The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

As Christmas approaches, it is again time for some reflection on the year behind us, and I am glad to say that it was a particularly good one.

New Home

The most significant event of this past year has been moving house. Our housing situation had increasingly been of concern for us, particularly as the prices of properties in the UK kept spiralling. But we are glad to say that after five years in rather abysmal accommodation, we succeeded this spring in buying a nice three-bedroom house in Banknock, a village on the western edge of the Falkirk council area. We are on the edge of open countryside of the Kelvin Valley, less than five-minute walk from the Forth and Clyde Canal, which is ideal for our running and cycling. In addition, the move has reduced the commuting times for both of us; my average journey to work is now around 45-50 minutes (envious of Linda’s 10 minute drive). The house also has a small garden, which I particularly enjoy.

Work

I continue teaching the Old Testament at Scottish Baptist College. In addition to that, I am going to be teaching an honours-level module in systematic theology this spring; it should be an interesting experience as this really is not my field. Teaching comes with its own joys and challenges, and provides an opportunity to reflect critically on one’s beliefs and attitudes, and my own theology has certainly been crystallising over the past couple of years. Otherwise, we are quite busy at present at the College, trying to get three new programmes validated through the University of Paisley for the next academic year. Overall, I am reasonably happy with my work, but I do struggle with the commuting, which I find incredibly stressful, but at present there is now way around that.

Climbing

I terms of climbing, it was not the greatest of years. Between the wet weather in the early part of the year and all the business that goes with buying new house, I only managed one day climbing this spring. I did, however, spend a week climbing on the Cornish sea cliffs this August (with the Christian Rock and Mountain Club), which has ranked among the best climbing I have ever done, and I am hoping to return there next summer (something rather appealing about the combination of the sea cliffs and Cornish cream tea). After that holiday, however, I have not managed to get out climbing until the first winter climb of the season this past Saturday (Curved Ridge on Buchaile Etiv Mor). I hope the next year is going to be better, I find few things as satisfying as a good climb.

Running

I am pleased to say that I have achieved my target for the year and broke through the 45min barrier for 10k this autumn. We both really enjoyed our running, and joined a handful of 10k races; our favourite was a small race at Laggan, with challenging, undulating, course set in the beautiful scenery of the Scottish Highlands – we have every intention to return there next May.

AbiWord

My involvement with AbiWord has entered into its fifth year, and over the years it has become a way of keeping my engineering brain sane. After six month of intense bug fixing, we have just released the next major version (2.2), with which AbiWord reached a serious degree of maturity, so if you are looking for a free alternative to MS Word, why not give it a try? Personally, I am particularly pleased with the excellent support for complex scripts we now have working in the Windows version, and fully expect to have similar support in place on Linux for the next major release (2.4), perhaps in next 6 months.

Well, that is enough ranting for one year.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!

I have decided to get a jabber id (see the right column). Spent about an hour trying to work out how to setup Exodus client to use SSL through proxy, but in spite of extensive googling, failed miserably. So I mailed the Exodus list for help, we will see.

I find Exodus to be a very neat application, but the complete lack of documentation is a serious turn off. This reminds me that I need to check that the documentation regarding bidi, revisions and document history in AbiWord is reasonably uptodate.

Yes, the big day arrived yesterday. The next major release of AbiWord has happened. We have worked hard toward this release for the past 16 months, for the past 6 months in ‘feature-freeze’, doing nothing else then fixing bugs. We have got a much improved product for that; there are number of new features as well as a number of improved features (one of the most exiting developments is the new MaxOSX version of AbiWord; the details are in the offical press release at our home page).

We have number of plans for the next stable version (2.4), but for now we continue working on the 2.2 line; we still have a few outstanding issues that we feel need to be fixed before we start working on new features.

Since we announced the release less then 24 hours ago, our site received nearly 30,000 visits; there is great sense of satisfaction in this; feedback from pleased users is the one reward that we get for the work we put it.