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Gnome Developer Websites I converted the Gnome LXR and Bonsai installations over to the new site design Jeff did.  Overall it looks very good.  Having a consistent design across the sites makes them all look a lot more professional.  This just leaves the big one to do (www.gnome.org). Advogato raph committed my patch to add <link> elements to the items in the diary RSS feeds.  This should make the RSS feeds a bit more useful, since you can then go from the RSS to the individual diary entries. I also had a play with the Mozilla midas rich text editing functionality as a way to provide WYSIWIG diary entry.  It is a little rough, but it is good enough to write this diary entry with :)  With a small amount of hacking, I was able to get the code to work with IE as well. David Hicks It seems that our Prime Minister and Attorney-General seem to have decided that it is okay to have an Australian citizen tried without due process in a secret court where he could face execution.  If there is evidence against him, there shouldn't be any problem trying him in an Australian court.  It is particularly sickenning to see them acting like this when compared to the British government's actions with respect to their citizens in a similar situation.  There was an interesting article by Malcolm Fraser about this yesterday.

Got a bit tired of the ancient site design of the Gnome developer website, so spent a little while updating it to match jdub's new site design. Now all that is left to do is to fix the content :) Update: updated the bugzilla.gnome.org templates to match.

GUADEC 2003 I said I was going to write a bit about GUADEC, but didn't get round to it til now. Saturday 14th Arrived in Dublin in the morning after about a day spent in airports and on planes. Took the AirLink bus from the airport into the city centre, and walked from there to Trinity College, Dublin. I ran into a number of hackers at the gate who pointed out where the accommodation office was. Dropped my pack off and took a walk around the area close to the college. I went out to take a look round and get some lunch. Was surprised how expensive everything seemed. Even though the exchange rate was about AU$1.80 to each Euro, the prices looked like the exchange rate should have been closer to 1:1 :(. Afterwards, I explored TCD a bit more, and found out where the conference was going to be held. Made my way down to the network room and met jdahlin (at first, I didn't realise who he was). Went to dinner with a bunch of hackers at a Japanese restaurant. Had a very large bowl of chili/chicken noodle soup. We then moved on to Messrs Maquires for some drinks. Sunday 15th On the Sunday, I went to the Gnome Foundation Board meeting. This was the first time that we had had a face to face meeting of just the board (last year we had a meeting with the advisory board, but that was it). Was a very productive meeting. Monday 16th The start of the actual conference. Saw a number of great talks including Havoc's freedesktop talk and Johan's PyGTK talk. I gave my first talk in the afternoon: EggToolbar and EggMenu. It had a fair turnout and was pretty successful. After the talk was finished, I had a conversation with Hans Mueller who was looking at some similar issues with menu handling and merging in Java. Had dinner with the AbiWord hackers. Tuesday 17th The second day had a lot of great talks. I got to Alan Kay's keynote a little late, but what I saw was very interesting. He made a lot of good points (although I don't agree with of all of them). I then went to Anders' D-Bus talk. After the break, I gave my PyORBit talk. Less people attended this one than the previous one, but there was still a fair number. I gave a few demonstrations of remotely controlling Nautilus through its CORBA interfaces, and getting notifications on metadata changes. Bill Haneman was at the talk, and asked how it worked with the accessibility framework (as expected). I hadn't actually tested it but I am fairly confident that PyORBit would be usable to script the AT-SPI interfaces. It would be great to see Gnome become more scriptable in the future. Whether CORBA is used for this purpose or not remains to be seen. Went to the Ximian party in the evening. Got to catch up with some more friends I hadn't…

Haven't posted anything here for a while. I've been at GUADEC since Saturday, and it has been really good so far. I've put the slides for my talk up on my website. I'll post some more info later.

linux.conf.au Had a nice dinner with the other LCA2003 organisers. The proceedings CD took a bit longer to finalise than expected, but it is pretty much done now. XFree86 Some very weird stuff is happening in the XFree86 project at the moment. The characterisation of Keith Packard by some of the XFree board just doesn't mesh with my experience dealing with him. His approach of working with the people who will be using the code has worked really well (it is no accident that Xft and fontconfig have become so popular and widely deployed so quickly). His post to the forum list seems very sound from my point of view. EggToolbar Started doing a bit of work on toolbar customisation for EggToolbar. I have basic DnD drop highlighting working in the toolbar. I think it might be necessary to add an optional input only window to EggToolItem to make dragging them easier in toolbar customisation mode. It looks like it should all work fairly well. Of course, these bits are relatively easy, so we will see how things go ... GTA: Vice City Ran into a weird bug while playing it a few days ago. At the end of one of the missions, there was a short cut scene where one of the characters (Phil) was meant to limp from the car to the doctors. During the mission, the cops had started chasing me. Since the cut scenes are run through the game engine itself (and in the game world), the cops were still racing down the street. The next thing I knew Phil got mowed down while walking to the doctor and the cut scene effectively hung. Gives an interesting insight into how bits of the game were implemented.