Tried out the latest garnome (which is fairly close to Gnome 2.4 I think). After fixing the wrong URLs and installing all the extra base dependencies, got it running.
A little better than the last time I tried. Screws up the desktop icons, the fonts and menus.
You still can't cycle through workspaces in metacity which makes it unusable for me. And gnome-terminal is still horribly flickery compared to konsole.
Oh well.
Is there an RSS aggregator[1] for Linux[2] that will compile on RH8[3] and doesn't require Java[4], and is a GUI[5] ?
[1] not firebird's RSS reader extension
[2] not sharpreader et al
[3] not straw or krss
[4] not newsmonster
[5] not rawdog et al
Apparently not. Anybody know if anyone's been playing with a trust metric style RSS aggregator ?
Just discovered that Apache's mod_alias is no better at enabling a website to be relocatable (no dependency on absolute paths) than PHP's require() was. The target URL has to be an absolute file path and it's rather difficult to redirect the top-level URL.
So I ended up (again) with a bunch of hacks. Sigh.
The Mozilla people have tried to please all the users before: it was called Seamonkey, and it was a total UI disaster. Firebird appears to be heading in the same direction.
If you can't understand the benefits of a "small core, lots of powerful extensions" approach, I can only assume that you've never used Seamonkey, or you've no experience of the vast majority of browser users out there. Sys admins needing to configure a deployment of browsers, web developers, "more configured than thou" geeks, and such, are quite capable of installing extensions, using about:config etc. There's absolutely no reason to imperil the default browser for normal users for these minorities.
So, I built a recent Firebird CVS build. Until this point, I've been very impressed with the focus on a simple shipped UI for the end user.
And then I find a new advanced panel in the prefs. Full of meaningless crap about SSL versions and the like.
A little prodding on IRC:
<mconnor> movement: the SSL prefs are the tip of the iceberg
<mconnor> all of the security prefs from seamonkey
<mconnor> will be in Firebird for 0.8
<mconnor> bury them in a dialog accessed from somewhere, and those who want to feel like "super secure hack proof l33td00ds" can tweak
It was nice while it lasted.
So I finally got FireBird CVS to build. It's been broken for days.
Unfortunately it appears that you need two trees in order to build ThunderBird as well. Not great given how large the source is, and that the automated builds don't work on RH8 (and don't include xft of course)
Having specific experience can mean a lot. Entrenched experience of particular libraries and technologies is not simply a matter of "learning the APIs". There is a whole body of knowledge on top of that; things like:
o bugs and idiosyncracies, their root cause, and how to work around them
o specific terminology and conventions
o preferred techniques for solving problems within specific frameworks
All of these things are only picked up by heavy work with the particular technologies, and *they count*. If you have a fixed-term contract, who are you going to pick ? The guy who is easily capable of learning all these things, but will take weeks and weeks learning the stuff, or the guy who is sickeningly familiar with the crap of the particular technology, and has a large body of ready solutions in his head?
It is absolutely not as simple as "go with the guy with the better general skills" ...
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
