Daniel’s Blog

Better late than never. GTK+ has supported loadable input method modules since the beginning of the century. However, how to actually implement a custom input method and make GTK+ use it has never been documented.

So, if you ever wanted to implement your own GTK+ input method (say, for example, one that completes words from a dictionary like it works on a mobile phone) but have been put off by the lack of GtkIMContext documentation — there you go. The patch is waiting at bug #563994, for early approvers.

It would be nice if there were a non-hackish way to reduce the GTK+ documentation build times, by the way…

Please. Let’s stop with the politics on Planet GNOME.

Usually I just skip over your posts but today you definitely went too far. I really, really don’t want to be drawn into a debate about politics on Planet GNOME, but I can’t just leave this unanswered either. In order to avoid turning the Planet into a political discussion board, can we please all agree to avoid posting about our personal political views? I don’t care about the occasional remark or so, but please, Miguel, stop the regular promotion of your partisan political views. Let’s keep the Planet peaceful.

Dear readers, you may now tear me apart.

Update: Looks like I’ve taken a lot of steam for that one. Well you can stop now. Everyone, I was wrong and should have posted a rebuttal instead.

So — I didn’t make it at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut. Apparently the worst applicant who was accepted had an overall score of 1.5. The worst. Dang. Well, I can live with that, as I had mixed feelings about the suits-styled and marketing-laden atmosphere anyway.

But I was accepted at the Freie Universität Berlin, and two days ago I handed in my enrolment application papers and paid the fee for the first term. I already met someone from my Abitur year while waiting in the line. Also a friend of mine, Gabriel, majors in mathematics at the FU. And I’ll be able to join Spline.

On another note, my Internet connection at home is currently down. Versatel is messing up big time — it’s been dead for ten days now. Calls to my phone number end up at Café Reichert in Neukölln. It was funny for maybe the first two days but now I’m just pissed. As a consequence I decided to switch to cable internet provided by Kabel Deutschland. I’ll upgrade to 6000 kbit/s and actually pay a bit less for it, and since it’s cable it’s also independent of the Telekom suckers. And I’ll get a cheap cordless phone for free — which I’ll need since the phone I have right now is an ISDN one and the cable to phone adapter they provide only supports analog phones. They say it’ll take about three weeks to hook me up. Bah, this should be as simple as flipping a switch as far as the Internet connection is concerned. After all they already hooked up the whole building to their network just a couple of months ago.

Ah well. I now know first hand what Havoc meant about your computer turning into a brick without internet access. It’s really painful, and I’m not talking about the brick hitting your foot.

Today I received the preliminary results of my Abitur. Just as I feared, I had underachieved somewhat in Math and History. On the other hand I did better in English than I thought I would. And I hit the jackpot in Computer Science — woohoo! The overall score is 1.7, which means I’m fairly well positioned for university application. To raise my not-so-good Math score of eight points a little, I applied for another voluntary oral exam scheduled for next Tuesday.

Incidentally, I also received the application documents for the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam today. If I don’t make it there, I’ll probably attend Freie Universität Berlin instead. The ball is rolling now. I’ll be soon be entering a new stage in my life. I have a feeling it’s going to be a rough ride. Hope it’ll be fun, too.

Yay!