Heading to the airport shortly to fly to GUADEC/GCDS.
Doing a bit of an airport tour: Perth, Singapore, Paris, Madrid, Las Palmas; then Las Palmas, Madrid, Gatwick; then Heathrow, Paris, Singapore, Perth. It's like the days of yore, when you had to stop all the time to refuel.
When I get home, there's a week left in Perth before our stuff is uplifted for the move to Melbourne. Have spent the morning packing books into boxes. Steph is going to finish most of the packing while I'm away.
Was talking about photos. Sometimes I do take photos that I like (sometimes they're not food). Here are seven:
If you, like me, are ever looking for the source to Jana (incl. libjana, libjana-gtk and libjana-ecal), it has been moved to GNOME's git repo and can be found here.
For some reason Google doesn't already know that.
(posted on Friday June 5th, 2009 at 02:20 pm — 6 comments)
When you use it for international postage, apparently.
I was forwarding a friend's mail to New Zealand, so I shoved it in an envelope, checked its weight and looked up the cost of sending that letter to New Zealand: $4.20. I still have the end of a roll of 50c stamps, so I stuck $4.50 worth of stamps to the envelope, and put it in the post.
The letter bounced and turned up in our mailbox on Monday with a note saying that there was insufficient postage and to please go to an Australia Post outlet to correct the matter.
It turns out that it was 60c short BECAUSE there is no GST charged on domestic stamps BUT there is GST charged on International stamps. I'm not sure how this comes out to 60c extra; it's possible they charge to bounce the letter. This explains why when you buy an airmail stamp it has a little blue "International" on it.
I'd like to take the time to thank the Australian Democrats for making an absolute mess of what's covered by the GST and what isn't. What I especially don't get is why this value isn't wired into the face value of the stamps. Prices in Australia are always quoted applicable taxes inclusive, so why not say that postage to NZ costs $4.60. That way stamps would work just like anything else you purchase (Australia Post collects GST and remits it to the Government, businesses claim it back as input credits) and we wouldn't need two kinds of stamps.
Epic, epic fail.
(posted on Wednesday May 20th, 2009 at 01:32 pm — 19 comments)
May 17th is International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.
There is an appeal for several international organisations to work towards eliminating transphobia from our societies.
Transphobia is a real concern, even in so called modern, enlightened countries. People are at risk of being bashed, raped or murdered, just because their genetics don't quite match up with their presentation. Governments pretend it doesn't exist. The media "uncovers" their trans status (as if it matters any more than a person's religion) or at the very least does not even have the decency to use someone's desired pronouns. Police ignore the crimes and culprits get away. This happens where you live (e.g. in Boston).
Let the world know you think that gender variance is not a mental disorder, and that you do not value human lives differently. Read and sign the appeal.
Helped my brother move house today. Extremely worn out. Thankfully there were only stairs at the loading end, and not the unloading end.
My status as an extreme nerd caused me to watch the Fremantle by-election result with extreme interest. It looks like the Greens candidate got up on a pretty respectable margin for a minority party (4%). Election historians have suggested that this is only the second time ever that a green candidate has been elected to a lower house seat that has one representative per electorate. Maybe this is one step closer to my dream of an eventual Greens/ALP coalition?
Dear Lazyweb,
Since upgrading to Ubuntu Jaunty, the 2D performance of the "Integrated Graphics Chipset: Intel(R) Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset" in my laptop has been atrocious. This is really beginning to bug me. It was good in Intrepid. Running Metacity 2.26 with compositing enabled.
Xorg.log (if it helps).
Thoughts greatly appreciated. I enjoyed being able to change window focus without my music skipping.
Update: from this page (thanks, Xan) it looks like my choices are: switch to UXA; switch to the greedy migration heuristic; or downgrade my driver. If no one has any recommendation for the GM45/Lenovo X200s, I suppose I'll try them and see what happens.
Update 2: I have updated the Intel driver to 2.7.99 (see this comment) and enabled UXA and things so far look good on the regular Jaunty kernel. Need to test if it's still nice and snappy with the second monitor plugged in. Also if it stays this way over a couple of days.
Update 3: So, it turns out that after a couple of good suspend/resume cycles, the latest drivers seem to blow up on every chvt (which includes suspend/resume), both in UXA and EXA modes. I wonder if it's related to kernel modesetting, but I couldn't be bothered poking around (yeah, I'm slack). I have downgraded to the 2.4 driver, to see how things work out.
(posted on Friday May 8th, 2009 at 04:05 pm — 34 comments)
I've begun looking at David Z's resolution independence work for GTK+. I imported it into a real GTK+ git repo (from his old git-svn repo) and have rebased it against the latest GTK+.
It mostly works, but it looks like there are a few things that have bitrotten in subtle ways that I need to track down.
For those who want to play along, here's the repo.
For the first time in a little while, Stephanie and I will not be going to the dawn service tomorrow.
ANZAC Day is not a day of celebration, nor is it a day of patting ourselves on the back for beating back a foe. It is a day of mourning for those whose lives were thrown away, and a reflection on the futility of war.
I intensely dislike the nationalistic vibe that ANZAC Day continues to gain; the Australian flags people wave and the celebration of conflict. The wish not being that our troops return home soon and safely and that the world can be at peace, but they they return victorious and brave.
Not that I wish to belittle sacrifices made to protect people's homes, or those oppressed; nor do I wish to look back and judge the validity of every conflict in human history. I get that evil exists, and that occasionally someone has to stand against it. It just shouldn't have to be that way; and I wish it happened less.
Hopefully the people who rise before the sun tomorrow think of this. That rather than celebrating those who have fought for Australia, they instead mourn the waste of life caused by an invasion in 1915 and the death and destruction caused by every conflict; and just maybe they think about how to ensure a future where it never happens again. Lest we forget.
After I rewrote Empathy's presence chooser to be seriously more awesome, one of the ideas that was floated was being able to use "Firefox-style" bookmarks to save your favourite status messages, allowing you to quickly add/remove messages without having to use the dialog (which is also a candidate for being rewritten).
Well, as my first bit of code to get back into the swing of things after being on break, I've hacked it up: screencast.
Git branch | Bug
Well, we're back from Melbourne. Got in this morning at 8am Perth time (saving $120 by booking a 6am flight is less appealing when you have to force yourself awake at 4am).
Sajee and Essie's Really Big Party (and commitment ceremony) was yesterday afternoon and it was a lot of fun. It was held at the old Glen Harrow manor house in Belgrave.
Someone is warming up for this afternoon...
(posted on Saturday April 18th, 2009 at 09:07 am — 1 comment)
Arrived in Melbourne around midday.
Things (in this case car hire) are always more expensive than you expect. Not to worry, this trip is on Kevin Rudd. We're helping to support the Australian economy!
The Coles and the IGA we stopped at were both closed (public holidays!), thankfully a Subway and a Baker's Delight were both open, otherwise we would not have eaten since breakfast.
The gig was pretty awesome. One of the support acts (Skipping Girl Vinegar) were fun, we bought their album. Tim Freedman turned up with secret Whitlams (he ran into enough people who'd toured with the Whitlams previously in a pub last night, and convinced them to come and play, that he could have a whole band). Missy Higgins was really super awesome (and played quite a long set). Unfortunately we froze through, so skipped out on the Cat Empire (sad, but we were completely unprepared for that much cold — coats and a blanket would have been the right choice). Turns out it gets colder in the Yarra Valley than Melbourne-town. BOM tells me it was about 12C. Really we needed Melbourne friends who wanted to come as well, who could have provided the picnic and the blankets.
We had 30 minutes of pretty intense country driving to get to where we're staying tonight. I think I'm out of practice driving country, but I've never enjoyed it at night or in an unfamiliar car in an unfamiliar location. Why someone feels the need to tailgate at 85kph through winding valley roads escapes me (sorry, I just wasn't willing to do 100kph when I couldn't see).
Anyway, curled up now with a cup of tea and clean hair. Will probably crash soon, since we've been up forever.
(posted on Sunday April 12th, 2009 at 10:00 pm)
Unanimous.
I hope a bunch of crank-jobs don't come up with a way to take your right back from you.
When are you going to fix it, Australia?
(posted on Friday April 3rd, 2009 at 11:37 pm — 7 comments)
Lots of people have written Docbook syntax highlighters, but they all seem to required saxon or xesam and random bits of Java and in general it's not a lot of fun. What I wanted was a syntax highlighter that was able to work with xsltproc.
telepathy-doc already includes a script to insert example fragments that are part of a complete executable example, insert-examples.py. It was easy enough to hack this up to generate XHTML from Python Pygments, but then what?
Well, since telepathy-doc already overrides the standard gnome-doc-utils stylesheet, I just invented my own Docbook tag, <embedhtml> (XML purists, please commence your tears), that is written out by the Python preprocessor. A template that matches this tag is implemented that does a recursive copy of its contents into the output document. However, in the appendices, we want to include Docbook tags inside our syntax highlighted HTML (namely <xref> and <anchor>). So a second tag was invented, <embeddb>, which can match while you're in embedhtml mode.
The XSL stylesheet looks something like this:
<!-- this template matches the hack tag <embedhtml> and copies its contents verbatim into the output document. This allows us to embed XHTML directly into the output, e.g. from a syntax highlighter --> <xsl:template match="embedhtml"> <xsl:apply-templates select="node()" mode="embedhtml"/> </xsl:template> <!-- matches <embeddb> inside <embedhtml> to switch back to docbook --> <xsl:template match="embeddb" mode="embedhtml"> <xsl:apply-templates select="node()"/> </xsl:template> <!-- recursive copy in embedhtml mode, see http://www.xmlplease.com/xsltidentity --> <xsl:template match="@*|node()" mode="embedhtml"> <xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()" mode="embedhtml"/> </xsl:copy> </xsl:template>(posted on Thursday April 2nd, 2009 at 06:20 pm — 1 comment)
wjt has just blogged about the new off the record support in Empathy 2.27, including a privacy mode for video chat.
Awesome.
(posted on Wednesday April 1st, 2009 at 10:56 am — 5 comments)
So, as of telepathy-spec 0.7.22, we have made available a new pure-Python parser for processing D-Bus API specifications written using the Telepathy XML namespace. This parser turns the XML into nice pretty Python data structures that you can do things with. One such thing is to generate HTML documentation using a templating system (we're using Cheetah); which looks something like this. At some point in the future, it will also be used to generate language bindings.
I mention this because those of us at Telepathy HQ think that our XML format is a pretty damned nifty way to specify D-Bus APIs, and we'd love to see other people getting on board. I know at least one other project is using our format, but I've forgotten who. If you want to give the new parser and HTML doc generator a whirl against your own spec, you can grab them from the telepathy-spec GIT repo. Bugs on a postcard.
In the course of today, I found myself wanting to access colours from the Tango palette in a document I was writing. Rather than just defining the specific colours I wanted by hand, I figured it would be quicker in the long run to generate a LaTeX package with all of the colours.
So, when you work from your home, you have to provide your own tea.
This has had the unfortunate side effect of turning me into a bit of a tea snob.
So while we were in Melbourne, we went to visit Tea Party (who have a website now, yay!), which is located in the Queen Victoria markets. We went around smelling teas with the help of Jonathan (who works there) and in the end left with a tube of mango sencha and something experimental, Australian Rainforest (which I think is similar to their Rainforest Delight, but also includes lemon myrtle). We could have bought more, but we already have at least 4 other open packets of tea at the moment (from diverse vendors).
It's really nice though (mango in tea: brilliant! Why had I never thought about it before?); so if you're a tea snob too, check it out!
(posted on Friday March 27th, 2009 at 02:49 pm — 15 comments)
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