Programming

After creating a number of signals and functions on my own to handle my class' fields, I reaised that GLib 1-uped me, and already has a frame work for that; properties. Properties are well exposed to the rest of the framework, can be elegantly handled using the g_object_set and g_object_get functions, and of course, emit signals whenever they are modified. This means you get signal creation free of cost. This was something I didn’t find well treated in the tutorial. There is a lot of boiler plate code that goes into enabling properties. An outline of the process (which is very well documented in the standard tutorial): ...

This past week, I’ve been up close and personal with GObjects, deciding to finally learn how to use them. Till now, most of my hacking has been with Gtk+, and that too largely in Python, which is, well…, child’s play. Luckily, I had a lot of patience to work out the boiler plate code, and figure out it’s various idiosyncrasies, enough so to appreciate what it’s trying to do. Before I say anything further, kudos to Mathieu Lacage’s for his helpful tutorial, which has been included in the official GNOME docs. It very clearly explains the motivation behind the whole GObject concept, which, to be fully honest is required if you want to make sense of it. He also did well in introducing the naming conventions used by GNOME. ...

A warning to potential readers (if they exist), this following article is slightly technical. As a move to make it remotely bareable, I have decided to blindly splatter it with over-dramatization, poor jokes and innuendo. Hopefully, you will enjoy it, whether or not you have a technical background. It might help to replace my characters with whoever you’d think I’d be uncomfortable with. Do comment on your selection. ‘Tis the eve of Valentine’s. I can imagine thousands of couples all over the world planning a romantic day/night. It also happens to be the eve of my most feared quiz, my arch nemisis, Dr. ThermoD (yes, he has a thick curly black mouschtache and speaks french). However, in the true spirit of love, I decided to blindly force my way through all reason and spend some quality time with my sweetheart through the wee hours of the night. Having no luck in the quarter of an actual person, I turn to the only area where I can hold my own fort, FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). My partner for the evening, the vivacious Madame DBus (who apparently is a petite brunette with a (3 arbitrary figures separated with hyphens) figure. She’s probably French as well), is quite popular with the closeted community of developers. In fact, she’s responsible for getting all of us to talk to each other and live in harmony (to those remotely interested, this is a vague reference to the fact that DBus is a inter-process messaging bus/protocol, whatever that means…). ...