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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.

I haven’t posted anything here for a while. I put out a
new version of dia last week. It went pretty well, but
there are a few major bugs in the release (missing header
include, bug in ellipses in custom shapes). I may make a
new release soon when I stabilise the new code I added.
With the current CVS code, we have XIM support, tearoff
menus that actually work, a less buggy polygon shape, and
the start of a beziergon shape. Once the beziergon is in
better shape, I will probably release it as dia-0.86, and
hope I don’t have any more showstopper bugs. Steffen has
been working on a DXF import filter, so I will be adding
more properties to the standard objects to make it easier to
create them through the properties interface.

GNOME 1.2 release came and went. There were some
communication problems which pissed off a number of people
at the release, but that is behind us now. Over all, this
new release is great.

One of the more amusing anti GST campaigns at the moment
is the one by the brewers association. They even have a web site for it.
The ads for it on television are a bit weird.