31 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.

20 May 2000

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 🙂

16 May 2000

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.

9 May 2000

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.