Mon 08 May 2006

  • Eleanor: Eleanor’s stub fell off today! That means that she now has a belly button, and more importantly, can now graduate to the (better fitting) size one diapers. She is also gaining weight well, and is past her birthweight.

    Also, she is wide awake right now. I hope she can sleep tonight.

  • SOC: There is less than a day left to get your summer of code proposal in. See the timeline here, and submit if you want to participate. We have a good list so far, but there’s always room for more.

Sun 30 Apr 2006

  • life: Eleanor is now over a week old, and is absolutely perfect! She has even started to sleep a little longer at night. Unfortunately for us, night for her seems to be from eight PM through four AM. Still, she is developing well and is gaining weight.

  • httpd: Every time I touch mod_rewrite, I end up regretting it.

  • printing: I saw that John did an initial port of gedit to the new printing work in GTK+. It didn’t look too painful all things considering, and I hope that other projects will also take the time to try the port.

  • evince: I got a pretty enthusiastic proposal to do an evince SoC project. They wanted to tackle annotations and implement bookmarks, along the lines of the mockup Bryan and Diana did last summer. Hopefully it well be accepted.

  • /nick: jrb_afk is now known as jrb_tired

Thu 20 Apr 2006

  • meta: Again, a long time between updates. This time, it’s because I moved blogging software again. Instead of my own, crufty, home-grown software, I decided to use Federico‘s home-grown, crufty software. But Federico’s uses emacs, which gives it pretty good style points.

Tue 31 Jan 2006

  • life: It’s been too long since I’ve written something. The usual excuses apply. I basically have no time, anymore, for anything.

  • ridley: While not strictly ridley related, I was excited to see that Kris wrote a patch for the TreeView that let you select by rubberbanding. We are still not sure how this will interact with drag-and-drop in existing code, but it looks really promising.

    I also found James Cape’s eggcellent EggIconChooser widget in libegg. He did much of the work last summer, but I hadn’t seen it before. I don’t think the categories are right, but I love the embedded file chooser! I put up a little video of it being used here: http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/testiconchooser.ogg

    Also, istanbul is pretty nice!

  • evince: I haven’t had much time to work on this lately. I did do some work on making poppler use gtk-doc over Christmas, and more recently added attachment support to the glib bindings. I haven’t added the necessary evince bits yet, though that should be easy.

    I am also realizing that I don’t have time to finish the transition code like I hoped I would. It’s a pity, as this was a pretty fun piece of code to write. If anyone wants to pick this up, let me know, and I’ll give them a run-down of what I started. It’s a great way to get involved with evince.

  • ekiga: I’m going to be the latest to jump on the ekiga bandwagon. They’ve done a really nice job of the latest release, and nailed the firewall interaction. I still have no idea how to pronounce the name, but they did a great thing with ekiga.net.

  • rusty: My family’s dog passed away this weekend. He was a very sweet dog, and lived for almost seventeen years. We all miss him terribly.

Tue 13 Dec 2005

  • colors: The GTK+ team closed #114355 recently. This is pretty good stuff, as it lets us set the colors of themes independent of the theme itself. It’s been needed for a really long time, and they did a good job of it. Some details:

    (expressions): Whenever you need to specify a color in a GTK+ RC file, you can use an expression. Currently we have:

    mix (factor, color1, color2) shade (factor, color) lighter (color) darker (color)

    Lighter and darker are just shorthand for shade with factors of 1.3 and 0.7. You can also combine these, eg:

    bg[NORMAL] = mix (0.6, “Red”, shade (0.5, #1013ff))

    (symbolic): In a style, you can declare symbolic colors. For example:

    color[“link-color”] = “Red”

    The symbolic colors can be used in color expressions as ‘@link-color’, and they are inherited along the style hierarchy.

    (System definition): We added an XSetting to let the desktop define specific symbolic colors, so that we can override the theme. We will also tie it to a GConf key as well. This can be done by property dialogs, or applets, or whatever is needed.

    The XSetting is called “Gtk/ColorScheme”. There is a patch in bugzilla to make gnome-settings-daemon map that to the GConf key /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_color_scheme.

    There is also a gtk_style_lookup_color() call to get the symbolic color.

  • colors (remaining): There are a few things left to be done.

    1. We don’t have a list of symbols defined yet. We’re planning on doing this prior to GTK+ 2.10 being released.

    2. We don’t have any property dialogs written. They’re planned, but not implemented yet. It’s really easy to hook up a color button to the properties, a little bit harder to do a nice job.

    3. We need a way for rc files to define defaults for symbolic colors. Also, it would be nice to define a default color scheme in the metatheme file.

Sun 06 Nov 2005

  • vote: As a reminder, there’s very little time left to vote. I voted No. Board size is being blamed for a lot of things, none of which are solved by cutting down on manpower. It’s not going to affect things one way or another, other than make the board less diverse.

  • 770: My Nokia 770 arrived on Thursday. I’ve been playing with it off and on since then. It’s really nice from the big picture, but is a bit raw in this incarnation. I can’t help but compare it to my sidekick, which fills a lot of the same functionality that the maemo has.

  • 770 (things I didn’t like): Given that they owned the hardware, I’m really surprised they didn’t include a scrollwheel of some kind. It would have made browsing that much better. It’s a little on the slow side too. I’m hoping that later versions will have a better processor. The lack of tooltips (which isn’t surprising with a touch screen) meant that I couldn’t figure out what any of the icons did in toolbars. There were a bunch of other small things, but I’ll bugzilla them.

  • 770 (things I liked): as everyone else has remarked, the screen had an amazing resolution! The color is a bit off on whites, but text is very readable. They got some very nice fonts for this device. I’d heard that the battery life was poor, so was actually pleasantly surprised with how long it lasted.

    In the long run, I could see dropping the sidekick in favor of a bluetooth-enabled phone and a maemo. Right now, it’s perfect for doing crosswords, and reading the news at breakfast.