Random stuff

Been hacking on the new dia canvas. The stuff is in the
dia-newcanvas module. I am currently working on some of the
DiaCanvas / DiaCanvasView interactions, which is
interesting. Hopefully the canvas will be useful to other
people doing multi view canvas stuff. It should also add
minimal overhead to people doing single view stuff (do same
sort of initialisation as for GnomeCanvas, but also create a
view), and you get transparent print support.

I got legOS to work with my lego. I should post the RPMs
I made to the Red Hat contrib archive. Being able to write
real programs for the RCX is a lot better than using the
provided software. From the legOS docs, it says you can
send any IR message to another RCX, including ones such as
`erase firmware’ 🙂

Been creating some RPMs for the stuff needed to compile
programs for the Mindstorms RCX (that is, binutils and egcs
compiled with h8300-hitachi-hms as a target and legOS). I
just realised I don’t have enough batteries to test things
out, and it is a public holiday 🙁

The CDDB hash function has a high rate of collisions for
single track CDs. Using the freedb.org database, the
RH6.2 source cd comes up as In the corridor of
uncertainty by Flacco and the Sandman.

On the dia list, we have been discussing writing a new
canvas for using in GTK/GNOME applications as a replacement
of GnomeCanvas. It will take all the good points of the
current Dia canvas (internal handling of multiple views,
abstract rendering interface meaning only a single draw()
routine is needed which can handle GDK, Libart, gnome-print,
etc backends) with the benefits of the GnomeCanvas (based on
GtkObject system, arbitrary transformations, etc).
Depending on how things turn out, we may submit it for
inclusion in GTK+. More info when we work out what we are
going to do.

There is something weird about bug buddy or the gnome bug
system. I am getting unrelated bugs from different people
posted as followups for bug #3500. All
the followups have been posted with bug-buddy 0.6 or 0.7.
It is getting quite annoying (and yes I have reported the
problen: #8144)

Also
got a message from someone wanting help installing
libglade, because he can’t install Unreal Tournament without
it 🙂

The GNOME mailing lists are really slow. There is
almost
three days between sending a message and it getting posted
to the list.

I checked in a correct distance function for the
custom
shape code. Now all the custom shapes in dia are actually
shaped with respect to selection (before they were all
rectangular as far as selection was concerned).

They have an ask
slashdot story on slashdot at the moment that seems to
be asking the question:

There is some GPL’d code I really like and want to use in my
proprietary application. I know that the GPL says that I
should GPL my software if I want to use the code, but do I
really have to? How about if I put it in a DLL?

The comments range from incorrect opinions and
suggestions about how to get round the GPL to sensible
messages from people such as Bruce Perens. Slashdot is
definitely not what it once was (both that a story like this
would even be on the front page, and the comments people
posted).

I wonder how that peer press idea is comming along. It
has the potential to provide a good news service and make
sure crud like that doesn’t get propagated.