Older blog entries for Spooky (starting at number 35)

If there has been one nasty bug that keeps recurring throughout the various programs in gnome-games it is a tendency for the Quit menu item and the window destroy signal to call different routines. I fixed a particularly problematic one last night. It had become clear that a certain variable read from gconf was becoming corrupted. The first problem was that the program was trusting gconf input. The second problem was figuring out why it was going bad. Everything worked fine for me, right up until I closed the window rather than hitting Control-Q as I normally do. Both routines were nearly identical, except one saved the important variable and the other didn't.

No one person had set it up like this, it wasn't planned, it was pure bit-rot. Needless to say there is only one function now.

I've just come back from five days showing friends around my end of New Zealand. The first day took us to the Mavora lakes for the obligatory Lord of the Rings location. The shore was used for the river-bank at the end of the first movie and the edge of the bush nearby was used for the edge of Fangorn Forest. Action photos of people kicking imaginary Orc heads were taken.

The last three days were spent tramping over the hump-ridge track. It's a nice track, quite challenging (for someone of my fitness) on the first day when you ascend a vertical kilometer up a steep ridge to the hill-top and this wonderful hut just above the tree-line. You get beautiful views both down across Southland and over across Fiordland. The second day is down another ridge to the coast and an abandoned logging village. We saw dolphins in the old harbour there. The final day is along the coast back to the car.

There were a lot of keas, we even saw one down at sea-level. Keas are a large green alpine parrot with a long hooked beak, the curiosity of a monkey and a destructive ability normally reserved for humans. They are quite friendly in the sense that they have learnt that humans are a good source of food and toys. Actually, I'm not sure they will eat anything that humans provide, but they will pull apart everything you own just in case.

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 ?