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.

Thu 08 Sep 2005

  • evince: GNOME-2.12 went out the door today with the new evince release. Version 0.4.0 is the culmination of a lot of hard work by the entire evince team. By blending a mixture of features and simplicity, we have reached a state of genuine usefulness. We are still very ambitious; there are a lot of awesome features currently on the drawing board.

    Of all the features in evince, the one that I’m most proud of is that we don’t have a preference dialog. It’s taken a lot of discipline and creativity along the way, but we managed.

  • zana: My wife rocks.

Wed 31 Aug 2005

  • evince: Bryan and I took another look at acroread today, and realized that we’re falling behind them in the web advertisement space! They have an toolbar just for Yahoo ads, and we don’t have anything like that at all. Since we had been looking for fundraiser opportunities anyway for the Evince Defence League, I whipped up Google AdWords support to the sidebar.

    http://jrb.webwynk.net/files/evince-sponsor.png

    Awesome. We’re planning on branching into personal ads, later.

Mon 29 Aug 2005

  • ridley: I finally got Project Ridley announced. This has been overdue for a long time, and I hope that we’ll get some good contributors to this project. I’ve gotten a number of replies from people interested in helping out, and there’s plenty to be done.

    There were a number of FAQs and some confusion about it, so I thought I’d give an effort to answer them:

    Q: What is the main goal of Project Ridley? A: We are really trying to clean up the existing library stack and platform. When we are done, we should have a better story for developers.

    Q: Are you going to write <my favorite feature> A: Depends if it’s in an existing library. There’s nothing that says that additional development can’t happen, but we’re going to be focusing on the functionality in libraries that currently exist.

    Q: Can I help? A: We always need help! There are some people signed up for projects already at the ProjectRidley page at live.gnome.org, but there’s plenty of room for more help. People interested in writing code should come to the GTK+ team meeting on Tuesdays. It’s typically held on IRC in -devel at 4:00 EDT.

    Q: <generic complaints about keybindings> A: This project has nothing to do with keybindings, dangit.

    Q: What does Project Ridley mean? A: I’m not telling. (-:

  • style: Zana got her hair cut short again. It looks really good!

  • dog: When we came back this evening after going out, we found a lot of muddy pawprints in the bathtub. The dog had jumped into it while we were gone. He hates baths! I have no idea what he was doing there.

  • sudoku: My mom bought us a book of sudoku puzzles, so I did what any good nerd would do — I wrote a simple solver in python. It’s now almost as good at these puzzles as my wife is. I need to add branching support to it, but it solves most of the puzzles I can throw at it.

  • New Orleans: We have been watching the really terrifying images on TV. The city was awesome when I visited it a couple months ago, and I really hope that it’s still there in the morning. It looks like it’s going to be horrible.