7 October 2004

Elections

Tomorrow is the Australian Federal Election. It is weird how there are some topics that none of the parties seem to have been bringing up during the election. In particular, they don’t seem to be mentioning about how John Howard lied about the children overboard scandal last election (if he didn’t lie, then he intentionally kept himself uninformed which is possibly even worse). This was a case where information was suppressed until just after the election had finished. If the information had been made public, it could have changed the result of the election.

Hopefully by the end of Saturday we won’t have a Prime Minister who isn’t a spamer and telemarketer.

Jamin: from what those articles say, Michael Moore was offering incentives for people to vote — not incentives to vote for a particular candidate. While I agree that the latter is bad, why is encouraging people to vote bad?

In the Australian elections, I’ve received a postal vote application from my current MP. While I think it would be better if the applications were sent out by the AEC, I don’t think there is anything wrong with encouraging people to vote in this way.

Also, even if you don’t consider yourself a Bush supporter, the people who manage the websites you referenced certainly are. If you want to accuse someone of being a propagandist, perhaps you should choose some less obviously biased news sources.

Hub: there is a preference to get Thunderbird to check all IMAP folders for new messages. It just isn’t exposed in the UI. Instructions for turning it on can be found here.

More Icon Theme stuff

In an email, Jonathan pointed out that simply using gtk_icon_theme_load_icon() by itself is not optimal either. If the user changes their icon theme, you should reload the icon in case it has changed in the new theme.

This is quite easy to handle correctly though, using the "changed" signal of GtkIconTheme:

GtkIconTheme *icon_theme = gtk_icon_theme_get_default ();
g_signal_connect (icon_theme, "changed", G_CALLBACK (callback), NULL);

Now callback() will be called when the icon theme changes, at which point you can reload the icon.

What would be nice would be a GtkImage constructor that let you pass in an icon name plus desired size, and handled theme changes for you. Maybe I’ll do a patch for this …

4 October 2004

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Icon Theme APIs (continued)

Of course, after recommending that people use gtk_icon_theme_load_icon() to perform the icon load and scale the icon for you, Ross manages to find a bug in that function.

If the icon is not found in the icon theme, but instead in the legacy $prefix/share/pixmaps directory, then gtk_icon_theme_load_icon() will not scale the image down (it will scale them up if necessary though).

jhbuild

Jhbuild now includes a notification icon when running in the default terminal mode. The code is loosely based on Davyd’s patch, but instead uses Zenity’s notification icon support. If you have the HEAD branch of Zenity installed, it should display without any further configuration. Some of the icons are a little difficult to tell apart at notification icon sizes, so it would be good to update some of them.

DVDs

The Double the Fist DVD is great. I hope they do another season, and release the second half of the first season on DVD. It is a satire on extreme sports and reality TV shows among other things, and is worth watching. Apparently it was originally shown on ABC digital, so not many people saw it during its original screening (digital television is fairly new in Australia, and equipment is still fairly expensive).