Random stuff

From what has been happening, it sounds like Air New
Zealand had been siphoning money out of Ansett by charging fuel
and catering costs against the airline and possibly doing so
after it knew Ansett was bankrupt. This has caused Ansett
workers to call for a boycott of Air NZ, which the NZ PM doesn’t
like much.

To save money, the .au Government allowed the
two domestic airlines (Qantas/Australian Airlines and
Ansett) to build the air terminals themselves. At almost
every domestic airport in australia, you will see a Qantas
half and an Ansett half (usually with different
architecture, etc). Separate checkins, separate bagage
collection, separate arival/departure gates, etc. Now half
of every domestic air terminal is left closed. Those people
who happened to own shops inside an Ansett terminal can’t
open for business. I really hope some of the smaller
airlines (such as Virgin) will finally be allowed to use
Ansett’s space in the domestic terminals, which will allow
them to compete more evenly than before (before they often
had to use other buildings round the airport or the
international airport terminals).

The ACCC is going to toughen
the rules for airlines so that this change doesn’t make
it even more difficult for new airlines to break into the
business.

In news on the Tampa refugees, the courts
are going to rule on the Government’s apeal today.

It is really sad hearing so many people in the US out for
blood (I have no way to tell how many people feel this way
— the internet+media can give a very skewed perspective on
things). The terrorists killed many innocent people in the
WTC, most likely because of issues they had with the US
govenment and foreign policy. If the US turns around and
kills innocent Palestinians or Afgahns (or where ever they
happen to be based) in order to get the terrorists, that
would be just as bad an act of terrorism.

In local news, Ansett has stopped
flying, which means the only interstate domestic airline
serving Perth now is Qantas. I hope the ACCC keeps air fares in
check.

It seems that even though Judge North ruled
in favour of the Tampa refugees, they are still going to
Nauru until the government is finished apealing the
judgement. I don’t know anyone who approves of how the
government treats boat people.

I have been converting a lot of the boxed types in pygtk
over to my new PyGBoxed code. So far, this has
resulted in about 1000 less lines of non generated source
code, which is helpful. It will also help wrap other addon
widget libraries that have boxed types (provided they are
registered with glib). I will have to submit a few patches
for GTK to register the last few types that aren’t already
registered.

The development version of libglade got support for
container child properties recently (thanks to the new GTK
APIs from Tim), which means that most container types can be
handled by libglade without any extra code, which brings us
closer to a stage where no new code would be required to
support new widgets. I also started work on a simple
converter to go from the old file format to the new one. It
still has problems, but it is better than nothing, and
should help test my code.

Recompiled devel gtk+ and its dependencies today from
scratch, and gtk-demo still segfaults 🙁. Tim
committed my g_object_newv patch, so people should be able
to build devel libglade. He also checked in the child
properties stuff, which will allow me to handle that
generically in libglade (once he adds a few missing APIs).

Once I sort out the gtk+ issues, I can get hacking on
pygtk a bit more.

I am sure most people have heard about the flame war on
the gnome-hackers list over the weekend. Things have
settled down now, and there is talk of creating some
procedures for introducing changes to the platform. Some
people have argued that it is introducing too much
bureaucracy, but I think it will work out quite well.
Similar schemes have worked well for Python, TCL, Perl and even the internet.
All have varying levels of formality, so we should be able
to find a process that suits GNOME well.

Unfortunately, the flame war was picked up by various
news outlets such as Linux Today who posted some fairly one
sided editorials. Judging by the comments, the maturity of
LT’s readership is dropping to slashdot standards. It
pisses me off when people blow things like this out of
proportion. Looks like they did something similar again
today in an editorial about a KDE disagreement.

Doing a bit more work on libglade2. It is still broken,
but getting less broken as time goes on. Should get it so
that the build completes to keep Sander
happy 🙂

Since we are starting to get a number of functional free
web browsers, I had the idea that it might be a good idea to
create a Certificate Authority for free software projects
and people and get its CA cert preloaded in browsers like
Mozilla.

Why do people use CAs like Verisign? Because people
trust them (rightly or wrongly), and their certs are
preloaded in almost all browsers so users don’t see a
disturbing dialog pop up when going to the site.

The free software community is probably in a better
position to verify the identity of people requesting
certificates. A group like Debian which already has a
strong web of trust between developers could set up a CA.
Requiring that certificate requests be GPG signed by a
debian developer who has positively identified the requestor
before issuing a certificate might provide a good balance
between security and ease of acquiring certificates.

Having the CA certificates preloaded in free browsers
such as mozilla, konqueror, etc would place them on an equal
footing with the existing CAs. Debian as a CA is just an
example, as they already have some of the infrastructure in
place for identifying people. It shouldn’t be difficult to
get CA certs added to free web browser’s databases. It
probably shouldn’t be limited to just free software related
CAs either.

Another interesting idea would be to setup (or adopt an
existing) alternative root zone that included a number of
TLDs related to free software (eg .gnu, .bsd, etc) along
with the existing ICANN and country code TLDs. If the major
distros shipped their nameservers pointing at this
alternative root, those TLDs would be usable (and not just
to Linux/BSD boxes — think about how many windows boxes
just forward all DNS requests to a Linux or BSD box for
resolution).

Both ideas would take quite a bit to get off the ground,
so probably won’t happen unless someone is really motivated
to do it.