1 March 2002
Got asked to go on the paper review committee for next year's linux.conf.au. This should be interesting. For people living in Europe, it should cut off about 5 hours flying time compared to the eastern states, so hopefully we will get some cool European hackers submitting papers. Conversely, flights from the US will most likely be longer.
If you have never been to Perth, it is a great opportunity to come (it
is a great place). If you live in Perth, it will be a great
opportunity to meet many interesting people without > 4 hours flight
:-).
Also, check out the video on the website if you haven't yet.
GNOME 2.0
The GNOME release is looking pretty good. Things have been shaping up quite well. The new stable GTK+ release is scheduled for Monday. There have been significant speed improvements to Nautilus (some due to improvements to the UI handler code in bonobo). Libglade is shaping up well. Guadec is about a month away as well.
Python
The development pygtk branch is going well. Most of the infrastructure is in place, and it is pretty usable (except threading, which is still a little broken).
I my first patch into python recently. It allows use of non string types as the __doc__ attribute of new style classes (eg. unicode strings, or arbitrary descriptors (which is what I wanted)). It should be going in both the 2.3 and 2.2.1 releases. The gettext module in the standard library is also partially based on my code (along with the other gettext wrappers that were around at the time), but that is really Barry's work. I should look at the bug about building libpython as a shared library, as it would be required to implement a full gnome-vfs wrapper.
raph: hopefully pygtk 2.0 should be a pretty good choice when it is ready. GTK+ 2.0 should work on win32, and I have gotten rid of the file naming issues and global variable referencing issues (MSVC doesn't allow referencing variables from other DLLs in global variable definitions. However, the C++ compiler does. It is a bit weird) people were having with the stable pygtk. Also, the Redmond95 windows lookalike theme has been improved a fair bit.
Mozilla
Looks like the patch to fix font handling for PS printing (#37685) is going in to mozilla 0.9.9. This should make printing on unix mozilla much better. Finally, preformatted text should finally be displayed in a monospace font. Previously, the generic font types (sans serif, serif and monospace) were all being printed as Times.