Author: James Henstridge

Haven’t posted anything here in over a month. I just
finished my last exam today, which was good.

It was interesting hearing about the formation of the KDE
League, especially after Kurt Granroth’s original comments
after then announcement of the GNOME Foundation. I did an
interview
giving the perspective of a GNOME hacker on the League.

The Python bindings for GTK 2.0 are coming along nicely.
I have wrappers for the new text and tree widgets mostly
written, and they are very nice to use. Combined with
python’s unicode support, python makes a very nice
environment for GTK programming.

Wrote some code to convert arbitrary elliptic arcs to
bezier curves for the gnome-print driver in dia. This
should stop people sending bug reports in about that
problem. The output looks very nice, so no one should
notice that it isn’t real elliptic arcs. I was talking with
Chema about adding support for arcs in gnome-print itself,
possibly using my code as a fallback for drivers that don’t
support them.

I went to see The Dish at the
cinema last night. It is a very good movie, and I recommend
watching it. Apparently the release date is next week, so
this was an advanced screening. They also had advanced
screenings in Perth for Chopper back when it was
released.

People have started putting in their nominations for the
gnome-foundation board elections. We have enough candidates
for an election to be necessary. None of the Sun guys have
nominated yet. Maybe they will now that the OpenOffice
source code has been released.

I handed in my dissertation today. The due date was Monday,
but I got a one day extension, which was really helpful as
it meant I could polish it a bit more. I feel much less
stressed now that is out of the way. Maybe back to a bit
more hacking now

As I have been pretty much house bound for the past two
weeks, working on my dissertation, I ordered a few cd’s from
78s (one of the
best music stores in Perth) over the internet. Very good
service, and the much faster than other places I tried.

Got a copy of the new Turnstyle record Geek Party. It is
a good compilation.

Looks like they sold Fatso
for AU$80,450. Eric
Moussambani’s goggles sold for a fair amount as well.
There is a nice quote from him on the auction page at
ebay.

working on honours dissertation.
due in on monday.
roy and hg’s coverage of the olympics was good.
fatso was a much better mascot.

jamesh certified aaronl as Dimwit

GNOME: prostituting
ourselves to big-money for the chance of being a
media-recognized standard since 15th August, 2000

I was looking at the coins problem. I can see a solution
if you know the bad coin is heavier (or lighter — just
s/heavier/lighter). Here is a solution for that:

1. Split the coins into 3 groups of 4 coins.
2. Put two of the groups on the balance.
3. If they weigh the same, the third group contains the bad
   coin. Otherwise, the heavier group contains the bad coin.

4. Add two coins from one of the good groups to the bad
   group, and split those coins into 3 groups of 2.

5. perform the same weighing operation to find the group
   with the bad coin. This leaves 2 coins.

6. Weigh the last two coins. The heavier of the 2 is the
   bad coin.

This doesn’t answer the original problem, but may give
some idea of what it would look like. If you know the bad
coin is heavier and can do 3 weighs, you should be able to
pick the bad coin out of a group of 27 coins.

On IRC:

<raph> UTF8 really is simple enough to do in
your
head
<raph> assuming your brain has SHL and SHR
instructions
<jwz> you need help, raph

The book I am tech reviewing must be almost finished.