Monthly Archives: February 2000

The river is still toxic. There were hardly any boats
out on the river today. It is not surprising that there
weren’t many small boats (you wouldn’t want to risk falling
in), but there didn’t seem to be many larger boats
either.

Thought a bit about buying my own set of scuba gear.
This will be easier than sharing the sets with the other
rovers down at Pelican Point.

As for dia, I posted something about some of James Cape’s
suggestions for the UI of the toolbox to the list. Not many
people liked the idea of having seperate windows for each
sheet. I can’t say I like the idea that much.

I finished integrating Lars’s properties patch into dia
(after modifying it so that it uses the offsets code). Now
you can group a number of lines and set their dash pattern
(before, you would have to ungroup the lines and go to each
individual properties dialog.

There are a few missing features though. Undo on changes
to a group does not work correctly. I will have to
implement a “compound ObjectChange” for this to work
correctly. I should also make it so you can modify the
properties of multiple objects without having to group them
(just selecting them).

Once more of the objects are changed over to using
properties maybe we will put out another release. There are
a few changes I want to make to the properties code though
(eg. giving bounds for number properties, giving enumeration
values for enum properties, etc).

I made a new release of gnome-python yesterday. Most of
the fixes in this one were applied by Matt Wilson. I am
looking at changing gnome-python/pygtk over to using
ExtensionClass. This will hopefully remove a lot of the
hand written python code, increase the amount of code that
can be generated, reduce memory usage and give a one to one
PyObject <–> GtkObject mapping and remove the need
for python class wrappers. With Havoc’s new defs file
format, doing the code generation should be even easier.

Went for a dive on saturday, around 7pm. Since the river
is toxic at the moment (an algae bloom), we went to the
wreck just off north mole. It seems that all the jellyfish
from the river had gone out to the sea where we were diving.
There were a few stinger jellyfish out there as well. They
were particularly annoying, as you couldn’t really see them
until they were about half a metre from you. I got to try
out my new dive light — it makes a big difference to what
you can see.

Was doing a bit of dia hacking on the weekend as well. I
implemented some convenience interfaces to make writing the
properties routines a bit easier. I also added some code to
help write the load/save routines of an object using the
properties interface. When the properties stuff is done, it
should make writing new objects a bit easier.

I hate the heat at this time of year. I got up to around
40 degrees celcius yesterday.

The properties code in dia is working a bit. I switched
the flowchart box object over to using properties, and it
seems to be working fine. I also added properties code to
the group object. You can select two flowchart boxes, group
them and set both their properties at once. There is still
a bit of work to be done w.r.t. undo with the group object
— I think I will have to implement a composite ObjectChange
to handle that. It will also be necessary to add change
notification to the group properties dialog so that we only
set the properties the user changes (this might be a good
thing in any case).

I will probably add code to make saving an object a one
line operation with the properties code. Loading should be
just/almost as easy. This should make it easier to write
new objects in C. Cyrille is looking at writing some
convenience routines for writing the property set/get
methods.

Been working on the property code for dia I proposed a
few months back. This should provide an easy way to
construct the property dialogs for objects. Once I add
support for it in the python scripting plug-in, we should
suddenly have a lot more power in manipulating the diagrams
programatically. One other thing to think about is adding
support for custom properties for custom shapes.

Have been playing around with zope for about a month, and
am very happy with it. Very nice to use and very powerful
(once you grab a few extra zope products and work out how to
use DTML).