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 🙂