James Henstridge

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.

Went to see the movie Looking for Alibrandi last night
with some friends. It was a pretty good movie, and I
recommend seeing it.

Put out a new release of dia, and a few problems were
found fairly quickly. One weird one was finding that the
libart in released gnome-libs was different from the one in
CVS. It was different enough so that the AM_PATH_LIBART
macro in CVS failed on released gnome-libs. There were also
a few other minor problems I will fix soon.

The cover on the Kraftwerk Expo 2000 CD is pretty cool.
It has that bumpy plastic on the cover so the image changes
as you move it.

yet
more people
pick on slashdot

Been talking with Andrei
about getting gtk bindings for php working. He will
probably be using some of the ideas from my python
bindings.

Got the first few chapters for a book I will be tech
reviewing. They are doing everything with MS office tools,
which is a bit of a pain. Abiword is nowhere complete
enough to do the job, as it doesn’t do the revision control
stuff needed. Gnumeric is probably good enough for the
spread sheet work. This is the part I hate most about the
MS monopoly — they have a monopoly on how you can access
the information. Dealing with Havoc’s book was a lot
easier, as he convinced them to let him use a text format
(XML). I guess I better put a copy of msword on the old 486
then.

Haven’t written anything here for a while. I put out
another snapshot of the ExtensionClass based pygtk. It is
available at ftp://ftp.daa.com.au/pub/james/python/pygtk-0.7.0-unstable-dont-use.tar.gz.
Features this release has over the previous one are keyword
argument support, better GtkCTree support and some other
changes so that the examples now work with minimal
modification. I am getting close to the main gtk module
being feature complete, and since most code is
autogenerated, the switch to gtk+-1.4 should be fairly
painless and hopefully quick.

More work on new canvas. Started work on the update and
render code for DiaCanvasItem and DiaCanvasGroup classes.
Some of these parts of the current GnomeCanvas code feel
like spagetti code, so hopefully this new canvas should be
more maintainable. The event code still needs to be hooked
up. Soon I may actually be able to start testing things a
bit.

I went to the show put on for Science Week by Dr Karl
Kruszelnicki and Adam Spencer last night. It was very
interesting to hear about the weird things some people
research. If you have a chance to see them in another
state, go.

One interesting thing in the show was when they were
pointing out one
of the sections in the GST^H^H^HNew Tax System act:

For the purposes of making a declaration under this
Subdivision, the Commissioner may:

• treat a particular event that actually happened as not
  having happened; and

• treat a particular event that did not actually happen
  as having happened and, if appropriate, treat the event as:
  • having happened at a particular time; and
  • having involved particular action by a particular
    entity; and
• treat a particular event that actually happened as:
  • having happened at a time different from the time
    it actually happened; or

  • having involved particular action by a particular
    entity (whether or not the event actually involved any
    action by that entity).

On the bright side, hardware will drop from 22% tax to
10% tax and software will go from 0% to 10%. Good thing I
use free software Maybe this will make a laptop a bit
more affordable

In response to sad‘s remarks
about the trust metric, yes it is
really a respect metric. It only has the name trust metric
because the original use for the algorithm was encryption
key webs of trust. Advogato was an experiment using the
same algorithms for a respect metric. I think raph mentioned this in some of the
early advogato articles.

Looking at doing the expose/redraw code for
DiaCanvasView’s. I am implementing this with Federico’s
nice UTA manipulation routines from eog. The routines are
GPL, but as Federico was talking about using them in
GnomeCanvas, he probably won’t mind relicencing to LGPL in
the future.

Alex is focusing on the renderer interfaces It is an
interesting problem where you want to cache data (eg. SVPs
for a libart based renderer) on a view by view basis, but
don’t want to add any special case code for a particular
renderer to canvas items.

Been hacking on the new dia canvas. The stuff is in the
dia-newcanvas module. I am currently working on some of the
DiaCanvas / DiaCanvasView interactions, which is
interesting. Hopefully the canvas will be useful to other
people doing multi view canvas stuff. It should also add
minimal overhead to people doing single view stuff (do same
sort of initialisation as for GnomeCanvas, but also create a
view), and you get transparent print support.

I got legOS to work with my lego. I should post the RPMs
I made to the Red Hat contrib archive. Being able to write
real programs for the RCX is a lot better than using the
provided software. From the legOS docs, it says you can
send any IR message to another RCX, including ones such as
`erase firmware’

Been creating some RPMs for the stuff needed to compile
programs for the Mindstorms RCX (that is, binutils and egcs
compiled with h8300-hitachi-hms as a target and legOS). I
just realised I don’t have enough batteries to test things
out, and it is a public holiday

The CDDB hash function has a high rate of collisions for
single track CDs. Using the freedb.org database, the
RH6.2 source cd comes up as In the corridor of
uncertainty by Flacco and the Sandman.

On the dia list, we have been discussing writing a new
canvas for using in GTK/GNOME applications as a replacement
of GnomeCanvas. It will take all the good points of the
current Dia canvas (internal handling of multiple views,
abstract rendering interface meaning only a single draw()
routine is needed which can handle GDK, Libart, gnome-print,
etc backends) with the benefits of the GnomeCanvas (based on
GtkObject system, arbitrary transformations, etc).
Depending on how things turn out, we may submit it for
inclusion in GTK+. More info when we work out what we are
going to do.