Random stuff

Been talking with Andrei
about getting gtk bindings for php working. He will
probably be using some of the ideas from my python
bindings.

Got the first few chapters for a book I will be tech
reviewing. They are doing everything with MS office tools,
which is a bit of a pain. Abiword is nowhere complete
enough to do the job, as it doesn’t do the revision control
stuff needed. Gnumeric is probably good enough for the
spread sheet work. This is the part I hate most about the
MS monopoly — they have a monopoly on how you can access
the information. Dealing with Havoc’s book was a lot
easier, as he convinced them to let him use a text format
(XML). I guess I better put a copy of msword on the old 486
then.

Haven’t written anything here for a while. I put out
another snapshot of the ExtensionClass based pygtk. It is
available at ftp://ftp.daa.com.au/pub/james/python/pygtk-0.7.0-unstable-dont-use.tar.gz.
Features this release has over the previous one are keyword
argument support, better GtkCTree support and some other
changes so that the examples now work with minimal
modification. I am getting close to the main gtk module
being feature complete, and since most code is
autogenerated, the switch to gtk+-1.4 should be fairly
painless and hopefully quick.

More work on new canvas. Started work on the update and
render code for DiaCanvasItem and DiaCanvasGroup classes.
Some of these parts of the current GnomeCanvas code feel
like spagetti code, so hopefully this new canvas should be
more maintainable. The event code still needs to be hooked
up. Soon I may actually be able to start testing things a
bit.

I went to the show put on for Science Week by Dr Karl
Kruszelnicki and Adam Spencer last night. It was very
interesting to hear about the weird things some people
research. If you have a chance to see them in another
state, go.

One interesting thing in the show was when they were
pointing out one
of the sections in the GST^H^H^HNew Tax System act:

For the purposes of making a declaration under this
Subdivision, the Commissioner may:

• treat a particular event that actually happened as not
  having happened; and

• treat a particular event that did not actually happen
  as having happened and, if appropriate, treat the event as:
  • having happened at a particular time; and
  • having involved particular action by a particular
    entity; and
• treat a particular event that actually happened as:
  • having happened at a time different from the time
    it actually happened; or

  • having involved particular action by a particular
    entity (whether or not the event actually involved any
    action by that entity).

On the bright side, hardware will drop from 22% tax to
10% tax and software will go from 0% to 10%. Good thing I
use free software 🙂 Maybe this will make a laptop a bit
more affordable

In response to sad‘s remarks
about the trust metric, yes it is
really a respect metric. It only has the name trust metric
because the original use for the algorithm was encryption
key webs of trust. Advogato was an experiment using the
same algorithms for a respect metric. I think raph mentioned this in some of the
early advogato articles.

Looking at doing the expose/redraw code for
DiaCanvasView’s. I am implementing this with Federico’s
nice UTA manipulation routines from eog. The routines are
GPL, but as Federico was talking about using them in
GnomeCanvas, he probably won’t mind relicencing to LGPL in
the future.

Alex is focusing on the renderer interfaces It is an
interesting problem where you want to cache data (eg. SVPs
for a libart based renderer) on a view by view basis, but
don’t want to add any special case code for a particular
renderer to canvas items.