Websites please stop tryingly to resize my Firefox windows, when being opened in a tab.
Pls; Ok, Thx.
Finer things in life
OSS Planets
Peoples
Projects I contribute to
Summit ftw
Thursday, October 12, 2006
This past weekend I was in Boston. Adam, Flav, Jorge and I were there for the summit, but we added up going there a day early, because that Friday it was my birthday and what batter way to get old then to go bar hopping in Boston. That Friday we were joined by our friends Cindy and Ken who where just finishing of the their east cost tour for their honeymoon. And, by some strange force of the universe that pulled us together almost in a random sort of way we meet up in Boston that Friday.
On Friday we were planing to see the whales, but it wasn’t in our cards, the whale tours were closed that day due to the winds that loomed over the ocean. So instead we went to the aquarium (which was rather fun), and then bar hopped, smoked cigars and had a cute waitress with a Irish accent. It was awesome!
Then came the summit, I’ve finally meet a number of awesome people including Jdub, Miguel, Dave Camp, Joe Shaw (and numerous other good people). Went to a bunch of cool sessions including the banshee, tomboy, gvfs, xrandr++ and also random hack sessions.
Having the opportunity to see the things coming down the pipe for gnome, let me tell you this: I’ve have seen the future and it’s looking mighty fine. xrand+++ hawtness was demoed, new f-spot organization plug-in (think graphical boolean searches), hula (Jorge was excited about this, I thought he was going to run up to Dave Camp and hump his leg).
We got work done, Adam created a whole entire banshee plug-in that fetches lyrics from the artists via telepathic challes (he says it’s multiple lyrics sources with fall back, but i think there is some voodoo involved). The plug-in works better then the one’s i’ve tried before (the rhythmbox one). After that’s done, he has some other secret hax0red apps lined up, which I can’t tell you about.
I worked on drapes, notably I’ve worked on a multithreaded metadata loader that will drapes responsive when you have collections of over a 1,000 wallpapers present (the app is responsive, but it takes a long time to import that collection). Jdub seamed impressed. Up next is a rss feed support, avahi support and a gui redesign.
This was my first summit, and now I can tell you that it won’t be my last.
Too bad I forgot the camera.
Lenovo battery debacle, but not the exploding battery kind of debacle
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
This actually happened about a month ago, but as they say: better now then never.
Almost a month, one of the representatives from Lenovo stumbled onto my blog (interestingly enough he was looking for info on how to get Linux working with a z61t, since I probably was the first dude to put Linux on a retail z61, also the first dude to blog about it, and probably one of the first dudes to get it since I got mine close to a month before they started selling them on the site officially) and noticed my woes that I experiences with 7-cell battery (which I wrote about earlier here). He left a comment on my blog, and he said that if i got in touch with him he’d able able to help me out. Soon enough he put me in touch with someone else (who name, sadly, I don’t remember) who was dealt with issues such as these. It was a quick phone call about 3 minutes I explained what happened, and then they guy said he would return my money. Sure enough 2 days later money was put back into my bank account and i got to keep both the 7-cell and 4-cell batter (which was not my intention).
So the moral of the story is that just like anywhere else there is a chance that you run into some one who makes a mistake like my original sales guy (or is unethical, but i’ll give him the benefit of the doubt), but there are lots of really good people at Lenovo who don’t suck.
Thanks Phil, I really appreciate it.
Btw, I’m sill loving my z61t; It’s awesome. Just ask Jorge everytime i turn away he looks funny at it, almost kind of like when you checkout a girl.
Randomness
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
- Ken and Cindy got married this past Friday, it was an awesome “event”, I had a great time with some great people. Many thanks to Andrew for being my DD. And most importantly many wishes to Ken and Cindy on their road ahead.
- Just finished an assignment fo’ one of the classes at school. I’ve got lots of stuff to do before I leave for the weekend.
- Mario hoops 3 vs 3 is fun on the DS, get it!
- I’m working on drapes, making the whole thing multi-threaded to handle huge wallpaper collections, it should improve import speed, load speed, displaying the preferences speed, etc; since everything should be done truly lazily now. This is because my only real reaming complaint is “I have 3,817,461.375 wallpapers, and drapes runs slow” As usual locking… is fun.
- Friday is my bday, and I’ll also will be in Boston with Ken, Cindy, Jorge, Adam and Falva Falve… being the opposite of sober.
- Also that weekend I’ll be at gnome summit (also what i refer to as gnome fest), i’m pumped for that.
- I’m looking into AOP (aspect oriented programing) in C#… on mono (here’s where my problem comes in), if anyone know a AOP frame work that does processing a run-time and not at compile time and works on mono, let me know. Apparently the Castle Project Aspect# doesn’t work in mono.
- I’m excited.
- And I’m going to sleep.
Interested friends can try.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
So I was curious where the hits for drapes site were coming from. I clicked a couple that weren’t the usual (gnomefiles/planetars/etc) and found a couple foreign sites, now being that I’m only able to read in two languages, I surfed over to the magical google translation page type in the url and this what I got:
Desktop Drapes Wallpaper is a manager for the GNOME desktop environment. With the built-in system is that different places, Desktop Drapes support random replacement wallpapers, and can automatically choose from a list of wallpaper has been added. Interested friends can try.
This funny google translation (in bold) just made my day (original link). Thanks to everyone for linking to drapes, esp. to the sites that I cannot read 
Stuffz
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
I updated drapes once more, to version 0.4.97, thanks to external contributions drapes now has tango icons that fit into the whole gnome tango icon theme (thx lapo) and also documentation you can view in yelp (thanks to Derek Vandivere); and you can never forget the numerous new and updated translations. On the fixing front, intofy stuff should behave a lot better, you can now add entire directory trees nor multiple wallpaper (90% of the feature requests was this). There also are plenty of performance enchantments, but on that front drapes isn’t fully there just yet, it still has issues on collections of over 500+ wallpapers, but I’m working on it, and that will be the focus on 0.4.98 (or 0.5.0 if everything goes smooth). Help me test it, by downloading drapes: deb tarball, reporting any issues in launchpad and completing more of the translations in Rosetta, here and here (documentation). And for the more adventurous and/or promiscuous the bzr tree is located here.
Also, I went to the Roger Waters concerts last night, it was freaking awesome. Normally, I’m not a big concert goer but damn that guy put on a show. Roger and the band played all the classic Pink Floyd songs, then Dark Side of the Moon, and then again some other classic Pink Floyd songs. The guy on the guitar, was right on with the old songs, I was impressed; but the most impressing part imnho was the chick who did the vocals for The Great Gig in the Sky… you had to been there to understand. One word, AWESOME.
And I’ll be in Boston for Summit & my B-day in 3 weeks.
Laziness
Monday, September 11, 2006
To say I don’t like when this happens would be __UNDER_STATEMENT__. You’ve been there before… your random open-source app crashes, it bugs you enough where you go ahead fetch the source, compile it, track down the dependencies for 1 hour… finally compile it; now your read to fire up the gdb, after about 5 minutes it’s crystal clear why your app crashes (null pointer? unallocated memory?) your like wow, that was simple.
AND THEN IT DOWNS on you… you would have to spend like a day figuring out the code base to do it the “proper way.” It took you long enough to get to this point — you really deserve that break after all you tracked the bug down — so you go grab a glass of wine (insert preferred beverage of choice here, or smoke break). So now you got your beverage in your hand, so you pop in a your favorite dvd and you’ll watch the first 10 minutes while you enjoy your drink (or read your favorite news feed)… Right, 2 hours later it’s time to do something else &| sleep.
Next time you have the app crash you can feel the pain travel thought your body. The very same pain you felt when you figured out that the simple error doesn’t have such a simple fix (at least to you). So what do you do, you do what any other self-respecting open-source user does you go onto good and find another OSS application that does the same exact task and hope it doesn’t crash.
It hurts, because it’s true.
Drapes: Folder importer
Monday, September 11, 2006
You can now import both images, or entire directory structures. I think this is the single most asked for features, I got emails about. 
Notice the Combo Box in the lower right hand corner for the file chooser.
Entertaining bug
Thursday, August 31, 2006
With the magic of intltool and some –obviously wrong– Makefile.am I bring you this bug.
Why stop at at application internationalization? Why limit our users to simply one language? Why not just show them all the languages, to improve the his or her knowledge of foreign languages? (Obviously this screen shots only shows that there are two translation that have have this part finished so far).
It’s like my friend Ken says, lets install these random applications that don’t fit the desktop, as long as it gives the users choice. I mean the users should be able to use the Joe emulation for emacs if he wants to.
Drapes feedback
Sunday, August 20, 2006
So now that drapes has been out for like a couple days a couple things have happened. Number one, I got lots of support requests, people find various ways of breaking drapes that I never thought of… and I love it, keep sending me bug reports and I’ll keep fixing everything to make sure drapes 0.5.0 is rock solid. I’ve got lots of positive feedback from people saying they love drapes and they were waiting for an application for gnome like this for years; that’s awesome to hear. Some people have blogged out it and also spread the word on foreign language forums; while I can’t read most of them it’s awesome seeing people who are saying good things about it (I hope:) ). Gnomedesktop.org wrote about drapes so I’m sure that’s where a lot of the traffic is coming from, check out the story. On gnomefiles.com drapes so far has a 9.4 user rating which is awesome, I hope drapes ends up on the list of best rated apps. And Jorge tells me that he showed off drapes at Ubucon; Rock on!
Here’s what has been fixed the 0.4.96 release:
- A complete Korean translation has been written by at atie (drapes just looks cool in Korean).
- James finished of the entire French translation, which was only 25% done after adding ALL the strings.
- The translations actually show up, since there was a bug preventing them from showing up properly.
- The deb package is now a universal deb package that runs on all archs that can run mono.
- Some missing dependencies have been fixed.
Some know issues:
- The help button dosen’t work, due to the fact that the help file isn’t written.
- We are lacking an Icon.
- The tmp icon doesn’t have transparent background on transparent panels.
I’m working hard on resolving these and other issues that remain, some trivial and some just odd. I’ll keep you guys posted.