Random stuff

Menu Code

I moved all my action based menu prototype code into libegg,
which is becomming the prototype library hp
proposed a while back. andersca might
check in some of his new icon list widget soon, which will
be good. GTK+ 2.4 should be very good (the 2.2 feature list
has already been finalised; it is basically 2.0 plus the
multihead patches, and should be available in a month or two).

My menu code should eventually provide menu merge
capabilities similar to the UI handler code in libbonoboui,
but not depending on any of the corba stuff. It should be
extensible enough so that it can be used by things like
bonobo. The aim being to allow gtk+ and gnome/bonobo
programs to use exactly the same menu code (rather than
having to rewrite portions of an app in order to port it to
GNOME).

linux.conf.au

Hopefully the Call for Papers should be released in a day
or two. Just a few last details to finalise. Note that the
conference website is at conf.linux.org.au at the
moment, due to the transient nature of .conf.au
domains. I hope to see everyone in Perth next January!

PyGTK

The Python bindings for GTK+ 2.0 are going pretty well.
The defs files are pretty much up to date with the 2.0 API,
so I have a fair idea of what needs to be done. After
finishing up a few of the remaining architectural issues, it
would be good to put out a 2.0 release. Not everything
needs to be wrapped, but I should reduce the number of
unwrapped functions.

Updated my Mailman
patch to use some of the newer features in SpamAssassin 2.20.
This includes showing which rules got triggered for
messages that get held (this is the feature that required
the 2.20), and the ability to give messages from list
members a bonus when calculating the message score (so that
they are less likely to get held/discarded). The newer
version is in Mailman’s patch tracker:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=534577&group_id=103&atid=300103

With this patch and SA 2.20, I seem to be getting about
80% less messages to moderate, which is much more
manageable. Adjusting the thresholds a little would
probably improve matters further.

jdub put the original version of my
patch on mail.gnome.org
(with a discard threshold of 20 — mainly to test its
ability to identify spam). It manages to get rid of the
worst of the spam delivered to GNOME lists though.

With this patch, you could almost open a list up to non
subscriber posting again, like most list admins did before
the spam epidemic grew to its current proportions. The SA
mailman filter doesn’t catch everything though, so list
members would have to be slightly tolerant of spam to allow
non subscriber posting again.

Looks like jdub is pushing to get my mailman
patches put up on mail.gnome.org.
It will be interesting to see how they hold up under heavy
volume. It
is coded fairly defensively, so it shouldn’t cause mail lossage
(unless you configure it to lose certain bits of mail), but
I have no
idea whether it has an acceptable CPU overhead.

Saw Rabit Proof Fence on Saturday. A very
good
movie and worth watching. It makes me sad to see how
Aborigines have
been treated.

Going to GUADEC

This is the first time I have travelled internationally since
September 11th and the terrorist paranoia. All the parking
spots
immediately outside the terminal were blocked off (apparently to
prevent terrorists from leaving bombs — like any terrorist
organisation would want to bomb Perth Airport).

When going through xray machines at customs, the ladie in
front of
me got held up for having a nail file in her hand luggage. They
stopped me because I had a laptop. They asked me to take
the laptop
out of the bag, disconnect the battery and then pass them
all through
the xray machine separately.

When we got the meals on the plane, they came with metal
spoon,
metal fork and plastic knife. The forks are probably
sharper than the
metal knives they usually provide with meals.

Travelling by plane sure is a lot less convenient now.

Sevilla

After getting my luggage checked through customs, I found
a bus
outside the airport going into the city. Caught it and got
off some
place that turned out to be two or three kilometers from the
house
docpi organised. I walked the rest of the
way to the
house.

I eventually found the place, and it had 4 buzzers (one
for each
appartment). On the forth try, I got let in (first two were
empty,
and the docpi was in the last one). The appartment looked
great —
marble floors, balconies looking out in two directions, etc.

April 2

In the supermarket, they had really big 6 packs — 6 one
litre
bottles plastic wrapped together. Meandered around the city
for the day, and had a very nice meal at night.

…

Will have to write something about the actual conference.
So far it has been a lot of fun.

Did a bit more mail system hacking, and wrote a filter to
get mailman to talk to SpamAssassin directly:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=534577&group_id=103&atid=300103

This one asks spamd to score each message that
is posted to a list. If the message goes above a particular
score (configurable, default 10), it gets discarded. If it
goes above another threshold (default 5), the message gets
held for moderation. It probably needs a bit more tweaking
to skip posts from listmembers (among other things). I
mainly wrote this patch because the PyGTK
mailing list currently gets more spam than real messages,
which is a bit depressing, and a pain to moderate.