Random stuff

Made new development releases of pygtk and gnome-python recently. The previous ones didn't work with the gtk 2.0 release (trivial to fix up). Since the release, I have done some clean ups to its code generator. I have refactored it so that the 4 code paths used to generate wrappers for GObject, GInterface, GBoxed and GPointer type classes are now merged into one code path. This shortened the file by 500 lines, and should make it easier to add new features. The previous layout was getting pretty hard to manage. I have started using Spam Assassin to tag incomming spam. As we have a mildly unusual mail setup (postfix with Cyrus IMAP), I ended up writing my own script to perform the spam checking. The result was a script that could be called as a "deliver" script by postfix for local delivery. The script would then pass the message off to the spamd daemon for spam checking, then pass the message on to the IMAP server via LMTP. The script is probably useful for use with other mail servers supporting LMTP. The script is attached to the following bug report: http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112 This has the benefit of only checking incomming mail, and allowing postfix to handle outgoing and transit mail at full speed as before. Next thing to try is adding spam checking support to Mailman (as the local delivery program doesn't get called for messages sent to mailman). It should be possible to set it up to reject messages above a certain threshold, and hold messages at a lower threshold. I wish I started looking at these tools earlier. Spam volume has gone up sharply in the last 6 months, and shows no sign of flattening out.

linux.conf.au Got asked to go on the paper review committee for next year's linux.conf.au. This should be interesting. For people living in Europe, it should cut off about 5 hours flying time compared to the eastern states, so hopefully we will get some cool European hackers submitting papers. Conversely, flights from the US will most likely be longer. If you have never been to Perth, it is a great opportunity to come (it is a great place). If you live in Perth, it will be a great opportunity to meet many interesting people without > 4 hours flight :-). Also, check out the video on the website if you haven't yet. GNOME 2.0 The GNOME release is looking pretty good. Things have been shaping up quite well. The new stable GTK+ release is scheduled for Monday. There have been significant speed improvements to Nautilus (some due to improvements to the UI handler code in bonobo). Libglade is shaping up well. Guadec is about a month away as well. Python The development pygtk branch is going well. Most of the infrastructure is in place, and it is pretty usable (except threading, which is still a little broken). I my first patch into python recently. It allows use of non string types as the __doc__ attribute of new style classes (eg. unicode strings, or arbitrary descriptors (which is what I wanted)). It should be going in both the 2.3 and 2.2.1 releases. The gettext module in the standard library is also partially based on my code (along with the other gettext wrappers that were around at the time), but that is really Barry's work. I should look at the bug about building libpython as a shared library, as it would be required to implement a full gnome-vfs wrapper. raph: hopefully pygtk 2.0 should be a pretty good choice when it is ready. GTK+ 2.0 should work on win32, and I have gotten rid of the file naming issues and global variable referencing issues (MSVC doesn't allow referencing variables from other DLLs in global variable definitions. However, the C++ compiler does. It is a bit weird) people were having with the stable pygtk. Also, the Redmond95 windows lookalike theme has been improved a fair bit. Mozilla Looks like the patch to fix font handling for PS printing (#37685) is going in to mozilla 0.9.9. This should make printing on unix mozilla much better. Finally, preformatted text should finally be displayed in a monospace font. Previously, the generic font types (sans serif, serif and monospace) were all being printed as Times.

linux.conf.au Went to linux.conf.au in Brisbane last week, which was a lot of fun. I went a few days early to see what was going on at the debian mini conference, and got roped into giving a small demonstration of gnome 2.0 stuff at about 30 seconds notice. I am not very good at doing presentations with no preparation :( Met up with gman, who was at the conference as part of his holiday over here. The talks were very interesting. Sounds like Samba 3.0 will rock (does win2k domain client RPCs), and it may not take long after that to become a win2k PDC. On the last day, among other things, I went to the Portable.NET work in process talk. The guy giving it seemed really bitter about Mono. He didn't seem to be giving any real reasons for it, but didn't give any real reasons for it. Looks like the next linux.conf.au is going to be in Perth, so I hope everyone is going to turn up :). Part of what got us the conference was the video some of the PLUG guys did. They showed the video at the end of the conference, and it was very good. Gnome 2.0 While at l.c.a, I put out another release of devel libglade. This one just stripped out some of the unused functions from the module API (which isn't used by any applications). I also went through and updated a lot of the docs. The tutorial section has been updated a lot, and so has the API reference section. I started filling out a third section of the manual on the actual file format, but that isn't finished. Gnome in the Past While talking about the difference between the old gnome window hints and the newer window manager spec (collaborative effort with KDE and many window manager authors). One thing that came up was the colour reactive GUI crack in the old spec. I pulled up a few related links from the bowels of time: Bowie's original proposal Slashdot story about the proposal Slashdot story about the implementation in GNOME On one hand, the new API got in a lot quicker than it would these days. On the other, it would have taken a lot longer to get rid of this kind of crach these days (deprecating it for the duration of a major release, etc). Maybe I should resurrect GnomeLamp as a bonobo control example for gnome-python :)

Skyshow Went to the Australia Day fireworks on Saturday night. I cycled into the city to see them, which was worth it (didn't get stuck in a traffic jam -- just had to dodge pedestrians on the way home). The fireworks looked so much better in the city (I went just a little past the narrows bridge). There were fireworks being let off the tops of the buildings in the city, off the narrows bridge, and off the barges in the middle of the river. At one stage, some small tough-ducks were driving past about 50 metres away and letting off some smaller fireworks. One of the embers from these smaller fireworks landed about 2 metres away from me! (on the esky belonging to someone sitting nearby). Sony NEWS I have been looking at reviving an old Sony NEWS NWS-1580 workstation. This is from a line of 68030 based unix workstations made by sony in the early 90's. It had been left off for about 5 years, so wouldn't boot at all. Apparently the problem was with the battery on the NVRAM chip, so I will try and get a replacement for it (its an MK48T02B-25 chip, which was also used in a number of Sun boxes). While I had the system open, I decided to take a few photos of its insides: http://www.jamesh.id.au/images/nws-1580/ While searching for information, I ran accross the NetBSD/news68k FAQ, which gave a button combo to press to boot a system with a discharged NVRAM battery, or new NVRAM chip. Using that combo, I was able to get the system to boot NEWS-OS 3.3 (a BSD-4.3 derivative). Once the system is running nicely, I might look at transfering the OS off the 180MB disk onto a spare 2GB SCSI disk I have (provided I can find the installation tape). I could probably fit two 3.5" disks into the space the current 5.25" disk takes up, which would mean I could put NetBSD on it too. I can also fit in another 8MB of RAM, which should be helpful (it takes standard 8 or 9 chip 30pin SIMMs). I will also look for a AUI -> 10Base-T tranceiver, so I can hook the machine up to the network (6 COMM ports can only get you so far ...). Python On the PyGTK development side, we now have bonobo bindings in CVS, using jdahlin's orbit-python bindings for ORBit2. We now have support for libbonobo, libbonoboui, bonobo-activation, nautilus views and panel applets (most of this work is thanks to jdahlin). I have also been looking at doing some automatic signal/property documentation for GObject wrappers. Rather than calculating all this documentation up front, I decided to use the cool new descriptor support in Python 2.2. This is essentially a generalisation of the rule that maps functions in a class dictionary to methods on instances. Rather than this being a special case in 2.2, functions implement a tp_descr_get() function, which gets called asking the function object to return itself in the…

More investigation of the slow processing speed for my document. It seems like the slowdown is somewhere in libxslt's chunking code. With chunking turned on, xsltproc took 4 minutes to process the document, while without chunking (ie. producing one large file), it only took 1:30 minutes (less than half the processing time). In comparison, using Jade to process the document took about 2 minutes with chunking turned on. With chunking turned off, it took 4 minutes. I wonder if this means that xsltproc's performance with chunking turned on can be improved to be faster than its nochunks performance? Either that, or the DSSSL stylesheets for Jade can be optimised for the non chunked case :-)