Cody Russell

Nikon D200

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.

Win32 Updates for GTK

Today I committed a patch to rework modal windows on Win32. This fixes #455627 and #511111. Ever vigilant, Brad quickly caught one very important thing that I missed, so I filed and fixed #514643.

I also finally took the time to get the gtk-2-10 branch caught up with all the latest Win32 patches, since Medsphere is using 2.10 still. I merged in patches for #505928, #506769, #504984, #144269 (again), #164537, #371036, and #405178.

There seems to be a lot of interest right now in improving GTK on Windows. There’s now a new wiki page devoted to it, and #win32 on IRC. Very exciting!

Medsphere Widgets Released

Nobody else at work has blogged on planet about this yet, so I figure I’ll go ahead and post it. Medsphere has just made the first release of Medsphere Widgets under LGPL 2.0. This includes CPaned, FBox (a “flow” container), GridView (managed Excel-like grid widget), and Graph (managed 2d graph widget using Cairo).

Berlin GTK+ Hackfest 2008!

Planning for the Berlin GTK+ Hackfest is underway! Behdad has been organizing stuff by email, and Mathias is working on finding a venue for it to happen at.

Things that are on the agenda:

• Release planning
• GIO hacking in GTK+
• Canvas discussion
• Generic HTML widget
• GObject introspection stuff
• D-Bus and GSettings
• Session management

Should be really interesting and a lot of fun. And I’m excited because I’ve never been there, and I get to see a friend of mine that I went to school with! 🙂

Emmanuele created a Wiki page and I’ve added some information there, such as who is planning to attend. If you are on that list and are not planning to attend, make sure to let Behdad know and remove yourself from the wiki page. Otherwise, everyone on there please add your travel information to the table as it becomes available, or if you don’t have a wiki account and don’t want one then email me and I’ll add your info.

Sponsors for the Berlin hackfest 2008 are:

GTK Win32 update

Last night I committed the patch for #164537 that I believe will finally solve the remaining transient and modal window problems that have been affecting GTK on Windows for years. I think this was the last really critical blocker for GTK being usable on Windows, at least that I’m aware of.

Transient windows

I finally committed my patch for Win32 transient windows to svn tonight. This fixes the long-standing #112404 that is probably the most irritating bug for GTK Win32. I’m glad to finally be done with this one!

Console

I’ve been using Windows a lot more since I went to work at Medsphere, and the one thing that bothers me most frequently is the lack of a very useful terminal. I’ve got the Cygwin rxvt terminal installed, and it’s been pretty good except that I sometimes have like three or four of them open and Windows doesn’t have virtual desktops like I have on Linux, so it’s a pain to find the terminal I want. But now I ran across this open source terminal app called Console. It supports tabs and works with any shell program, like the default crappy Microsoft shell or with Cygwin’s bash. It also lets you customize the colors and the opacity of the window, which is not as big of a deal but possibly still of interest.

Medsphere OpenVista CIS Open Source

Yeah, I know Pete and Brad have already posted about it, and both of them have said more about it than I really could, but I want to post anyway! The place I work, Medsphere, has released the source for the OpenVista CIS client. It’s very exciting for me to be a part of this project and team, and it’s great to get to work on open source software. I’ve had the privilege of getting to work with really awesome hackers (Anthony, Bailey, Brad, Cesar, Jon, and Pete), getting to work with Mono and gtk#, and being able to do some hacking on GTK+ itself (next release should have some noticeable improvements for Win32!). Of course, as much as I’ve been learning and hacking GTK-Win32 internals, I would love to see all the hospitals using this software use it on Linux. 🙂

As Pete already mentioned, Medsphere is interested in hiring more gtk# hackers. As a fairly new person there, I think it’s a great place to work and I think everyone there is really awesome. If you’re interested in working somewhere in a Gnome/GTK/Mono type environment, email Pete or Brad.

Visiting California

I went out to California last week for work. We had a good time hacking, watching movies, eating, and hearing music. Cesar, Anthony, Amber (Anthony’s girlfriend), and I all went to hear LA Phil play on Thursday. They played Brahms 3 and Brahms 1, which seemed like a little bit of a strange concert.. but it was really good. Whoever was sitting principal viola was playing on an Iizuka viola like mine, which was sort of cool. Walt Disney Concert Hall was fantastic. On Tuesday we went to see The Departed at the dollar theater. Very cool movie.

Hacking

I’ve been trying to do some Win32-related hacking in GTK. I got a couple theme patches for notebook rendering approved, and I’ve got a patch up for review that fixes an issue with windows not receiving enough expose events when they’re being resized. Now I’m trying to understand and fix some issues related to modality and transience of windows. That’s a pretty difficult bug though. Somehow I’ve managed to get Windows XP to have multiple titlebars highlighted as though the windows are focused, although only one of them is focused in the taskbar. I hate Windows.

I’ve also been fooling around with Ruby a little bit, and I installed Rails yesterday. I was initially deceived by its inclusion in Ubuntu’s apt repository. Apparently if you want to use Rails on Linux, it’s easier to just install RubyGems and install Rails and its dependencies through gem. The instructions on the RubyGems site was a little bit inaccurate for installation to your home directory, though. You need to make some environment variable adjustments:

export GEM_HOME=$PREFIX/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
export RUBYLIB=$PREFIX/lib/ruby:$PREFIX/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8

There are some problems with using the version of Rails that’s included in Ubuntu’s apt. Like missing very important features, like ActiveRecord and Initializer.