Random stuff

Went for a dive on saturday, around 7pm. Since the river is toxic at the moment (an algae bloom), we went to the wreck just off north mole. It seems that all the jellyfish from the river had gone out to the sea where we were diving. There were a few stinger jellyfish out there as well. They were particularly annoying, as you couldn't really see them until they were about half a metre from you. I got to try out my new dive light -- it makes a big difference to what you can see. Was doing a bit of dia hacking on the weekend as well. I implemented some convenience interfaces to make writing the properties routines a bit easier. I also added some code to help write the load/save routines of an object using the properties interface. When the properties stuff is done, it should make writing new objects a bit easier.

I hate the heat at this time of year. I got up to around 40 degrees celcius yesterday. The properties code in dia is working a bit. I switched the flowchart box object over to using properties, and it seems to be working fine. I also added properties code to the group object. You can select two flowchart boxes, group them and set both their properties at once. There is still a bit of work to be done w.r.t. undo with the group object -- I think I will have to implement a composite ObjectChange to handle that. It will also be necessary to add change notification to the group properties dialog so that we only set the properties the user changes (this might be a good thing in any case). I will probably add code to make saving an object a one line operation with the properties code. Loading should be just/almost as easy. This should make it easier to write new objects in C. Cyrille is looking at writing some convenience routines for writing the property set/get methods.

Been working on the property code for dia I proposed a few months back. This should provide an easy way to construct the property dialogs for objects. Once I add support for it in the python scripting plug-in, we should suddenly have a lot more power in manipulating the diagrams programatically. One other thing to think about is adding support for custom properties for custom shapes. Have been playing around with zope for about a month, and am very happy with it. Very nice to use and very powerful (once you grab a few extra zope products and work out how to use DTML).

Have not posted anything here for a while. I got back from my holiday last wednesday. It was three weeks in New Zealand and a few days in Melbourne. Other than getting my bags lost for two days on the way into NZ, it was a good trip. In Melbourne, I stopped by at my uncle's company Data Electronics. Some of their new products sound very interesting. One problem with the trip was lack of access to email. I had heaps when I got back. I quickly learnt that the signs saying a shop had `Internet/Email' meant they had a web browser with its home page set to hotmail. Not very useful if you need an ssh client. Maybe I should look into one of those java ssh clients for such occasions. Matt Wilson has been doing quite a bit of bug fixing on gnome-python, so we will be making a new release of that soon. A number of people have been doing some work on dia. Mainly Cyrille who has been doing some new object libraries and and a bit of work on other bits. There are also a number of custom shapes that people have done (mainly network related ones) that I need to integrate.

I made another release of Dia. This one should fix the bugs people reported just after the 0.82 release. You can now copy/paste image and bezier objects without dia crashing. I also added a new export dialog modeled after gimp's save dialog. This also allows me to separate off export filters to plugins, which is good. I have included a partially complete CGM filter with the new release. It does everything except beziers at the moment. There is a polybezier element in CGM v3, but I have not had much luck finding docs for it. I don't even know if it is meant to be a closed, filled region or just a line. Some more work on gnorpm. It almost compiles again. I just need to finish off converting the web find window to the new API and then I can start testing it. After that I should see what changes are necessary to get it compiling with RH6.1 and make sure it doesn't crash in that setup. Then I can go and start cleaning out all the bug reports. Is there any record for the largest number of merged bug reports closed in one go? It certainly feels like I shoulf be in the running :)