Print yourself!

I’ve been working a bit on a printing API for gtk+. Its a highlevel API that integrates cairo, pango and a native print dialogs. Its really easy to get nice printing output, and it will work on all platforms, using native printing. I just made a code drop so that people can look at the APIs and comment on it.

The example code in it is pretty awesome, it actually prints itself. Here is the output pdf.

If you read that pdf you’ll see it produces some other output too. I’m sure interested parties can find that file too. 🙂

At last!

Daniel Veillard built the ekiga beta (ekiga is basically GnomeMeeting 2.0) in rawhide yesterday, so I decided to try it out. For the longest time I’ve thought GnomeMeeting was a really cool idea, but whenever I tried to actually use it I’d alway fail due to some firewall issue. (I have a pretty standard setup with a Linksys WRT54 broadband router as firewall.)

Not so this time!

It was incredibly smooth to set up, even autodetecting how to avoid NAT problems. The only manual thing I had to do was to enable the top secret “+20dB mic boost” setting in the volume control. I tried calling various echo servers on the net, which worked fine. Then I called caolan, who just got a “commercial VOIP thingie”. Worked immediately! Maybe the firewall handling got better, or maybe SIP is just easier to get through firewalls. I don’t care, and I don’t have to, it just works!

The integration with the free ekiga.net service and its central address book really makes this much more usable. Hats of to Damien!