Been working on the property code for dia I proposed a few months back. This should provide an easy way to construct the property dialogs for objects. Once I add support for it in the python scripting plug-in, we should suddenly have a lot more power in manipulating the diagrams programatically. One other thing to think about is adding support for custom properties for custom shapes.

Have been playing around with zope for about a month, and am very happy with it. Very nice to use and very powerful (once you grab a few extra zope products and work out how to use DTML).

Have not posted anything here for a while. I got back from my holiday last wednesday. It was three weeks in New Zealand and a few days in Melbourne. Other than getting my bags lost for two days on the way into NZ, it was a good trip. In Melbourne, I stopped by at my uncle's company Data Electronics. Some of their new products sound very interesting.

One problem with the trip was lack of access to email. I had heaps when I got back. I quickly learnt that the signs saying a shop had `Internet/Email' meant they had a web browser with its home page set to hotmail. Not very useful if you need an ssh client. Maybe I should look into one of those java ssh clients for such occasions.

I made another release of Dia. This one should fix the bugs people reported just after the 0.82 release. You can now copy/paste image and bezier objects without dia crashing. I also added a new export dialog modeled after gimp's save dialog. This also allows me to separate off export filters to plugins, which is good.

I have included a partially complete CGM filter with the new release. It does everything except beziers at the moment. There is a polybezier element in CGM v3, but I have not had much luck finding docs for it. I don't even know if it is meant to be a closed, filled region or just a line.

I made my first release of dia as its new maintainer. It mostly seemed to go well. There are a few bugs that showed up after the release, so I will have to fix those. I guess we can get back to breaking things to add new features.

Did not end up going diving on monday night, since it felt like more work getting everything ready than we wanted to do.

I got my uni results yesterday. I got good marks in both my computing and pure maths majors. I got invitation for honours year letters from both the maths and computer science departments. I will have to decide where I want to do honours. Apparently I got the highest score in the computer networks unit, which means I will be getting a prize from a company called AlphaWest.

I converted the page setup widget I wrote for dia to use GnomePaper and GnomeUnit. After doing a bit more cleanup, and implementing the old GnomePaperSelector interface, I will commit it to gnome-libs HEAD branch.

Alexander Larsson handed over the job of maintainer of dia to me. He has done a great job so far, but did not have enough time to put into maintaining it. I have a few ideas for new features I want to work on. These include the scripting interface, object properties and printing changes.

If anyone wants to help out with dia, join the dia mailing list.

• Working on gnorpm again. I am converting the rpmfind code over to a non blocking architecture using the glibwww code I wrote (a thin wrapper around the W3C's libwww that uses the glib mainloop for transfers). It is not currently finished, but it is getting there.
• Apparently the gtkhtml guys are using glibwww as well. Maybe it would be a good idea to split the code into a separate package at some point. For now, it means there are other people to help find and fix bugs in the code :) Libwww is a bit of a beast if you try to do something non trivial in a way that the authors did not expect. I know all libraries are like this, but libwww seems to be more so.
• Once I have these changes finished, I should install that copy of Red Hat 6.1 to see what the problems were with it. Probably merge in some of the Red Hat patches in the RH6.1 RPM of gnorpm and release 0.11 (if I call it 0.10, there will be people calling it 0.1, which is quite old now).
• I should do some more hacking on dia. I am looking at adding a python scripting interface. With a few modifications, it should be possible to add extra menu items that trigger python functions. Alexander has made Dia nice and modular, so this should be pretty easy. This interface should be powerful enough to do full manipulation of diagrams, and also extract information from a diagram for writing export filters. I want to be able to use the interface to export UML diagrams to UXF format and circuit diagrams to SPICE net files for instance. One thing that will be needed is a general way of reading and modifying the properties on objects. There was some talk on the list of adding this, which will be good.

• finished my exams at the end of last week. Hopefully I should have more time to work on the packages I maintain.
• close to getting a new release of libglade ready. It is mostly a bug fix release.
• hopefully I should be able to get gnome-vnc and gnorpm up to scratch. Gnorpm has heaps of bug reports open, but the majority are for about three packages. It would be nice if the web bug submission form got people to look at the current bugs for a package. If their bug is covered, then they could add information. This would save me having to merge the reports. Of course, I will have to fix those bugs :)