized that some links were broken. Looking a little bit more on detail I found the problem. The nice URLs like T:System.Activator are being lower-cased by gecko to t:System.Activator, so the ecma-provider gets lost. I tried in firefox, epiphany, etc and found the same behavior. I remembered then a post in monologue about URLs and following a link to the RFC-spec I found the following:

Scheme names consist of a sequence of characters. The 
lower case letters "a"--"z", digits, and the characters plus 
("+"), period ("."), and hyphen ("-") are allowed. For 
resiliency, programs interpreting URLs should treat upper case 
letters as equivalent to lower case in scheme names (e.g., 
allow "HTTP" as well as "http").

So I suppose gecko is just acting "polite" and lower-casing everything before the ':' for us. Thank you very much.

On the other hand, I've almost finished the search for Monodoc. I'm just playing with the process to try to improve the results and I realized It would be great if the people tell me different searches they would make and the results they would expect.

I couldn't resist to post this thingy Paula sent me. I'm sooooooo impressed how imperfect we are.

Hey, just open the GIMP and check it for yourself

Return to Karlsruhe

I've visited Belgium this weekend with Paula. We were in Brussels, Brugges and Gehnt. The three of them are great places for tourism and Belgium is a nice country with three gastronomic attractions: Chocolate, Mussels and Beer. We have tried to enjoy all of them.

Chocolate fountain


/me enjoying a great meal


Brugges at night

Search for the Holy Documentation

The last week was not very productive, I was just infected with a virus called lazyness. However I can post the first world premiere screenshot of Monodoc browser searching feature:

The GUI is not feature complete, but the idea it's clear. You write a search term, hit return and get your results grouped by that search term (woooooooooow). The thing would be as good as the performance of the searching. Just as Jon Trowbridge said at the Guadec, if you cannot give the user what he is looking for in the first 5-8 results, that is a bug. Nothing more to add.
At the moment, the search only works for the ECMA-C# spec, but I'm already working in the ECMA API, which, of course, is the most interesting.
I'm visiting Brussel with Paula next weekend so I will have to work hard next week to finish the Search'o'matic feature. It would be also great to write down all the ideas I'm thinking for Monodoc and send that to the list. Just as Lelalau uses to say: "mal sehen".

First commit to Monodoc

Today I commited my first patch addressing the first goal, use gecko to render html in monodoc. The patch is far from being complete but it is the first step in the right direction. Some things don't work but it renders the documentation nicely. For completing the task I will wait for the work of Michael which is doing an ASP.NET editor with Mozilla. He has already a way to call Javascript from C# (which can solve some of my problems).

Meanwhile I will be adding search support for Monodoc with Lucene. Also, I want to write down a TODO list as I found several things that can be improved.

This Friday the "Tour de France" came to Karlsruhe, two hours waiting for 10 seconds of emotion. I could barely see nothing but, at least, I have some good photos. Also, I was at two parties, the first one, N&N Abschied party, was really good, the second, in Hadiko, not so good.

Just one more thing. This week we had two remarkable things, the first one really good (Software patents were rejected) and the second one really sad (London Bombings).

Why does it rain so much in Summer?

The first week of the Summer of Code is gone.

Every day I get a clearer vision of the whole Monodoc system. I've opened three battlefronts:

• Integrate Gecko in Monodoc: I've already a working system but it lacks some functionality. I'm a little bored of fighting with the GtkMozEmbed and looking in Epiphany and Galeon source codes. Waiting a response from the tutor.
  

  
  

• Use of CSS: I've started looking into this. Much of the works comes from rewriting the XSLT files.
  

  
  

• Integrating search engine (Lucene): This one is the funniest at the time writing. I can already make easy searches and I'm looking how to integrate it nicely with the code.
  

From the not-so-Summer-of-Code department, I've been interviewed today for the tech section of a spanish newspaper: El País. I hope my grandma like it.

Eating a Kebab and drinking a Czech Budweiser in front of the Karlsruhe Schloss, with all the starts and some friends, is pretty near to the idea of happiness.