Older blog entries for jamesh (starting at number 55)

jamesh certified aaronl as Dimwit

GNOME: prostituting ourselves to big-money for the chance of being a media-recognized standard since 15th August, 2000

:-)

I was looking at the coins problem. I can see a solution if you know the bad coin is heavier (or lighter -- just s/heavier/lighter). Here is a solution for that:

1. Split the coins into 3 groups of 4 coins.
2. Put two of the groups on the balance.
3. If they weigh the same, the third group contains the bad coin. Otherwise, the heavier group contains the bad coin.
4. Add two coins from one of the good groups to the bad group, and split those coins into 3 groups of 2.
5. perform the same weighing operation to find the group with the bad coin. This leaves 2 coins.
6. Weigh the last two coins. The heavier of the 2 is the bad coin.

This doesn't answer the original problem, but may give some idea of what it would look like. If you know the bad coin is heavier and can do 3 weighs, you should be able to pick the bad coin out of a group of 27 coins.

On IRC:

<raph> UTF8 really is simple enough to do in your head
<raph> assuming your brain has SHL and SHR instructions
<jwz> you need help, raph

The book I am tech reviewing must be almost finished.

I released a new version of dia on sunday. Didn't get everyone's patches in, but I thought it was important to get another release out because of how long ago the previous release was. Of course, after doing the release someone finds an XIM bug, I notice that the SVG CR has been put out (so the recommended namespace URI's have changed) and I didn't tell the translators about the release. So I will probably put out another release of dia soon with these fixed.

Tomorrow (9th August) is my parents 25th wedding aniversary.

I should put out a new release of Dia soon. The next release will be the first release as an official part of the GNU project, which is pretty good. Lots of nice user interface improvements. Just one more feature before the release :)

Over the weekend, we pulled through a few CAT5 cables in the house. By putting the cable through the wall cavity there is no coax running through the doorways anymore. This should also reduce the problems of trying to find out which computer's network card has gone crazy when the network stops working.

The Sun open office source release should be interesting. Some of the details are still being thrashed out, but things look good. In a worst case senario, the code will be released under GPL, so we can grab all the good features and integrate them into existing apps :)

I got my new notebook, and installed Linux on it. It is mostly working. The only real problem I have had is with resuming from a hibernate when I was in X. With X in 32-bit mode, the display gets garbled. With 16-bit mode, the whole machine locks up. Changing to another VT before hibernation avoids the problem. I wonder if XFree86 4.0 would fix the problem? It is probably caused by the Compaq bios not saving enough of the state on the graphics card (enough for the windows drivers but not enough for XF86_Mach64)

I was also upgrading another Linux box, and the installer caused an exception just after installing all the packages, so I had to set up the last few things by hand. A bit annoying but not too difficult to fix.

Heard from another guy who has a Sony NEWS workstation who gave some interesting info about the problem we were having with our machine (it doesn't boot). We had left the machine off for a while, and then it stopped booting. I had thought that the BIOS was dead or something, but it sounds like a NEWS box won't boot if the battery is dead also. Now I just have to find where the battery is in the system. There is no information about these machines on any of the sony web sites (they seem to be denying all knowledge of the machines). Now all I need to do is find where the battery is in the system -- they are built very solidly.

Been thinking about what I need to do about setting up Linux on the notebook I ordered. I think I should be able to get most things up and running without trouble, but I am a bit unsure about hibernation. I guess I will wait and see what happens when I get the notebook.

I saw the xmen movie on thursday (it was released a day earlier here, compared to the us). It was pretty good, and the ending looked like they are expecting a sequel or something.

I finally got round to ordering the my laptop, so it should be in on monday. It is a Compaq Armarda M300 (with the 1024x768 screen). With the introduction of the GST, computer hardware suddenly dropped by about 10% (and software went up 10%). It is annoying that the wholesale prices on most hardware are about the same as US street prices though.

I haven't written anything here for a while. I went to a friend's 21st birthday on friday, which was pretty good. The day after we went to a climbing gym. It was the first time I had gone this year, so I was a bit out of shape.

I started working on the gtk+-2.0 based pygtk. I wrote a simple module gobject that encapsulates the base GObject stuff. This also encapsulates the evil reference counting stuff away from the rest of the pygtk stuff. I have done wrappers for most of the Gdk types that have been converted to GObjects, and generated the wrappers for GtkWindow and GtkLabel to test out a few features. Interfacing with the python-2.0 unicode strings didn't require any extra code, as using the "s" format character for PyArg_ParseTuple causes the unicode string to be encoded in UTF8, which is what GTK wants. So you can do GtkLabel(u'\u03A0\u03B1\u03BD\u8A9E') and have it do exactly what you would expect. Lets see you do that in Tkinter :)