Monthly Archives: May 2000

I haven't posted anything here for a while. I put out a new version of dia last week. It went pretty well, but there are a few major bugs in the release (missing header include, bug in ellipses in custom shapes). I may make a new release soon when I stabilise the new code I added. With the current CVS code, we have XIM support, tearoff menus that actually work, a less buggy polygon shape, and the start of a beziergon shape. Once the beziergon is in better shape, I will probably release it as dia-0.86, and hope I don't have any more showstopper bugs. Steffen has been working on a DXF import filter, so I will be adding more properties to the standard objects to make it easier to create them through the properties interface. GNOME 1.2 release came and went. There were some communication problems which pissed off a number of people at the release, but that is behind us now. Over all, this new release is great. One of the more amusing anti GST campaigns at the moment is the one by the brewers association. They even have a web site for it. The ads for it on television are a bit weird.

Went to see the movie Looking for Alibrandi last night with some friends. It was a pretty good movie, and I recommend seeing it. Put out a new release of dia, and a few problems were found fairly quickly. One weird one was finding that the libart in released gnome-libs was different from the one in CVS. It was different enough so that the AM_PATH_LIBART macro in CVS failed on released gnome-libs. There were also a few other minor problems I will fix soon. The cover on the Kraftwerk Expo 2000 CD is pretty cool. It has that bumpy plastic on the cover so the image changes as you move it. yet more people pick on slashdot :)

Been talking with Andrei about getting gtk bindings for php working. He will probably be using some of the ideas from my python bindings. Got the first few chapters for a book I will be tech reviewing. They are doing everything with MS office tools, which is a bit of a pain. Abiword is nowhere complete enough to do the job, as it doesn't do the revision control stuff needed. Gnumeric is probably good enough for the spread sheet work. This is the part I hate most about the MS monopoly -- they have a monopoly on how you can access the information. Dealing with Havoc's book was a lot easier, as he convinced them to let him use a text format (XML). I guess I better put a copy of msword on the old 486 then.

Haven't written anything here for a while. I put out another snapshot of the ExtensionClass based pygtk. It is available at ftp://ftp.daa.com.au/pub/james/python/pygtk-0.7.0-unstable-dont-use.tar.gz. Features this release has over the previous one are keyword argument support, better GtkCTree support and some other changes so that the examples now work with minimal modification. I am getting close to the main gtk module being feature complete, and since most code is autogenerated, the switch to gtk+-1.4 should be fairly painless and hopefully quick.