10 April 2000

Seven days till my birthday. I checked in the starts of the new plugins API for dia. This code reduces the number of entry points in a plugin to two. It should also allow me to write a nice plugin manager dialog where you can turn off loading of plugins if you want (this will be more important as we get more heavy plugins such as the python plugin).

5 April 2000

Went to see Loon X-Wing (of Beaverloop fame) playing at the uni at lunch time yesterday. Have been setting up my system with the new hard drive. I almost have it to a working state and a delivery man gives me RH6.2. I guess I will see what improvements have been made. Noticed that a new version of gtkglarea was released in february. This means that the gtkglarea wrapper in pygtk should work with a released version of gtkglarea (there were a few API changes a while back, but no released version containing them). The first Python 1.6 is out. It contains unicode support, which should make integration with Pango/gtk+-1.4 very nice. The article about Python 3000 was interesting. I wonder how much the internals are going to change? Luckilly pygtk and gnome-python mainly consist of generated code, so changing the code generator will do the majority of the work chainging over.

4 April 2000

Have been upgrading my system for the past few days. I got a nice new 20GB hard drive. When I was installed it, everything was working fine, but part way through the install of Red Hat the system would turn itself off. While checking all the things I had changed, and trying bios upgrades, I got to a stage where the system would turn off as soon as you powered it up. I eventually worked out that the power supply was pretty much dead (not overloaded -- I don't have that much in my case), so I moved everything into one of the spare boxes and everything (including the new hard drive) works fine. The new case has three fans, and is a bit noisy. I should probably unplug one of them (they are all hooked up to the motherboard, so I wonder if you can tell the motherboard to turn them off :-) I also turned on DMA for the hard drives and it makes a big difference when compiling stuff. I am currently upgrading things to a more usable state (ie. gnome stuff with debugging info turned on). I should put out a new pygtk and gnome-python. I will switch them over to using CVS automake and libtool rather than automake-1.4 + my patches. I put out a test release of the ExtensionClass based pygtk on my ftp site. I really like the new code, and it will be good to move the rest of pygtk and gnome-python over to that codebase.

30 March 2000

Tracked down the segfault when subclassing GtkObject wrappers in the new pygtk. I also reenabled object attributes on the wrappers defined in C without problems, so this problem looks like it is fixed. The wrapper rescue code really is evil.

30 March 2000

I don't know what all the fuss is about the gnome steering commitee thing. The main job we are doing is doing a bit of release coordination, so things get done on time (for october gnome, Elliot did most of this work, but it is probably less stressful to have a group of people doing the work). The other stuff discussed was about starting the process of creating a gnome foundation (which should take over a lot of what steercom was set up for). Did more work on pygtk/extensionclass. It is starting to feel like the old pygtk. I am trying to track down some weird errors that are occuring when deallocating instances of python subclasses of GtkObject wrappers. I think I am the only person who has tried to do this kind of weird stuff with ExtensionClass. I think it has something to do with the evil wraper rescue code in pygtk_dealloc :( It looks like my certification of advogato pushed him up to master :)