Random stuff

I was updating my documentation generator for pygtk (the
one that tries to make the C reference docs for GTK look
like docs for Python). It was taking a while to process
with db2html (which uses Jade to convert from SGML to HTML),
so I thought I would look at using DocBook/XML and
DV‘s xsltproc, which I had heard
ran a lot
quicker.

Unlike other people’s experiences, the docs ended up
taking over twice as long to process with xsltproc compared
to jade! I suppose this was to do with the size (about
1.9MB of of XML source), and the number of cross references
(the doc generation script added a lot of xrefs). On other
docs I tried, xsltproc seemed noticably better.

I also found out that White Christmas made with coco pops
tastes pretty good.

Assuming that the initial count is correct, /me is on the
GNOME Foundation
Board of Directors! (as soon as the results are verified).

As board members are evenly spaced around the globe (I am
in +800, Telsa is in +100, many are in -500 and George is in
-800), board meetings are going to be at inconvenient times
for some people. At the moment, it looks like it is George
who will be getting up at 8am for meetings, and at midnight
for me. As I said I would make meetings difficult to
schedule in my candidate statement and George voted for me,
I can’t feel too sorry for him 🙂

Congratulations to all the other new board members.

My arms are still a bit sore when I straighten them from
the kneeboarding. I guess I need to get a bit more
excercise.

I was setting up an Adaptec 2400A RAID card today. It
came with a bootable configuration CD, which was pretty
convenient. I put it in the drive, and see a LILO prompt,
and it booted Linux, and started X.

There was a little program that gave access to the RAID
config program, documentation, the ability to set up driver
disks for various operating systems. The last option was to
start an RXVT, so I chose that. Looking at the ps listing,
I noticed that the GUI was actually a python program using
PyGTK, which was a nice surprise. It is nice
seeing my code being used in small applications like this.

Working at ActiveState was a lot of fun. It was
interesting working on Komodo, and learning about the
Mozilla code base.

I got to feed the useful mozilla fixes back upstream that
was good. I got bug
107651 – Handle multiple file drops on mozilla (gtk build)
using the text/uri-list target into the 0.9.6 release
(which is not as useful as it could be, due to many mozilla
dnd observers not being set up for multiple item drops).

I have a few other useful patches pending:

• bug
  109798 – support multi item text/x-moz-url drags as
  text/uri-list on mozilla/gtk

• bug
  69528 – support attaching multiple files at once via dnd

• bug
  37685 – get postscript printing to use more than just Times

Hopefully some of these will get into 0.9.7.

The weather was great on the weekend. Went out
kneeboarding with some friends. We put together a two metre
tower high on the back of the boat built from two spars
lashed together. It looked a bit dodgy, but it worked
pretty well. It made getting up on the board a lot easier
(it was my first time kneeboarding in over a year, and I was
expecting to fall off almost immediately).

In Melbourne for a month working for ActiveState on
Komodo, which is pretty interesting. I am supposed to be
fixing linux/gtk related bugs. It is quite difficult to
work out where in the mozilla source code things are
happening though 🙁.

Komodo is a very interesting project, and should mature
into a good IDE (it is already usable under windows). Some
great free software has come out of Komodo already (even if
Komodo itself isn’t), such as PyXPCOM.