James Henstridge

The second day of talks went well. That night we had the conference dinner which went pretty well. We continued the tradition of auctioning off a conference tshirt signed by all the speakers. This year’s tshirt was also signed by many of the people who attended the kernel summit at OLS. The winning bid was made by the people at the Sun table for about AU$2100.

Everyone had a good time, although a few had too much to drink. We ended up having to take one to hospital, where he spent a night. He was okay in the morning though. This is something the next conf organisers should take into account.

The talks on Saturday went pretty well (including mine). After a year of telling me how much better PPC laptops were, jdub ended up borrowing my laptop to give his presentation because his one had no VGA connector.

A group shot of all the speakers and some of the organisers was taken as well.

The closing ceremony was pretty good. We gave out bottles of “Holy Penguin Pee” to all the speakers. I haven’t been able to find a photo of these online yet. I am pretty proud of of the labels, as I did the layout myself.

At the closing, it was also announced that the next LCA will be held in Adelaide, followed by Canberra in 2005.

A Speex file is available from the LCA website containing the audio from the Q&A session. It came out at 3.4MB for about 45 minutes. This is the format we will be encoding all the audio in for distribution on CD.

On the Sunday I didn’t do much, as I was exhausted. I cycled into the city to see the Australia Day fireworks in the evening though. They were pretty good this year. It looked like they were using about 6 zodiacs to launch smaller fireworks, in addition to the larger barges. A great ending to a great conference.

Update: a picture of the Holy Penguin Pee. If you look at the larger version you can see a bit more of the penguin silhouette. Another picture of Linus getting his Holy Penguin Pee from Tux.

Things have been going very well so far. Registration was a breeze (compared to last year). By having all the bags packed with the correct tshirt size and labeled with the person’s name, we could process each registration in less than a minute. We had some of the speakers giving out bags, which was nice.

The speakers dinner on Tuesday and was very successful. It was a very relaxed atmosphere, and I got to talk to many interesting people. Some of the other organisers managed to convinced Linus to make an appearance at the welcome session. You can see the results here.

Tutorials on Wednesday went quite well. Went to a bit of malcolm‘s talk in the morning, and to Rusty’s talk in the arvo. They were followed by the “Proffesional networking session” which also ran very well. Everyone who attended was very impressed with how things were going. Tony brought some very nice Little Creatures beers.

Thursday saw the start of the talks. Also, the fonts announcement happened at LWE, so I was finally able to talk about it . Jim has done a wonderful job following through with this. I hope to get a copy of the Vera fonts to display my slides with.

Has a nice lunch with malcolm, alan and telsa and managed to miss the first lot of talks afterwards.

After the talks, we had a Q&A session. On the panel we had Linus, Tridge and Bdale. Part way through, Rusty was added as well because he was answering so many questions. Afterwards, someone said something like “you know you are at a good conference when you have 3 people on the panel and none of them are Alan”.

After that, the Linux Australia AGM was run. As part of the conference registration, delegates automatically got a membership with LA. This has very quickly brought the total number of members up from 5 to about 405. There were nominations and elections for seats on its board. It wasn’t as well handled as I would have liked. Since the nominations happened right before the voting there were many candidates I didn’t really know, which made it hard to make an informed choice. Good to see some new faces on the board though. Will be interesting to see how things shape up.

The mini-conferences started today, and have been going pretty well. More of the speakers have arrived, and there will be even more tomorrow.

Had take-away chinese down by the river for dinner tonight. jdub was lecturing the seagulls with a pair of chopsticks. They weren’t listenning.

Probably the biggest news that has broken recently is that we got Linus. We managed to sell all tickets to the conference without this information leaking, so I am pleased with how popular it is so far.

Probably the best place to keep up with the media coverage is at news.google.com.

linux.conf.au

Spent the day packing bags for the Linux conference. Stuffing cruft into 350 bags is more work than you would at first think … Good thing that there was a lot of people to help.

Alan and Telsa got in today, and got tricked into helping out with the bag stuffing.

I also put together an iCalendar file containing all the talks in the program that people can merge into their calendars. I don’t think I have seen other conferences do this, so I don’t know how many people will use it. Was a bit fiddly to set up with Evolution, and even more so when I realised I had my Evo timezone set wrong .

Hacking

My fontilus nautilus extension was in the new Red Hat beta (as well as being in Debian and Mandrake). It even got a mention in the ExtremeTech review of the RH beta. The newest release will turn on thumbnailing by default (if you have a new enough libgnomeui and nautilus), so it looks a bit better than the screenshots in that article. I also put out the first tarball release of nautilus-rpm, which currently only views info in the RPM database rather than modifying things. Still a lot to do to make it really useful.

Haven’t posed here for a while …

PyORBit

Put out a few releases of PyORBit. Seems to work quite well, although it still needs some more work. CVS gnome-python is already using it, but I haven’t put out any tarballs yet (which I should do — it has been too long since the last releases).

fontilus

I started working on another small GNOME package a few weeks ago: a set of tools to help manage fonts on fontconfig based GNOME systems (such as GNOME 2.1.x and Red Hat 8.0). Here are a few screenshots of what it can do:

• List of fonts in icon view
• List of fonts in list view
• Font viewer

The thumbnailing only works if you have Nautilus 2.1, but the rest works on vanila RH8. What the screenshots don’t show is that the fonts:/// folder can also be used to install fonts via drag and drop (it puts the files in ~/.fonts, which is in the default fontconfig search path).

Even though I have only been hacking on it for a while, fontilus has already become fairly popular. There are packages in Mandrake Cooker, RH Rawhide and Debian Unstable.

Jury Duty (almost)

Thursday, 17 October

I received a letter, dated 16 October, saying that I have jury duty in 5 days (Tuesday). Rather than being held at the closer Perth District Court, it is to be held out at Fremantle The Weird thing is that it says that I should notify them at least 5 days before hand if I should be excluded.

I spent the weekend wondering about what it will be like, and wondering why it was scheduled at such short notice.

Monday, 21 October

I received an overnight envelope saying that the Court case out at Fremantle has been rescheduled to be held in the Perth Court, so I am no longer required. This letter was dated 17 October.

I am a bit pissed off about this. I don’t mind getting called for jury duty, but I would expect slightly more notice. If it was going to be cancelled, I would also prefer to hear about it earlier than the night before hand.

The client side of PyORBit should be pretty usable now. Marshalling and demarshalling of pretty much all types is working well. I ported most of test/everything/client.c to Python using PyORBit, which helped test the a lot of the code.

I support pretty much all of the complex types pretty well (structures, unions, sequences, arrays, exceptions, anys).

I fixed the weird typelib bug (bug 94513), and checked the fix into both HEAD and gnome-2-0 branches of ORBit2 (haven’t had a release yet though). I need to look at porting the fix for bug 93928 back to the gnome-2-0 branch. I ran into some other bugs while working on the union support: bug 95581 and bug 95591. Hopefully I can get both of these resolved and a new ORBit2-2.4.x release put out.

As the client side of things is mostly working, I am tossing up on whether to port gnome-python over to using it. I should probably wait for a tarball release of ORBit2 though …

linux.conf.au

Registrations are now open!

PyORBit

Fixed up handling of return values for all types. Now I need to look at the handling of arguments. The semantics of ORBit_small_invoke_stub are non trivial. Also fixed a bug in the marshalling of sequences to python types.

Tracked down and fixed one of the typelib bugs. Turned out to be a subtle bug in the IDL compiler.

PyORBit

Started working on a new binding for ORBit2 about a week ago. The existing orbit-python port to ORBit2 is a little crufty, and doesn’t take advantage of the new features in ORBit2. So far things have looked fairly promising, but I have turned up a number of ORBit2 bugs related to the use of typelibs. Some of them are pretty weird (such as bug 93928 and bug 94513), while others indicate defficiencies in the current typelib implementation itself (bug 93725). I don’t know if I will be able to get it to a usable state when compiled with ORBit2 2.4.x, so I might have to wait til GNOME 2.2 before using these in the GNOME Python bindings.

Other than the bugs, I have a mostly working client side binding that generates stubs at runtime from typelibs, and have a little code for the server side. I am looking at doing a custom object adaptor at the moment, rather than getting it to work with the POA (it won’t prevent using POA in the future). The API would probably be as simple as “objref = create_servant(repo_id, instance)“, which would create and activate a new servant that delegated all method calls to instance (which could be of any class — the only constraint being that it implement the required methods), and returned an object reference. This should be enough for most cases.

Weird Bug Reports

Some people send in very weird bug reports. This morning, I received bug 94576 which seems to have nothing to do with the package it was filed against, has a stack trace from some weird custom app (I guess), and talks about Anna Kournikova a bit. I don’t know why people send in bug reports that are obviously useless — it is a waste of their time and mine.

Egg

Did a bit of work on EggToolbar and got it into a state where I could use it in EggMenu. Felt good to work on these, as they had been neglected for a while. The toolbar works quite well now, and I brought the merge code for toolbars in EggMenu into parity with the menu merge code (now supports placeholders, etc).

PyGIMP

Yosh added a little bit of magic to the autogen script for GIMP so that if you have automake-1.6, it will optionally build PyGIMP. So it should be as simple as running “./configure --enable-python” on the gimp-1.3.9 tarball to install PyGIMP.