colin@
colino.net

Wow, it’s done! Paul put the 2.0 release on sourceforge today, and did the whole “release ritual” including cvs tagging, tarballs, release notes, release mail, sourceforge, freshmeat, and I’m sure I forgot some… Leaving to me a single responsability, clicking on Send on the linuxfr.org news item I had prepared on Sunday, and the Ubuntu packages (which I also prepared yesterday…)

So, it’s finally done after 2.5 monthes since last release! Paul and I have been investing a whole lot of our free time to make this happen, and the sensation post-release is kind of strange. I feel relieved, and tired as hell. Sylpheed-Claws sucked my energy!
Now is to hope that people won’t only answer to the announce mail to complain about this and that!

In Sylpheed Main’s mailing list, it has been asked how to print images attached to a mail. The only answer provided was:

“A workaround is to save the message somewhere with the .eml extension,
so you can open it as Outlook Express message and print from there.”

I guess anyone can see the irony of this. Well, I thought that I wouldn’t want to have to answer this question, so I added images in the prints we do with libgnomeprint.

There are a few funny things to implement it, like the fact the x,y coordinates origin is in the lower-left corner like in maths, instead of the upper-left corner like we developers are used to. That, and libgnomeprint prints images, by default, to the 0,0-1,1 coordinates, making a nice 1 pixel image. So one has to rescale the thing explicitely. Still, I like this lib, even if its documentation mainly consists of digging through mailing-list posts to find out an answer provided to someone having the same problem before!

Broadcast message from root@jack (Wed Jan 25 19:42:33 2006):

Power button pressed
The system is going down for system halt NOW!
Connection to jack.colino.net closed by remote host.
Connection to jack.colino.net closed.

So, there’s a monkey I know of… Not that it’s mine or anything, mind you… Anyway, that monkey tried parachuting about fifteen years ago. At this time the technology wasn’t anything near perfect, and Monkey gave up after trying to jump with plastic groceries bags.

Now Singi-Singea (it’s his name. He’s from France.) wanted to try again, this time with professional gear, that is a home-sewn round parachute ! After the long engineering phase came time to test the brand new canopy.

The first tests were quite disappointing. Streaming malfunctions, tensions knots, line entanglements… Thankfully he managed to track beautifully and land on soft pillows each time — which is the only reason he’s still there to share the joice of his first successful experience!

Finally it was decided that static line jumps would be more easy at first. The static line anchor has been provided by my girlfriend Clo, always willing to help — as long as noone’s looking. And little monkey made his first jump, and it has even been filmed.

This is not perfect yet. Monkey insisted on getting a high-performance canopy (round… yes…) and as monkeys can’t flare, he’s getting hard landings. Well.His choice!
Stay in touch for the next attempt from a much higher building!

Our last release was on November 8th, much more time than usual before two releases! I think we’re finally seeing the end of the tunnel, since this release we’ve only been fixing stuff, updating the manual to something less shameless, and mostly doing grunt work…

Now, there’s only one page of the manual left to write, the translations to get up to date, and we’ll be set! I’m impatient :)