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 1024×768 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.