This is the archive for June 2007. Recent posts can be found at the main blog page.

Guadec 2007 booking

Sunday, June 17, 2007 ★ 17:23 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Yay, I’ve just arranged my Guadec 2007 trip. I’ll be traveling with Olav Vitters (bkor). Details:

Sunday July 15: arrival at Birmingham Airport in Birmingham , England.
Stay at the Etap Hotel, as suggested on the Guadec accomodation page. The hotel is situated not too far from the conference venue, at least that’s what this guadec map suggests.

Sunday July 22: fly back to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport , Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Note that the website only supports hotel bookings up to 6 nights; I made my 7 day reservation over the phone (see the Etap web page for phone number).

I’m looking forward to attending the conference and meeting all the lovely Gnome people!

New hackergotchi

Thursday, June 14, 2007 ★ 23:53 ★ Category Photography ★ Permanent url

I should have updated my hackergotchi long time ago… figured it makes sense to do so before attending Guadec.

On the left side my old hackergotchi is shown; the new one is on the right.

That’s right, I have irresistible long hair now! Oh, the tan is just a camera flash/gimp artefact. My skin colour has not changed that much over the last two years…

Find fonts in Gnome Specimen

Friday, June 8, 2007 ★ 13:46 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Yay, finding fonts seems to work:

Code in the Gnome Specimen bzr branch.

Update: Included in Gnome Specimen 0.3

Gnome Specimen bug tracker

Thursday, June 7, 2007 ★ 12:21 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Some time ago I registered the Gnome Specimen product in Launchpad, mainly for these reasons:
- Make sure nobody else “captures” the name
- Free gnome-specimen.uws bzr branch mirroring
  
  Today I discovered people are actually using it to file bugs/feature requests, so I decided it would be a good idea to “officially” use it from now on. Here we go:
- Overview of open Gnome Specimen bug reports
- File a new Gnome Specimen bug
  The first Gnome Specimen bug is already fixed!
  
  (Even though Launchpad is not OSS—no cookie for you—it works pretty well to track bugs and feature requests for another project of mine, the Almost No Effort Web Toolkit, a set of useful and mostly clean and non-obtrusive PHP libraries.)
  
  Gnome Specimen 0.2 is out!
  
  Monday, June 4, 2007 ★ 14:06 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url
  
  Note: Gnome Specimen 0.3 is available as well.
  
  I proudly present Gnome Specimen 0.2, your favourite tool for previewing and comparing fonts. It has been a while since the initial Gnome Specimen release happened. Since then, development has slowed down a bit… however, Gnome Specimen is still alive!
  
  User-visible changes in this release:
  - New artwork: application icon and image in about dialog
  - Show previews for all font styles when a font family is double-clicked/activated
  - Don’t ellipsize the preview texts, scroll instead
  - Use a more common pangram as the default preview text
  - Allow zooming using ctrl-mousewheel
  - Consistently use the correct application name
  - Respect theme colors
    
    Other changes:
  - Store settings and defaults in GConf
  - Allow running from the source directory
  - Changed license to GPL only (copy-pasted boilerplate referred to LGPL as well)
  - Better Python module checking
    Translation updates (the Gnome community rocks):
  - Brazilian Portuguese (Vinicius Depizzol)
  - British English (Alex Jones)
  - Catalan (Josep Puigdemont)
  - Chinese (Lew Harper)
  - Czech (Vítězslav Kotrla)
  - Dutch (Wouter Bolsterlee)
  - Finnish (Kalle Vahlman)
  - French (Yan Brodeur)
  - German (Christian Kintner)
  - Greek (Dimitris Glezos)
  - Italian (Daniele Medri)
  - Norwegian Bokmål (Runar Ingebrigtsen)
  - Portuguese (Flavio Martins)
  - Russian (Alexandre Prokoudine)
  - Spanish (Albert Abril)
  - Swedish (Mårten Woxberg, Daniel Nylander)
  - Vietnamese (Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy)
    
    Get it while it’s hot! Download Gnome Specimen 0.2 now!
  - Gnome Specimen 0.2 tarball
  - Development branch (Bazaar-NG, bzr branch that url)
  - Gnome Specimen 0.2 Debian package
    There’s a provisionary Debian package as well, thanks to Daniel Holbach of Ubuntu fame. He has also uploaded Gnome Specimen 0.2 to Ubuntu Gutsy, so it is apt-gettable already! In the mean time, Debian and Ubuntu users may just download the file and run dpkg -i gnome-specimen_0.2-0_all.deb (as root) to install it.
    
    Other distros will soon follow I hope… Og Maciel already packaged Gnome Specimen for Foresight Linux.
    
    Which in python
    
    Saturday, June 2, 2007 ★ 17:12 ★ Category Programming ★ Permanent url
    
    If you want the functionality of which in a Python program, i.e. you want to look up the file system path for a given executable, you may use this simple function:
```
def which(e): return ([os.path.join(p, e) for p in os.environ['PATH'].split(os.pathsep) if os.path.exists(os.path.join(p, e))] + [None])[0]
```
    The return value is the full path or None if the executable was not found. Easy enough!