14 February 2002

linux.conf.au

Went to linux.conf.au in Brisbane last week, which was a lot of fun. I went a few days early to see what was going on at the debian mini conference, and got roped into giving a small demonstration of gnome 2.0 stuff at about 30 seconds notice. I am not very good at doing presentations with no preparation :(

Met up with gman, who was at the conference as part of his holiday over here. The talks were very interesting. Sounds like Samba 3.0 will rock (does win2k domain client RPCs), and it may not take long after that to become a win2k PDC.

On the last day, among other things, I went to the Portable.NET work in process talk. The guy giving it seemed really bitter about Mono. He didn't seem to be giving any real reasons for it, but didn't give any real reasons for it.

Looks like the next linux.conf.au is going to be in Perth, so I hope everyone is going to turn up :). Part of what got us the conference was the video some of the PLUG guys did. They showed the video at the end of the conference, and it was very good.

Gnome 2.0

While at l.c.a, I put out another release of devel libglade. This one just stripped out some of the unused functions from the module API (which isn't used by any applications). I also went through and updated a lot of the docs. The tutorial section has been updated a lot, and so has the API reference section. I started filling out a third section of the manual on the actual file format, but that isn't finished.

Gnome in the Past

While talking about the difference between the old gnome window hints and the newer window manager spec (collaborative effort with KDE and many window manager authors). One thing that came up was the colour reactive GUI crack in the old spec. I pulled up a few related links from the bowels of time:

On one hand, the new API got in a lot quicker than it would these days. On the other, it would have taken a lot longer to get rid of this kind of crach these days (deprecating it for the duration of a major release, etc). Maybe I should resurrect GnomeLamp as a bonobo control example for gnome-python :)