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.