I haven’t been able to contribute as much as I would like lately, just barely keeping www.pygtk.org not too outdated, but…

You can also read a bit more about future plans and a general overview about the direction GNOME is taking in an interview to Vicent Untz.

I’m not surprised to see some of this work being shown in the Tate Modern in London, and, as an architect, I really enjoyed how the paintings/animations are spatially conceived and take into consideration the scale and relationship with their close environment. Working spaces are carefully selected, as one can see in BLU’s blog, so this subtle dialogue can be achieved.

Such a deep sensitivity to the surrounding environment hasn’t struck me very frecuently when faced to the majority of street art. Most of it is intrusive or plainly aggresive, in the mood of advertisements, and limit themselves to smart trompe l’oeil effects. They hardly ever come to play using their materiality as a mean to attach to their canvas, and could just have been painted in any other place, without ever potentiating or reacting to their spatial framework.

It’s also worth having a look to BLU’s website as the graphic design is very nice: clean and personal.

The following video was the one that attracted my attention:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Another interesting urban artist worth knowing is SpY, which, through frequently subtle interventions on the urban landscape, brings to life and subverts the normal reading of our cities, much in the way of avant-garde, situationism.

Both BLU and SpY’s work look to me like an urban version of Land Art.

Some other street art artists which show some attention to the surrounding context in their works are Banksy or 108 (108 homepage).

Being able to do this using my favourite language, Python, is possible, but not very well documented, so I’ve experimented a bit with it and have come up with a simple example that defines a bunch of new functions that take double and range arguments and return a single value or write back to a defined range. This example can be used as template to write your own plugins and is released under a GPL v2 or greater license.

The example has been developed using OpenOffice 2.4 running on Vista. To build it, you need the OO 2.4 SDK and a MSys environment to comfortably use makefiles and get a decent shell.

The extension file has in it all the needed files to rebuild the example. As the .oxt files are just zipped files you can get them renaming the extension file so it gets a .zip extension and unzipping it.

The makefile has some variables that point to the SDK dir and zip utility that you need to tweak and has the all and install targets build and install the extension.

Addins are composed by:

• an .idl file to define the interfaces
• a manifest.xml file to define the extension resources
• an implementation file

I hope this calc addin example is simple enough to get started. Enjoy!

Click here to download calc addin example: PachiAddin.oxt

Xkcd definitely rocks!

As far as I can tell, the main problem lies in the lack of a convenient packaging due to lack of manpower, as the platform seems to build fine and win32 binaries are being offered, including all its dependencies.

The lack of good packaging probably hits harder on the bindings users, like the PyGTK ones, as they don’t need a C development chain but depend on a working GTK+ runtime and already have their own deployment problems to solve.

As either there’s not enough people interested in helping out with a more convenient packaging or the potentially interested ones don’t have the information, skills or time to join the effort, this post will try to gather some information that’s currently scattered around blogs, wiki pages or mailing lists in the hope that lowering the barrier to getting started can improve that situation:

• There’s a gtk+ on win32 packaging mailing list.
• Alberto Ruiz has blogged about the current status of gtk+ packaging on win32, his all-in-one pygtk installer for windows, and what he has been doing to improve the situation, by explaining the gtk+ build process on windows and throwing a call for help.
• John Stowers has also blogged about how to build the gtk+ stack using jhbuild on windows using msys and mingw and he has also explained his experience trying to get it to work.
• Fréderic Peters has accepted some patches to reduce the jhbuild dependencies to make it easier to get it working on win32.
• There’s some information on the gnome wiki on how to cross compile gtk+ for win32 using jhbuild.
• Ali Sabil has written a script to build win32 GTK+ mis installers. His code hasn’t been updated in some time and is in need of some testing to see if it still works or needs some update. It’s kept in a bazaar branch and can be fetched and used like this:
  
  mkdir windows-build; cd windows-build;bzr branch http://people.collabora.co.uk/~asabil/bzr/buildows ;cd buildows; ./buildows
  
  The script generates some configuration files and a .bat file so you only need to copy the contents of the windows-build dir to a windows machine and run the .bat file to get the msi installer.

Alberto thinks the ideal solution would be the creation of msi installers. This allows easy mass deployments and gets good operating system integration, but while some of the needed tools (WiX) are open source, the toolchain isn’t (AFAIK), and being able to create the packages on a GNU/Linux box using cross-compilation and other native tools (wine/Mono/mingw) would be a great plus that would let GTK+ developers build their own win32 packages or the creation of GTK+ runtime packages using GNOME’s infrastructure.

We are sure that having a few motivated people willing to document the building and packaging process of gtk+ on windows can make a great difference here. Anyone is willing to scratch this itch?

Update: Alexander Shaduri is currently publishing an updated gtk+ runtime installer, a theme selector and a collection of themes within the gtk-win project on sourceforge. It can be downloaded here, as well as the NSIS configuration packages.

Update 2: Ali Sabil‘s buildows script is based on jhbuild. It fully works on a GNU/Linux box except for the last packaging step as WiX runs native code and he hasn’t got it to work using wine (he tried using a native dll under wine but couldn’t get it to work).

Update 3: There’s now a wiki page on live.gnome.org to collect all the relevant information about windows GTK+ packaging and the desired goals and a new chat room on gimpnet called #win32.

This is the latest xkcd comic strip. Yay!

Last week I visited Toledo, as part of an ongoing contract, where I’m doing the structural engineering evaluation and consultancy for the rehabilitation of an old building. This building is very interesting, as some of its parts date back to the XI century, with some additions from the XV century, and minor ones later on. Besides that, it’s structure is a frankenstein like mix of masonry walls, timber frames, wooden columns and beams, earth walls and even some recent steel parts.

Alicia González, the architect that’s leading the works, had also arranged for that day a visit to the church of San Juan the los Reyes [1][2][3], a building in the plateresque style, built in the XV century by the Catholic Monarchs, which is undergoing some maintenance works on its façades and roofs.

From the roofs you can get some gorgeous views of the surroundings, including the famous cloister in the same building:

Something that always surprises me is the care given to detail even for sculptures and stained-glass windows that stand further than 30 meters away from the ground:

But not only this kind of monuments have their hidden treasures. Given that Toledo and the building we are working on both have a very interesting history, you can expect to find some hidden mozarab beauties and other little gems like carved wooden beams hidden behind a bathroom’s tiles, plaster decorations under a very boring covering or old decorations (XI century) that still keep some polychromy on them:

I’m just curious about what the old arab writings on the mozarab wooden beam say… maybe someone on the web can help with that…

Interestingly, these two buildings frame what has been called the Golden age of jewish culture in Iberia, the Golden Age of Arab or Moorish Rule in Iberia, or even La Convivencia (“the Coexistence”), spanning from the VIII to the XIV century.

Firefox:

• Firebug, Yslow, Colorzilla, JSView:
  Powerful addons to debug and help into the development of websites and webapps
• Minimize to Tray Plus, Remember mismatched domains, Download statusbar, Bookmark Duplicate Detector
  Convenience addons
• Scrapbook
  Locally store web contents

Thunderbird:

• External editor:
  to be able to warmly use gvim to compose messages
• SyncMab:
  to synchronize (export/import) the address book.
• Quote colors:
  Colors paragraphs depending on quoting level. Very useful for mailing list reading.
• Colored Diffs:
  Colors inline diffs. Very useful for mailing list reading.
• Sync on arrival:Get IMAP mail as soon as a new message notification arrives
• Copy sent to currentPut reply as child message
• Minimize to tray Plus, Remember mismatched domains:
  Convenience addons

Even if I’m clearly biased in favor of anything this cousin creates, he, and his team, have already showed their talent before approaching this new challenge in a number of theater and TV plays and scripts, besides his role as theater and short film director. I hope they continue to nurture and develop their artistic vein (and a TV channel buys them the sketches).