I found a new contract which sounds like it’s just what I wanted – C++ on Unix (Solaris) with CORBA and some GUI. I
may even be
able to persuade them to use Gtk– instead of
QT.

I start at the beginning of June, which is also great
because it gives me time to work on the new Gtk– for GTK+
2.0, which has just got underway. I wish that
kenelson had more time. He’s the expert and
it’s a real problem waiting days for replies to emails. It
sounds like he’s real busy.

jamesh‘s <a
href=”http://www.gnome.org/~james/language-bindings/”>notes
on the new GObject/GSignal/GClosure system at are really
helpful, but I
can tell that I’ll have lots of additions to them when I’ve
finished figuring this stuff out.

Released the first version of Glom, which I have been working on for extended periods of time over the last year. I’m disappointed that the level of functionality
is still quite low, but I think that it proves a concept,
and it gives me a feeling of completion to get a version
out. It’s approximately 8 months late so I was right not to
pre-announce it. It also gave birth to Bakery
which I feel is genuinely useful.

I also released a new Gnome–, which several
of us were crying out for. Gnome– is now quite a mature
gnome-libs binding. We’re just going to add a fancy streams
API for the Canvas, and we should be able to go stable soon.
Then I need to work out how to write a script that will
configure, make, and make install all the various GNOME C++
wrapper libraries as one big SDK. Does anyone know how a
script (in any language) can make itself superuser
temporarily without asking for a password several times.

The new Gnome– allowed me to release a new
Bakery, which magically adds session management
and Recent Documents to all Bakery apps. Now that’s what I
call reuse.

I released a first version of GConf–. I had done most of it last year but lost everything when a hard disk died.

I wanted to wrap Gdome too, but it doesn’t
look like they’ve released anything yet.

I’m starting to think that we could have a complete GNOME
C++ SDK ready for GNOME 2. I want to liberate all those MFC
developers away from Windows, and show them how easy life
can be.

Back from GUADEC II, which seemed like a great success. It was a great way to learn about a lot of the new GNOME
stuff in a short space of time.

I also became even more convinced that GNOME hackers are
far more capable of getting things done than regular people.
I know that they complain about long threads and flame wars,
but it’s nothing compared to the life-sucking mix of
total-lack-of-understanding, personal agendas, failure to
compromise, and apathy that one finds in commercial
entities. I think GNOME is a pretty good example of how
people who are confident and determined can find common
ground through setting out their thoughts clearly and
admitting when they don’t understand things.

I heard RMS speak for the first time and thought that he
put his ideas forward sanely. Then he proceeded to lose any
respect that he had gained, by hijacking a GNOME 2 planning
session and doing a stage invasion of the final keynote,
just to winge about some irrelevant newbie stuff such as
‘Should the minimise button be a down arrow?’ and ‘Should
KDE and GNOME have the same background’. Totally abusing his
position and our attention. Maybe RMS wouldn’t be RMS if he
was capable of recognising the facial expression that
signifies ‘total incredulity at your freakish
behaviour’.

There’s a bunch of new stuff that I want to wrap for C++,
such as Bonobo, GConf, gdome, and gnome-vfs. I had a long
irc discussion with cactus about Bonobo,
and he seems to have some idea of how to wrap it all up
nicely for C++.

The Doc says that I don’t have to wear the cast on my
ankle anymore, but I’m still limping along like a
horror-show sidekick.

Released a new version of Bakery, including yet more tweaking of open/save functionality, for your re-use.

Also released a new GtkExtra–.

Finished another contract. Went snowboarding. Broke my ankle. I should get a lot of code done in the next few weeks.

Let it be known that Gauss Interprise’s VIP Portal Manager is an awful product and that there technical support is
comically hopeless.

The content management UI is unusable unless you have a
huge monitor to keep all the windows from overlapping.

There is an admin tool used to create new websites but
those websites will not work properly unless you go add
some entries to a config file, in a way which is very badly
described deep in a part of the manual which is nowhere
near the part about creating new websites.

The examples contain several magic numbers with no
explanation of what they mean or where they can be found.
It turns out that they are an essential part of the system
and that they can be seen by using the cursor to widen the
leftmost column in a list box. The column is set to 0
pixels by default so there is no visual clue that the
column is even there.

There technical support team just repeat the obscure error
messages back at me, adding the odd ‘in’ or ‘the’ word.
Then they say things like It’s in one of the manuals
somewhere but we don’t know where.

Essential functionality such as adding new meta-infomation
fields for documents is seen as a cutting-edge hack
requiring editing of internal config files, with general
warnings about bad things happening if you do this at the
wrong time.

Whenever you change these text files you need to make
identical changes to similar files in 3 other places.
Immediately. Bad things will happen if you do not get this
right.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to move documents to other
parts of the site – i.e. You can’t reorganise your site
structure.

Also, it’s incredibly unstable both on the client and the
server, exhibiting a variety of ways of simply not working.
The client can’t be used together with a JAVA_HOME
environment variable, making it impossible to use the
client at the same time as most Java development
environments.

Furthermore, it’s based around an ancient version of the
JDK, which ought to demonstrate that it hasn’t been
actively developer for ages.

I do hope that advogato diaries get indexed by search
engines, because there isn’t much more information about
this system on the web.

Finally got GNOME CVS access. Celebrated by fixing a bunch of showstoppers in gnome–. We should make a new release
soon, but it’s hard to say whether it’s stable until we have
code that tests it. libgnomeui has very few demos that we
can translate, and there is very little documentation for
some widgets. At least I feel good that gnome– has more
(and clearer) demos than the library that it wraps.

Did an interview for a new contract in Munich. In german.
That was a silly idea.

Life would be a lot less tedious if Sun would just supply the GNU toolchain with Solaris. Life would also be less
tedious if Sun would supply Solaris with the patches needed
for their own JDK. Life might be less tedious without
Solaris.

Released a new version of Bakery. Coding for things like ‘This file is already open’, ‘You have unsaved changes.’, etc is so fiddly for multi-doc apps, that I’m
becoming more and more convinced of the usefulness of this
library.