Douglas Thrift's Blog: January 2004 Archives

A collection of random thoughts, commentary, and crazed opinions.

Thursday, January 15, 2004

Look, I Wrote Code for Gaim

Tags: c, patch, software, stuff, things

I did it, I wrote a patch for Gaim! If you can read C (or even if you can't), the code I wrote is in gaim/gaim/src/gtkimhtml.c - diff - 1.265.

Now, you're probably wondering what does that do and why would I need to add that, and probably a number of other questions that have no relation to this post at all like, "What is the meaning of life?"

What it does is supposedly fix the log viewer in version 0.75 so it displays the fonts and colors of stuff in your conversations as they showed up when you had them. I needed to fix that because the developers of said instant messaging program decided that they would clean up the HTML code in the logs so it was more standards compliant (like XHTML or HTML 4); I think that this is a noble cause, but they forgot to complete this task and left it half finished.

This I could not stand, so I finished their job for them. I got it fixed in version 0.75 (and if you want to see it actually work the patch is /download/gaim-css-0.75.diff), and then added it to 0.76cvs so I could give the developers the patch. However, it doesn't all work in 0.76cvs because of changes since 0.75 so they will have to munge around with my code to get it right.

Wow, this must be really interesting to you.

Anyway, here is an example of what happens with logs created with 0.75 and without my fix, this would be a snippet of a hypothetical conversation with my friend Jenny:

(22:08:46) Douglas: Hi Jenny

(22:08:56) Jenny: well hello doug

"Hmm, that looks fine to me, what's wrong?" you say. To that I say, "Bah!" Now look at what it looks like if the log were created with version 0.74, if after you've recompiled 0.75 with my patch, or if it's some time in the future and you have 0.76 or higher:

(22:08:46) Douglas: Hi Jenny

(22:08:56) Jenny: well hello doug

"Much better," you say, if you don't I don't know what to tell other than maybe you don't have the same fonts or you're using a browser that doesn't have color or fonts or you're blind and using a text to speech browser.

So the lesson you should have learned from this post is that if you make changes don't make them halfway and that Open Source software is good (even if the GPL is evil).

Posted by Douglas Thrift at 9:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Monday, January 12, 2004

Stuff

Tags: reference, stuff, things

Eat flaming death…!

Wow, you read this! Don't you feel special now?

Posted by Douglas Thrift at 4:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Douglas Thrift's Blog: January 2004 Archives

Table of Contents

Thursday, January 15, 2004

Look, I Wrote Code for Gaim

Monday, January 12, 2004

Stuff