Compiled and installed the latest release of Ximian OpenOffice.org. Among other goodies, it nows uses the native gtk fileselector widgets. The button order is wrong – but nevertheless, it is better than the stock file selector of OOo.

Finally got gDesklets up and running in my system (it’s as simple as emerge desklet-goodweather . Here’s a screenshot:



Sutanu-babu came over in the evening – it was nice to meet him after almost a year. Had a nice adda. He’s having troubles with his internal PCTel modem – I’ll probably go to his house and fix it tomorrow.

This evening, I managed to spill a whole glass of water on my keyboard. Yes – I am clumsy, I already know that. Anyway, the keyboard is supposed to be water proof (apparently, the keys are hosted in a compartment which is separated from the membrane and the circuitry), so I shut down the computer, kept the keyboard under the fan to dry, and went off to Lake Market. After around 45 minutes, I came back, found the exterior of the keyboard to be more or less dry, and so I plugged it into the computer and started the thing up. Boy!! I was in for a big surprise. As soon as the system began to boot, random characters began to appear all over the screen, and the Function LED (my keyboard has a LED which tells me whether or not the Function keys are enabled) began to turn itself on and off quite erratically, without any kind of input from me. I managed to do a Ctrl – Alt -Del (well – it’s a Microsoft keyboard, and probably these three keys are given some extra protection), turned off the computer and unplugged the keyboard. After a bit of fumbling around for a screw-driver of the right size, I managed to locate one and opened up the keyboard. The water had somehow managed to seep through the key compartment, and had seeped right in between the plastic layers underneath the keys. Scratched head for sometime. Then, went to my mother, borrowed her hair dryer, and started “blow drying” the entire thing. Fifteen minutes of blowing through the plastic sheets, and all the water had gone away. My mom did not like the process at all, but I could’nt think of any other solution. Anyway, after that, I plugged in the keyboard again, started up the system, and everything was back to normal. A pretty good experience, I would say.

Jabber at WBUT

I setup Jabberd at the West Bengal University of Technology today. It was pertty easy – and seems to work fine.

No – I don’t. And when I see school girls flashing “V” signs after hearing that a convict is going to be hanged – I feel that there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

For the past few days, I have been playing around with Zeroconf – which has got a lot of potential. With Zeroconf, you can get dynamic IP addresses for the computers on your network without running any DHCP server, and your applications can find services, like printers, FTP/WebDAV shares without a directory server (there are other stuff too – but to me at this moment, these are the two most interesting features). The latest version of GNOME-VFS has got DNS Service Discovery (dns-sd) support, and I was looking at ways to get the various components of Zeroconf (especially the service publishing part) up and running under GNU/Linux. Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the latest beta of Nautilus detecting my FTP server and WebDAV server through dns-sd (I had published the services using mDNSResponder from HOWL). For more cool stuff that can possibly be done with dns-sd, take a look at this interview.

Changelog goof ups resolved

Apparently, the Changelog related goof ups (which I mentioned in my last post) has been resolved – which is a relief.

Finally got the time to build the latest CVS version of Mozilla to test the brand new Indic script support. I had to specify –enable-pango to the configure script and the rest was the usuall stuff. Took around an hour to compile, and here’s what it looks like.



The rendering is perfect (at least based on what I have seen so far) – there are a few minor glitches with text selection (entire text does not seem to get selected). Also, I could’nt get printing to work – the print-preview looked OK, but when I generated a PS file, I got blank squares. However, this does look extremely promising, and hopefully distros will ship Mozilla with pango enabled.

Also, very interestingly, Mozilla now uses the native GTK 2.4 file selector for it’s open/save dialog boxes – which is really cool!! Can’t wait to see the new file selector in Firefox and Thunderbird.

The need to make entries in Changelog files.

The Indic translators recently hired by Red Hat India (I think…) were for some weird reasons, not making entries in the Changelogs after making modifications to the source files. Some of them, in an even more stranger fashion, were making entries in po/Changelog while modifying/adding the po files, but not while making changes to ALL_LINGUAS in configure.in. I sent in a mail to two of them explaining that Changelog entries are important – hopefully this would be sorted out soon.

Xdmx is proxy X server that provides multi-head support for multiple displays attached to different machines (each of which is running a typical X server). When Xinerama is used with Xdmx, the multiple displays on multiple machines are presented to the user as a single unified screen..

Now imagine running Xinerama on a 4×4 setup of 16 monitors, using Xdmx – Oooo……

OK – I’m getting too excited – I’ll go to sleep.

Watched The Gathering Storm. Albert Finney is absolutely marvelous.

Just noticed that support for Indic printing has been added to Gedit 2.7. This is due to the addition of Pango support in the printing code of gtksourceview (which is used by Gedit for on screen rendering and printing). Many thanks to Owen Taylor and Jody Goldberg for doing this much needed job. Among the core applications, we now have only Evolution and Epiphany which need to be fixed. Here’s a screenshot of the new Gedit’s print preview window :



For the past few months, I have been sitting on my own printing patch for Gedit 2.2 – it is a very very ugly hack (don’t look at the source code – your eyes may get burnt, and all your hair might fall off ), and has a few really weird bugs. It has been tested only in Gedit 2.2x – to use it, overwrite the gedit-print.c in your Gedit source directory with this file. Here’s a screenshot of Gedit 2.2 rendering Indic language.



I had also tried my hands at Evolution – and I partially succeeded with Evolution 1.4 – but the damn thing fails to do on screen rendering properly – so its of no value . I started to port it to Evolution 1.5, but then other stuff came up, and you should know the rest of the story… Anyway, here’s the obligatory screenshot.



I have also looked at the Mozilla code – but I think I don’t have the time/knowledge to handle that at this time.

..and in other l10n related news, quite a few major Bangla related bugs have been fixed in Pango over the last few days, and we should get more or less perfect rendering for Bangla working “out of the box” from GNOME 2.8 onwards. Yay!!

The GNOME Structured File Library (GSF) is an I/O abstraction for reading/writing compound files. Spent most of the evening trying to understand the libgsf API. Luckily the libgsf developers provide quite a large number of examples and after reading some of them, I think I’ll be able to do what I want to.

During the day, worked on getting a GtkTextView to behave like this. The hard part was handling Indic and Arabic text. Luckily Glib-2 provides some really handy utilities to handle UTF-8 text – and I have managed to come up with a a more or less working demo.

Compiled and installed GNOME 2.7 (from CVS) today. It is uses a new mime system (which seems to be borked right now – at least in my machine), and there have been a few quite a few interesting visible improvements on the desktop. There is a new dialog for adding applets to the GNOME panel – this should make things easier for new users.

Gandhi’s Autobiography

Finally managed to finish The Story of My Experiments with Truth – it makes for fascinating reading. Bernard Shaw would have had to reconsider his “All autobiographies are lies.” statement, had he read this one.