Advogato blog for ssp

17 Jun 2008

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:12:17 GMT

The weird thing about the decadence discussion is all the talk about how we made this "awesome desktop" which is like totally awesome and the only reason nobody uses it that they are just happy enough with Windows or OS X.

The problem with that is that GNOME is not awesome; it is in fact a pile of junk where basic stuff DOES NOT WORK. It is not not even competitive with Windows 95, let alone Windows XP or OS X.

Maybe that has something to do with why nobody cares.

10 Oct 2007

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 21:35:01 GMT

Power Information

The AC Power has been unplugged. The system is now using battery power. To celebrate, let's frantically seek the harddisk for several seconds.

"o hai i made u a notafication bubble"

9 Sep 2007

Sun, 9 Sep 2007 09:29:04 GMT

An extremely interesting blog about algorithms, data structures, parallel programming etc.

10 Dec 2006

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 02:37:37 GMT

Sysprof 1.0.8 is out with a fix for an embarrassing bug that caused panics and lockups on preemptive kernels.

27 Jul 2006

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:10:44 GMT

Randall Hyde writes about The Fallacy of Premature Optimization and how Tony Hoare's original quote is widely misunderstood.

Found via Rico Mariani's blog

25 Feb 2006

Sat, 25 Feb 2006 18:05:06 GMT

Wobble Me Harder
Ever since Kristian introduced them in Luminocity, Wobbly Windows have been an indispensable part of the modern composited desktop. Now they are also available in Metacity/AIGLX, the compositing manager for the adult in you:

This is how they work:

7 Dec 2005

Wed, 7 Dec 2005 21:05:14 GMT

The Composite and Damage extensions don't work all that well.

19 Oct 2005

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 16:07:21 GMT

Make it Boring

Vincent, it's true that users don't get passionate about GNOME. But they also don't get passionate about Windows, even though you can get boatloads of crack for it. Would users get more passionate about Windows if it shipped with a little pig that would sit in corner of the panel and sometimes make funny sounds? Would it be really cool if the pig was called Henry and was actually some internal joke from Microsoft?

Sorry, but users don't give a flying fuck. Only people who already believe that "GNOME is teh best desktop environment on the planet" (and actually understand what the that sentence means) will think that Wanda is cute. It's not that I think the fish is really harmful. It's an easteregg and that's fine -- just don't kid yourself and think that it's building any passion or loyalty in (real) users, because it isn't.

The way to get loyal users is to make GNOME reliable, useful and fast, write more applications like Evince, fix the session manager, somehow convince distributions that they should scrap Firefox and ship Epiphany instead, get rid of retarded "This application can't be automatically restarted" dialogs, make GNOME office competitive, first with OpenOffice, then with MS Office, and fix all the annoying bugs.

13 Oct 2005

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 15:05:11 GMT

Behdad, what is most likely going on is that your X server is running software fallbacks to draw the antialiased glyphs.

To draw one pixel of an antialiased glyph, the X server has to (a) read the existing pixel, (b) blend that pixel with the alpha value for the glyph pixel, then (c) write the result back to the screen. The killer is (a). Reading pixels out of video memory is really, really, really slow. Perversely enough, the better video card you have, the more likely it is that it has lots of memory, and the worse performance you get.

Try running the antialiased test again with

     XAANoOffscreenPixmaps       False

in your xorg.conf file. This will cause gnome-terminal to draw to system memory which is much faster for antialiasing. Unfortuntately it will also cause other stuff such as painting the background to become slower.

8 Oct 2005

Sat, 8 Oct 2005 00:05:50 GMT

Performance Lifecycle
Rico Mariani on the Performance Lifecycle:

If you've ever heard me speak you'll probably remember me cautioning that the old cliché ``Premature Optimization is the Root of All Evil'' often leads to very bad thinking like ``Just make it work the easy way first and worry about making it fast later.'' Now of course the reason that this is bad is that the most egregious performance mistakes are generally not in execution but in design and those mistakes are made very early in the project - it's important to have a design that is sound from a performance perspective. That means at least some consideration should be given to performance right away.

Sysprof
Sysprof 1.0 is out. It's the profiler for people who don't care about profilers.

Google Reader
Google Reader is the first thing to come out of Google that simply isn't very impressive. It doesn't really work, and when it does, it's too slow. And tts user interface should be much simpler.

I'd expect it to improve though; it does have some good parts.