tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91898696866074238052010-02-09T15:43:01.954+02:00I'll keep track of the various projects & tutorials I develop for Gnu/Linux here.Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-3146592526357734852010-02-09T15:31:00.003+02:002010-02-09T15:43:01.962+02:002010-02-09T15:43:01.962+02:00

Here are a few scripts using pyClutter 1.0 that I have recently finished. They are only for demonstrating some of the abilities of Clutter -- which I must say is just awesome!Clipping actors (and groups of groups of... etc.) into a path shapeSo, you have a shape and you want to force all the children in that Group (groups are Actors) to show within that path? Here you go:import clutterfrom

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-55945174885107704652009-10-04T20:57:00.004+02:002009-10-04T21:20:19.934+02:002009-10-04T21:20:19.934+02:00

I have worked hard for about two weeks now and I am quite happy with things. There are still problems (keyboard things mostly) but it's quite usable.Get it here:svn co svn://svn.sv.gnu.org/fontypython/trunkScreenshot - a little out of date, but shows the general idea.Stuff I done didFonts that have weird spacing to the left and top are now cropped to fit. This is optional (see Settings) because

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-5363525890273329072009-10-02T09:56:00.002+02:002009-10-02T10:02:30.071+02:002009-10-02T10:02:30.071+02:00

Aaaargh! I spent an hour on google and on the command-line trying to start gucharmap with a given font name at the command line. No dice. (And don't speak to me about man pages....)It took the source code for "Font Manager" (A rival to Fonty ;) ) and some small hacking to get it to reveal the secret sauce. Here, then, is the way to do it:gucharmap --font="SOME DAMN FONT NAME, 32"The "SOME DAMN

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-15871484612216328882009-09-29T19:35:00.003+02:002009-09-29T19:46:36.495+02:002009-09-29T19:46:36.495+02:00

Fonts sometimes render in odd positions - seen from a top-left point of view. (I have no skill or experience in right-to-left languages, any help would be appreciated!).To correct this random affliction, I have had to scan each font image and calculate the x,y of the first actual data therein (anything that is not alpha zero). This works quite well and fonts now draw on a sharp left-top edge,

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-14366641811158526522009-09-27T11:49:00.003+02:002009-09-27T12:05:14.185+02:002009-09-27T12:05:14.185+02:00

September has been a busy month for Fonty. I have a new version ready to go in the svn. If anyone wants to give it a test run, please head over to https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fontypython/ and get it while it's hot.I will be making a tarball in the days to come, so any bugs before then would be nice to know about.New features:You can zip Pogs into zip files. When you need someone else to

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-77596905330097949812009-08-18T17:38:00.003+02:002009-08-18T17:42:44.076+02:002009-08-18T17:42:44.076+02:00

Flowcharting FaithOver on my personal site I have a new page:"The idea is to test your beliefs against the flow of the diagram.Take some proposition and start anywhere (big orange headings are best). Then honestly follow the flow and observe what happens. If you are honest with yourself (and value truth) you should find your belief getting more and more honed and simple — eventually you should

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-10572017070156923612009-05-19T16:18:00.004+02:002009-05-19T16:22:35.361+02:002009-05-19T16:22:35.361+02:00

I just finished writing a short tutorial for the Things API. You can get it on my wiki:otherwise.relics.co.za or from the CVS on the official website.The tarball contains a PDF, an SVG file and a bunch of python files. You will still need to fetch the actual API and make a link to it where you want to run the tutorial samples.It should all make a kind of sense. If it does not, then you need to

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-682950878084003672009-05-09T19:50:00.005+02:002009-05-09T20:10:59.131+02:002009-05-09T20:10:59.131+02:00

Announcing "Things" - Vector animation in PythonI just got my Savannah project approved and have uploaded the code to CVS. I have never used a cvs before, so I don't really know what I am doing.You can visit the project here:http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/things/"Things" is a way to make quick visual metaphors and animate them. Things can contain other things -- in this way you can have one

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-14996884543721298612009-02-01T14:10:00.003+02:002009-02-01T14:13:43.985+02:002009-02-01T14:13:43.985+02:00

I have put together a Django-powered website of my own -- come visit it at otherwise.relics.co.za -- I have a bunch of comics, tutorials and some writing there.\d

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-79734302446127004712008-07-25T14:58:00.005+02:002008-07-25T15:09:27.170+02:002008-07-25T15:09:27.170+02:00

Why is this not a done deed?How many of you out there know someone who simply wants to send pictures by email but has no clue about how big the darn things are? Attach, attach, clickety-click and then off goes a 10mb email... Man this is crazytown. Why is there no thought given to this for email clients like kmail and evolution?This is a cry-out to the boffins to please (pretty, pretty please)

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-34490499613147542902008-07-25T14:43:00.003+02:002008-07-25T14:53:10.918+02:002008-07-25T14:53:10.918+02:00

Me again,I have delayed putting a link to my little book of poems (available on Lulu.com) for many, many months now; feeling a little shy about such marketing, but today I felt a rush of optimism and I just did it. So, this is a quick post to mention it. I hope someone out there enjoys a few of the poems in my book, but I have never had any feedback so I really don't know if they are any good.

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-73901079886792430702008-07-25T14:15:00.003+02:002008-07-25T14:19:35.678+02:002008-07-25T14:19:35.678+02:00

Greetings,I have one more operation to go (I hope that's all) and I should be all repaired. Man I wish I was as simple as a motherboard and I could get opened-up with a screwdriver and have bits swapped-out.Otherwise July has been good to me; we have moved into our house and I have a reliable Internet connection (the most important thing :D ) and I am starting to edge towards coding again.Plans:

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-42857552110883489022008-07-25T13:59:00.003+02:002008-07-25T14:12:19.489+02:002008-07-25T14:12:19.489+02:00

Hello world,I was asked in an email the other day if I could add a function to gather all the fonts in a given folder into a Pog. While this is a cool idea for a future release, it's possible right now from the command-line. Lemme show you how.Open a console/terminal (like konsole or gnome-terminal). I will use square brackets [ ] to surround the command you can type but don't type the brackets.

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-6468952064901066302008-06-14T15:02:00.002+02:002008-06-14T15:05:12.712+02:002008-06-14T15:05:12.712+02:00

May has been, and June is shaping-up to be, a month of being sick and in hospital. Man I hate hospitals! They remove your spirit and leave you at your most basic: a body in a bed with nothing but hours between you and sanity.I wonder when I will get back into a productive phase again -- sometimes I think it will be never.I be blue. \d

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-45411210106896966292008-04-14T21:25:00.001+02:002008-04-14T21:28:08.194+02:002008-04-14T21:28:08.194+02:00

Ah well, no code and no updates. Hoping to get back in the swing of things in a few months, life's too strange right now.\d

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-84460933856667402522008-01-30T19:12:00.000+02:002008-01-30T19:14:49.023+02:002008-01-30T19:14:49.023+02:00

I made a few tweaks and there is the slim chance that fui might become a Debian unstable package in the future.Latest source here.Would appreciate any feedback about it's use in the digital wild.\d

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-23556779331053049852008-01-25T16:36:00.000+02:002008-01-25T16:44:31.806+02:002008-01-25T16:44:31.806+02:00

Have you ever wanted to select various files from a console: this one and those two and not this one? Have you ever wanted to move over to another console (or tab) and go to some directory and then copy all those files in one go?If so, then fui might be for you. The name means 'fake user interface'. Yeah, well, I had to call it something.The idea was to create some of the elegance of the select,

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-17255495298286891502008-01-23T08:09:00.000+02:002008-01-23T08:11:52.679+02:002008-01-23T08:11:52.679+02:00

I fixed the bug mentioned in the last post - it was caused when a font rendered with zero width (I think because it could not draw any of the letters in the text string).I also improved the Check Fonts dialogue - to give a little feedback.Version 0.3.6 is on Savannah.\d

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-84806336195556156072008-01-22T15:50:00.000+02:002008-01-22T15:57:44.462+02:002008-01-22T15:57:44.462+02:00

I noticed an error that kills the app. It's not 100% unexpected, but I had not found a font that triggered it until a moment ago. The font is called 50SDINGS.ttf, BTW.If you see this kind of thing, it will tell you what font did the deed (et tu, 50SDINGS.ttf?) and you should then manually move it to ~/longknives or someplace else.So, I will be hacking (when I get a night's sleep) on that issue

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-16958816291280052032008-01-22T08:37:00.000+02:002008-01-22T08:43:12.920+02:002008-01-22T08:43:12.920+02:00

Sheesh, I didn't sleep a wink last night. Urgh... Just stared at the ceiling. I would have been hacking away or surfing about but the power had cut (again) and took my net with it, so I switched my PC off and watched the ceiling.All.Night.Anyway, Fonty is on 0.3.5.1 because I added a menu item for KDE/Gnome and then had to fix that (hence the extra .1) There is some hope that it will be packaged

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-81830432902672226412008-01-20T12:59:00.001+02:002008-01-21T17:41:22.124+02:002008-01-21T17:41:22.124+02:00

Here is an overview/tutorial/summary of the Cairo drawing library from a Python perspective done in a diagram form. If you want an at-a-glance overview which is followed-up by many details that fill-in the surrounding aspects, then this might do the job.It's done as a single SVG file and I suggest you use Inkscape to open and view it. Zoom-in on the page and read the instructions about what fonts

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-53641438238584881302008-01-18T15:07:00.000+02:002008-01-18T18:18:21.422+02:002008-01-18T18:18:21.422+02:00

I am struggling from the after-effects of the fire and constant power cuts (thanks Eskom, you just light the way :(), not to mention all the unicode stuff I have been hacking.I rushed the new release out - hoping to get it done before yet another power cut.Comments and bugs are welcome.\d

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-63995249228615847642008-01-16T16:29:00.000+02:002008-01-16T17:11:34.217+02:002008-01-16T17:11:34.217+02:00

Fire in Fonty-LandThe 15th of January was a crazy day. I started out hacking on Fonty, thinking I'd get a release out by the end of the day but after a few hours the strong smell of smoke changed all that.We live in the Fynbos (the Western Cape floral kingdom) at the foot of a mountain range. There was a hot wind blowing fast, the house was whistling at every small gap. The brush around us was

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-73864241482072749832008-01-13T10:36:00.001+02:002008-01-13T10:57:06.719+02:002008-01-13T10:57:06.719+02:00

Oh well, it's very boring, but I don't think Fonty Python will be released as a Debian package in the near future -- this is entirely due to my own ignorance of the issues involved with i18n and unicode.It seems I have to write code to support the default "C" locale, which is ascii, and that conflicts (a lot) with the many different filenames given to fonts. I am suffering horrible unicode errors

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9189869686607423805.post-89165204283049607112008-01-10T21:46:00.000+02:002008-01-10T21:50:01.848+02:002008-01-10T21:50:01.848+02:00

Another day, another release - version 0.3.3This release fixes a bug in the setup process that was horrible to behold. It also adds the Type1 algorithm mentioned in the last post. Hopefully this will work now (I have done my best to test it) and will include the metric files as appropriate to the kind of Type1 font chosen.I have also added a clear button for quickly erasing the filter.Fetch it

Donn Inglehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04108378594020924753noreply@blogger.com0