Richard Jones' Log: What I've been up to

Sat, 03 Jan 2004

Happy New Year to all!

  • Life with Abbey continues to be fun, frustrating and tiring. She's recently learnt to get to sleep on her own though, which has reduced the stress levels around the house no end!
  • I've been amusing myself re-learning parts of pygame, tooling around with user interface for a game I've been hacking in spare time. I've recently realised though that I don't need a fully-featured, generic widget set just to get the game going, and that's been liberating. It's meant I've been able to get back into the more fun side (ie. the actual game interface itself) with the other boring user interface bits being handled by command-line controls :)
  • I upgraded my desktop to Mandrake 9.2. This fixed a lot of weird little glitches that I was running into due to my extensive hand-patching of the 9.1 installation. My KHTML views don't have the unnecessary horizontal scroll bars now! (KHTML is used in Konqueror, Kopete, ... and had a bug in its resizing algorithm) Unfortunately, the Mandrake people repackaged the KDE bits, so after the upgrade a bunch of KDE apps weren't installed because they had their own packages now (kmail, konsole, and a few others). An upside was that I had to re-install PyQt - and there's Mandrake-compatible RPMs now, no recompiling of Qt!
  • I've also found this urpmi config helper quite useful.
  • On the laptop front, KDE-on-OSX has come closer and has been all over the news. Buried in the noise though, was the cool info that the OSX theme for Qt has made significant progress.
  • I've been taking a lot of digital photos of the sky under various conditions (sunset, wispy cloud, puffy cloud...) and using the resulting large collection of images as desktop backgrounds. I generally don't see much desktop with my window usage, but it makes a pleasant change from the standard Mandrake/KDE theme. The digital camera was also put to good use in producing our beagle2mas gift for relatives. Taking this photo with the SLR would've been a nightmare, as the lighting was very difficult to get right.
  • Eyesore of the month, for something completely different :)