Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 18)

If I ever have to touch the console, it is a bug that should be fixed.

Thank you and good day

As heard on #ubuntu

[name withheld to protect the innocent] Hey guys I got a real problem I just install ubuntu on my computer and well Now I can't find my windows media player and I can't find my Internet explorer eaither! And I think i really messed up as in I think I mistakenly hacked into some guys computer. I keep seeing his name "Gnome" everywhere

As heard on #ubuntu-devel

[wasabi] Wouldn't a LTSP port to Ubuntu be NEAT?
[Kamion] that would be what mdz's currently doing
[wasabi] Oh. Really?
* Kamion steals and waves mdz's retroactive feature request satisfaction wand
....
[daniels] Kamion: shit man, can I borrow that wand?
[lamont] daniels: you're not getting out of xorg work that easily
[daniels] damnit!

Playing a DVD on Windows XP

Recently, my gf and I watched A Room to Rent on my fathers laptop. While watching the movie, the laptop did the following stupid things:

1. Start a previously unknown program to play the dvd, that apparently had no way to make it go full screen. This means that there are 4 programs on my fathers machine that can play a DVD, and all of them cannot even get close to Totem for ease of use.
   
2. Turn on the screensaver
   
3. Go into hibernation
   
4. Shutdown due to no battery life, with absolutely no warning. No beeps, no interrupting the movie, nothing.
   

Not impressed.

But my machine now boots again, so I am back to being useful.

Adventures with Windows XP

As some of you may already know, I have most of the training towards an MCSE, and actually have an MCP (on Windows 2000 Server). However, I exited the MS game in late Febuary and am glad I did so. (BTW, I am still looking for a job)

Since yesterday, I have been house sitting for my parents, looking after their two dogs. While this does bring the advantage of having a vehicle at my disposal, it also means that I am forced to use one of 2 computers: my father's brand-new XP Home laptop, or my step-mother's ancient 98 box.

Suddenly, I am reminded all over again why I chose to exit the Windows world. My list of complaints includes the following:

• The start menu is an unusable piece of crap. Honestly, my "slow" gnome-menu loads quicker than this. Also, applications are not sorted according to function, but by whatever the application developmer wanted, usually name.
• There is no easy way to burn an ISO. I decided to download the Colony 2 live cd to test on my fathers laptop, as part of a general goal of moving him over. After I downloaded the ISO, I right-clicked on it, and looked for "Burn to CD" thingy. Not there. Turns out I have to trust some random bits from the internet for this one.
• My father also recently purchased a digital SLR camera. It is very nice, but the software they ship with it is, as can be assumed, terrible.
• Select and middle-click paste. I never realized exactly how much I use this until I tried to do it on brothers XP machine (he has since migrated to Ubuntu and loves it).
• The machine is unacceptably slow, even after a cold boot. The problem only gets worse as the time goes on. My Breezy box has now run for 1 week and is still as responsive as ever, despite this little bug eating all my memory. There is no particular reason that my home machine could not run for months without being shutdown, due to smart packaging (not needing to reboot after a software install. See next) and good design.
• My father also asked me to setup an old parallel port scanner on his machine. Turns out the old software that comes with it freezes both my parents machines hard. So hard that only a hardware reset works. Umm, ok then. Also, when installing the software, I was forced to restart the machine.
• The old default windows widgets are truly ugly but turning on the happy XP default theme not only uses more memory but also causes me to think I am back in pre-school again.

Now that being said, there are some nice things about XP. Because this version of XP was created by Sony for the laptop, the wireless and the rest of the fancy hardware just works. Now, if they stopped all their stupid Sony-crap programs from starting up by default...

(This blog post written on a Windows XP machine and thus may contain viruses (or is it virii?))

User Profiles

I have just finished reading (and re-reading) a post by Paul Drain about locking the screen and the xscreensaver in general.

I agree with him that Xscreensaver is crap, as far as its configuration dialog goes. I also like the idea of the configure screensaver and lock screen on the right click menu.

However, I do not agree about the "User knows how to use their desktop thing". The reason I disagree with it is that anything that is usable by Aunt Tillie is also usable by Joe Hacker, and Joe Hacker can figure out how to change stuff by themselves.

The proof of this is in the following: Joes and Tillies alike are moving to Mac OS X and Ubuntu. And Joe's are even moving from such l33t distros like Gentoo.

So I say again:

Just because you known your way around a desktop doesn't mean that you don't want a usable one

Same sex legislation passed

After the great news of Walmart being rejected, I have also just learned that Canada has become the 3rd country in the world to allow same-sex marriage.
from the CBC

Now if I could only get a job today. That would really cap it off...

Walmart Rejected

I cannot tell you how much these words warm my heart.
from the CBC

Manila faithful flock to bury Sin

from the BBC, the best news service in the world. I wish the CBC was as smart. (But at least they do have ogg streams now)

The post with many titles

Recently, I read two excellent comments on the Ubuntu community and vision, by Michael Banck and Stephan Hermann. This is my quick story about that.

I started using Linux in August of 2003, after I finished Katimavik. I installed Red Hat 8.0 and later put Ximian Desktop on it. While I enjoyed using it, it was only when I installed Ubuntu in October of 2004 that I truly starting feeling part of the Linux community.

Shortly after that, I went to Mataro and the first Ubutu developer conference on my own money. That was sort of crazy, but there was a comment I heard there that really struck me. "You can't tell the difference between the Canonical people and the community". Now that is the kind of people I want to work with.

Anyway, the point of that long beginning was to discuss my latest crazy idea:

Gnome 3 today

The crux of my idea is that all the pieces are in place for one specific section of Gnome 3, and that is the image editing.

What I would like to see is a unified interface for image viewing, managing and editing.

How would this look? Here is how I would imagine it.

1. User opens image. Image is opened in a window somewhat like Eye of Gnome. Across the top are buttons for rotating the image, jumping to the next/previous image in the directoy and also 3 buttons for the "mode". They are labelled: View, Edit and Manage.
2. User clicks Edit, and see the gimp interface launch
3. User clicks Manage and sees an f-spot/gthumb window sidebar.

What is key is that the main image window doesn't change, you are just opening and closing extra windows around it.

The best part about this is that nothing much has to change. Only the 3 specific applications. We can roll this out slowly. Which brings me to my next part...

Now for the total crack

There is no reason why this could not be extended to every kind of document on the desktop. Open in a viewer, and the launch and edit interface.

Later, we can change the menus. There is an excellent mockup on the Gnome desktop-devel list