Author: James Henstridge

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).

In Melbourne for a month working for ActiveState on
Komodo, which is pretty interesting. I am supposed to be
fixing linux/gtk related bugs. It is quite difficult to
work out where in the mozilla source code things are
happening though .

Komodo is a very interesting project, and should mature
into a good IDE (it is already usable under windows). Some
great free software has come out of Komodo already (even if
Komodo itself isn’t), such as PyXPCOM.

From what has been happening, it sounds like Air New
Zealand had been siphoning money out of Ansett by charging fuel
and catering costs against the airline and possibly doing so
after it knew Ansett was bankrupt. This has caused Ansett
workers to call for a boycott of Air NZ, which the NZ PM doesn’t
like much.

To save money, the .au Government allowed the
two domestic airlines (Qantas/Australian Airlines and
Ansett) to build the air terminals themselves. At almost
every domestic airport in australia, you will see a Qantas
half and an Ansett half (usually with different
architecture, etc). Separate checkins, separate bagage
collection, separate arival/departure gates, etc. Now half
of every domestic air terminal is left closed. Those people
who happened to own shops inside an Ansett terminal can’t
open for business. I really hope some of the smaller
airlines (such as Virgin) will finally be allowed to use
Ansett’s space in the domestic terminals, which will allow
them to compete more evenly than before (before they often
had to use other buildings round the airport or the
international airport terminals).

The ACCC is going to toughen
the rules for airlines so that this change doesn’t make
it even more difficult for new airlines to break into the
business.

In news on the Tampa refugees, the courts
are going to rule on the Government’s apeal today.

It is really sad hearing so many people in the US out for
blood (I have no way to tell how many people feel this way
— the internet+media can give a very skewed perspective on
things). The terrorists killed many innocent people in the
WTC, most likely because of issues they had with the US
govenment and foreign policy. If the US turns around and
kills innocent Palestinians or Afgahns (or where ever they
happen to be based) in order to get the terrorists, that
would be just as bad an act of terrorism.

In local news, Ansett has stopped
flying, which means the only interstate domestic airline
serving Perth now is Qantas. I hope the ACCC keeps air fares in
check.

It seems that even though Judge North ruled
in favour of the Tampa refugees, they are still going to
Nauru until the government is finished apealing the
judgement. I don’t know anyone who approves of how the
government treats boat people.

I have been converting a lot of the boxed types in pygtk
over to my new PyGBoxed code. So far, this has
resulted in about 1000 less lines of non generated source
code, which is helpful. It will also help wrap other addon
widget libraries that have boxed types (provided they are
registered with glib). I will have to submit a few patches
for GTK to register the last few types that aren’t already
registered.

The development version of libglade got support for
container child properties recently (thanks to the new GTK
APIs from Tim), which means that most container types can be
handled by libglade without any extra code, which brings us
closer to a stage where no new code would be required to
support new widgets. I also started work on a simple
converter to go from the old file format to the new one. It
still has problems, but it is better than nothing, and
should help test my code.

Recompiled devel gtk+ and its dependencies today from
scratch, and gtk-demo still segfaults . Tim
committed my g_object_newv patch, so people should be able
to build devel libglade. He also checked in the child
properties stuff, which will allow me to handle that
generically in libglade (once he adds a few missing APIs).

Once I sort out the gtk+ issues, I can get hacking on
pygtk a bit more.

I am sure most people have heard about the flame war on
the gnome-hackers list over the weekend. Things have
settled down now, and there is talk of creating some
procedures for introducing changes to the platform. Some
people have argued that it is introducing too much
bureaucracy, but I think it will work out quite well.
Similar schemes have worked well for Python, TCL, Perl and even the internet.
All have varying levels of formality, so we should be able
to find a process that suits GNOME well.

Unfortunately, the flame war was picked up by various
news outlets such as Linux Today who posted some fairly one
sided editorials. Judging by the comments, the maturity of
LT’s readership is dropping to slashdot standards. It
pisses me off when people blow things like this out of
proportion. Looks like they did something similar again
today in an editorial about a KDE disagreement.

Doing a bit more work on libglade2. It is still broken,
but getting less broken as time goes on. Should get it so
that the build completes to keep Sander
happy

Since we are starting to get a number of functional free
web browsers, I had the idea that it might be a good idea to
create a Certificate Authority for free software projects
and people and get its CA cert preloaded in browsers like
Mozilla.

Why do people use CAs like Verisign? Because people
trust them (rightly or wrongly), and their certs are
preloaded in almost all browsers so users don’t see a
disturbing dialog pop up when going to the site.

The free software community is probably in a better
position to verify the identity of people requesting
certificates. A group like Debian which already has a
strong web of trust between developers could set up a CA.
Requiring that certificate requests be GPG signed by a
debian developer who has positively identified the requestor
before issuing a certificate might provide a good balance
between security and ease of acquiring certificates.

Having the CA certificates preloaded in free browsers
such as mozilla, konqueror, etc would place them on an equal
footing with the existing CAs. Debian as a CA is just an
example, as they already have some of the infrastructure in
place for identifying people. It shouldn’t be difficult to
get CA certs added to free web browser’s databases. It
probably shouldn’t be limited to just free software related
CAs either.

Another interesting idea would be to setup (or adopt an
existing) alternative root zone that included a number of
TLDs related to free software (eg .gnu, .bsd, etc) along
with the existing ICANN and country code TLDs. If the major
distros shipped their nameservers pointing at this
alternative root, those TLDs would be usable (and not just
to Linux/BSD boxes — think about how many windows boxes
just forward all DNS requests to a Linux or BSD box for
resolution).

Both ideas would take quite a bit to get off the ground,
so probably won’t happen unless someone is really motivated
to do it.

Put out another development
pygtk snapshot. I actually released it yesterday, but
my computer’s clock was out by 12 hours when I made the
release, but didn’t notice it (something weird must have
happened when bringing all the computers back up after the
brownout on sunday), and the ntp server on the gateway
didn’t start up correctly so it didn’t correct itself. I
hate clock skew.

I have some ideas on how to decrease the amount of
handcoded stuff in pygtk even further. The beginnings of
this code is included in the latest snapshot (the GBoxed
type). I haven’t gotten round to converting any of the
existing boxed types over to this new code or adjusted the
code generator yet though.

Cyrille, Lars, Steffen and Hans have been doing great
work on Dia. They
are responsible for most of the work on the recent 0.88.1
release of dia. There will probably be a 0.89 release soon.

Chema posted an initial tarball of glade
v2. I will have to look at it a bit closer. Libglade will
have to be ready for the gnome 2.0 API freeze, which will
probably be before glade2 is usable. The Sun guys want
accessibility support in glade/libglade, so we will see how
that shapes up.

At the office, I was attempting to get the amanda backup
client agent to compile under cygwin (with the aim of adding
some NT boxes to the network backup system). After patching
it to take into account “.exe” suffixes on some programs and
commenting out some of the fstab/block device code, it
finally compiled. By hooking it up to cygwin’s inetd, the
amcheck, amdump, etc programs on the backup server could
talk to the client agent on the NT box. Unfortunately, the
backup was really slow and was using 100% CPU It sent
the dump to the backup server, but then had to create an
index or stats for the dump, or something, which was taking
a long time and caused a timeout

Cygwin is a very useful tool on windows boxes, but it has
its limitations. I found out about an Amanda
Win32 client which I might try. It uses yet another
POSIX emulation layer.

First entry for 2001. A lot of things have happened.

I went on a holiday to Paris for a week and then Oxford
for a week with the rest of my family. It was good, but a
bit cold. I got to meet Mathieu while in Paris which was
good.

A few days after I got back, I was back on the plane for
Sydney (where I am writing this) for linux.conf.au. It starts
on Wednesday, and should be a lot of fun.

Have been hacking on pygtk recently, and a small amount
on glib HEAD and framebuffer gtk (which is looking really
promising). I did up the first cut at allowing arbitrary
GtkTreeModels to be defined in python code. It leaks badly,
and it will probably be near impossible to fix correctly
.

The glib patch was to add some convenience functions for
the GSignal code, as it is so difficult to use the existing
functions people are still creating GtkObjects because of
the gtksignal compatibility wrappers. Still waiting on
feedback from Tim about it

Yesterday night alex asked me to try
compiling pygtk with the framebuffer port of GTK, which he
is working on. After adding a single missing function to
the framebuffer gdk backend, pygtk compiled with no source
modifications, which was good. I was having trouble with
the “ms” serial mouse driver in GtkFB and my mouse. I put
together a patch to make finding the start of mouse packets
a little smarter, and to fix up the mouse button handling
for that driver. The level of functionality in GtkFB is
quite impressive.

Last Sunday, I went to the reconciliation walk in the
city, which went quite well. Lots of people turned up.
Also, on the way there I noticed a big banner on the old
Swan Brewery (which has been a sore point, because it was an
Aboriginal sacred site) saying “sorry”. I don’t know if
anything different will happen with the development at that
site though.