Yearly Archives: 2001

More investigation of the slow processing speed for my document. It seems like the slowdown is somewhere in libxslt's chunking code. With chunking turned on, xsltproc took 4 minutes to process the document, while without chunking (ie. producing one large file), it only took 1:30 minutes (less than half the processing time). In comparison, using Jade to process the document took about 2 minutes with chunking turned on. With chunking turned off, it took 4 minutes. I wonder if this means that xsltproc's performance with chunking turned on can be improved to be faster than its nochunks performance? Either that, or the DSSSL stylesheets for Jade can be optimised for the non chunked case :-)

I was updating my documentation generator for pygtk (the one that tries to make the C reference docs for GTK look like docs for Python). It was taking a while to process with db2html (which uses Jade to convert from SGML to HTML), so I thought I would look at using DocBook/XML and DV's xsltproc, which I had heard ran a lot quicker. Unlike other people's experiences, the docs ended up taking over twice as long to process with xsltproc compared to jade! I suppose this was to do with the size (about 1.9MB of of XML source), and the number of cross references (the doc generation script added a lot of xrefs). On other docs I tried, xsltproc seemed noticably better. I also found out that White Christmas made with coco pops tastes pretty good.

Assuming that the initial count is correct, /me is on the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors! (as soon as the results are verified). As board members are evenly spaced around the globe (I am in +800, Telsa is in +100, many are in -500 and George is in -800), board meetings are going to be at inconvenient times for some people. At the moment, it looks like it is George who will be getting up at 8am for meetings, and at midnight for me. As I said I would make meetings difficult to schedule in my candidate statement and George voted for me, I can't feel too sorry for him :-) Congratulations to all the other new board members.

My arms are still a bit sore when I straighten them from the kneeboarding. I guess I need to get a bit more excercise. I was setting up an Adaptec 2400A RAID card today. It came with a bootable configuration CD, which was pretty convenient. I put it in the drive, and see a LILO prompt, and it booted Linux, and started X. There was a little program that gave access to the RAID config program, documentation, the ability to set up driver disks for various operating systems. The last option was to start an RXVT, so I chose that. Looking at the ps listing, I noticed that the GUI was actually a python program using PyGTK, which was a nice surprise. It is nice seeing my code being used in small applications like this.

Working at ActiveState was a lot of fun. It was interesting working on Komodo, and learning about the Mozilla code base. I got to feed the useful mozilla fixes back upstream that was good. I got bug 107651 - Handle multiple file drops on mozilla (gtk build) using the text/uri-list target into the 0.9.6 release (which is not as useful as it could be, due to many mozilla dnd observers not being set up for multiple item drops). I have a few other useful patches pending: bug 109798 - support multi item text/x-moz-url drags as text/uri-list on mozilla/gtk bug 69528 - support attaching multiple files at once via dnd bug 37685 - get postscript printing to use more than just Times Hopefully some of these will get into 0.9.7. The weather was great on the weekend. Went out kneeboarding with some friends. We put together a two metre tower high on the back of the boat built from two spars lashed together. It looked a bit dodgy, but it worked pretty well. It made getting up on the board a lot easier (it was my first time kneeboarding in over a year, and I was expecting to fall off almost immediately).