Yearly Archives: 2000

I saw the xmen movie on thursday (it was released a day earlier here, compared to the us). It was pretty good, and the ending looked like they are expecting a sequel or something. I finally got round to ordering the my laptop, so it should be in on monday. It is a Compaq Armarda M300 (with the 1024x768 screen). With the introduction of the GST, computer hardware suddenly dropped by about 10% (and software went up 10%). It is annoying that the wholesale prices on most hardware are about the same as US street prices though.

I haven't written anything here for a while. I went to a friend's 21st birthday on friday, which was pretty good. The day after we went to a climbing gym. It was the first time I had gone this year, so I was a bit out of shape. I started working on the gtk+-2.0 based pygtk. I wrote a simple module gobject that encapsulates the base GObject stuff. This also encapsulates the evil reference counting stuff away from the rest of the pygtk stuff. I have done wrappers for most of the Gdk types that have been converted to GObjects, and generated the wrappers for GtkWindow and GtkLabel to test out a few features. Interfacing with the python-2.0 unicode strings didn't require any extra code, as using the "s" format character for PyArg_ParseTuple causes the unicode string to be encoded in UTF8, which is what GTK wants. So you can do GtkLabel(u'\u03A0\u03B1\u03BD\u8A9E') and have it do exactly what you would expect. Lets see you do that in Tkinter :)

Did a lot of work on the extension class based pygtk. It now does most of what the non extension class based one did. With a simple skeleton generator, adding support for new libraries is very easy. I added libglade and gtkglarea support in just a few hours (gtkglarea was easier, as it required less override code). I also tightened up the type checking a bit, so you get a python exception if you try to pass a non widget to gtk_container_add for instance (rather than a Gtk-WARNING and the function failing without telling the python program). For those interested, you can get it here. I have been wondering about whether it is worth releasing this version at all, as it breaks compatibility and would be followed by another compatibility breaking release when gtk+-1.4 comes out. Even if I don't release it, a lot of the work done on it. Now that Havoc's gdk object branch has been merged into the head of gtk+, my code generator should be able to generate even more of the bindings. I set up the gtk-1.3 libraries on my system, but there is a few problems with rendering (ie. none of the widgets render). I might start looking at porting pygtk accross to it soon.

One more exam tomorrow (computer vision), then mid year break. I think someone has been distributing binaries of dia with gnome-print support (which is broken). This has resulted in a lot of complaints and bug reports about the print support not working correctly. I hope it isn't the Helix packages with gnome-print support enabled. It seems like no one who submit bug reports bother to take the time to check if the bug has already been reported. It is very frustrating to get lots of reports about the same bug. It is not as bad as reports about bugs in old versions of a package that have been fixed in the latest version or "it crashed" reports with no info on what the problem was. A little extra effort on the part of the person submitting the report can be very helpful to the developers.

Did my first exam today. It was differential topology. As there are only two people doing the course, I either got top or bottom mark :) Two more exams to go and then the break. We switched ISPs on friday. I am sure that our previous ISP was saturating their network with the internet phone call service they started up a while back. At times, performance was really bad. Things are half working with the new ISP. We can reach just about everywhere except most perth ISPs. I will have to look into this. After Hans's new plugins are tidied up, I will look at doing a new release of dia. The new version has a fixed polygon shape, a beziergon and working tearoff menus among other things. Quite a bit nicer to use than 0.85.