Yearly Archives: 2000

Haven't posted anything here for a while. We released a new version of dia. Some of the features are not complete, but for most things, it is more stable than the last version. I also updated the web site this time :) Still looking into using ExtensionClass in pygtk/gnome-python. I wasn't able to find any info on subclassing ExtensionClasses from C and didn't get any response from Jim Fulton, so I went ahead and added the feature myself. I posted the patch to Jim and the zope-dev list for anyone else who may want it. I hope it gets included, as I don't want to end up maintaining a fork of ExtensionClass. This looks like it will greatly reduce the amount of hand coded stuff found in pygtk, which will be good. There are a number of patches that I have to integrate into pygtk. I will look at that soon. I should also make a new release of libglade as well.

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.