Monthly Archives: June 2002

28 June 2002

GNOME

The 2.0 release has come and gone. It managed to take down widget (which serves www.gnome.org, news.gnome.org and bugzilla.gnome.org). Not being able to access my bugs was a bit of a pain.

The new release looks very nice, and GTK 2.0 is a joy to program. I still need to finish off PyGTK 2.0 though. The articles from Dennis E. Powell and Nick Petreley about GNOME 2.0 have been very surprising. DEP’s article was very encouraging and Nick’s one almost promoted GNOME 🙂.

LibEgg

I haven’t done much work on the menu merge code, but have set up gtk-doc to build reference documentation. I configured it to use the new XML support (so gtk-doc generates XML, and xsltproc is used to transform to HTML). Seems to work very nicely.

I also had a small play with conversion to PDF with the xmlto script, which uses the PassiveTeX FO processor. There were only a few minor issues making the conversion difficult. The first was that xmlto wasn’t performing XInclude processing. This was fairly easy to fix (I sent a suggestion to the author to turn this xsltproc option on).

The more serious one was that passivetex didn’t seem to support prortional table column widths, which are used in the gtk-doc output. This shouldn’t be too big a deal, as I could correct this with a stylesheet customisation layer. Lastly, the <synopsis> elements were not being rendered correctly, but I think this was an issue with the (old) version of the XSL stylesheets I was using.

Bugzilla

I did a mockup of a “show/hide advanced options” button for the query form in bugzilla (see the second attachment). It is just some simple javascript that uses a cookie to persist its state. In the simple mode, it just shows the summary search field and the product/component/version/milestone lists. While the new query page layout is a lot better, I know a number of people who are simply put off by the number of available query options (even though they only need use the first few in the new layout). By allowing people to hide the majority of the options, hopefully this complaint will go away.

17 June 2002

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Work

Last week, one of the servers died because one of the
sticks of memory died. After pulling it out, the system
booted fine. It would have been a lot easier to test if I
didn’t have to open it up to plug a floppy drive in. I now
have Memtest86 in
the GRUB
boot menu. Was pretty easy to set up:


cp memtest.bin /boot
grubby --add-kernel="/boot/memtest.bin" --title="Memtest86"

This is the second stick of DDR memory we have had that
died; probably due to overheating. As the server has 5 IDE
ribbon cables, I might look at getting rounded cables which
Jaycar is stocking
these days.

GNOME

The release candidate for GNOME is out. It is looking
very nice, and will be a great release. Still working
towards a 2.0 release of PyGTK and
gnome-python. I did a bit of work on gnome-vfs bindings
(there are a number of annoying inconsistencies in the API,
but overall it is a nice library), and jrb
has been trying to implement a full widget in python (and
reporting bugs for things that prevent him from doing so).

Beer

The honey ale I brewed turned out very nice. The first
bottle I tried (two weeks after bottling) was a bit sour,
but subsequent bottles have improved a lot.

XSLT

Been playing with XSLT a bit recently. It is quite a
nice transformation language. I have been porting the gtk-doc
DocBook -> HTML conversion program to use xsltproc (with
a customisation layer over Norman Walsh’s XSL stylesheets),
rather than Jade (with a customisation layer over his DSSSL
stylesheets). Took a little while to learn what I needed,
but the end result looked fairly elegant.

While working on the customisation layer, I even found a
simple bug
in the base stylesheets.