Older blog entries for CaptainNemo (starting at number 15)

I'm very proud to have discovered a way to satisfy my wife's need for shopping. Ebay works like a charm... and the best part about it is that she hasn't spent anything yet :)

Now that we're talking about ebay, I'll drop a blatent plug for something I'm selling there.

<blatent plug>

Here is a nifty home made serial remote control receiver. It used to be great fun before my kid learned how to walk and flushed the remote control down the toilet. Anyway, there is no reserve and it's about to go pretty cheap (approx $2.25).

</blatent plug>

I've taken my Home Video VCD collection and made ISO's of them on my hdd. Now I'm trying to find a way to view them straight off the ISOs.

Do any of the standard movie players in Linux play the avseq01.dat file directly off the mounted iso, without going through the VCD interface? I've tried with xine/totem/mplayer but they don't work. I've asked questions in chat rooms but gotten less then sufficient answers.

I haven't put a lot of time into this, but if anyone has done this I'd be very pleased if you'd let me know.

It's been a while since I've been here! Personal life has been VERY busy, so all else is put aside... such is life.

Linux Mags and UK

So I've relocated to the UK, and to my disappointment I haven't been able to find ANY Linux mags in any of the newsagents. Why is this? In Italy and Germany every little Kiosk on the corner has anything you would want.

I've never had to DL iso's of the latest and greatest Linux distro, as it was without a doubt at the corner News agent... oh well...

I Konverted. Is that a Krime?

Ever since I can remember I have been a Gnome guy. When I was on Mandrake 9 I was less then satisfied with the speed of Gnome, and then when I got fed up with that and upgraded to Slackware I used the very nice Dropline Gnome. However, Nautilus still didn't satisfy my file management needs.

I hadn't even installed KDE when I installed Slackware, but in my quest to find the perfect PGP gui (which I'm still on) I flew over to linuxpackages.net and grabbed a copy of KDE 3.1.2.

Konquerer (the filemangager, not browser) was kluttered yet, usable. The desktop is friendly (with the "new" menu which is strangely absent from Gnome), the printing is wonderful, dialogs are beautiful. What more can I say?

So now I primarily use the KDE desktop, but still use other non-KDE apps, Abiword, Xchat, GAIM, Mozilla, etc... I miss my Gnome Fish, and all the pretty icons, but I'm trading that all for the functionality that KDE offers.

Gnome does have a bright future, and I will stay with whatever scratches my itch.

And yes, I am a bit annoyed with the Kontinual lack of Kreativity both camps show in the naming of their apps.

Xaraya

The saga continues, with version .905 released yesterday. I will be playing with it over the next few weeks, it shows lots of promise.

Certification Level

As reflected in the timestamp on my last diary entry, I have recently had VERY little time to contribute to the OSS community. I have sent in a few patches, but I have certainly not spent "a significant amount of time on free software" which is a requirement for the Journeyer level of certification that I now hold.

In my opinion, I don't fall into the Apprentice category either, since I am not "still striving to acquire the skills and standing in the community".

I would like to maintain some position in the advogato trust metric, so I am at a loss as to what to do. I am currently an "observer", but to ask people to certify me as such would be to withdraw their certification, if I understand it correctly.

Ideas?

I was chatting with someone the other day and he (she?) said that advogato was getting a bit too ``I-just-installed-debian''... well, like they say, ``If you can't beat them...''

XFree86

My Mandrake r128 bug bothered me enough to make me turn hardware acceleration off, when using the scroll bar the interface does freeze for a second then recovers. Yuck! I hope I can hold out until I can try to fix it. Anyway, I'm getting a new graphics card in Jan, so I should be alright then. I would try to recompile X, but I just don't have the time to look into it just now.

xaraya

Finally got around to taking a look at what these guys have been doing, nice stuff... Blocklayout was much friendlier then I expected. I'll be taking it for a bit of a swing in the next few days (weeks?), I'll post my findings here.

What interests me the most is the possibility to use the core and create xaraya distros/bundles. I haven't seen what type of installer is coming, but it would be nice to have it modular, so that individual module developers, can create a ``distro'' with just their module (and the modules it depends on), and have it plug in to the installation procedure, without having to hack the actual installation code.

Good Luck!

Jackpot!

After a long and tiring trip, I finally arrive at the Frankfurt Airport. I work my way to the regional train station, and in the few minutes before the train comes I decide to give my wife a call. I pull a few coins out of my pocket and drop on into the phone. I had nothing better to do then to chat while I waited for my train, so I proceeded to talk until the phone wanted more money. Feeling exceptionally stingy, I said goodbye and was promptly disconnected. Now comes the fun part. I hang up the phone, and it cranks out 14 times the amount of money that I spent on the phonecall!!!

I'm being intentionally vague in explaining exactly what I did, just in case it is reproduceable. I'll try the exact same procedure next time I see one of those phones... even if it was just a fluke of 'nature', hearing the sound of those shiny new euro cent coins clunking out of the phone made my day!

Mandrake/Gnome/X r128 server showstopper bug

I've finally gotten around to moving my desktop from win2k to Linux. I've been using Linux for the last few years on my dev box, and I had cygwin nicely configured under win2k. However, after a series of events I decided to take the plunge and replace my win2k interface with X, GNOME and Nautilus.

I was quite happy with Mandrakes version of Gnome 2 and Nautilus, but after a very short time ran into a "showstopper". The GTK scrollbar in some apps (xmms, gnucash, rpmdrake) would crash X.

I scoured the web for information, but this very short thread was the only reference I saw to the bug. I first asked in the Mandrake chat room about it, but was passed on to the Gnome people, so I chatted with them about it and got passed on to the X people. I asked on their irc channel but didn't recieve any responses.

So at this point I can either not use 3d acceleration, get another distro (which may or may not solve the problem), get another video card, or get another version of X. None of which I'm really looking forward to doing.

Any other ideas?

janschrage: Sorry, I didn't finish my thought... What I meant to say was ``PostNuke needs PostNuke users, and ProjectX needs ProjectX users''. When users start being a liability, is when they veer from the vision and start pushing separate directions. The Envolution/Encompass people were valuable users, they were just users of the wrong project, since their vision didn't coincide with that of PostNuke.

If I was writing a CMS to manage my personal site, the only user I'd care about is the only user that's going to be using it, Me. But since ProjectX has a far wider audience then just the developers, care needs to be taken to see to it that the users needs are being met. If ProjectX doesn't need users then what's the point in writing a program for a larger audience. Of course, like I said in my previous post, the needs of the users come after the needs of the developers, or else you'll find yourself in a situation where the users bite the hand that feeds it.

Even if you're only writing a program for your personal use, and you don't care about anything but your own needs, finding another person who has the same needs as you and starts using your code would be a huge benefit. Now you have 2 pairs of eyes on your code and any bugs will surface twice as fast. Even if your user never contributes anything but bug-reports, he may recommend your software to another user who becomes a developer, or forks off and creates a whole new beast out of your code (which is a good thing).

So I guess to sum it all up, my thoughts are: if you're writing a program for an audience greater then the developers you need users. If not, then users are an asset. Either way, users are a good thing :)

And, I do get a kick out of knowing that my code is being used by someone other then myself, it wouldn't be enough to keep me working on a project though.

janschrage: Thinking that a project doesn't need users is what lead PostNuke to fork from PHPNuke. Here's the deal:

When PostNuke forked from PHPNuke, it brought along a huge group of users. These were people who were already using PHPNuke and for whatever reason (the energy, the people, the code) they decided to use PostNuke. For the most part these ``users'' had production sites which they, against the warnings of many of the developers, immediately moved to PostNuke. They wanted/needed support for their current site. They did not have the 1.0 vision. They were not PostNuke (as per the Vision) users.

PostNuke needs PostNuke users, however, when it comes to listening to users, this must be done after the developers have reached their goals (post version 1.0). I have to agree with you that without the developer there will be no software, and I hope that ProjectX will be open to it's users/co-developers and their suggestions and ideas.

Treat users like your greatest asset and they will turn around and become your greatest asset.

niceguyeddie, I have never had any training (formal or otherwise) in management, so your `rant' was quite interesting, now my rant :).

While I'm sure there is a lot that we can learn from commercial software project management, the dynamic nature of open source projects makes the overhead that Commercial software management carries with it unneeded. I think that is the point that ESR was making.

Bringing your thoughts about goals and management together, I'll blockquote some more ESR...

Can we save defining goals as a justification for the overhead of conventional software project management? Perhaps; but to do so, we'll need good reason to believe that management committees and corporate roadmaps are more successful at defining worthy and widely shared goals than the project leaders and tribal elders who fill the analogous role in the open-source world.

That is on the face of it a pretty hard case to make. And it's not so much the open-source side of the balance (the longevity of Emacs, or Linus Torvalds's ability to mobilize hordes of developers with talk of ``world domination'') that makes it tough. Rather, it's the demonstrated awfulness of conventional mechanisms for defining the goals of software projects.

Like I said in my previous diary entry, having first hand experience leads me to question much of what ESR puts forward in his papers, so I'm not going to argue any of what he says. I do tend to think that overmanagement can be more harmful to an opensource project then undermanagement... it is a bazaar afterall.