Sat 14 May 2005

  • introspection: Matthias has been doing fantastic work on the GObject introspection front. It’s currently in the gobject-introspection module in CVS if anyone wants to play with it. It is already mostly functional, if a bit untested. He added libffi support this week, meaning that g_function_info_invoke() now works.

    For those who haven’t been following this project, this is really exciting news. The introspection framework will give us the ability to find out what objects, functions and methods are available in a given library. Theoretically, a significant chunk of the work in a language binding can disappear when this lands. Additionally, libraries can be bindable without writing explicit bindings. It can also be used by glade-style applications to handle new libraries.

    To test it further, jdahlin started doing bindings for python, and I added the metadata to libpoppler. We’ve been able load in much of the poppler’s API into python, shaking out quite a few bugs along the way. The next step is to put together some working python bindings. We should be able to get something functional pretty soon.

  • evince: The latest version is pretty darned nice. We hit a lot of the initial features that we want, and it’s looking really sexy. We’ve gotten some great external patches, and there are a couple more good ones in the works.

    I started writing the presentation mode a couple weeks ago, and it turned out to be a lot less fun than I thought it was going to be. It wasn’t really clear how many pdfs in the wild are actually used as presentations, and it seemed an awkward fit with the rest of the interface. It also is going to require a pretty big restructuring of some of the code.

    Just when I was putting it down and moving on, a powerpoint renderer appeared! This makes it much easier to justify spending time on this code. I haven’t seen a patch yet, but I can’t wait.

  • weather: Inexplicably, for five weekends in a row, we’ve had rain on both Saturday and Sunday. My grass is growing out of control, and I haven’t been able to cut it yet. There have been nice days during the week in April, just not on the weekends. I want a refund!

  • sports: I watched Jeff Weaver take a no-hitter into the seventh inning tonight. Regretfully, as with all other games I’ve seen, it was broken up when Horacio Ramirez hit a double. One of my life-goals is to catch no-hitter from start to finish, and I seem no closer today to that goal. I really enjoy watching a pitching dual, and keep hoping that I’ll catch that most magical of games.

    In the eighth, it fell apart for both pitchers as the Braves hit a grand slam and the Dodgers responded in kind. The Dodgers win, 7-4.

Sun 06 Jun 2004

  • AisleRiot: I fixed a bug in the hint code in odessa.scm that has been bugging me for seven years. While testing it, I found another bug (crasher) that must have been there for at least as long. My scheme skills are rusty.

  • weather: Zana and I went to the beach with Brian and Delphine, yesterday. We tried to fly the kite that they had gotten in California, but it wasn’t windy enough. So we flew my kite instead.

Thu 04 Mar 2004

  • Music: With apologies to Oscar Hammerstein II

    Ol’ file chooser That ol’ file chooser. He don’t show nothin’ But he must save somethin’ Cause we just keeps codin’ We keeps codin’ along. Codin’ along. He don’t make new dirs He don’t drag bookmarks. Files thats big is soon forgotten. But that ol’ file chooser We keeps codin’ along…

  • File Chooser: Actually it’s not that bad. The number of critical bugs has gone down by a good number this week. But Monday is awfully close; it’s going to be a busy weekend.

  • Games: Seth Vidal and looked up the last few letters in that game. Zana and I would never have gotten ‘U’ and ‘Y’. A good game overall.

  • Weather: It was warm enough today that we were able to open up a bunch of windows in the house and turn of the heating. It was really refreshing to air the house after winter.