Random stuff

One more exam tomorrow (computer vision), then mid year break. I think someone has been distributing binaries of dia with gnome-print support (which is broken). This has resulted in a lot of complaints and bug reports about the print support not working correctly. I hope it isn't the Helix packages with gnome-print support enabled. It seems like no one who submit bug reports bother to take the time to check if the bug has already been reported. It is very frustrating to get lots of reports about the same bug. It is not as bad as reports about bugs in old versions of a package that have been fixed in the latest version or "it crashed" reports with no info on what the problem was. A little extra effort on the part of the person submitting the report can be very helpful to the developers.

Did my first exam today. It was differential topology. As there are only two people doing the course, I either got top or bottom mark :) Two more exams to go and then the break. We switched ISPs on friday. I am sure that our previous ISP was saturating their network with the internet phone call service they started up a while back. At times, performance was really bad. Things are half working with the new ISP. We can reach just about everywhere except most perth ISPs. I will have to look into this. After Hans's new plugins are tidied up, I will look at doing a new release of dia. The new version has a fixed polygon shape, a beziergon and working tearoff menus among other things. Quite a bit nicer to use than 0.85.

Finished upgrading quoll today. It is now a Pentium 200MMX, which means it is now not the slowest computer in the office (not that you would notice -- it can do a lot more than the NT boxes). I switched over the mailing lists to mailman, which looks very nice. It feels nice having newer software on that machine.

I haven't posted anything here for a while. I put out a new version of dia last week. It went pretty well, but there are a few major bugs in the release (missing header include, bug in ellipses in custom shapes). I may make a new release soon when I stabilise the new code I added. With the current CVS code, we have XIM support, tearoff menus that actually work, a less buggy polygon shape, and the start of a beziergon shape. Once the beziergon is in better shape, I will probably release it as dia-0.86, and hope I don't have any more showstopper bugs. Steffen has been working on a DXF import filter, so I will be adding more properties to the standard objects to make it easier to create them through the properties interface. GNOME 1.2 release came and went. There were some communication problems which pissed off a number of people at the release, but that is behind us now. Over all, this new release is great. One of the more amusing anti GST campaigns at the moment is the one by the brewers association. They even have a web site for it. The ads for it on television are a bit weird.

Went to see the movie Looking for Alibrandi last night with some friends. It was a pretty good movie, and I recommend seeing it. Put out a new release of dia, and a few problems were found fairly quickly. One weird one was finding that the libart in released gnome-libs was different from the one in CVS. It was different enough so that the AM_PATH_LIBART macro in CVS failed on released gnome-libs. There were also a few other minor problems I will fix soon. The cover on the Kraftwerk Expo 2000 CD is pretty cool. It has that bumpy plastic on the cover so the image changes as you move it. yet more people pick on slashdot :)