There’s been a lot of talk on the Gtk# mailing lists about the lack of a 2.12 installer for Win32. I finally took the time to roll a new MSI installer for Gtk# 2.12.3. But Medsphere is not using Gtk# 2.12, and we’re not planning to use it any time soon so I don’t think we really want to provide support for 2.12, or for 2.14 once it comes out, until we’re actually using them.

My long-term plan has been that I want to get gtk.org distributing its own official msi/msm installers for each component of the stack. Then other projects, such as gtk# or any gtk+ app, could consume the msm installers for their own msi containers.

Boston Summit is coming up pretty soon, and Brad and I plan to take the opportunity there to try to get Medsphere’s installer code into shape to do this and then push it into an upstream svn module, probably on Gnome’s svn.

Linux Journal has an article entitled The *Other* Vista: Successful and Open Source. It’s a brief introduction to the VistA system that is used by the VA and now many private hospitals, and which is the basis for Medsphere’s current products. The article talks a bit about Medsphere’s open source GTK-based OpenVista CIS, the new Medsphere.org initiative, and Congressman Pete Stark’s proposed Health-e Information Technology Act of 2008 bill that would advance open source medical software in the US if it were passed.

It’s really cool to see that our work is being noticed, and that people are starting to think about how open source can affect the medical industry.

Seven years, 157 comments later.. IT IS DONE!

I wasn’t even there and I can answer that question.

Megan and I went to the House of Blues in Dallas last night for the Raconteurs concert there. It was really awesome! Birds of Avalon opened for them. I had never heard of them before, but I thought they were okay. They had a funny gimmick where they have these little plastic birds, that I guess are battery powered since their wings could flap quickly, and the lead singer would turn them on and throw them out into the audience during one of the big instrumental sections of one song near the end. The Raconteurs came out later and it was the best show.. they did some stuff from their first album, and the new album, and a few songs that they have never recorded yet. Lots of fun. And House of Blues is a cool place, except that they charge you $5 for a can of beer.

I picked up a concert poster for it while I was there, of course.

This is a call out to anyone on Planet Gnome who can suggest a good printer that will work well with Linux. My ideal printer would probably be just a black-and-white laser printer that connects with USB, and is compatible with any recent versions of Ubuntu.

I’m not 100% sure about the B&W laser part. I’m also open to suggestions for inkjet printers, especially ones that have integrated scanners that also will work in Ubuntu.

So last week I was playing with East Texas Symphony again, and we played Brahms Symphony No.1, some Copland overture that I didn’t care for too much, and a concerto for piano trio and orchestra by a young composer named Jay Greenberg. The concerto was nice, and Eroica Trio played with us for it. They played really well, of course, although this piece isn’t really the best metric for judging how good a piano trio is.

So during the first rehearsal with them, I was looking at the violinist and thinking, “Who is this girl? She looks so familiar but I’m not sure where from.” I’m not overly familiar with Eroica Trio, and I don’t yet own any recordings of them, so I knew I didn’t recognize her just from that. I obviously had met her somewhere. Well, later I found out that it was Susie Park who I had known when I was at Encore, a summer music festival one summer. I didn’t recognize her at first because she cut her hair short now, and I’m used to it being very long. So I figured she wouldn’t remember me, because she’s all famous and shit now. So after the second rehearsal I go up to her and I say, “Hey Susie.. you probably don’t remember me but…” and she just yells, “CODY!”

She also knew two others in the orchestra, Andrew and Ordabek. So after the concert we went to the reception and drank a lot of wine and hung out. Then after that we went to some local bar in Tyler to drink some more. Apparently some of the people in the bar had gone to the concert, because we walk in and they see Susie and treated us like fucking rockstars. It was pretty cool.

I wish I had my camera with me, but I didn’t expect to know one of the soloists.

Now that things have settled down a little at work, we’re finally in the process of moving to gtk# 2.10 now. One of the cooler things that we can finally use now is the Gtk printing system. Previously we were using Gnome.Print on Linux and System.Windows.Forms.PrintDialog on Windows, which sucked for various reasons that you can probably guess. Obviously what we really needed was something we could use easily from both Linux and Windows.

Gtk.Print to the rescue! Except that it didn’t work on Windows yet. But in Berlin Behdad pointed me to #488833, to add support for cairo_win32_printing_surface to GTK. So once I got home I finished up the patch and it’s now committed to gtk+ svn trunk. Since it requires a new (and unstable) version of Cairo I can’t commit this support to gtk-2-12 branch, so I think I’m going to have to maintain a branch for Medsphere’s use.

This doesn’t solve print preview, though, so that’s the next thing I want to work on.

So I’m in Berlin at the GTK Hackfest, and it’s a lot of fun. I finally get to meet a lot more of the GTK hackers, and hear everyone’s thoughts and ideas for the future of GTK. Plus, we’re having a lot of fun hacking. It just wouldn’t be a hackfest otherwise.

I’ve been doing some hacking on a few different things. Worked on rewriting the test program for the sensitivity bug, using Tim’s GTester framework this time. Worked on the GtkIconEntry (merging from libsexy’s SexyIconEntry). Tonight I decided to see if I could get some WebKit action going from gtk#, and it was really simple.

This should be a lot of fun to play with, and I think Cesar will be interested in it as well.

Jenny is in Italy now, but should be arriving on Friday or Saturday I think. So that will be really cool, and I’m going to go hang out with her for a bit. I’m really looking forward to seeing her again.

I had been thinking about getting a new camera for awhile, because I bought my Coolpix 995 back in like 2000 or something and it’s getting a little tired. But I thought I might step up to an SLR this time, and I figured now would be a good time to get one so I would have it when I go to Berlin next month.

I’m always very impressed with César’s photos, so I bought a Nikon D200 like he has. It just arrived yesterday, and I started toying around with it some. I’m not posting any photos today though, because I haven’t taken any good ones yet. Hopefully I’ll get plenty of good photos in Berlin at the GTK Hackfest though.