Cody Russell

Ludwig van

A few changes this afternoon. LudwigViewFrame now inherits from GtkTable rather than GtkScrolledWindow, and it now creates rulers. I figured out how to do popup menus in BonoboUI today, so I’ll make the rulers right-clickable in order to set the measurement units (points, millimeters, centimeters, inches).

New screenshots should be made soon, I think.

Peabody

Oh yeah, I think I forgot to mention in my diary that I’ve been accepted to Peabody on the GPD (Graudate Performer Diploma) program. This is quite cool, I think, and I’m very excited. So, I’ll likely be moving to Baltimore next semester and beginning my study at Peabody Conservatory.

Ludwig van

Page margins are now working. This is pretty cool. They still need to be easily configurable, as do page sizes.

Thanks to some help from Jonathan Blandford and Liam Quin, canvas items are displaying correctly immediately now. I just assumed the bug was in Ludwig van, but it turns out that it is in GnomeCanvas. All standard canvas items were experiencing this bug sometimes, but canvas items that I wrote never experienced the bug.

If your standard canvas items (GnomeCanvasLine, GnomeCanvasRect, etc..) aren’t displaying immediately, just do a gtk_widget_queue_draw (canvas) after you create them. If canvas items that you wrote are experiencing this bug, you need to make sure your update() method calls gnome_canvas_request_redraw() under the proper circumstances. Look at GnomeCanvasPixbuf for reference.

Sound servers; I hate SourceForge projects

The subject of a new sound server for GNOME 2.0 has come up recently on gnome-hackers, and I’ve been interested in reading it. I had nothing to contribute to the discussion because I thought Elliott said everything important. Of course, no one came to any conclusions and so we’re still back at where we were before.

The possibilities are to keep EsounD, which is well-known by everyone to suck all kinds of ass, to switch to aRts, which has the benefit of being the KDE2 sound server but which would add a C++ dependency to GNOME and is also way too heavyweight for GNOME’s (or KDE’s, in my opinion) needs, or throw our weight behind ASD, the Advanced Sound Daemon. At this point I’m not sure how advanced ASD really is, but the guy writing it seems to have the right idea in mind.

I wonder how far off the possibility is that we could create a common C API for ASD and aRts that could communicate between both servers. That way KDE apps could use sound under GNOME environments, and GNOME apps in KDE could as well.

I’ve been trying to download the sources to ASD for a couple hours, but ASD is hosted on SourceForge, and so it is so incredibly slow that I can’t possibly ever connect and retrieve the code. SourceForge was a cool idea, but I think it’s just not working very well. Anyone with a stupid program or hack can ask for a SourceForge entry to be created for it. It’s becoming as polluted with crap as Freshmeat is. Every time I try to get something from SourceForge, it’s very painful.

Linux

I finally decided to fix some problems I was having on Linux today. My machine was crawling because I didn’t have DMA disk transfer turned on. So I downloaded kernel 2.4.3 and updated from 2.2.16. I tried to build with devfs, but that totally botched everything, and after removing that things worked fine. Now I can play mp3 files, compile software, and rebuild my Medusa database and I experience no noticeable slowdown. That’s good enough for me. =)

New recordings I bought

Last night while I was in the neighborhood, I went over to Tower Records and bought some cool CDs. I got a recording of the Walton viola concerto recorded by Nobuko Imai, a William Primrose CD with lots of stuff (but so far I’ve only listened to Paganini’s “La Campanella” over and over again!), and the complete Beethoven string quartets recorded by the Alban Berg Quartet. Their set of Beethoven quartets was the cheapest, and I happen to like what recordings of theirs I have heard so far. I had intended to buy the recording by the Cleveland quartet eventually, but it was like $75, and of course Emerson quartet’s was like $130 or something unreasonable. I guess because they’re sort of the biggest quartet out there right now, they can get away with charging way too much for their recordings.

In the hospital

I went to the hospital to see my friend Chris Forrest yesterday. His brain surgery went very well, and he is recovering very quickly. He may even be out of the hospital as early as Monday!

I noticed that he is being watched over by a little Angel Hello Kitty doll, complete with cute little wings. Regina would be so proud!

I like interesting people

Tonight I was over by SMU hanging out with Gabriel and Fumika at this coffee house across the street, and a few of the SMU music students came in and were talking to us. There was this girl from Spain who was there, and I thought she was so interesting, because she was just so incredibly fierce! She obviously did not have a very great English vocabulary yet, and so when she couldn’t say what she wanted then she would either say, “Fuck!!” or she would make some sort of violent grunt-like sound. Her boyfriend was with her, and Gabriel said that before the two of them began going out he was a really tough sort of person, but now he’s very passive. I found this very interesting, and now that I think about it I think Regina would absolutely adore this girl based upon what little I’ve written of her here.

Their recitals..

Gabriel and Fumika are both playing recitals later this month at SMU. Gabriel at least knows what he’s playing in his recital (mostly), but I can’t believe Fumika still hasn’t even decided at all yet what she will be playing. She seems to make these sorts of decisions about a week before her recitals, and she’s such a good violinist that she can get away with it and play an excellent recital!

Ludwig van

I’ve been adding stuff for measurements in Ludwig van (ludwig-display-metrics.[ch]), and doing some necessary page layout things. I’ve started to add page sizing, margins, and rulers, as well as some other changes to LudwigView and such.

It’s unfortunate that there is no accurate way (at least in X) to determine the dpi of the display. There is a way to request the information from X, but since nobody ever sits down with a ruler and calibrates their display it really isn’t a good solution.

Symphony

Fort Worth Symphony did a pops concert tonight with Burnadette Peters. It was pretty fun, actually. I heard that the woman is around 50 years old, and I could not believe it. She looks so young!

Hacking

I’m interested in fooling around with Gdome now. I’m investigating how it works, and the possibility of adding SVG to it. It looks like it is a huge amount of work, judging merely by the file size of SVG’s IDL definition, but it would be a very worthwhile piece of work to do I think. Maybe.

During symphony rehearsal today I was giving some thought to document/page layout so I’ve got some ideas of where to go from here to make Ludwig van actually give the appearance of doing something vaguely like what one might expect it to do. Who knows when I’ll actually start doing anything towards this goal though? I need to talk to Raph or Ankh or someone about figuring out how many pixels are in an inch.

Bpath update

TrueType importing is working now. You can see a simple screenshot here. It’s not finished yet and needs a lot of polishing, but I’m quite happy about it. Next on the agenda is maybe going after SVG importing!

Chris..

I’m told by Geoffrey that Chris’s surgery this morning went very well and that he is doing fine. I’m very happy to hear this.

Hacking

Bpath/font hacking is going well. As soon as .ttf importing is working, I may go after SVG importing. That would be really cool. Ultimately other forms of input may be useful as well, but at this point I can’t really think of any.