Author: James Henstridge

I released a new version of dia on sunday. Didn’t get
everyone’s patches in, but I thought it was important to get
another release out because of how long ago the previous
release was. Of course, after doing the release someone
finds an XIM bug, I notice that the SVG CR has been put out
(so the recommended namespace URI’s have changed) and I
didn’t tell the translators about the release. So I will
probably put out another release of dia soon with these
fixed.

Tomorrow (9th August) is my parents 25th wedding
aniversary.

I should put out a new release of Dia soon. The next
release will be the first release as an official part of the
GNU project, which is pretty good. Lots of nice user
interface improvements. Just one more feature before the
release

Over the weekend, we pulled through a few CAT5 cables in
the house. By putting the cable through the wall cavity
there is no coax running through the doorways anymore. This
should also reduce the problems of trying to find out which
computer’s network card has gone crazy when the network
stops working.

The Sun open office source release should be
interesting. Some of the details are still being thrashed
out, but things look good. In a worst case senario, the
code will be released under GPL, so we can grab all the good
features and integrate them into existing apps

I got my new notebook, and installed Linux on it. It is
mostly working. The only real problem I have had is with
resuming from a hibernate when I was in X. With X in 32-bit
mode, the display gets garbled. With 16-bit mode, the whole
machine locks up. Changing to another VT before hibernation
avoids the problem. I wonder if XFree86 4.0 would fix the
problem? It is probably caused by the Compaq bios not
saving enough of the state on the graphics card (enough for
the windows drivers but not enough for XF86_Mach64)

I was also upgrading another Linux box, and the installer
caused an exception just after installing all the packages,
so I had to set up the last few things by hand. A bit
annoying but not too difficult to fix.

Heard from another guy who has a Sony NEWS workstation
who gave some interesting info about the problem we were
having with our machine (it doesn’t boot). We had left the
machine off for a while, and then it stopped booting. I had
thought that the BIOS was dead or something, but it sounds
like a NEWS box won’t boot if the battery is dead also. Now
I just have to find where the battery is in the system.
There is no information about these machines on any of the
sony web sites (they seem to be denying all knowledge of the
machines). Now all I need to do is find where the battery
is in the system — they are built very solidly.

Been thinking about what I need to do about setting up
Linux on the notebook I ordered. I think I should be able
to get most things up and running without trouble, but I am
a bit unsure about hibernation. I guess I will wait and see
what happens when I get the notebook.

I saw the xmen movie on thursday (it was released a day
earlier here, compared to the us). It was pretty good,
and the ending looked like they are expecting a sequel or
something.

I finally got round to ordering the my laptop, so it
should be in on monday. It is a Compaq Armarda M300 (with
the 1024×768 screen). With the introduction of the GST,
computer hardware suddenly dropped by about 10% (and
software went up 10%). It is annoying that the wholesale
prices on most hardware are about the same as US street
prices though.

I haven’t written anything here for a while. I went to a
friend’s 21st birthday on friday, which was pretty good.
The day after we went to a climbing gym. It was the first
time I had gone this year, so I was a bit out of shape.

I started working on the gtk+-2.0 based pygtk. I wrote a
simple module gobject that encapsulates the base GObject
stuff. This also encapsulates the evil reference counting
stuff away from the rest of the pygtk stuff. I have done
wrappers for most of the Gdk types that have been converted
to GObjects, and generated the wrappers for GtkWindow and
GtkLabel to test out a few features. Interfacing with the
python-2.0 unicode strings didn’t require any extra code, as
using the “s” format character for PyArg_ParseTuple causes
the unicode string to be encoded in UTF8, which is what GTK
wants. So you can do GtkLabel(u’\u03A0\u03B1\u03BD\u8A9E’)
and have it do exactly what you would expect. Lets see you
do that in Tkinter

Did a lot of work on the extension class based pygtk. It
now does most of what the non extension class based one
did. With a simple skeleton generator, adding support for
new libraries is very easy. I added libglade and gtkglarea
support in just a few hours (gtkglarea was easier, as it
required less override code). I also tightened up the type
checking a bit, so you get a python exception if you try to
pass a non widget to gtk_container_add for instance (rather
than a Gtk-WARNING and the function failing without telling
the python program). For those interested, you can get it
here.

I have been wondering about whether it is worth releasing
this version at all, as it breaks compatibility and would be
followed by another compatibility breaking release when
gtk+-1.4 comes out. Even if I don’t release it, a lot of
the work done on it. Now that Havoc’s gdk object branch
has been merged into the head of gtk+, my code generator
should be able to generate even more of the bindings.

I set up the gtk-1.3 libraries on my system, but there is
a few problems with rendering (ie. none of the widgets
render). I might start looking at porting pygtk accross to
it soon.

One more exam tomorrow (computer vision), then mid year
break.

I think someone has been distributing binaries of dia
with gnome-print support (which is broken). This has
resulted in a lot of complaints and bug reports about the
print support not working correctly. I hope it isn’t the
Helix packages with gnome-print support enabled.

It seems like no one who submit bug reports bother to
take the time to check if the bug has already been
reported. It is very frustrating to get lots of reports
about the same bug. It is not as bad as reports about bugs
in old versions of a package that have been fixed in the
latest version or “it crashed” reports with no info on what
the problem was. A little extra effort on the part of the
person submitting the report can be very helpful to the
developers.

Did my first exam today. It was differential topology.
As there are only two people doing the course, I either got
top or bottom mark Two more exams to go and then the
break.

We switched ISPs on friday. I am sure that our previous
ISP was saturating their network with the internet phone
call service they started up a while back. At times,
performance was really bad. Things are half working with
the new ISP. We can reach just about everywhere except most
perth ISPs. I will have to look into this.

After Hans’s new plugins are tidied up, I will look at
doing a new release of dia. The new version has a fixed
polygon shape, a beziergon and working tearoff menus among
other things. Quite a bit nicer to use than 0.85.

Finished upgrading quoll today. It is now a
Pentium 200MMX, which means it is now not the slowest
computer in the office (not that you would notice — it can
do a lot more than the NT boxes). I switched over the
mailing lists to mailman,
which looks very nice. It feels nice having newer software
on that machine.