I’m upgrading to GNOME 2. Obviously, I really like
shiny new things. Watch this space for the inevitable failure and teeth-gnashing.
Update: I’ve been reading the Ximian mailing list, and it looks like a very bad idea. So I’ll wait some more.
Apart from those lovely guys at Ximian, does anybody have a clue as to how it works? Last night, after coding up a Perl XML-RPC server to display the current song being played by Xmms (yes, I’m getting back into geek mode ready for university), I suddenly had the great idea of embedding the GtkHtml
editor into my simple Python blogging tool, just like how Evolution uses
it for reading/writing mail. I’ll just look up a few examples of Bonobo usage
in Python, and I’ll get a HTML editor for no effort.
You can stop laughing now.
After three hours, a conversation on irc.gnome.org, and extensive
trawling through Google, I managed to find an example that created a GtkHTML
editor window. And did nothing else. The core Bonobo documentation is terse
to the point of being unreadable, and the scant few developer articles online
focus on extremely light-weight controls, rather than talking about things
that are actually useful. I eventually gave up and went to bed. It shouldn’t
really be that hard. Ideally, it should be extremely easy to write GNOME
applications in a high-level language like Python (incidentally, I’m singling
out GNOME mainly because it’s what I’m most familiar with - KDE might be
better), which can access all areas of the desktop environment, from simple
buttons to the more complex features such as html widgets and Bonobo components.
For all the knocking that Visual Basic receives, it allows almost complete
access to the Windows system, and has reams of fantastic documentation. I
know that the GNOME Project doesn’t have the same sort of resources, but
it would be nice for them not to treat non-C programmers as third-class citizens.
Maybe GNOME 2 will change all this. I hope it does.
I found LIDN on my travels. It’s a start
(although for some reason the Bonobo link goes to a CVS book - which seemed
to sum up my experience of the last 24 hours quite well), although still
heavily C-orientated. Again, it’s frustrating, as GNOME 2 sounds like it’s
got some wonderful features (e.g. the Gnome-VFS system, which allows transparent
writing to WebDAV systems), but I don’t want to have to go through all the
wheel-rebuilding that C involves just to write a simple program…
Okay,
rant over.
It started innocently enough. My abused RedHat 7.0 installation was beginning to show signs of age, and it seems to be dropping off Ximian’s Red Carpet in terms of support. An upgrade to 7.3 seemed like a good idea.
The pain.
What
I forgot was that every time I’ve upgraded RedHat, I’ve done so via a clean
install. Still, what could possibly go wrong? I burn the release CDs, reboot,
start the upgrade process, and sit back.
Then comes the error. The program dies trying to install twm.
It gives a wonderful message saying that basically any number of things could
have gone wrong, but it wasn’t going to tell me. Oh, and it was going to
abort and reboot if that was okay with me.
The reboot leads to all kinds of interesting errors, from refusing to mount my LVM /mp3 partition, doing strange things with my ext3 partitions, before finally giving up with a kernel panic.
After wiping the entertaining thoughts of smashing my machine into pieces
with a sledgehammer, I start again. With a clean install. It works. With
no errors. Obviously, there was a reason that I never did upgrades.
After that, it was a matter of completely junking the RH kernel, and grabbing 2.4.18 from kernel.org,
as my VIA chipset wasn’t detected with the RH 2.4.18, but was with the standard
one. And then slowly rebuilding the applications that I’d lost.
Just
for balance - my sister upgraded from IE 4.0 to IE 6.0 yesterday, and lost
all of her mail in the process. To sum up - Computers Are Evil.
Spent the day re-reading the entire Invisibles saga, to a cut-up soundtrack of Hacienda/Ibiza period New Order, mid-1990s BritPop, a long-forgotten Ant & Dec support band, and the post-future hymns of Godspeed You Black Emperor, Exhaust, and A Silver Mt. Zion. And this time, I understood. The next time I’ll understand differently. Fiction as Fractal. FictionSuitGo.
Apparently, I get my own office at UNC Chapel Hill. This is quite scary. They’re paying me real money as well. Where’s the catch? Aside from having to deal with the students?
or why I love Python. I’m timing it as having created a usable blogging application one hour after opening XEmacs and Glade windows. And quite a bit of that time was spent remembering how Python syntax works. I feel useful again.
And it’s only 42 lines of code. That’s quite cool.
Kieron Gillen/Brem X Jones/David Kohl has started his own blog. Go, visit, and suchlike.
Every time one of my favourite bands releases a
new record, I tend to get rather apprehensive. The concept of 10-12 new songs, that I haven’t heard before, that could completely change how I feel about
them, unsettles. I worry that the new album will suck. A copy of the first
track from the new Sleater-Kinney release, One Beat, fell into my hands on
Friday.
I’m sorry I even doubted them for a second.
‘One Beat’ is the most irresistible song you’ll hear this year, I promise. A diatibe
of Thomas Edison, Chaos Theory and oil fields, welded to a fantastic machine-gun rhythm of drums and guitar. It’s as much a call to arms as ‘Ballad of a Ladyman’ was, but this time, they Really Mean It. Roll on August…
XML-RPC is
very cool. I always like it when I stumble across new things on the Internet,
so this week has been very entertaining. I never knew that blogging was soinvolved…
Could it be? After all this time, is Ogg Vorbis 1.0 finally here? Well, almost.