Older blog entries for sisob (starting at number 99)

Palm Tungsten T2

My Grandad is getting me a Handheld for Christmas and I'm pretty sure I wanna get a Palm Tungsten T2. Anyone have any experiences with these in General or in particular with Linux?

I'm pretty confident that I can get it up and running over bluetooth and installing software on the main memory and such. The only thing I'm not sure about is if I can get files onto an extra SD Memory Card if I buy one.

I have to decide by the end of the day :/


Really terrible news about Ettore. I really can't accept that it has actually happened. I didn't know him at all really, but had encountered him and his work and was really exciting about talking to him about F-Spot. My heart goes out to all the Ximian and old time Gnomers who have no doubt been hit the worst by this and by Chema's passing. And of course to their families and friends.

Life
Spent a week in hospital. Need radiotheaphy for another damned tumour. I'm not that worried about it tho, kinda getting used to all this. Just hope I don't need more chemo cus that's really nasty. May not quite get first year Uni finished as a result.

As a result of all this I've moved my computer to the bottom floor of the house and have changed to a bedroom on the middle floor instead of in the Loft to save me all the stairs climbing and so that my parents can look after me easier. Sounds a bit sad having my parents look after me, but I'm too tired to care.

Technology
Need to get my Desktop PC onto the wireless network now that it's not beside the router. I've had mixed sucess with a Dlink DWL-520+ using the acx100 open source driver.

I'm thinking about buying a laptop. My desktop is beginning to annoy me. It would need a fair bit of upgrading before I'd be happy with it, and Laptops are getting so good nowadays, I figure I could just switch over to using a laptop for most things and use my desktop as a file server and for beta testing gnome and downloading stuff etc..

I've kind of fallen in love with the look of Packard Bell Easynote T but i need to shop around a bit. I'd be like spending 3/4 of the money that I have in this world :/ Not sure why I like the look of it soo much. It's really thin and has a nice understated elegance unlike some of the shiny silver to black plastic things you get nowadays.


Life and Evo

Evolution 1.5
I tried (after a backup) to use evolution 1.5 with my current evolution folder, but unfortunately it's not quite ready for the task. None of my contacts were imported, neither were most of my mail folders, and the IMAP support was fairly flakey. But it is looking really great, can't wait till it gets more useful :)

Life
It's been a long busy term. I came straight out of major surgert into University and now I'm paying the price. I think I'm anemic and the muscles in my back and leg are wrecked. I'm so tired of being sick...


Fast User Switching

I found out today when I was fiddling with GDM that it already has the ability to find out if a user is already logged in, and will even ask you if you want to use the existing session or start a new one. This is a major part of a possible "Fast User Switching" implementation for Gnome.


Bye Bye Blog-Spam

Ludovic: Thanks for suggesting MT Blacklist. It was able to remove 27 comments with the default blacklist and another 65 when I added the 3 urls of the spammers that hit me recently. Hopefully thanks to MT Blacklist I'll be alble to keep comments enabled, I really like having my blog interactive.


Linux 2.6

I'm now running Linux 2.6 from the rpms for Fedora. It's really hard to tell what's changed. For some reason my mouse is much faster and moving windows is creating a whole lot of artifacts. Can't really say I'm feeling any extra responsiveness or speed or anything like that :/


Weblog Spam

My Blog is getting seriously spamed. 66 ad-comments posted since this morning. FFS


It's the little things...

Dennis Cranston recently posted patches that HIGify the ell/nautilus error dialogs. This has been one of my pet pieves for quite a while.

Here's a before and after example of one of the dialogs:

<img src="http://sisob.tuxfamily.org/screenshots/Screenshot-nautilus-error-old.png">

<img src="http://sisob.tuxfamily.org/screenshots/Screenshot-Nautilus-error.png">

The only thing I can say against it is that the ... would be better placed closer to the start of the location string so that one can see the filename. This really is a great improvment. Thanks Dennis.


File Sharing in Linux

File Sharing in Linux has taken a pretty decent step forward recently:

<img alt="mldonkey.png" src="http://sisob.tuxfamily.org/archives/mldonkey-thumb.png" width="294" height="214" border="0" />

This is G2Gui, a new Ui for mlDonkey, which is a client for pretty much any P2P network you can think of. It's still in Alpha, and is still a bit fiddly to set up, but the UI is a whole lot better than anything I've seen on Linux(or Windows).


Evolution 2.5

Could Evolution 2.5 _be_ any sexier? It may not actually be useful yet, but it's going rock our worlds when it's done. It has my vote for inclusion in Gnome 2.6.

<img alt="Screenshot-Evolution-1.5.png" src="http://sisob.tuxfamily.org/archives/Screenshot-Evolution-1.5-thumb.png" width="355" height="273" border="0" />


Re: Matrix class

Kez: Here's my Matrix Class and an example program to use it. I'm afraid that I haven't really cleaned up or documented it very well, but hopefully it will speak for itself.

Don't know if it will make learning matrix multiplication any easier tho' :)


Have been really busy of late. College work is really building up. I'm learning Assembly, Computer Architecture, Digital Logic Design (Designing Circuts) , Electrotechnology, some Physics, Maths(Matricies and Logic) and Programming. It's all really interesting, but yeah, takes time.

Got bored today and wrote a Java Class to do matrix multiplication. I wonder can I make it do gaussian elimination. Writing programs to do other parts of my course seems to be a good way to revise.

I'm trying to get Kernel 2.6.0 up and running so that I can test Gnome 2.5 on it. The changeover to alsa is probably the biggest issue. I've installed the fedora rpms and I'm gonna reboot now and see how I go.

The Gnome menus need some tidying up, but I'm not sure if I should mail the list about it or not. There have been loads of bugs about the menus, but some of them have been there since before 2.0, *sigh* it just takes so long to get some things done. The problem as I see it is that no-one really ships Gnome with un-modified menus. Well none of the big boys anyway. Sun, Ximian, Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE(I assume), Dropline etc... all change the menus. Debian and Gentoo are probably the biggest users of the default configuration.

So naturally as a result of this, there is less motivation to get the menus sorted out than there is other parts of the desktop.

I've also been thinking about how to do a better new launcher dialog. Must get some MS Windows and kde dialogs to look at. The current one has way to much crap in it. The "Advanced" Tab and the "Generic Name" and maybe even the "Type" widgets shouldn't be there. We can now auto-detect urls and stuff so Name/Comment/Location should be all that's needed. But what term can we use to describe the fact that you can use a uri or app name?


Luis: How do I keep informed about Gnome News? Well I used to read footnotes, but now that that is agregated into Planet Gnome, I just read Planet Gnome.

I'm also subscribed to loads of mailing lists: desktop-devel-list, usability, nautilus-list, gnome-announce-list, rhythmbox-devel, gossip-devel, foundation-list, gnome-bugsquad and maybe a few others. I'm also CCed on lots of bugs, and I've created quite a few myself. So I get plenty of Gnome related e-mail.

Last but not least, I spend a whole lot of time on irc.gnome.org so pick up a lot there from talking with hackers and users.


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