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.