The StartX Files: Between the Sheets With abs
By: Brian Proffitt
Friday, December 7, 2001 03:32:08 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/3939/1/
IF Crew = Dave THEN DoorPosition = Close
I managed to get a hold of the television remote the other evening after I distracted my wife by gently tossing one of the cats' catnip mice at my wife's head and ordering the cats to go get the toy mouse. In one sense, my gambit worked, as my wife's reach for the remote was diverted into a desperate flinging of hands to get the mouse off of her before the cats could charge across the room and attack, thus leaving me with the all-powerful remote in my possession. In my house, possession is no mere nine-tenths of the law--it is the law.
Of course, ultimately my gambit failed, because my wife was later able to get back at me in ways that I would rather not mention.
All part of the magic of the Proffitt home.
Anyway, to the victor go the spoils, and I began to peruse the channels to see what was on. Being a guy, I naturally avoided such oddities as the WE channel, Oxygen, or Lifetime. Being a geek, I concentrated on such channels as Discovery, Sci-Fi, PBS...hello! What was this? I had stumbled on "2001: Hal's Legacy," a program on Arthur C. Clarke's vision of 21st Century computers (like Hal) and the reality of current efforts for artificial intelligence. Intrigued, I settled in for a hour-long journey into serious geek territory. Fuming, my wife rolled her eyes and settled in to plot her revenge.
I won't bore you with unnecessary details, but the upshot of the program was a look at the various aspects of AI manifestation that Hall seemed to comfortably manage: speech, vision, common sense, and emotive response were just some aspects that were examined. Various scientists are taking different approaches to each of these obstacles to producing artificial intelligence, in projects that are divided piecemeal throughout the artificial intelligence community. IBM is hammering on problem solving with Big Blue, for example, but all that Big Blue can do is play chess (albeit very well). It could not even play checkers if you asked it to.
There are projects on teaching object recognition, speech recognition, and there's even an open source project on teaching a computer common sense. I'll believe this last when I see it, since I know several human beings that seem to blithely go through life with a complete lack of it.
Strides are being taken, but we are nowhere near the computer technology Clarke envisioned with Hal. Certainly there have been few (if any) efforts to try to combine all of these different aspects into one cohesive system.
To some, this seeming failure of not living up to the timeline of one man's dream could be discouraging. I myself have often joked about the fact that it's the 21 Century and there's still no flying cars yet.
But beyond this layer of disappointment, maybe it's a good thing we have yet to figure out how to create intelligence with technology yet. It's a nice reminder that although we have figured out how to split an atom, we still have not figured out how we, our inner selves, really work. Perhaps when we have a better handle on that, we will be able to bring the technology up to speed.
Because I am reminded every day that it's not the technology that's the important thing. A funny thing for a technology writer to say, I know. Here in the Linux community, there are countless examples of people using their technical knowledge to show what's good about the human race. And sometimes people put the technology before the people around them and say and do things they might otherwise regret--all in the name of that same technology.
This week's shocking statement: Linux is not the be all end all. I know even Linus and the rest of the keepers of the kernel don't buy into this. Ultimately, Linux is just another tool. Just like UNIX. Just like Windows. Something I think we all could use a reminder of as we conduct ourselves in this community and all the rest of the IT world.
Great things will not be done by Linux. Great things will be done with Linux, driven by the people who know how to use it and can build more tools to work with it.
Looking at abs
One good example of a good Linux tool is the abs spreadsheet application. I should be specific here and mention that in actuality, abs was originally written for UNIX and, like many X apps, abs has neatly made the jump over to our neck of the woods.
abs is a freely available download maintained by programmer André Bertin. The current version is 0.907, which is available as a binary for Linux. Earlier versions are available for AIX, HP-UX, and IRIX in binary form. The source, it goes without saying, is also available for this GPL application, both for 0.907 and 0.908. Given my preference for binaries, I pulled the 0.907 for Linux file down and installed it onto my SuSE 7.3 box, using the instructions provided on the abs Web site.
This may seem like a very minor thing, but I have learned that not all tarballs with binaries in them should be treated the same way, and it's a polite development team that spells it out for the newbies among us.
After installation, I started abs on my KDE desktop and was awarded with a frozen splash screen, which was initially off-putting. I restarted KDE and from then on, everything worked fine. I'll chalk this one down to post-installation jitters--that nebulous pseudo-technical frame of time where all programs are given a temporary free pass to act a little hinky. But only once.
The first thing you will say to yourself after starting abs (or looking at the screenshot with this article) is "Oh. Motif." since that is what the interface appears to be built upon. Actually, its based on Xaw, which has a very Motif-like look. This was certainly intentional, since Bertin first developed abs in Motif for AIX back in 1996.
Although Xaw/Motif are aesthetically not my favorite widget kits, the overall look of abs was satisfactory. I did notice that there were some mouse tracking delays within the dialog boxes under KDE, which did not happen under GNOME. These delays were slightly more than negligible, so for better performance I would recommend working with this under GNOME, if you are inclined to use a desktop environment.
In terms of functionality, all of the standard spreadsheet accouterments were in place: input line, function bar, row and column controls... pretty much everything you need to manipulate your data in the cells and sheets. The only thing missing that I would have liked to have seen was a pop-up context menu for the row and column control buttons. In abs, you have to select the row or column then go all the way up to the main menus to implement a command like formatting. Picky, but time-consuming after a while.
Printing is not a difficult thing to master, as abs workbooks are converted to XFig format and then sent to the printer in that format. You need to make sure you have fig2dev if you want to send information to the printer in PostScript format.
abs does a good job letting you enter functions into individual cells without having to type a thing, if you are willing. Just click on the Function tool, pick a function, and then choose the cells you want to be entered in the function to have their cell addresses automatically entered. The only thing you need enter manually are parentheses and brackets, if you need them. There are 144 functions included, so there's no shortage of calculations to implement.
Chart creation is a wee bit convoluted, depending on how you start it. If you have a range of cells selected, then selecting Chart|Create will immediately slap up an XY chart, which can be moved and resized around the sheet with ease. Of course, this is all well and good unless you wanted another kind of chart. In this case, or if you don't have a range selected, you will have to use the Chart|Create menu commands and then Chart|Change Chart to pick a range and/or chart type. You can select from XY, pie, and bar charts, using a dialog box that is very reminiscent of Excel's chart tool. Again, this quirk is not a deal-breaker, just a little quirk that you will have to adapt to.
Speaking of Excel, abs does provide a certain kind of compatibility with Excel, using a unique tool patterned directly after Visual Basic: the ABVisual scripting language.
Bertin's approach to sharing Excel and abs files is rather interesting. The contents of every abs file, he explained, is an ABVisual script that is faithfully recreated by abs when the spreadsheet file is opened in abs.
"If you open in an editor the file saved by abs," Bertin said, "you will find something like:
Sub main() Cells(1,1).formula = "Welcome to the abs spreadsheet" Cells(2,1).formula = "=10+10" Cells(2,1).font.size = 18 ... End sub
"When you open this file inside abs," he continued, "abs will execute
the macro called main to recreate the spreadsheet. Inside Excel, you just
have to import the file inside Visual Basic, run the main routine and the result is
exactly the same."
To reverse the process and pull Excel data into abs, Bertin has written a simple Excel macro to save the content of the workbook in the abs file/script format.
Granted, this is a bit cumbersome, but it works. I was able to open files of either type with impunity in either application. Some of the fancier formatted Excel workbooks looked a bit weird in abs, but this was mostly due to font-handling differences between Windows and X.
As far as other spreadsheet formats are concerned, users might be a bit out of luck for now, as Bertin has concentrated his efforts on just Excel compatibility for now.
The ABVisual scripting language is one of the big strengths of abs, since it does far more than provide Excel compatibility. According to Bertin, "[ABVisual scripts] can be compiled as stand-alone applications and you can easily add your own classes to the object model."
Bertin has created this scripting language from the ground up, with the lexical
analyzer generated by Lex (Flex) and the grammar interpreted by Yacc or
Bison. His
biggest problem was "creating ABVisual to be compatible with Visual Basic from
Microsoft, [since] there is no well defined grammar of this language."
Looking Ahead
Now that abs is at version 0.907, Bertin feels confident that that spreadsheet functionality of the application is stable enough for him to start working on the ABVisual part of the app. Part of this is a desire to improve the script, but it also stems from a desire to keep the spreadsheet as simple as he can.
"A debug tool is needed, more information about syntax errors is needed, and documentation about the object model and implemented functions is needed," Bertin stated.
Before version 1.0, Bertin also wants to implement a full batch mode, to accommodate those times when multiple instances of abs will help generate/process data for a large or multiple reports.
Bertin has a lot of work ahead, as he is the sole developer on the abs project (though he indicated he gets a lot of help from user bug reports).
Overall, I found abs to be a solid and fast spreadsheet that can be used for simple to fairly complex spreadsheet needs. It's nothing fancy, but it definitely gets the job done, which is something we all can appreciate.
Available from: http://www.ping.be/bertin/abs.shtml
Version reviewed: 0.907 for Linux/Intel
License: GNU General Public License
Cost: Free to download as binary or source