March Newsletter Draft

[Danny Mui <dm...@apache.org>]

My first draft for the March newsletter.  Please let me know if anything 
needs to be updated.  I'll post it to the news site once its blessed.  
This newsletter applies only for March items.  Ongoing efforts should be 
logged on the news site to have a more complete report and require less 
manual effort.

btw: Glen,  I am sober now (will work on that problem shortly ;)).

* Patch applied for deep cloning of worksheets was provided 
(record.clone() specifically [1] and string records [2])
* Patch applied to allow sheet reordering [3]
* Due to named reference work, several named-ranged bugs were closed
        1) Creating multiple named ranges crashes Excel[4]
        2) Test case in re-manipulating references [5]
        3) Test case to verify named range reading  [6]
        4) Converted named references to use proper Excel syntax 
(Sheet!$A$1:$C$1) [7]
* Patch applied to prevent sheet corruption after a template 
modification [8]
* Discussion/Efforts have begun to tackle encoding issues and spefically 
on EBCDIC systems [9]
* Added additional print area setting methods using row/column numbers [10]
* HDF got some attention!
        1) Encoding investigation [11] 
        2) Negative Array size fix [12]
        3) Lucene indexing for word documents [13]
* Formula Parser Changes
       1) Added argument pointers to support the IF formula [14]
       2) Added special character support for string literals, 
specifically for SUMIF formula support [15] and addresses a bug as well [16]
* Some fundamental issues were discussed with regards to how POI reads 
from input streams
       1) BlockingInputStream committed to help ensure reads [17]
       2) Architectural discussion on where the responsibility lies for 
handling slow streams [18]
* Proposal to close poi-users was discussed [19]
* Nicola Ken Barozzi's status changed to Emeritus Committer [20]
* Fixed problem with NaN values differing from the investigated value 
from file reads in FormulaRecords [21], [22]
* Work on updating the build system has begun [23]

[1]  http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17540
[2]  http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=poi-dev&m=104819049101793&w=2
[3]  http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17491
[4]  http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13775
[5]  http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16411
[6]  http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=9632
[7]  http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16315
[8]  http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17373
[9]  http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17791
[10] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=poi-dev&m=104707396616768&w=2
[11] http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17824
[12] http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17208
[13] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=poi-dev&m=104777496501972&w=2
[14] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.poi.devel/4448
[15] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=poi-dev&m=104787649224917&w=2
[16] http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17582
[17] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=poi-dev&m=104801463202675&w=2
[18] http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13478
[19] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=poi-dev&m=104828678918728&w=2
[20] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=poi-dev&m=104879521107671&w=2
[21] http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18114
[22] http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18155
[23] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=poi-user&m=104791136628656&w=2