Finally got version 2.0 of PyGTK, PyORBit and Gnome-Python out. I sent the announcements a bit further than usual this time (gnome-announce-list, python-announce, etc). Already, it is in Debian, Mandrake Cooker and there is a Win32 installer. PyGTK is also buildable/runnable on MacOS X, provided that you have an X server installed (such as Apple's one). If you have been holding off from looking at PyGTK 1.99.x, you should definitely take a look now.

Over the weekend, I did a set of releases for pygtk, pyorbit and gnome-python. These releases are pretty much what I want for the 2.0 versions (which have been a long time coming). These releases should fix up the last few remaining bugs related to running with Python 2.3, and bugs related to compiling on MacOS X. If no serious bugs are found, I'll do 2.0 releases shortly.

Once 2.0 is done and I have branched, I can start looking at moving on to the newer APIs. Some of the things I want to do include:

raph: If you upgrade to Mailman 2.1, you can run qrunner as a daemon instead of from Cron (this is in fact the preferred way to run it).

This does have some disadvantages, of course. I have experienced problems with 2.1.x qrunner running away and using all the CPU on occasions (a problem with temporary failures for local delivery being handled by queuing the message for immediate re-delivery). I found that the particular problem I ran into had been fixed on the HEAD branch though, which I am now running on my mail server. It should handle the higher loads though.

Python

Spent a bit of time writing a reply to kiko's proto-PEP about fixing Python's handling of LC_NUMERIC.

As it stands at the moment, Python requires LC_NUMERIC to be set to C in order to function correctly (important things like parsing of floats in source code break if it is set to a locale that uses a comma as the decimal point). They then have some hacks that allow you to parse and format floats according to locale conventions. This all works great in a pure Python environment.

Laptop

Since upgrading to RH9, I started to experience some problems with my laptop. Every time I switched from text mode to graphics mode it would hang with the keyboard LEDs flashing for between 10 seconds and a minute. This was particularly annoying, since I usually switched to a console before suspending the machine.

After searching for any information about this problem without any luck (I was trying to find relevant changes to the kernel or XFree86, both of which had been upgraded).

edd: The advogato RSS export has been around for quite a while; however raph only recently added the little RSS buttons.. I recently submitted a patch to add the missing <link> elements, which it looks like I screwed up slightly :).

Before it was only giving the pubDate and description elements. I have submitted another patch to add a title elements and fix the links. Don't know when it will be applied though.

Jeff moved the main Gnome website over to the new design yesterday. While there is still a fair bit to do on the content side, it does look a lot nicer. He also got rid of the WML dependency which was a large barrier to potential contributors.

Once the new infrastructure gets merged, it'll be possible to mark up new content as plain XHTML or Docbook/XML and have it all fit into the site design. This will make it a lot easier to contribute, since there are more tools available to edit those formats, and it is possible to easily validate them.

Gnome Developer Websites

Did a little more work on the Gnome LXR. It is now no longer using the old '95 era apache file icons in the directory listings, but instead using some icons based on the main Gnome icon theme. I had to modify some of them a bit because they didn't scale all that well down to the smaller sizes. It definitely looks a lot nicer now.

Mailman

Gnome Developer Websites

I converted the Gnome LXR and Bonsai installations over to the new site design Jeff did. Overall it looks very good. Having a consistent design across the sites makes them all look a lot more professional. This just leaves the big one to do (www.gnome.org).

Advogato

raph committed my patch to add <link> elements to the items in the diary RSS feeds. This should make the RSS feeds a bit more useful, since you can then go from the RSS to the individual diary entries.

Got a bit tired of the ancient site design of the Gnome developer website, so spent a little while updating it to match jdub's new site design. Now all that is left to do is to fix the content :)

Update: updated the bugzilla.gnome.org templates to match.

GUADEC 2003

I said I was going to write a bit about GUADEC, but didn't get round to it til now.

Saturday 14th

Arrived in Dublin in the morning after about a day spent in airports and on planes. Took the AirLink bus from the airport into the city centre, and walked from there to Trinity College, Dublin. I ran into a\ number of hackers at the gate who pointed out where the accommodation office was. Dropped my pack off and took a walk around the area close to the college.

Haven't posted anything here for a while. I've been at GUADEC since Saturday, and it has been really good so far. I've put the slides for my talk up on my website. I'll post some more info later.

Red Hat 9

Installed it on a few boxes, and I like what I see so far. The Bluecurve mouse cursors look really nice. It is also good to see some more of my packages included in the distro (fontilus and pyorbit).

Spam

Some spammer has been sending mail with random @daa.com.au addresses in the From: field. So far, I have received lots of double bounces, a few messages asking if we know about the spam, and many automated responses (some saying the message came from a blocked domain!). The Received headers indicate that the mail comes from somewhere else, so there isn't much I can do. I hate spammers.

linux.conf.au

Had a nice dinner with the other LCA2003 organisers. The proceedings CD took a bit longer to finalise than expected, but it is pretty much done now.

XFree86

Some very weird stuff is happening in the XFree86 project at the moment. The characterisation of Keith Packard by some of the XFree board just doesn't mesh with my experience dealing with him. His approach of working with the people who will be using the code has worked really well (it is no accident that Xft and fontconfig have become so popular and widely deployed so quickly). His post to the forum list seems very sound from my point of view.

SpamAssassin/Mailman

I recently upgraded the Mailman installation on the machine handling the pygtk mailing lists. I am now using Mailman 2.1.1, and so far it looks a lot nicer.

I took the opportunity to update my SpamAssassin patches for the new Mailman (the old filter didn't work anymore). I now have the code for talking to spamd split into a separate module, which might be useful for other projects, and means that it can be updated for newer SpamAssassin versions as needed without changing the MM related code.

Build Infrastructure

Got approval and checked in my glib changes. I also have intltool modified po/Makefile.in.in's passing make distcheck with newer automakes, which should make upgrading other modules a lot easier.

Talked to malcolm who has apparently been working on some docs for updating packages to newer versions of the build tools, so I won't be writing my own document.

PyGTK, Reference Counting and Cyclic GC

When I started working on the 1.99.x branch of PyGTK, I added a feature to make sure that there was at most one Python wrapper object for each GObject, and that the wrapper would stay alive for as long as the GObject did and vice vesa.

For the past few weeks, I have been working on improving the Gnome build infrastructure. It is something that we have needed to do for a long time. Most of Gnome is still using automake-1.4 because they rely on bugs that have since been fixed, and don't handle the readonly sourcdir builds that "make distcheck" does with newer automakes.

So far I have been working on updating the various build tools that Gnome uses to reduce the amount of work needed to update a package's build infrastructure. So far, I have updated the gnome-common package, removing most of the macros it contained and doing significant updates to the shared autogen.sh script, and gtk-doc (adding code to separate out the common section of the docs makefiles everyone is using).

website

After not having touched my website for a long time (years), I finally decided to do a bit of work on it. Wrote some scripts to automatically generate the navigation links (and added <link> elements). Decided to put the slides for talks I have given up in one place. Still a fair bit more information worth putting up for the packages I maintain though.

linux.conf.au:2003

The conference CD should be finalised tomorrow (thanks to a lot of work done by Tony). We've got material from just about all the speakers, audio of all the talks (in Speex format) and some photos, so it should be quite good. The CD will be mailed out to delegates, and ISOs will be made available when they are ready.

Put out a new release of fontilus, which increased the number of supported languages from 2 (including the default english) to 21. It also has a few small UI improvements for the font view dialog, and adds a context menu item for fonts in the "fonts:" folder that allows you to easily set the default application font for Gnome.

You can also now use fontilus to view the Bitstream Vera fonts. The fonts are currently available in a limited beta form (you can download and use the fonts, but not redistribute them). The terms that will be used for the finished version of the fonts is also available at the above site, which probably meets the open source definition (some people think it doesn't, but the license seems to satisfy all the points in the definition).

lmjohns3: if you use a locale with right to left text direction, GTK+ will automatically flip the direction of standard widgets.

This means that if you have a GtkHBox, items added with pack_start() will end up on the right hand side of the box, and ones added with pack_end() on the left (after all, they aren't called pack_left and pack_right).

To see what happens, try out the "flipping" test in the testgtk program included with GTK.

freetype: I have a "beta" version of the Vera fonts, and they are in TrueType format. I think it is safe to assume the final version will also be in TrueType format.

The Vera fonts are based on the Prima fonts if you want to see more samples. The copies I have display quite nicely with recent freetype versions (using the autohinter). The slides for my presentation at linux.conf.au were displayed with the Vera fonts. They didn't look as good as they might have because MagicPoint still uses freetype1 :(

The second day of talks went well. That night we had the conference dinner which went pretty well. We continued the tradition of auctioning off a conference tshirt signed by all the speakers. This year's tshirt was also signed by many of the people who attended the kernel summit at OLS. The winning bid was made by the people at the Sun table for about AU$2100.

Everyone had a good time, although a few had too much to drink. We ended up having to take one to hospital, where he spent a night. He was okay in the morning though. This is something the next conf organisers should take into account.

Things have been going very well so far. Registration was a breeze (compared to last year). By having all the bags packed with the correct tshirt size and labeled with the person's name, we could process each registration in less than a minute. We had some of the speakers giving out bags, which was nice.

The speakers dinner on Tuesday and was very successful. It was a very relaxed atmosphere, and I got to talk to many interesting people. Some of the other organisers managed to convinced Linus to make an appearance at the welcome session. You can see the results here.

The mini-conferences started today, and have been going pretty well. More of the speakers have arrived, and there will be even more tomorrow.

Had take-away chinese down by the river for dinner tonight. jdub was lecturing the seagulls with a pair of chopsticks. They weren't listenning.

Probably the biggest news that has broken recently is that we got Linus. We managed to sell all tickets to the conference without this information leaking, so I am pleased with how popular it is so far.

linux.conf.au

Spent the day packing bags for the Linux conference. Stuffing cruft into 350 bags is more work than you would at first think ... Good thing that there was a lot of people to help.

Alan and Telsa got in today, and got tricked into helping out with the bag stuffing.

I also put together an iCalendar file containing all the talks in the program that people can merge into their calendars. I don't think I have seen other conferences do this, so I don't know how many people will use it. Was a bit fiddly to set up with Evolution, and even more so when I realised I had my Evo timezone set wrong :(.