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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.

Tracked down the segfault when subclassing GtkObject
wrappers in the new pygtk. I also reenabled object
attributes on the wrappers defined in C without problems, so
this problem looks like it is fixed. The wrapper rescue
code really is evil.