Weekend hacking summary

As I learn GNOME Python programming by way of Google, I come to realize that I need to document what I've learned so that future coders can use Google easier. My intent is to write a summary each weekend that I hack; we'll see how that really goes.

My hacking was cut short Friday night (well, 3AM Saturday) by a hard drive failure in my mail server (and Web server, and database server, et.c). I did an emergency hard drive replacement and recovered what I could from the old one (causing two kernel panics on the way), finishing up at 7AM with a working Exim. I just now got Apache going again (there was a party in between, you see) and will get PostgreSQL going in a minute. Future plans (next weekend, or maybe this week if I need it sooner) include Subversion.

Despite all that, here are some tips:

gnome.init

If you get the error message:

(guploadr.py:33062): Gnome-CRITICAL **: file gnome-program.c: line 870 (gnome_program_locate_file): assertion `program != NULL' failed

That means that you forgot to do this before calling gtk.glade.XML:

import gnome.ui

gnome.init('guploadr','0.01')

GNOME File Selector Dialog

To use the file selector dialog use this callback:

def on_open1_activate(self, widget, *args):

    chooser = gtk.FileChooserDialog(

        title="Select an image",

        action=gtk.FILE_CHOOSER_ACTION_OPEN,

        buttons=(gtk.STOCK_CANCEL,

          gtk.RESPONSE_CANCEL,

          gtk.STOCK_OPEN,

          gtk.RESPONSE_OK))

    if gtk.RESPONSE_OK == chooser.run():

      print chooser.get_filename()

    chooser.destroy()

About Dialog

To show a dialog window, such as the About dialog, in your constructor create an instance of it:

self.about_dialog = self.widgets.get_widget('about2')

Then in your callback just show it:

def on_about1_activate(self, widget, *args):

    self.about_dialog.show()

Unsolved

I don't fully understand drag-and-drop yet. I'm reading example code at the API Web site, but I'll need to check out real code soon.

Speaking of real code, I need to use the thumbnail viewer from gthumb. It's a bonobo component, I think. How do I do this?

Other Software Ideas

• A good-looking, working, easy-to-use Web log publishing software for GNOME.


• A syndication aggregator for GNOME with a Planet-like view.


• GNOME Flickr Organizr.