Random stuff

Put out another development pygtk snapshot. I actually released it yesterday, but my computer's clock was out by 12 hours when I made the release, but didn't notice it (something weird must have happened when bringing all the computers back up after the brownout on sunday), and the ntp server on the gateway didn't start up correctly so it didn't correct itself. I hate clock skew. I have some ideas on how to decrease the amount of handcoded stuff in pygtk even further. The beginnings of this code is included in the latest snapshot (the GBoxed type). I haven't gotten round to converting any of the existing boxed types over to this new code or adjusted the code generator yet though. Cyrille, Lars, Steffen and Hans have been doing great work on Dia. They are responsible for most of the work on the recent 0.88.1 release of dia. There will probably be a 0.89 release soon. Chema posted an initial tarball of glade v2. I will have to look at it a bit closer. Libglade will have to be ready for the gnome 2.0 API freeze, which will probably be before glade2 is usable. The Sun guys want accessibility support in glade/libglade, so we will see how that shapes up. At the office, I was attempting to get the amanda backup client agent to compile under cygwin (with the aim of adding some NT boxes to the network backup system). After patching it to take into account ".exe" suffixes on some programs and commenting out some of the fstab/block device code, it finally compiled. By hooking it up to cygwin's inetd, the amcheck, amdump, etc programs on the backup server could talk to the client agent on the NT box. Unfortunately, the backup was really slow and was using 100% CPU :( It sent the dump to the backup server, but then had to create an index or stats for the dump, or something, which was taking a long time and caused a timeout :( Cygwin is a very useful tool on windows boxes, but it has its limitations. I found out about an Amanda Win32 client which I might try. It uses yet another POSIX emulation layer.

First entry for 2001. A lot of things have happened. I went on a holiday to Paris for a week and then Oxford for a week with the rest of my family. It was good, but a bit cold. I got to meet Mathieu while in Paris which was good. A few days after I got back, I was back on the plane for Sydney (where I am writing this) for linux.conf.au. It starts on Wednesday, and should be a lot of fun.

Have been hacking on pygtk recently, and a small amount on glib HEAD and framebuffer gtk (which is looking really promising). I did up the first cut at allowing arbitrary GtkTreeModels to be defined in python code. It leaks badly, and it will probably be near impossible to fix correctly :(. The glib patch was to add some convenience functions for the GSignal code, as it is so difficult to use the existing functions people are still creating GtkObjects because of the gtksignal compatibility wrappers. Still waiting on feedback from Tim about it Yesterday night alex asked me to try compiling pygtk with the framebuffer port of GTK, which he is working on. After adding a single missing function to the framebuffer gdk backend, pygtk compiled with no source modifications, which was good. I was having trouble with the "ms" serial mouse driver in GtkFB and my mouse. I put together a patch to make finding the start of mouse packets a little smarter, and to fix up the mouse button handling for that driver. The level of functionality in GtkFB is quite impressive. Last Sunday, I went to the reconciliation walk in the city, which went quite well. Lots of people turned up. Also, on the way there I noticed a big banner on the old Swan Brewery (which has been a sore point, because it was an Aboriginal sacred site) saying "sorry". I don't know if anything different will happen with the development at that site though.

Haven't posted anything here in over a month. I just finished my last exam today, which was good. It was interesting hearing about the formation of the KDE League, especially after Kurt Granroth's original comments after then announcement of the GNOME Foundation. I did an interview giving the perspective of a GNOME hacker on the League. The Python bindings for GTK 2.0 are coming along nicely. I have wrappers for the new text and tree widgets mostly written, and they are very nice to use. Combined with python's unicode support, python makes a very nice environment for GTK programming.

Wrote some code to convert arbitrary elliptic arcs to bezier curves for the gnome-print driver in dia. This should stop people sending bug reports in about that problem. The output looks very nice, so no one should notice that it isn't real elliptic arcs. I was talking with Chema about adding support for arcs in gnome-print itself, possibly using my code as a fallback for drivers that don't support them.