Freepascal, synedit and scintilla

Been up for god knows how many hours coding. I think i’ll go for a late dinner and a pint down at the diner. I’m allergic to malt so a pint of beer always makes me sleepy. I am pondering if synedit is not beyond all help at this point. Just getting the widestring repo to talk to the codebase that supports code folding and non-editable sections is a nightmare. Perhaps i’ve forked the wrong codebase (he said in retrospect). Freepascal have done wonders with it at the cost of years (which i don’t have) but that seems like a steep price for what is essentially a basic text editor, albeit a good one.

I could have coded my own scintilla wrapper by now, for which Jordan Russel would have been the inspiration (what can i say, the guy is a legend). I’ll talk it over with a couple of friends from the FPC scene — I really want to update synedit and wake that gem up from the dead, but not at the expense of customers waiting for me to fix 10-year-old bad habits (I have more than enough with the bugs I create myself). Hopefully we can avoid scintilla… i hope so. The synedit codebase is a mess to say the least.

I take back everything negative i have ever said about the lazarus project, it must have taken a lot of stamina to do what they did. So fair is fair, I stand corrected when it comes to freepascal and lazarus. And I also feel slightly ashamed having given them such a poor review a year ago. Goes to show, the user and the provider live in two different worlds – often a middle man is required to bridge the gap (enter the public relation representative).

It’s not always easy to get attention over at the fpc forums, but some things (like fighting with synedit’s internal tables for 10 hours) have to be experienced to be understood. So I get it now. And I must applaud the effort of the lazarus team for what they have done, without getting even a fraction of the credit they so truly deserve.

What a weeked

This was a kick ass weekend. Finally had time to focus completely on my kids. So on friday we were all relaxing on the couch watching “Yogi bear” on blue ray first, then we pigged out on ice-cream + Thai food at a local diner. My wife went off to her kickboxing tournament (and came back quite bruised but happy sunday at around midnight) – so it was just me and the kids.

You can never have to much ice-cream

Saturday we visited the annual medieval and viking festival here in Tønsberg. We decided to drop the outfits at the last moment due to talks of rain, but the weather did hold. The kids had a blast, with my son Niklas testing out his bow and arrow, and Sunniva went berserk with her wooden sword and sadly knocked out a few kids — but mostly herself. After a few apologies and dad accidentally “losing” the wooden sword during lunch, everything calmed down and we watched the ritual slaying of a paper dragon, the kings men and his troops — and then an all out viking music and dance festival.

Sunni ready for battle. The boy there have no clue what he’s getting into..

Kicking it, viking style

Sunday was we took the boat out to a local island (Bolærne) where the kids could play pirates, and we all did some barbecuing and let the kids run amok on apple juice. We fished for crabfish, shellfish and god knows what and had a fantastic day 🙂 We also inspected the old army depo in the middle of the mountain (about 10 minutes walk directly into the heart of the bedrock) which was pretty cool.

“Dead cow is the best dad” .. yup, that’s my girl!

Pirate bay? Tz.. beginners

Needless to say, with my wife out fighting I was exhausted by the time she came back – but exhausted in a good way. Hm.. every time I go out fighting she get’s mad. Women, go figure.. 😛

God I love Norway, there is drama and action woven into the fabric of things — and there is never a dull moment if you got the spirit for it 🙂