Thomas Wood

My gobject generator project I mentioned a while ago has been named “Turbine” (thanks to Charles for the suggestion). I’ve made a few more improvements and it’s now available in a GNOME git repository:

http://git.gnome.org/cgit/turbine/

git clone git://git.gnome.org/turbine

The new Moblin User Experience has been announced. Finally we can show people what we’ve been working on!

Check out the introduction video

There has been recent talk about GObject Generators, so I’m going to throw my own one into the mix. It’s based on Ross’ gobject.py, but given a fresh dose of GTK+ and auto completion love.

If you’d like to try it out, there is a git repository available:

git clone http://gnome.org/~thos/git/gobject-gen.git

I’d like to move it to GNOME git, but before I do it needs a decent project name. Does anyone have any suggestions? Something descriptive but unique, preferably with only 2 syllables.

Kudos to the Anjuta GObject generator for the auto completion idea. Also, before any one suggests it, I know about Vala but we’re not using it for this project, so it’s of no use.

In the office we have two white boards that where going rather underused. Last week I decided to rectify this by drawing FOSS propaganda on one of them. On the same day, Damien (of Shave fame) happened to show us all a new Vim command we hadn’t used before, so I suggested we start a Vim Command of the Day sheet on the other white board. We’ve taken this into the 21st century as well, so anyone can follow Damien’s encyclopedic knowledge on Vim through the magic of twitter: @vcotwdorso (short for, “vim command of the week day or so”, because Damien didn’t want to be restricted to updating it just once a day)

Does anyone know what’s happened to vim’s “comment” feature in Debian Lenny? It seems this feature is enabled (i.e. –version shows +comment) and the default string set, but it just doesn’t work. Does any one have any ideas?

Update: many thanks to Lubomir; the answer was that the ‘r’ and ‘o’ options where missing from formatoptions.

I recently had cause to remind someone about the evilness of using backticks as quote marks, which lead me to dig up this really useful document: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

Please show this to anyone to who abuses backticks in this way and enlighten them!

We will be bringing up these ideas for discussion on gtk-devel-list.

This week I am in Dublin for the GTK+ theming hackfest. On Monday we spent a long time throwing ideas around and discussing various approaches. Thankfully since then, we got on with some proper hacking. I’ve been working on two things:

cairo based engine api

Ben and I have been working on completely converting the default GTK+ theme to cairo so that it will be easier to move to a completely cairo based api for theme engines in the future. This would allow third parties to draw widgets without the need for a GdkDrawable, or even X11 itself.

Css styling in GTK+

Rob and I also discussed CSS themeing and how we might implement this within GTK+. We decided it would be good to implement a way of styling generic GObject types as not all objects on screen and GtkWidgets (e.g. GtkCellRenderer). We decided to make a GStylesheet object which acts as a data store (implemented as a GObject wrapper around libcroco, which we’ve also been enhancing) and a GStylable interface (which would replace the style properties in GTK+). Apart from allowing us to style any GObject with CSS, this also allows third parties to retrieve style properties without creating their own fake GTK+ widget.

I’ve just created myself an account on github, and am pushing my work from this week there: http://github.com/thos

If anyone else (like me) is having problems with the iwlagn drivers (Intel wireless), try loading the driver with hardware encryption disabled. This seems to have solved the issue for me:

rmmod iwlagn && modprobe iwlagn swcrypto=1