Jonathan Jongsma has recently pushed, pulled, and tweaked the gtkmm manual a bit. He’s added extra semantic markup and created a stylesheet to present it properly. It’s a big improvement on the old non-styled version. For instance, the view part of the gtkmm treeview section.
Jonathan Jongsma is the kind of person that I’d like to encourage to get more and more involved. He’s also doing lots of work on the Cairo C++ bindings (cairomm) and has already written the Cairo chapter in the gtkmm book.
I’ve put lots of work into Glom over the last few days. There are a couple of nice new features, needed for (my idea of) version 1.0 completeness. I guess this will be available in Ubuntu (maybe only Dapper) real quick, thanks to Daniel Holbach. It is a little difficult to get all the dependencies when building it yourself.
As in FileMaker, you are always looking at either all the records or a set of records based on a Find that you just did. Now there’s visual feedback about this at the bottom-right of the window, and a button to get back to seeing all records.
Whenever I built systems with FileMaker I would always create a big concatenated calculated field for doing quick full-text searches, and I’d make this show up on the Find screens. Glom just gives you this feature for free. There are probably more efficient ways of phrasing the SQL, but that can be improved behind the scenes.
The glom example now contains example data, including an attractive picture of me in a record in the Contacts table, some made-up products, and some invoices that use them. And now you don’t need to be aware any more of the name of the database on the postgres server. Glom automatically chooses a new database name and associates the new file (created from the example, like a template file.) with the database.
Harish, we had a similar problem in gtkmm. Apparently you need to tell autoconf to use a different tar format that supports longer names. I guess there are obscure backwards-compatibility reasons why this can’t be the default.
It’s the new year and I’m back in Munich. Working on the project for Web.de in Karlsruhe was great but being away from home during the week is always difficult. I’ll try extra hard to work only in Munich now.
I spent Christmas in Karlsruhe with the various parts of my girlfriend’s family there. Then we visited Berlin because our Lisbon flight included a free train ticket and my sister was visiting. I’ve never seen Berlin under so much snow. It makes everything quiet.
Lisbon was a great place to spend New Year’s, walking up and down the old streets under blue skies and winter sun. It’s old and crumbling like Venice, but younger and alive. Barrio Bairro Alto, where we had an apartment, seems to be nocturnal. The population sleeps all day and parties all night. Trust Fernando “nightlife” Herrera when visiting Lisbon – I wish that we had visited Chapito sooner.
Now that I’m back I’l start work again on Glom, and finish off the Maemo/Hildon C++ bindings for Nokia.
My other big project is to find a new apartment, now that my girlfriend has finally decided to move in together, to my amazement and delight. We have quite high aims – a 3 or 4 room altbau place in the Glockenbachviertel with a big kitchen and a balcony. We’ve looked at five so far, but each lacked something. Maybe someone knows an apartment to rent and wants to save the agent’s fee?
I need to call on the lazyweb once more.
The odd Windows program (Ashlar Vellum) that I need to use inside vmware has a copy-protection dongle that attaches to the parallel port. But vmware can’t seem to find the parallel port. By default it looks for /dev/parport0, which does not exist. If I use /dev/lp0 then it says “parallel0: We have detected an LP style device. This type of device has been deprecated in VMware Workstation. We have guessed that “/dev/parport0” corresponds to “/dev/lp0″ and will use that instead.”
So I guess that /dev/parport is the new thing in Linux, so I wonder why I don’t have it (with Ubuntu Breezy).This doesn’t seem like a vmware problem.
I have tried changing the IRQ number used for the parallel port in the BIOS, without effect.
Update:
$ lsmod | grep ppdev
$ insmod ppdev
insmod: can’t read ‘ppdev’: No such file or directory
But
$modprobe ppdev works
and it is loaded at startup if I put it in /etc/modules.
But I need to
$rmmod lp
to prevent it from claiming the port. I have added lp to /dev/hotplug/blacklist and a few other files that look similar, but it is still loaded at startup.
The dongle still isn’t recognised, but I haven’t tried it under non-vmwared Windows either.
Jonathon Jongsma has just updated the DrawingArea chapter of the gtkmm book to describe use of Cairo via cairomm, as used by gtkmm 2.9 (only in CVS for now), with several examples. This is good stuff.
I now have VMWare Workstation. It’s an amazing product that’s going to be very useful to me for testing and for running a handful of obscure Windows programs. It’s well worth the price considering all the amazing work that’s been put into it.
Installing Windows in a VMWare virtual machine is a pleasure. It’s great to know that MS Windows is trapped inside the window. Just try trashing my boot partition now you monopoly-abusing little fucker. And none of its viruses/worms/spyware/adware can touch my real work.
The UI is pretty good. There are some eccentricities, but I can understand their choices. I’d like some things to be explained a bit more in the installation and user interface. For instance, the installation script asks some scarily unanswerable (to me) questions about networking NATs and subnets. And I wasn’t sure if a referenced clone would be affected by actions in the original.
Now, how on earth do I create vmware appliances for use in VMWare Player?
Morten, it’s not very nice to attack the GTK+ developers in the middle of the discussion, and in a version of GTK+ that has never even been released yet. I’ll be the first to demand ABI stability, but I know I need to be nice about asking what’s happening first.
We love Linus, and we love GNOME, though it isn’t really his kind of desktop. We love the attention and the opportunity to explain what we do. Human interest, enthusiasm, optimism, empowerment, what more could a story need. Journalists should see the GNOME press page for contact details.
I keep seeing wonderfully dramatic wide angle photos, so I am now severly tempted by the Canon 20D wide angle 10-22mm lens.
However, at 600 Euros (From DigitalRev, for instance) it’s just too expensive a toy for someone with zero talent. Surely there’s some lower-quality non-USM maybe-not-so-wide alternative?