Author: James Henstridge

There is something weird about bug buddy or the gnome bug
system. I am getting unrelated bugs from different people
posted as followups for bug #3500. All
the followups have been posted with bug-buddy 0.6 or 0.7.
It is getting quite annoying (and yes I have reported the
problen: #8144)

Also
got a message from someone wanting help installing
libglade, because he can’t install Unreal Tournament without
it

The GNOME mailing lists are really slow. There is
almost
three days between sending a message and it getting posted
to the list.

I checked in a correct distance function for the
custom
shape code. Now all the custom shapes in dia are actually
shaped with respect to selection (before they were all
rectangular as far as selection was concerned).

They have an ask
slashdot story on slashdot at the moment that seems to
be asking the question:

There is some GPL’d code I really like and want to use in my
proprietary application. I know that the GPL says that I
should GPL my software if I want to use the code, but do I
really have to? How about if I put it in a DLL?

The comments range from incorrect opinions and
suggestions about how to get round the GPL to sensible
messages from people such as Bruce Perens. Slashdot is
definitely not what it once was (both that a story like this
would even be on the front page, and the comments people
posted).

I wonder how that peer press idea is comming along. It
has the potential to provide a good news service and make
sure crud like that doesn’t get propagated.

Today is my 21st birthday. It looks like I am getting
some Lego Mindstorms stuff, which should be interesting.

The custom shape code in dia now has a proper distance
algorithm. This should get of the bugs where sometimes
clicking on one object causes another one close by (which
happens to be implemented with a custom shape) to be
selected.

Had my 21st birthday party yesterday (the actual birthday
is tomorrow though). It was pretty good, although we ended
up with the same amount of swan gold as we started with (you
can’t even give that stuff away). Maybe this was also
because we had some good beer as well.

Thanks to everyone who came, as I had a great time.

That is annoying. If your browser has the diary page
cached, you will overwrite your last diary entry. The form
on the diary page has the entry number as a hidden
field.

I have been looking through what was installed when I did
the upgrade from RH6.1 to 6.2. It looks like it installed a
lot of kde stuff during the upgrade without asking (there
wasn’t any kde stuff before). A bit annoying, but not too
bad. What was annoying was when I tried to install a new
gnome-core RPM I had just built, and I get the following
message:

file
/usr/share/gnome/apps/.directory from install of
gnome-core-1.1.8-20000413 conflicts with file from package
kdebase-1.1.2-33

This seems fairly odd. Why would a file in
/usr/share/gnome/apps be part of kdebase? So I
decided to check what actually is in kdebase:

$ rpm -ql kdebase | grep gnome
/usr/share/applnk/gnome
/usr/share/gnome
/usr/share/gnome/apps
/usr/share/gnome/apps/.directory

On closer inspection, the file is a slightly
different
format from the one with gnome-core. Also, the one in the
kdebase RPM doen’t contain all the translations that are in
the gnome-core version.

Looking at the spec file for kdebase, the file
was
added
by whoever made the RPM. I think I will file a bug report
about this.

There was another GNOME steering committee meeting last
night. This one was one hour earlier, which was unexpected
but nice (the last one started at midnight). This probably
had something to do with the daylight saving (something we
don’t have to worry about over in western australia, as it
confuses the cows (yes that was one of the reasons people
voted no in the referendum — the cows would get confused if
they were milked at a different time)).

Comitted a plugin manager dialog to dia. You can now
disable plugins if you want. It seems I got unsubscribed
from the dia mailing list, which is a pain. The list seemed
a bit quiet recently.

Seven days till my birthday. I checked in the starts of
the new plugins API for dia. This code reduces the number
of entry points in a plugin to two. It should also allow me
to write a nice plugin manager dialog where you can turn off
loading of plugins if you want (this will be more important
as we get more heavy plugins such as the python plugin).

Went to see Loon X-Wing (of Beaverloop fame)
playing at the uni at
lunch time yesterday.

Have been setting up my system with the new hard drive.
I almost have it to a working state and a delivery man gives
me RH6.2. I guess I will see what improvements have been
made.

Noticed that a new version of gtkglarea was released in
february. This means that the gtkglarea wrapper in pygtk
should work with a released version of gtkglarea (there were
a few API changes a while back, but no released version
containing them).

The first Python
1.6 is out. It contains unicode support, which should
make integration with Pango/gtk+-1.4 very nice. The article about
Python 3000 was interesting. I wonder how much the
internals are going to change? Luckilly pygtk and
gnome-python mainly consist of generated code, so changing
the code generator will do the majority of the work
chainging over.

Have been upgrading my system for the past few days. I
got a nice new 20GB hard drive. When I was installed it,
everything was working fine, but part way through the
install of Red Hat the system would turn itself off.

While checking all the things I had changed, and trying
bios upgrades, I got to a stage where the system would turn
off as soon as you powered it up. I eventually worked out
that the power supply was pretty much dead (not overloaded
— I don’t have that much in my case), so I moved everything
into one of the spare boxes and everything (including the
new hard drive) works fine. The new case has three fans,
and is a bit noisy. I should probably unplug one of them
(they are all hooked up to the motherboard, so I wonder if
you can tell the motherboard to turn them off

I also turned on DMA for the hard drives and it makes a
big difference when compiling stuff. I am currently
upgrading things to a more usable state (ie. gnome stuff
with debugging info turned on).

I should put out a new pygtk and gnome-python. I will
switch them over to using CVS automake and libtool rather
than automake-1.4 + my patches. I put out a test release of
the ExtensionClass based pygtk on my ftp site. I really
like the new code, and it will be good to move the rest of
pygtk and gnome-python over to that codebase.