Older blog entries for Spooky (starting at number 33)

There has been a fair bit of new stuff going into gnome-games:

• gnect has been given a make-over by Tim Musson: cleaner UI, cleaner code.
• glines has been given a theme that is hopefully colour-blind friendly (shapes). Each "colour" is also a different shape. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who is colour-blind as to whether it is helpful.
• Aisleriot has the start of a statistics dialog. The dialog itself is fairly complete, it's just that no statistics are actually collected yet. The obsessive freecell people will hopefully postpone their plans to lynch me.
• Someone finally noticed that mahjongg has become easier. This means I'm going to have to hunt down that particular bug.

I have basically finished the resizing code for glines. The window size isn't remembered yet and there are a couple of minor bugs, but it is in CVS ready to be admired. This is a fine example of how easy it is to use SVG to get great visuals. Download it, install it, and select the "balls" theme (the new SVG theme). Now hit the maximise button and marvel at what vector graphics do for your soul.

Not just a shinier toy: it uses 100k less X server memory.

Hungarian

Thanks to Laszlo and Gergo I now know that Ezt megkapja means "it gets this" or "it gets this one". Even in the context of the code this still doesn't mean anything to me. At least no one tried to tell me my hovercraft is full of eels.

I started off last night by rewriting glines drawing routines so that the window can be resizable. This has cascaded into a complete reworking of the way it handles the graphics (it kept a backing pixmap and redrew all the pixmaps from the client end at each expose). On top of this I've created a new alignment widget to align widgets that need to be a fixed multiple of pixels wide and high (think game boards, this saves writing a lot of offset handling code). All this for a silly little game.

Comments

Buried in the code for glines there is the line:

/* XXX Ezt megkapja */

I understand XXX, can someone who knows the language enlighten me about the rest ?

Sjoerd has rewritten a large chunk of gataxx to make the AI better and to allow more code sharing with iagno. It's early days yet, but I know a lot of people have wanted a better AI.

Sjoerd: my email is down, I don't know if you read this, but I have looked at it and will be in contact as soon as possible.

glines, SVG, and inkscape

SVG themes for glines now work. This means that the awful ball theme has been replaced by a whizzy SVG one. In the process I have discovered that Inkscape is a lot easier to use than Sodipodi. I know the two haven't diverged too much yet, but the rearranged interface did a lot for me.

There is a nice new default theme for gnometris thanks to Graeme Worthy. Check it out in CVS now.

It's been a good day for hacking, over-eager kittens aside. I got the fast gtk-doc xsl working for everything in glib, gdk and gtk. It it complete and fast, but shabby. I sent it off to the gtk-doc list anyway for "peer review". Don't expect to be able to remove --disable-gtk-doc from your .jhbuildrc in the immediate future.

There is another release of gnome-games out there. The major user-visible change is that the shuffling algorithm in mahjongg is now guaranteed to produce a sane result. I was quite pleased to find that my pile-generation code made more sense now than three months ago when I wrote it. This fixes two pre-100000 series bugs.

To top the hacking off I also worked a bit on aisleriot. Seahaven, my favourite solitaire variant, now allows you to move entire sequences onto the foundation rather than having to double click every single last card. This was of course purely for myself since I don't think anyone else ever plays seahaven.

Oh yeah, we went and saw Bright Young Things yesterday. Quite an enjoyable movie: the story of young, 1930s, serial party-goers slowly self-destructing.

I've actually done some work on it .. like wow ... maybe I'll have something to put in the 2.5.3 release notes.

gtk-doc

The fast gtk-doc style-sheets are nearly done. All the hard bits (i.e. where I had to learn XSLT and make it fast) are now done. I'm just adding in the last elements that are used in the GDK documentation (my test-bed) but I still have to tidy the html output a little and do a bit of profiling to make sure I'm not doing anything stupid. I'm still not sure if this is going to be worthwhile for use in gtk-doc, but it has been a great learning experience for me.

Kittens

You can balance a kitten on each shoulder and still type. This isn't a good thing ergonomically, but it keeps them happy and away from the keyboard.

It's Boxing Day morning here which means I have survived another one. Five different family groups to visit (compressed into three visits fortunately). Christmas is nice, but it requires too much coordination. Given that the car had decided to start playing up on Christmas Eve it had the potential to be a lot more stressful (thankfully it was only a spark plug cable that had come adrift). I hope everyone enjoyed their Christmas (although I suppose those in the US are still celebrating it I suppose).

Kittens

We have finally acquired the long-anticipated kittens. They are about nine weeks old and brother and sister. He is a smokey coloured tabby named "The Dog" (after the comic strip character from Footrot Flats, people outside New Zealand aren't expected to understand this). She is a tortoise-shell tabby called "Bandit" (since the other one is smokey, people under twenty-five aren't expected to understand this, people over twenty-five don't want to). Kittens and computers don't mix, to quote Cushla: "I was wondering why some of my files had acquired strange names, but then I realised that the kittens had been walking on the keyboard."

Hacking

It's Christmas time ! When do I find the time for such things ?

I have seen Return of the King too. A good movie, but I suspect that no one reading this needs any further recommendations.

XSLT and gtk-doc

My crash-course in XSLT continues. I have nearly got a fast replacement for the subset of docbook that gtk-doc uses written. The catch is fixing up the cross-references, the naive way to do this in XSLT rescans the document tree every time a link is encountered. This adds a factor of ten onto the run time. If I can't figure out a quicker way then I think that the perl script that gtk-doc uses to fix up all the inter-package links could be adapted to fix up these as well, and I know that that script is efficient.

gnome-games

As for gnome-games work, well, um, not a lot really. Although I have fixed one crasher and finally put some of the code consolidation work in CVS.

We don't speak that language here

While writing this I see that jhbuild has stopped again. It seems to have tried to compile x86 assembler code while compiling Mozilla. This is somewhat unfortunate given that the CPU is a powerpc.

Edit: Before someone tells me: I now know the answer to the XSLT problem is key().

I've been working on more internal stuff for gnome-games. Almost all the games grab a list of files at some stage so I've created a file list object and routines for collecting the common lists of files: either from a glob or just "find all image files that gdk-pixbuf understands". Only a handful of the original code has been replaced, but the latest iteration of the API looks good so the rest should follow quickly. The only major problem remaining is to make it easy to create widgets from these lists. There are two problems: one is that the current code varies wildly in what widget it uses; the second is that the names could undergo a transformation (e.g. dropping extensions). Making sure that the resulting API is simple and clean is the hard bit.

G5

Good news: GNOME 2.5 runs on the G5. Bad news: it is still 32-bit.

gtk-doc

After becoming annoyed at how long gtk-doc takes to generate anything I decided to do a little profiling. The transformation from docbook to html is where all the time is wasted so I decided to run xsltproc with some of its debugging options. The --verbose option managed to produce 600 Mb of output processing the GDK documentation ! The other options are a little more useful. I'm not entirely clear where all the time is going, but tt all seems wasteful just to transform 1.1 Mb of xml to 1.8 Mb of html.