Older blog entries for redi (starting at number 149)

Fedora desktop suckage due to KDE 4.0

I can't drag files from konqueror to the desktop or vice versa (meant to be fixed in KDE 4.1)

I can't reduce the panel size because the clock resizes itself wrongly and wraps to the top edge of the screen. The bug report was summarily closed because it's been fixed upstream. Except it hasn't, in a perfect example of the situation apenwarr describes:

With 4.1 just around the corner, it's time to close off 4.0 bugs. In the off chance that I'm wrong in believing this to be fixed in 4.1, please reopen. :)

You're wrong and the smiley face doesn't change the fact you didn't bother to check.

Screen Saver Settings gives me the option of blank screen or random (which will pick from the list of blank screen, and erm, that's it.)

Something regularly swallows Alt-Tab so I can't cycle through windows.

I have files in ~/Desktop that aren't shown on my desktop and stranger still: icons on my desktop that don't refer to any files. Clicking the settings button on the icon tells me its location is ~/Desktop and its name is 0889.html.gz, but ls ~/Desktop/0* shows no matches. Whose clever idea was it to separate the contents of ~/Desktop and the contents of my desktop?

All in all, a significantly worse desktop experience than Fedora 8. The new things that actually work are pointless bells & whistles that I couldn't give a flying toss about. I understand why the KDE team made a dot-oh release like this, but I can't understand why distros thought it was ready to ship. Fedora had better not turn from a RHEL beta-testing environment into an alpha-testing one. I like Red Hat and hope they are successful making money, but for the first time in over a decade I'm seriously considering switching distro.

I agree with lkcl that you can avoid being marked as a spammer by taking 30 seconds to say what your involvement is in open-source software. Linking to a brand new Wordpress account that has no content doesn't convince me you're doing anything except preparing to spam (see one of today's new accounts.)

Create a new account could recommend being more descriptive, to protect against the trigger-happy spam police (I include myself in that category.)

ncm, yep, I only mentioned the one that most annoyed me, as I'd already done one hatchet job on it in the #cplusplus channel at work. There are a few sensible rules, though they tend to be in the blindingly-obvious category, rather than useful e.g. "Use the C++ keyword explicit for constructors with one argument" - not really a style tip, more like "remember to tie your laces when you put your shoes on."

Update: I hadn't noticed they require ALL_CAPS for enumerator names. Epic fail.

Having read the Google C++ Style Guide I can safely say I would never work for Google. Any style guide that recommends 2-stage construction "if at all possible" is shit. That style is, as Stroustrup said eight years ago, a relic of pre-exception C++.

Dear Advogato,

I've been too busy to read you recently, except for a few people's diaries that I watch for updates. I hope you don't mind.

I thought you might like to know I released a new version of PStreams yesterday, but you probably don't care. I've also resumed porting STLsoft and Pantheios to Solaris, and made my biggest change yet to GCC: GNU Compiler Collection, fixing something I helped break back in February this year.

Until next time.

movement, brilliant! Humm, Pastor Roger Byrd ... "Roger" is so close to "Roget" I think he may be a thesaurus and therefore doesn't recognise god.

ncm, thanks for sharing that. As an ex-physicist who is very skeptical of the entire astronomy/cosmology field I think the poster's explanation for the behaviour makes a lot of sense.

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain.

The three stages of expertise

Ruby is a cult.

You can ignore one or two fanboys who want to teach you why they're right and you're wrong, but after the hundredth one raving about Ruby's unique features it just gets laughable.

Hint: Smalltalk. C'mon, kids, try to explain why Ruby is good without the rhetoric, you're just exposing your ignorance.

I'm off to the ACCU conference tomorrow and have just bought an Asus Eee on which I plan to install GHC in time for Simon Peyton-Jones' talk. I'm pretty impressed with it so far - it meets all my criteria for a convenient way to ssh to my home PC (cheap, lightweight, wireless, *nix, proper keyboard, fits in my larger pockets.)

Over the past week I've been porting STLsoft to Sun's compilers and Solaris. Pantheios now works with Sun compilers on Linux or Solaris. Once I submit those patches my next step is to get it working with GCC on Solaris. I must say, Solaris system headers are a lot nicer to read than GNU ones. Solving a glibc include-order bug happened in spite of having access to the full source code, not because of it!

Hank Paulson, who I had assumed to be a fairly well-educated man, said yesterday the US economy is in a "downcline". This is rather conturbing information, and a matter of real discern. We must keep our crongers fissed that it does not become a more serious deturn, I suppose.

Thinking about that stupid word make me regret recently coining the term "deducerator" for C++ functions such as std::back_inserter and std::make_pair. Although it was suggested as a joke, I do think it's more memorable than Object Generator, or the less specific "creator function" used by Matthew Wilson in his books. I think functional languages call them constructors, but that would obviously be confusing in C++.

jtauber, that's due to GNU bash. Bash remembers that you changed dir via the symlink, and preserves that information in your pwd, which is why bash's pwd command has a -P option to see the physical pwd, not symbolic one.

cannam, to uncertify someone just certify them as Observer. You make a very good point otherwise, making it optional would be an improvement.