Older blog entries for gicmo (starting at number 35)

26 Jun 2006 »

Strange things happen at GUADEC ...

All began with some giggeling from behind the fence. There was a group of GNOME Hackers sitting around a table at the GUADEC Camping and hacking for fun and profit when said giggleing was first to hear from across the fence. The source of this turned out to be 3 Irish girls and 1 boy. When I told them to come over may of us belived that they would instantly be scared away by all the laptops and geeks but guess what .. the total opposite happend!
The come over and were uber-excited. "This is sooo cute. ... Ohh look at the cute foot. ... It's called GNOME. This is soo cool!" And all we demoed was gnome-screensaver and gedit :)
Here is the group photo:

There are 3 errors hidden on this photo. Spot them!

The guy really seemed to be interested so we even handed out one of the Fedora Core 5 DVDs that were included within the GUADEC Bag.

27 Mar 2006 (updated 27 Mar 2006 at 18:41 UTC) »

Bling, Bling
ChipX86 mentions the post from Mike about Cairo and semi-transaprent windows. I did the same work a while ago to make Gnome Launch box have nice RGBA *bling bling*. Since we some to get a lot of duplicated code here I really whish we had that directly in gtk. Also a gdk_compositor_is_running or something like that would be very very nice. I know there is a way for some window managers (e.g. metacity) to tell you (over selections and stuff) but having that in gdk/gtk would be way nicer. The real reason I blog though is LbFrame. It is basically a frame with round corners which can also handle transparency if the compositor is running. Now with Xgl and AiglX maybe more people are interested to use it or use it as a starting point for their own widgets. Also if you are one of the lucky ones that have fast compositing, you should really give Gnome Launch box another try. I use it as my Alt-F2 replacement. And I have some patches in the queue to make it even more rocking!

14 Feb 2006 »

Evolution + Scalix = Love
Today Scalix finally announced the Evolution Connector together with version 10 of their Server (including the free community edition). I have spent the last 3 of my university vacations in California to make this happen and it is a great fealing now that it is released. I am going to be in CA again for another 6 weeks starting from 27 Feburary to work some more on the Connector and Evolution. I totally love to work there and I specially wanna thank Carsten for being such a good boss and friend. Kudos to the whole scalix team! Go and try it out while it's hot ... :)

8 Feb 2006 (updated 8 Feb 2006 at 21:08 UTC) »

GMail + GTalk in the browser is crazy!
It's already working here ... not with my friend's gmail ... muahha :)

8 Feb 2006 »

We have come a long way
I am doing something wrong now, I know it, but oh well whatever. First I wanted to write something up about the parallels of Rousseau's political theory and all this fuzz about community and decisions. Second I told myself to just not post a statment because I bet people will surely get it wrong and try to deduce my position on that affair from what I am going to write now. Be warned, don't do it! Well anyway here we go: In response to

Profit:There is no damn natural law that businesses are there to make profit. What's the problem with break even? Go and watch The Corporation and see that even in the US it hasn't always been that way or read Profit over People
Time: I still have to fix a lot of bugs that were introduced because bad desicions were made under time preasure. People *always* tell me: "But next GNOME release is only in 6 month!" Don't get me wrong here, I can see the point ...
Users: So I hate that target group argument. Really. We should not have a target group but a target, or better a vision. I prefer the "make a damn rocking desktop" vision to the "get many many users" vision. Especially because we can achieve the second one by having the first one. (Again, don't get me wrong, 10x10 rocks.) And about that "don't let us hacker design the UI". Well I might not be a good designer at all, but I still feel that I can judge if I like the results or not. (I love nld10's panel btw.) I actually want to make a desktop that most people just love to work with, including us hackers. I mean think about how this whole linux thing started. I totally agree with the theory that software development is about passion. If I should spent my engery into GNOME, I want it tp be fun. I want a rocking desktop for myself!

To sum it up (in a declamatory way): In the first place I want a rocking desktop, not a good product. But thanks soo much Novell, Red Hat, VMware, Scalix ... for paying all the great people in the GNOME community for doing that.
Sorry for the bad english this time I was under time preassure :)

5 Feb 2006 (updated 5 Feb 2006 at 11:57 UTC) »

GNOME Desktop Mokups

Apropos rocking mokups; here is some more new, hot stuff:

2 3 4 5 6 7

Made by jon "desplesda" manning. Send him your Feedback.
I like the Clipboard thingy ...
Read detailed information here!

15 Dec 2005 »
CAIRO IS NOT: Magical eye candy WTF?!
It sure is! ;) Here is the prove:

Left: GNOME-Launch-Box with compositor sweetness. Rigth: GNOME-Launch-Box without in normal mode.

So I promised to blog when the code for this is available but I obviously forgot to do so. It hit svn a while ago. Get it with:
"svn co http://developer.imendio.com/svn/gnome-launch-box/trunk gnome-launch-box"
Start with it "gnome-launch-box -t" combined with a running composite manager for the real sweetness.

14 Dec 2005 (updated 14 Dec 2005 at 22:34 UTC) »
Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery
[Update] Quote corrected according to "about:epiphany" in epiphany. This just rocks! Thanks to chpe for telling me

21 Nov 2005 »
Hacking GNOME Launch Box for Fun and Profit

So after the headaches I had after doing some more GnomeVFS ACL work (more about that next week) I wanted to do something cool. Inspired by the deskbar applet I remembered that there was GNOME Launch Box. I checked out the lasted version from Imendio's svn and I was very pleased to see that it has gotten really stable, but the pseudo transparency was gone. :( So I though that would be the perfect "cool" thing I could do. A bit of Cairo learning, tons of source reading and a few gtk/gdk I had never heared of later I have it ready! Tada! First try and the fancy Final version of GNOME Launch Box with real transparency powered by XComposite. Hope you like it - I do. I am still shaping up the code so it can handle non transparent cases nicely as well but I am confident that I will be ready by mid-next week. I am going to continue hacking on it ... maybe we can have it in Gnome 2.14? :) By the way .. coding with Cairo is real fun.

2 Nov 2005 »
Schrödinger's cat and OpenGL
So I had the feeling that I didn't learn any new stuff in the Computer Science field for a long long time. At the beginning of this semester I had the very strong feeling that this had to change. I though learning OpenGL so I could help Soeren putting cool new eye candy in metacity (and the rest of the desktop) would be a good new "thing". So I ordered the famous redbook 2 weeks ago and I already made some good progress. And you know what? Doing all that linear algebra is real fun. I kinda missed that. Really. Scary at the same time!

I have 5 philosophy classes this semester including ones about political philosophy of early modern times (Hobbes, Lock, Rousseau), asian philosophy (buddhism, daoism, ...), economics and ethic, Nietzsche (ohh you gotta love him ...) and last but not least relativism (inspired by our all pope's critics of relativism). Everything very interesting. It's a bit scary how many things I learned in school about Hobbes and Co. were just wrong or at least half true. Oh well. Much reading ...

Ohh and this picture of Schrödinger's cat made me laught a long time. :)

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