As an aficionados of numbers, statistics and movement I worked with gnucash a lot.
Back to 2001 I 've started on Mandrake which was my distro of choice at that time. Gnucash was included, everything was fine. But then the dependencies hell drove me mad. I still can't accept one have to update the kernel and other major libraries just because you want the last version of "ethereal". After some tests with redhat and debian (no improvements) I decided to give Solaris x86 a try. It was a natural move because Solaris was (and still is) my main OS at work.
No gnucash binaries for Solaris exist on the internet and I decided to compile this stuff by my own ...

2 months later

Today I laugh about it but at that time it costed me a lot of gray hairs. Gnucash is one (if not the one) of the hardest software to compile. Internet attests it in a lot of places. I remember how funny some emails are, full of frustration and anger. It was a painfull process but I managed to compile gnucash in the version 1.8.6 and since I used it almost everyday.

today

Things aren't better from a software point of view. You still need slib, guile, a ton of old gnome 1.x libraries and packages. The gnucash developers didn't managed to create a gnome 2.x version due to short ressources (if you can hack C please consider getting involved). But there is some improvment from other fronts:

• Solaris 10 come otb with gcc
• DTrace is a great help to debug things
• blastwave provides a lot of needed libraries

DTrace

The best DTrace recipe I've saw so far and for me the most usefull is the one that reads every bytes landing in /dev/null. I urge the creator of this little gem to release it.

Blastwave

Really cool site for Solaris software. If you use it please make a donation. I've contacted them to maintain gnucash in the CSW tree and hope that you will soon (less than 2 months) find gnucash in the list of packages. Eventually I'll report on progress.
bbr

Since I work in the IT I 've always enjoy coding. I won't call me a developer nor an hacker and my opinion is what it is. But since my love is strong I've to shout it loud "Perl is my favourite" !

Yesterday I've to check my ~2000 lines of code because the interpreter failed with the error "too many right curly". I don't know how to do it with vi so I went with perl on the command line.

The first invocation was:

$ perl -n -e '$p++;print "$p";while (/(.)/g) { $a++ if $1 =~ /{/;$a-- if $1 =~ /}/; }print " $a\n"' jass_report.pl

The last was:

$ perl -n -e '$p++;while (/(.)/g) { $1 =~ /{/ ? $a++ : ($1=~/}/ ? $a-- : "")}print "line $p curly $a\n"' jass_report.pl

After 5 minutes, the mistake was found. great.

Somes reasons I like perl:

• it solves problems
• I've always much fun  with it
• it's realy near to UNIX philosophy
• by now I've never hit its limit

I'm back on this site because of a silly bug in blogger and I'm back from holiday in les gets. One reason I enjoy holiday in France is for the ability to find some food outside the big industrial chain. Local artisanat continue to fight mono culture and lost of flavour. We found a cheese trade la fruitiere. You will find hand made abondance, reblochon, tome de savoie and a lot more. All this are delicious. My tip is to eat young abondance at breakfast with bread and a good coffee!

First blog with blosxom.
Fine.