Random stuff

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 …