Fri 19 Nov 2004

  • screenshots: I spent some time over the last month rewriting the screenshooting utility. The code had rotted considerably since last time I looked at it, and it needed refreshing. There was a cut-n-paste of gdk_pixbuf_save using libpng, as well as some pretty crufty dialog handling. It was clearly a GNOME 1 application that had had a straight port and little else.

    I started out by cleaning up the code and modularizing it, splitting it out into fourteen different files. This apparently violated the terms of my lease and markmc evicted me from the gnome-panel CVS module. Fortunately, the gnome-utils guys were kind enough to give the screenshooter a place to live, and I moved it over.

    A good deal of the impetus for doing the rework was to add gnome-vfs support to the dialog. I started work on a new library libgnomevfsui and needed an application to test it with. As a result, you can now save the image directly to remote location, and get a nice (semi-functional) progress bar while doing so. Here’s a screenshot of it that was saved directly to my gnome.org public_html directory:

    http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/Screenshot-Save-Screenshot.png

    I also added a couple other features such as drop shadows, dark borders, and improved D-n-D handling. The child process handling was cleaned up and it’s much less likely to leak files in /tmp. Oh, and it also looks better now.

  • porting: While cleaning up old code, I decided to devote a few evenings to fixing up AisleRiot a bit. Callum has done a great job of keeping that code sane, but it really needs a good house keeping. It turns out that the guile API I used initially was deprecated a couple years ago. I went through and updated the code to the preferred method. As a bonus, I added some simple exception handlers so that we no longer crash when there’s a scheme error. Hopefully we’ll be able to pass the backtrace to bug-buddy and get real bug reports for GNOME 2.9.

  • planets: Seems like I temporarily broke planet.gnome.org. It’s not just Rich Burridge.

Fri 24 Sep 2004

  • Reader’s Block: Eric Eldred (of Eldred vs. Ashcroft fame) and his Bookmobile are coming to Groton. They are stopping at our local library (http://www.gpl.org) in a couple weeks, and are printing and binding free books for the first 25 people who reply. The texts are all public domain from Project Gutenburg and its ilk. It should be pretty cool to attend and hear what they have to say.

    I’m having trouble deciding on a book to print out though. There are so many options that I can’t narrow it to just one. I normally buy a book as the result of some external impetus, or on a recommendation, or perhaps because it just caught my eye. This is a little different; I have an entire blank book in front of me ready to be filled in and read! It is surprisingly hard to choose.

Mon 13 Sep 2004

  • Travels: I spent last week in Northern California meeting with a customer. The visit with the customer seemed to go pretty well, though it took a lot of my time. I also saw friends and family while out there, and was generally kept busy. On Wednesday, I made it to a Red Sox game at the Oakland Coliseum, which despite being an away game, had a large Red Sox contingent.

  • automata: Last Labor day I went with my parents to the San Francisco Exploratorium. It has a new exhibit of automata, which by itself is worth the price of admission. They were cleverly done with lots of intricate gears, cogs, bellows, levers, and pulleys, all intricately carved out of wood. They were modern and it showed in the themes and sensibilities of their vignettes. The lack of age didn’t detract from their cleverness and charm, though.

    It’s definitely worth a trip for those in San Francisco, even if you have seen the Exploratorium many times already.

  • Birthday: For my birthday, Zana made me crab and shrimp stuffed crepes. It was served with a side dish of asparagus, and stuffed shrimp and cheese as starters. She also got up at 5:00 in the morning to pick me up from the airport, which was very appreciated!

  • Crossword Helper: On the plane trip out last weekend, I wrote a simple little program to help with crossword puzzles. I wrote it from start to finish in about three hours in python. It searches for a list of words that match a partial word, and does simple anagram searches. The feature count was limited by the battery life on my laptop, though I did add a blinking cursor a couple days later. A screenshot is available at:

    http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/crosswordhelper-1.png

    I don’t know if this is interesting enough to check into CVS or not, as it’s only a couple-hundred lines of code.

Wed 01 Sep 2004

  • games: We bought Pikmin 2 tonight. Zana promptly beat me in multi-player mode while claiming to be unable to figure out the keys. Very sneaky!

  • filechooser: Ellipsizing cell renderers now works well in GTK+-HEAD. I put a screenshot of the filechooser using this at http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/fileselellipse.png

    We really need to get tooltips on rows going now.

Mon 23 Aug 2004

  • life: It was a nice day today, so I did what I always seem to do on such nice days; I huddled in the basement fiddling with firewall rules.

  • car: I took my Saturn in to the dealership to get its 100,000 mile service. It was the first time in a while that I’ve stayed in the dealership for the duration of the service, instead of getting a ride. They now have wireless network support, which is a nice bonus. However, the bowl of jelly donuts and bananas is now gone. I’m not sure which I’d prefer.

  • crossword: We finished the Saturday prize puzzle! We’re definitely improving.