15 August 2003

Laptop

Since upgrading to RH9, I started to experience some problems with my laptop. Every time I switched from text mode to graphics mode it would hang with the keyboard LEDs flashing for between 10 seconds and a minute. This was particularly annoying, since I usually switched to a console before suspending the machine.

After searching for any information about this problem without any luck (I was trying to find relevant changes to the kernel or XFree86, both of which had been upgraded).

In the end, a BIOS upgrade did the trick (which had been sitting on Compaq’s website for about a year). Now I can even suspend while in graphics mode. If you have a Compaq Armada M300, the BIOS upgrade is definitely worth it.

PyGTK

Put out new releases of PyGTK and PyORBit. Still haven’t done a new gnome-python release though. The new PyORBit release fixes a bug in the stub generation that was showing up when used together with Python 2.3. After the release, I got another 2.3 related bug report which is fixed in CVS, so the next release should be pretty solid.

The PyGTK release fixed a number of other bugs that caused errors when compiling under Mac OS X. Unfortunately, I missed a few, so it still requires some patches to build correctly. Next release should be build fine though.

Given that Apple is shipping their X server with the next version of OS X, this essentially means that PyGTK apps can run with little or no modification under Unix, Windows and Max OS X, which should make it a pretty attractive option to developers.

ChangeLogs as RSS

I wrote a short script for processing ChangeLogs into RSS format, so that they can be read using a news aggregator such as Straw (plug for a cool PyGTK using app). The script still needs a bit of work, but it can already identify references to bugzilla bugs, and provides links to the files in Gnome’s LXR. A sample of the output is available here:

http://cvs.gnome.org/~james/rss/

I also wrote a short XSL stylesheet to make the RSS display nicely in a web browser. It ended up requiring a small javascript hack to work in Mozilla, since disable-output-escaping does not work with its XSLT engine (and is not likely to get it).