Older blog entries for jvic (starting at number 30)

TV SoftwareLivre rocks

TV SoftwareLivre has just made avaliable for download the videos from FISL 6.0. Check out Mark Wielaard and Dalibor Topic's "Escape the Java Trap" ;)

Soon they'll also be selling all videos on DVD.

BTW, you need Xiph.Org's codecs to watch it. I managed to watch it with VLC.

dm rant

We Linux users are so proud of our multitask/multiuser system. We love having a separate /home partition for user data, and we love that each user in the system has his own little space in the system.

We put up telecenters where lots of people are able to remotely connect to a machine, and they all share the same server as if there were actually many computers running.

Now, why is it that we can't simply do:

  • Lock the current session
  • and start a new session with a new user?

It does seem like it's so simple, doesn't it? MacOSX and WinXP have this figured out years ago, and we multitask/multiuser Linux people can't do it.

No, the gdm "Start new session" doesn't count because you actually can only execute that before you lock the current session. You can't do it if you've locked the session already. Which totally misses the point of it, IMHO.

And yes, there are hacks. But they're just that, hacks... each one of them i've tried has some kind of annoying usability problem.

Phew... after spending hours playing with gdm/kdm/xdm/mdkkdm to get this working, i had to put this out, sorry.

On building distributable linux binaries

Andrew, also take a look at Autopackage. These guys have been doing lots of research about all issues concerning distributable linux binaries, and what's great is they're producing lots of documentation, not to mention some nice tools to make your life easier.

In this tutorial, you can find a chapter about binary portability.

And for crazy/interesting thoughts about software deployment in general, read this "dream" Mike Hearn had of having some kind of linux desktop platform.

Speak Java?

Java is now the most popular language on Sourceforge projects.

1. Java (16772 projects)
2. C++ (16754 projects)
3. C (15956 projects)

JG point release

Andrew says we should make a point release of Java-Gnome in a week or so, so everybody: if you've got stuff to commit, please do it within a week ;)

A new planet is born

Here's a new planet you should watch on your agregator: Planet Autopackage! Yay!

Tango and Oxygen

I already knew about Tango, but now just found out about Oxygen, which apparently is an "arm" of the Appeal project.

Apparently there are some nice similarities between Tango and Oxygen... both apply this outline to icons, and they seem to use almost the same color palette (Oxygen's palette has a few more colors). A very Firefox-ish thing. One interesting thing in Oxygen is that they have a "normal" color palette, and a "vibrant" color palette. Maybe that's an interesting concept.

Oh well, i just hope these folks shake hands and would create a unified (in one way or another) icon set for the free desktop.

Buy CONISLI t-shirts

The folks that organized CONISLI are going through a financial situation. The company that was helping make it happen decided, few days before the event, that they wouldn't do it anymore.

So some folks took the responsability of making it happen, pay the bill. You can buy t-shirts and bags to help them. They need to sell 300 t-shirts and 100 bags to raise R$7.000.

Back from CONISLI

I just for back from CONISLI 2005. The event could've been a little bit more organized, but it was nice, it was fun definitely.

It was also my first time in São Paulo. What can i say? What a messy huge town, if you wanna know. Everything's too big, too distant, and too gray. But it was cool anyway.

Oh!, oh!, i bought an Elliott Smith album!! Yaaay. It's just impossible to find anything by Elliott here in Salvador; so i couldn't waste the opportunity of buying it in Sampa. Also bought 2 albums by the Teenage Fanclub. Now, i just don't want to talk about how much it costed $$$ me... (ouch)

Let's talk about Free Java

I've got an invitation to give a talk about Free Java in a uni here, and i was taking a look at the slides i presented at the beginning of this year, at the II Festival -- it's great to literally see how Classpath improved since then.

Gimp X Drawing shapes

(Please don't take this as trolling!)

So, today i was making some quick images for a presentation, when i decided i wanted to draw some circles in one of them. As the nice Gimp user i am, i thought "ok, that's a job for Inkscape...", and then i suddenly realise there's no Inkscape installed on that machine. "Hm, let me download it... hmmm... nopes, no internet connection".

"So, Gimp's all i got. I know Gimp can make circles. But how is it? I remember it's something with the selection tool... hmmmm...", i take some chances filling a selection and all that, but i just can't remember what goes next... and then i just gave up, made some ugly circles with a pen.

The point of that story is: i used to turn my back on the people who complained "hey, Gimp doesn't have a shape drawing tool!", replying that "That's Inkscape's job", and sending them a link to the Gimp tutorial... but... ermm... really, why, oh why can't Gimp have a basic shape drawing tool?

I'm not talking about full drawing support (that's for Inkscape), but just some tool which will automatically do the "select-fill-shrink-cut" steps so the user don't need to memorize it. That'd be very handy.

PS: I don't know if i'll file a bug about that because i know probably 2,000 people already did that, so...

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