Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 21)

J5, I am glad that Gnome gets it. This is exactly the reason why it is my only desktop and will remain that way for a long time.

I am one of the designer/usablity people he talks about, if only just dabbling my feet right now. As per his comments about us not being code crunchers, it is true. This bug threatens to destroy my perfect zero of direct code changes in Gnome. Unfortunately, I have already ruined my perfect zero in terms of upload status into Ubuntu.

As a side note, I need something to parse my xchat logs better. Grep doesn't really cut it for vague searching. Remeber, as the terminal is a bug, this better be graphical. An Xchat beagle backend would be nice...

The Ubuntu Wiki Team

Our wiki team is really rocking. In the past week or so, we have attracted a fair number of new people and convinced some of the old people to get more involved (like me).

So thanks to: Matthew Parslow (major work on FileCompression, other work), Matthew Paul Thomas (copy edits and reminding us to use simple language), John Lambrects (amazing work on MultimediaApplications), Daniel Robitaille (general work on old wikipages), Ralph Wabel (many game docs and general organization), Matthew East (UserDocumentation work, general cleanup) and others.

If you want to help us out, come to #ubuntu-doc on Freenode.

Other Documentation team news

We have begun the process of respecing the FAQ Guide (and if I get my way, the Quick Guide as well). We invite all comments on the proposed new Table of Contents, which can be seen here

Random thoughts

• Change the volume with the scroll wheel is major cool
  
• Drivel is nice, very nice
  

As heard on #wikipedia

Q: How many Wikipedians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: 4, one to change the bulb, a second to write a lengthy article about the historical ramifications of changing light bulbs, and a third to start an edit war with the second. Oh, and the person that invariably lists it on VfD.
This light-bulb has blown. You can help Wikipedia by changing it.

(Note: VfD is Votes for Deletion, for all you non-wikipedians here)

In Ubuntu news, I have been cleaning up the wiki and working on getting applications into main for Edubuntu. In this task I have already made Martin Pitt cry with gcompris.

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...