Random stuff

Got the new ExtensionClass pygtk to a state where you can play with it. It actually compiles into something that actually imports, which is a step forward. I started work on a defs file for gtk, which has all the GTK widgets and has the constructors set for most of them. It also specifies public fields of objects, but that is not fully implemented yet. I also got single wrapper per GtkObject working, and added support for an ExtensionClass instance dictionary. The new GtkObject wrappers are pretty much just as functional as the old ones, but without all the weirdness found before (eg. _o, multiple wrappers, two layers of wrappers, etc). When things get closer to working, I should do some benchmarks or something. The new stuff definitely loads quicker, and probably runs faster and uses less memory. I posted instructions on how to test things out on pygtk-list. Alex added bonobo support to dia. I will have to look at this, and help out a bit. I will be very pissed off if someone complains that you only get bonobo support if gnome support is enabled :). Some people don't seem to realise that if we don't use a library, then the functionality of the library has to be duplicated in dia, which means we have more code to maintain.

Got back from GUADEC yesterday at 4pm. 17 hour flights are way too long. Good thing they had a SNES at every seat. They also had a phone at every seat, and it looked like you might have been able to plug in a modem. If there was somewhere to plug in a laptop, Singapore Airlines would be almost perfect for hackers :). Here are some notes on what I did in paris: Wednesday, 15 March: Got through customs at about 6am. It was still a bit dark, so it took a while to realise that I was 2 floors up from the ground. I dedided to take the train, as from the instructions on the GUADEC web site, it seemed the simplest. It took me a while to get to the train station, as I didn't realise that aerogare meant airport terminal rather than a train station at the airport :(. After getting off at Denfer Rocherau. The 300m walk down Boulevard St Jaques to get to Rue Barrault turned out to be closer to 1km, and passed a few metro stations. After getting to the hotel, I dropped off my bags and went sight seeing. I went to the Eiffel Tower, which is a great place to go first, as you can see a lot of Paris from there. They have a lot of boards up about the history of the Eiffel tower, which is really interesting. The french complained about it as an eyesore, then agreed to put the same advertising on three sides of it for over a decade. Go figure. I also went to see the Arc d'Triumph. Tried not to look australian while standing next to the eternal flame :). You get a great view of the traffic from the top of the arc. You will probably never see anything like that round about anywhere else in the world. After that, I was starting to feel a bit tired (a 7 hour time difference does that to you), so went back to the hotel, where I fell asleep from 6pm to 7am. Thursday, 16 March Got up, feeling a bit shaky as I hadn't had a proper meal since yesterday breakfast. It was good that the hotel had a buffet. Around that time I found Miguel and met a lot of the other HelixCode guys in the dining room. I forgot to ask for one of their cool T shirts, which I am regretting now (if there is a second screening, I would love to get a copy). Had a bit of a conversation with Michael Meeks about whether the ideas of the canvas needs to be rethought to make it easier to use in a model/view type application (currently it is easiest for a single view apps, and I think there is a lot of code duplication in doing up multi view support which should go in the canvas). Went to the ENST after that and met up with some more hackers. Commented…

Put together some slides for the workshop talks at GUADEC. I have put them up on the web at http://www.daa.com.au/~james/slides/ for anyone who wants to read them. I put out new versions of libglade, pygtk and gnome-python yesterday. The new libglade version contains bonobo support from Michael Meeks. The other two were mostly bug fixes.

Got a message from jwz on dia-list. He had a few interesting ideas for dia. I don't know how soon we will be able to implement them. Did a little more work on libglade. Should probably do a new release soon. Should also release new pygtk and gnome-python before going to GUADEC. Today was very humid rather than being very hot.

Thought I would see what the Advogato trust web looked like with graphviz. I would not recommend anyone else doing this, as it takes longer than I wanted to wait. Running it on just the purple lines finished in reasonable time, but ghostview was not usable with such a large single page PS file. Someone suggested adding support for graphviz. As graphviz is not open source (despite what they say they believe in their licence faq), we can't link it with dia. If I get around to doing this, it would probably involve modifying graphviz to export the data in an easily readable format, and getting the import filter to read this data through a pipe.