Older blog entries for jamesh (starting at number 69)

From what has been happening, it sounds like Air New Zealand had been siphoning money out of Ansett by charging fuel and catering costs against the airline and possibly doing so after it knew Ansett was bankrupt. This has caused Ansett workers to call for a boycott of Air NZ, which the NZ PM doesn't like much.

To save money, the .au Government allowed the two domestic airlines (Qantas/Australian Airlines and Ansett) to build the air terminals themselves. At almost every domestic airport in australia, you will see a Qantas half and an Ansett half (usually with different architecture, etc). Separate checkins, separate bagage collection, separate arival/departure gates, etc. Now half of every domestic air terminal is left closed. Those people who happened to own shops inside an Ansett terminal can't open for business. I really hope some of the smaller airlines (such as Virgin) will finally be allowed to use Ansett's space in the domestic terminals, which will allow them to compete more evenly than before (before they often had to use other buildings round the airport or the international airport terminals).

The ACCC is going to toughen the rules for airlines so that this change doesn't make it even more difficult for new airlines to break into the business.

In news on the Tampa refugees, the courts are going to rule on the Government's apeal today.

It is really sad hearing so many people in the US out for blood (I have no way to tell how many people feel this way -- the internet+media can give a very skewed perspective on things). The terrorists killed many innocent people in the WTC, most likely because of issues they had with the US govenment and foreign policy. If the US turns around and kills innocent Palestinians or Afgahns (or where ever they happen to be based) in order to get the terrorists, that would be just as bad an act of terrorism.

In local news, Ansett has stopped flying, which means the only interstate domestic airline serving Perth now is Qantas. I hope the ACCC keeps air fares in check.

It seems that even though Judge North ruled in favour of the Tampa refugees, they are still going to Nauru until the government is finished apealing the judgement. I don't know anyone who approves of how the government treats boat people.

I have been converting a lot of the boxed types in pygtk over to my new PyGBoxed code. So far, this has resulted in about 1000 less lines of non generated source code, which is helpful. It will also help wrap other addon widget libraries that have boxed types (provided they are registered with glib). I will have to submit a few patches for GTK to register the last few types that aren't already registered.

The development version of libglade got support for container child properties recently (thanks to the new GTK APIs from Tim), which means that most container types can be handled by libglade without any extra code, which brings us closer to a stage where no new code would be required to support new widgets. I also started work on a simple converter to go from the old file format to the new one. It still has problems, but it is better than nothing, and should help test my code.

Recompiled devel gtk+ and its dependencies today from scratch, and gtk-demo still segfaults :-(. Tim committed my g_object_newv patch, so people should be able to build devel libglade. He also checked in the child properties stuff, which will allow me to handle that generically in libglade (once he adds a few missing APIs).

Once I sort out the gtk+ issues, I can get hacking on pygtk a bit more.

I am sure most people have heard about the flame war on the gnome-hackers list over the weekend. Things have settled down now, and there is talk of creating some procedures for introducing changes to the platform. Some people have argued that it is introducing too much bureaucracy, but I think it will work out quite well. Similar schemes have worked well for Python, TCL, Perl and even the internet. All have varying levels of formality, so we should be able to find a process that suits GNOME well.

Unfortunately, the flame war was picked up by various news outlets such as Linux Today who posted some fairly one sided editorials. Judging by the comments, the maturity of LT's readership is dropping to slashdot standards. It pisses me off when people blow things like this out of proportion. Looks like they did something similar again today in an editorial about a KDE disagreement.

Doing a bit more work on libglade2. It is still broken, but getting less broken as time goes on. Should get it so that the build completes to keep Sander happy :)

Since we are starting to get a number of functional free web browsers, I had the idea that it might be a good idea to create a Certificate Authority for free software projects and people and get its CA cert preloaded in browsers like Mozilla.

Why do people use CAs like Verisign? Because people trust them (rightly or wrongly), and their certs are preloaded in almost all browsers so users don't see a disturbing dialog pop up when going to the site.

The free software community is probably in a better position to verify the identity of people requesting certificates. A group like Debian which already has a strong web of trust between developers could set up a CA. Requiring that certificate requests be GPG signed by a debian developer who has positively identified the requestor before issuing a certificate might provide a good balance between security and ease of acquiring certificates.

Having the CA certificates preloaded in free browsers such as mozilla, konqueror, etc would place them on an equal footing with the existing CAs. Debian as a CA is just an example, as they already have some of the infrastructure in place for identifying people. It shouldn't be difficult to get CA certs added to free web browser's databases. It probably shouldn't be limited to just free software related CAs either.

Another interesting idea would be to setup (or adopt an existing) alternative root zone that included a number of TLDs related to free software (eg .gnu, .bsd, etc) along with the existing ICANN and country code TLDs. If the major distros shipped their nameservers pointing at this alternative root, those TLDs would be usable (and not just to Linux/BSD boxes -- think about how many windows boxes just forward all DNS requests to a Linux or BSD box for resolution).

Both ideas would take quite a bit to get off the ground, so probably won't happen unless someone is really motivated to do it.

Put out another development pygtk snapshot. I actually released it yesterday, but my computer's clock was out by 12 hours when I made the release, but didn't notice it (something weird must have happened when bringing all the computers back up after the brownout on sunday), and the ntp server on the gateway didn't start up correctly so it didn't correct itself. I hate clock skew.

I have some ideas on how to decrease the amount of handcoded stuff in pygtk even further. The beginnings of this code is included in the latest snapshot (the GBoxed type). I haven't gotten round to converting any of the existing boxed types over to this new code or adjusted the code generator yet though.

Cyrille, Lars, Steffen and Hans have been doing great work on Dia. They are responsible for most of the work on the recent 0.88.1 release of dia. There will probably be a 0.89 release soon.

Chema posted an initial tarball of glade v2. I will have to look at it a bit closer. Libglade will have to be ready for the gnome 2.0 API freeze, which will probably be before glade2 is usable. The Sun guys want accessibility support in glade/libglade, so we will see how that shapes up.

At the office, I was attempting to get the amanda backup client agent to compile under cygwin (with the aim of adding some NT boxes to the network backup system). After patching it to take into account ".exe" suffixes on some programs and commenting out some of the fstab/block device code, it finally compiled. By hooking it up to cygwin's inetd, the amcheck, amdump, etc programs on the backup server could talk to the client agent on the NT box. Unfortunately, the backup was really slow and was using 100% CPU :( It sent the dump to the backup server, but then had to create an index or stats for the dump, or something, which was taking a long time and caused a timeout :(

Cygwin is a very useful tool on windows boxes, but it has its limitations. I found out about an Amanda Win32 client which I might try. It uses yet another POSIX emulation layer.

First entry for 2001. A lot of things have happened.

I went on a holiday to Paris for a week and then Oxford for a week with the rest of my family. It was good, but a bit cold. I got to meet Mathieu while in Paris which was good.

A few days after I got back, I was back on the plane for Sydney (where I am writing this) for linux.conf.au. It starts on Wednesday, and should be a lot of fun.

Have been hacking on pygtk recently, and a small amount on glib HEAD and framebuffer gtk (which is looking really promising). I did up the first cut at allowing arbitrary GtkTreeModels to be defined in python code. It leaks badly, and it will probably be near impossible to fix correctly :(.

The glib patch was to add some convenience functions for the GSignal code, as it is so difficult to use the existing functions people are still creating GtkObjects because of the gtksignal compatibility wrappers. Still waiting on feedback from Tim about it

Yesterday night alex asked me to try compiling pygtk with the framebuffer port of GTK, which he is working on. After adding a single missing function to the framebuffer gdk backend, pygtk compiled with no source modifications, which was good. I was having trouble with the "ms" serial mouse driver in GtkFB and my mouse. I put together a patch to make finding the start of mouse packets a little smarter, and to fix up the mouse button handling for that driver. The level of functionality in GtkFB is quite impressive.

Last Sunday, I went to the reconciliation walk in the city, which went quite well. Lots of people turned up. Also, on the way there I noticed a big banner on the old Swan Brewery (which has been a sore point, because it was an Aboriginal sacred site) saying "sorry". I don't know if anything different will happen with the development at that site though.

Haven't posted anything here in over a month. I just finished my last exam today, which was good.

It was interesting hearing about the formation of the KDE League, especially after Kurt Granroth's original comments after then announcement of the GNOME Foundation. I did an interview giving the perspective of a GNOME hacker on the League.

The Python bindings for GTK 2.0 are coming along nicely. I have wrappers for the new text and tree widgets mostly written, and they are very nice to use. Combined with python's unicode support, python makes a very nice environment for GTK programming.

Wrote some code to convert arbitrary elliptic arcs to bezier curves for the gnome-print driver in dia. This should stop people sending bug reports in about that problem. The output looks very nice, so no one should notice that it isn't real elliptic arcs. I was talking with Chema about adding support for arcs in gnome-print itself, possibly using my code as a fallback for drivers that don't support them.

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