Monthly Archives: April 2002

Menu Code I moved all my action based menu prototype code into libegg, which is becomming the prototype library hp proposed a while back. andersca might check in some of his new icon list widget soon, which will be good. GTK+ 2.4 should be very good (the 2.2 feature list has already been finalised; it is basically 2.0 plus the multihead patches, and should be available in a month or two). My menu code should eventually provide menu merge capabilities similar to the UI handler code in libbonoboui, but not depending on any of the corba stuff. It should be extensible enough so that it can be used by things like bonobo. The aim being to allow gtk+ and gnome/bonobo programs to use exactly the same menu code (rather than having to rewrite portions of an app in order to port it to GNOME). linux.conf.au Hopefully the Call for Papers should be released in a day or two. Just a few last details to finalise. Note that the conference website is at conf.linux.org.au at the moment, due to the transient nature of .conf.au domains. I hope to see everyone in Perth next January! PyGTK The Python bindings for GTK+ 2.0 are going pretty well. The defs files are pretty much up to date with the 2.0 API, so I have a fair idea of what needs to be done. After finishing up a few of the remaining architectural issues, it would be good to put out a 2.0 release. Not everything needs to be wrapped, but I should reduce the number of unwrapped functions.

Updated my Mailman patch to use some of the newer features in SpamAssassin 2.20. This includes showing which rules got triggered for messages that get held (this is the feature that required the 2.20), and the ability to give messages from list members a bonus when calculating the message score (so that they are less likely to get held/discarded). The newer version is in Mailman's patch tracker: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=534577&group_id=103&atid=300103 With this patch and SA 2.20, I seem to be getting about 80% less messages to moderate, which is much more manageable. Adjusting the thresholds a little would probably improve matters further. jdub put the original version of my patch on mail.gnome.org (with a discard threshold of 20 -- mainly to test its ability to identify spam). It manages to get rid of the worst of the spam delivered to GNOME lists though. With this patch, you could almost open a list up to non subscriber posting again, like most list admins did before the spam epidemic grew to its current proportions. The SA mailman filter doesn't catch everything though, so list members would have to be slightly tolerant of spam to allow non subscriber posting again.

Looks like jdub is pushing to get my mailman patches put up on mail.gnome.org. It will be interesting to see how they hold up under heavy volume. It is coded fairly defensively, so it shouldn't cause mail lossage (unless you configure it to lose certain bits of mail), but I have no idea whether it has an acceptable CPU overhead. Saw Rabit Proof Fence on Saturday. A very good movie and worth watching. It makes me sad to see how Aborigines have been treated. Going to GUADEC This is the first time I have travelled internationally since September 11th and the terrorist paranoia. All the parking spots immediately outside the terminal were blocked off (apparently to prevent terrorists from leaving bombs -- like any terrorist organisation would want to bomb Perth Airport). When going through xray machines at customs, the ladie in front of me got held up for having a nail file in her hand luggage. They stopped me because I had a laptop. They asked me to take the laptop out of the bag, disconnect the battery and then pass them all through the xray machine separately. When we got the meals on the plane, they came with metal spoon, metal fork and plastic knife. The forks are probably sharper than the metal knives they usually provide with meals. Travelling by plane sure is a lot less convenient now. Sevilla After getting my luggage checked through customs, I found a bus outside the airport going into the city. Caught it and got off some place that turned out to be two or three kilometers from the house docpi organised. I walked the rest of the way to the house. I eventually found the place, and it had 4 buzzers (one for each appartment). On the forth try, I got let in (first two were empty, and the docpi was in the last one). The appartment looked great -- marble floors, balconies looking out in two directions, etc. April 2 In the supermarket, they had really big 6 packs -- 6 one litre bottles plastic wrapped together. Meandered around the city for the day, and had a very nice meal at night. ... Will have to write something about the actual conference. So far it has been a lot of fun.