Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 5)

KDE and Large source packages

Everytime I see an update to one of the large KDE packages, I am glad that I don't run Kubuntu or live behind a 56k line.

What strikes me about it is that large source packages are easier for upstream and that there has not been much communication regarding what is good for shipping. Now, that could be completely wrong.

Now, I am not a developer, but honestly, even I can see the bandwidth bill ticking over.

Riddell, are there plans a foot to do something about this?

Thanks

For the past number of weeks, the topic on #ubuntu-motu has included:

-Please don't complain about mono deps for next 2 weeks

-Please don't complain about X for the next 2 weeks

It occurred to me that I don't know if anyone has thanked Daniel Stone (our X guy) or Brandon Hale (our Mono guy) for their absolutely amazing work. Mostly, it has been bitching and bug filing it seems.

Thus, I would like to take a moment to say "Thanks!" to those 2 people (and the rest of the Ubuntu team) for all the great work.

There are a number of applications I would like to see packaged for Breezy:

• Koha - an open source library solution
• Mediawiki - by far the best Wiki engine out there, but unfortunately written in PHP.
• Fedora Directory Server - the GPL'ed Netscape server

Enough serious stuff, there are a number of nice games that would be awesome to package:

• S.C.O.U.R.G.E. - rogue-like game in the fine tradition of NetHack and Moria
• FreeOrion - cool 4x space game. I am hoping for the 0.3 release before Breezy
• Lincity-ng - a graphical update to the old classic Lincity, done by the great people at The Linux Game Tome
• Nexuiz - a GPL'ed first person shooter
• UFO: Alien Invasion - graphical remake of the great classic UFO

The games I am likely to try and package myself, but the server applications are completely beyond me. To my knowledge, no other distro ships either Koha or Mediawiki, so it would be a major coup. Oh, and keep updating Hula, that is a project that is going places.

If you are going to work on any of these, come chat in #ubuntu-motu on Freenode.

Ogg's big mistake

I really like ogg and the guys at the Xiph foundation. They have provided us with free and good codecs for video and audio.

But they also made one big, giant, glaring mistake:

.ogg as a file extension for both video and audio.

Why is this a mistake?

Well, to put it quite simply, it confuses users and computers. Users get confused because they can't tell what is a video and what is a audio. Case in point, I downloaded Jdub's excellent 10x10 speech. If I didn't have video thumbnailing, I wouldn't know that it is a video.

Computer get confused as well. Nautilus attempts to do a sound preview of the file, as it cannot tell the difference between the ogg audio and the ogg video.

Now, it is not too late Xiph! You can define a .ogv extension for video and leave .ogg for audio alone. Please, it is a simple thing to do.

Ok, chatting with jdub it appears that Thunar is exactly what I was looking for. I happen to like their current (possible) interface. Screenshot (from here)

Hello, my name is Corey Burger, and I think up crazy thinks regarding usability and other related matter.

I had a crazy new thought regarding file managers. Basically, every current file manager sucks.

The current mess with Spatial in Gnome and Ubuntu, and watching a friend use the OS X 10.3 file manager led me to some thoughts:

1. Single window is nice

2. You need an easy to go up and down the file tree

3. A side pane is also useful

Thus, I had thought:

A single pane file manager, similar to the OS X one, but with a row of buttons along the top, showing the file hierarchy. A user can click those to go back up the tree. Until they go down the tree to another folder, the icons for child folders remain.

The most common area where file managers fall down the dragging files up the tree. When a user drags a group of files over the button for a folder up the tree and pauses for a second, that folder opens, allowing them to drop it there. The same would happen if they dragging them over a folder in the sidepane.

Another current area where file managers fall down is chossing which folder to highlight when you have many selected. My file manager would grey out the icons to very light and when the cursor (not greyed out) is over the button or folder, it is highlighted.

To swim down the tree with something dragging, you can highlight-open in the same way.