My tropical fish tank has suffered it’s first fatality. I purchased a small gourami about a week and a half ago and its introduction immediately produced a violent reaction from the kribensis. I isolated the kribensis for a few days and it seemed to calm down after that, but last night I came home to…

Rich Burridge has written about coding style. I’m not an expert on style but I will comment that the motivation for his comments, the goto statement, does not preclude good style. Gratuitous use of goto is obviously bad, but here is an example (used widely in the Linux kernel) of where it can do some…

I’ve just uploaded an new utility called dndlist to my software page. All it does is sit there and wait for you to drag something to it at which point it lists all the types that the dragged object supports. It was my reaction to the frustration, while writing drag and drop support for gnometris,…

As part of the Big Push to get features in place before the feature freeze I’ve been working all day on gnometris. New features are: Sound effects (sounds courtesy of Richard Hoelscher) Customisable keyboard controls (courtesy of Paolo Borelli) The background can be set to a solid colour by drag and drop, just like you…

It’s been a while since I last wrote, but life is good. Work has been going very well, today has been fun and now I get to watch the All Blacks clobber Australia. Could it be better ? One of my toys at work is a home-made arbitrary function generator. It is a video card…

It was Cushla’s birthday on Wednesday, so we took the day off and went to the movies. This time it was at the Metropolis Cinema’s unusual “Screening Room”. The Metropolis itself is a small theatre crammed into some unused space in the corner of the town hall. It’s screening room is an even smaller theatre…

Recent work on gnome-games has concentrated on making the mouse cursor give a decent hint about what you can do. It started with Paolo Borelli sending in a a patch for aisleriot to change the cursor when you clicked on a card. This patch mutated somewhat and now the cursor changing to a hand when…

I wish I was at GUADEC. I made the decision not to go back in summer and now that it’s the middle of winter anywhere north looks appealing. Ah well, maybe next time. Last night was spent working on click-to-move support for Aisleriot. This is one of the last features of the old stand-alone Freecell…

Having finally decided what mp3 player I wanted (an iRiver iHP-140) I set about finding one. In general you can’t find the range in New Zealand that you can in the US because the market is a lot smaller. This also means that I am used to a week or more delay when I have…

If you have been watching GNOME News you will know that there has been a new stable release of gnome-games. Actually, you probably wouldn’t have noticed since it was buried under a HUGE gst-plugins ChangeLog entry. I’m not sure that using the ChangeLog when the NEWS file is missing is a good idea, they’re either…