Hello My Keboard Is Workng Again Hurray!

On my quest to become a more useful and agile Linux person, and to accept my shiny new laptop out for a spin, I'll be attending the Ohio LinuxFest for the first time, representing Ubuntu (and the Ubuntu Kentucky LoCo/Bluegrass Linux User Group) and GNOME.

Be sure to checkout GNOME two.28 and all of the great improvements made throughout this cycle (hopefully the last of the GNOME ii.x releases!)

Hope to see y'all at OLF and onward and upwardly to GNOME 3.0!

Finally getting effectually to writing this post. Information technology'southward way belatedly, and I repent for that, but I've been busy, so…

Almost exactly a month ago I turned 23, and decided to buy some new hardware.

These are my new 22″ Dell monitors, courtesy of my Dad. Both of these guys are capable of 1920×1080 (that'south 1080p to the HDTV oversupply), and are visually stunning. Equally with every piece of hardware, nothing'south absolutely perfect though. Merely at least the flaw hither is a tiny one: the buttons are highly annoying, requiring too much force to press and feels spongy. Still, the primary chore of these guys is to show me a lot of text, and these guys do that job quite well.

The coffee mug is new too. It was office of the souvenir from my Mom. Hard to decide which gift I love more. (That mug is HUGE!)

This is the real new hotness. My showtime new auto in 3.65 years. Specs: Core 2 Duo (P7350) 2.0GHz with 3MB of L2/core, 4GB of RAM, "500GB" (ahem, 466GB) Hard disk, 1920×1080 LED backlit screen, 9 Cell Battery, Intel Graphics and 802.11a/b/chiliad/n WiFi (making it a Centrino II machine), Backlit keyboard. Every component was picked for battery life, except the backlit keyboard which I just had to have… All for less than a thou dollars.

Well, the bad news was, when I pulled the machine from the box, it wouldn't boot. Wouldn't even plough on. Fortunately Dell sent out a dude, and it was up and running with a new motherboard. The repair guy was quick and very efficient, so on the overall I'd say the experience was positive, even if it meant I got sent a $900 paperweight straight from the mill. (One that I still had to install Ubuntu on. Shame on you lot Dell for non offering this machine with Ubuntu).

The bad news doesn't quite stop there, sadly. The keyboard is taking a long fourth dimension to get used to, and I'm being driven crazy by Dell's pathological cardinal layout:

That's correct kids. They swapped the menu and control keys. Every, unmarried time I endeavor to hit the right control fundamental, or the left arrow key, I hit the damned card key, and *headdesk*. The page upwards/down/home/end cluster is also hard to get used to, but I foresee myself figuring that one out sooner than this damned key swap… Argh.

One last downer before we move on to the goodies: the software worked amazingly out of the box. Every unmarried thing worked. About. For a little while, at to the lowest degree. I'm not quite ready to rebuild my kernel to get effectually a nuisance ACPI bug like the latter: I typically ready my CPU to as depression as possible, the display backlight down to as low as information technology will become, and ready the backlight off during daytime and on the medium "auto-off" setting at nighttime, and then there's no existent reason I need those keys working. The other bug is that the Ricoh card reader doesn't work, but I really don't use information technology, since my camera has a handy USB cablevision and I'one thousand quite used to using that. Merely I'd still like them to work, just to say "Ubuntu supported my hardware perfectly with zero configuration."

Okay, so the goodies:

2 headphone ports (and a microphone port, yay), in-lid webcam and microphone, slot loading DVD-RW bulldoze (I adore slot-loaders, why bother with the trays!), eSATA port, HDMI, non-locking lid… Dell actually got the design of these machines down. (Hell, this automobile compared side-by-side with a Macbook Pro… it'd exist really hard for me to choose.) The machine feels at least twice as fast as my three year old Toshiba machine, which I immediately attribute to its dual-cadre nature, and the battery life… oh the battery life. My old Toshiba chained me to a wall, quite literally. Started at around 1:30, degraded in about 18 months to xx minutes, now holds a accuse of about four minutes. My new auto, at all of its ability-saving glory: six hours, 45 minutes.

Enough with the hardware you say!

Life updates. The Ubuntu Kentucky LoCo has a group of folks heading up to the OhioLinux Fest. I should exist one of those folks, if things go well. I'thou likewise trying to piece of work out a way to go to the GNOME Boston Height if I can work out the money and particulars. I'd love to take a Nautilus hack session now that we accept people interested in working on it and the code is moving again. We'll run into how that all works out. And we have some other UDS coming up before long plenty, which I'd honey to attend once more and work with the new papercuts crew on some farther UI revisions. All things looking up for a nice GNOME 3.0 Nautilus cleanup.

Last minute thing (gosh, feels like I'1000 always request for things, merely hey, information technology's a good way to get a plug on by blog, if that counts for anything. Might increase your pagerank…): gotta find stickers for the new car. If you've got any dandy ones, I'd love to come across them! I received in the postal service a dainty ane from the Tinkerlog people, all the fashion from Germany, and a couple from the nice MoveOn.org folk, and of course at that place are the always nice Ubuntu stickers. But anyone who has seen my old sticker surface knows that I'm a fan of them…

As shortly equally I put the new ones on my laptop, I'll get a picture of that upwardly, simply I'm non quite certain how I want to lay them out as of now. Nevertheless in the planning phases.

And now, off to enjoy a sunny Saturday.

Like Mono? Hurray, information technology's included!

Don't like Mono? `sudo apt-go remove –purge mono-common` Hurray, information technology'southward gone!

It'south that easy people. Nosotros can bikeshed almost information technology for the next forever, only it'due south non going to matter because everyone's already picked their side of this battle and trenched in. Information technology's non plenty to see every Planet ping ponging about Mono, or every unmarried person on identi.ca pinging the !ubuntu group, or emails flying back and along in the hundreds on the mailing lists. It's not going to change until at that place is a reason for it to change, and correct at present, in that location just isn't. Everyone'south just existence argumentative to the indicate that it's counterproductive.

Meanwhile, the rest of us would like to terminate hearing about it so that nosotros can go back to piece of work. Things that really need to be discussed are besides decorated being drowned out by the huge signal:noise drop caused by all of this nonsense. Nosotros've got FreeDesktop.org absolutely in shambles in a fourth dimension when it's more critical than always to get right, with the development of so much new software including some other desktop completely in LXDE. Nosotros've got shifting infrastructure left and right with PulseAudio and udev and DeviceKit and Kernel Way Setting and you lot name what else coming downward the pipeline. GNOME's got piece of work to do on ToPaZ 2…ahem 3.0 with Zeitgeist and Shell and whatnot.

I AM Afraid OF PEOPLE Also Busy TALKING Well-nigh MONO TO WRITE CODE.
(/rant).

It's been a while since I've updated this blog, then I thought it was time to post an update (and Jorge called me out on Identica; follow me here. ;).

Things are moving upstream with notifications again, then hopefully we'll have a new spec revision ironed out very soon. Lots of patches to push upstream for both libnotify and notification-daemon too. Not much to run into yet though, stay tuned. You can see some of the discussed changes to the spec in my git branch.

The great Death by Ane Hundred Paper Cuts has reawakened quite a few old Nautilus bugs, so I've been trying to play catchup in that location. With all of the work going on to Client Side Windows by Alex and Empathy from Cosimo, nosotros've been left with a bit of a vacuum in Nautilus, so I'm trying to selection up the slack a scrap. Nosotros even so take a lot to become, and nosotros could really use some help, so feel free to end past #nautilus on gimpnet and come across where you can lend a hand. (And think, if nobody replies right away, await! Lots of different people in different fourth dimension zones on at different times).

The last development in my life is that I'one thousand finally heading back to school, just every bit soon as I tin handle all of the paperwork and such. This will probably cutting into my gratuitous time a bit more than, only at present that I take a much ameliorate grasp on what I'grand looking for from my education and what I intend to do with it (that is, working on Gratuitous Software), I'g hopeful that it won't cut into my community involvement. Wish me luck.

(Lastly, as a tiny request: as you may have noticed here or on identica, I don't really take a neat personal icon. If anyone in the community would like to make me 1 of those fancy hackergotchis, please contact me: I'd like to employ this image (CC-Past-NC) taken by Martijn van de Streek at UDS Jaunty, which is probably the most favorite photo I've had taken in the past few years, but I have a couple others if that ane won't piece of work. I mostly hibernate from cameras… Thanks in advance, and thanks Martijn for the motion-picture show!)

Yeah? No? Tell united states of america what you think

(Update: Add together the earlier and afterwards, as requested)

I did get a few details wrong, and people have came to me and told me, and I am very glad that I did go them incorrect.

First, the legal problems were copyright disclaimers, so they're no large deal here, typical stuff, which is a HUGE load off my mind. Thank goodness for that.

Secondly, the code is however in very bad shape and was mainly for demonstration purposes with the development team and the UI squad, which is too okay; the demo actually fabricated it look more consummate than it turns out to exist, which is also a expert thing because it will mean lots of chances for people in the GNOME community to get involved. I am so enthused to here this!

Thanks for everyone for clearing upward details for me; always feel costless to reply to me and make sure that what I'm saying is correct. (I'1000 factually wrong all the time, merely don't sue me ;).

Edit: Besides, I was told that this code may become under GPLv3, which very much excites me then this code will be truly free. This actually does make me feel a whole lot amend about the whole situation. Thanks once again anybody.

The big innovation (and controversy) coming out of the Desktop Experience team here at UDS seems to be the new notifications work going on. This is a large concern of mine, as I've worked on that code locally, and have definitely wanted to see some progress hither for ages. Unfortunately, the upstream is more or less dead or limping due to conflicting fourth dimension constraints on the pb developer, Christian Hammond.

Weighing in, I recollect that Approved's work hither is looking really good, and has a wonderful blueprint, but I do worry about some of the edge cases. The biggest other concern is that no effort until recently was put into contacting Christian Hammond at all, so it's substantially a fork/reimplementation, even if it is one that makes sense due to upstream'southward stagnation (until recent developments). Now that Libnotify and Notification-Daemon are upward for proposal for GNOME 2.26, it'southward merely now that we're looking into replacing it… Information technology'due south both unfortunate and opportunistic of Canonical to pull this out of their chapeau at UDS.

For those that are not here at UDS Jaunty at Google, information technology is important to understand some of the changes that we have discussed here. The first of which is the removal of "Actions" from notifications. This means that there will be no more buttons inside the notifications at all. The style that applications currently use libnotify is somewhat abusive to the original spec, where they should query for capabilities so use an action if the daemon supports it, but changing the daemon now to but never show actions will likely get out you with notifications that say "Please click the button below", and there is no button to press. Bugs to be filed, users to scream at us…

Notifications at present are simply there to evidence you the data almost what's happening on your machine. This can happen in ii ways; Synchronously, as yous press a push button like the volume or brightness controls, the notification comes upward and shows y'all the alter, and "unremarkably", how instant messengers like Pidgin with the libnotify plugin currently work.

Instead of having "Deportment" inside of the notification window, they will be moved to a panel applet, which will allow you to get to the awarding in question by clicking it. There have been a lot of discussions on what this console applet volition be like, but information technology is probably the biggest missing component in the discussion so far, since we haven't seen whatever prototypes on it, or what it'due south interface volition look like. The Design squad that'due south working on this seems to exist doing and so backside closed doors and beyond all contact by mere mortals like myself.

So, despite the conflict of the Bazaar vs the Cathedral in the situation nosotros're in, I'm feeling pretty good about the general work being done. I'g really hoping that I can be a function of information technology and it won't exist this cabal-similar state of affairs where I have to bring patches to Canonical's door and sacrifice a goat in offer to the Gods of the New Notification Daemon. Or, you know, I could always get off my bum and send my resume in ;).

*: I had planned to insert all kinds of wonderful pictures and a link to the wiki here, but unfortunately Google has outright outlawed the usage of cameras inside the buildings on their campus, and Canonical has to wait for some more than pattern piece of work before the wiki is up. GNOME community developer 0, Enormous Global Companies 2.

I have been rather quiet on the code frontier lately. It'southward non a issue of annihilation more than working on my own personal projects and spending entirely too much fourth dimension away from my computer. (That and getting everything in gild for UDS.) So I decided I'd share a teensy, tiny bit of what I've been working on, since I'grand excited about it…

Some fourth dimension ago on the Nautilus mailing list, the give-and-take came upwardly about so chosen "Miller Columns"; Apple tree calls this "NSBrowser", and it has a ton of history as far as tree visualizations go, dating dorsum to the Smalltalk guys in the 70s. I managed to bang together a trivial demonstration that took but a few hundred lines of C (I had some weird problem with Vala that it didn't want to work dorsum then). It looked like this.

I coded that upward, and promptly forgot about it. I thought that actually implementing it correctly over GtkTreeViews and GtkTreeViewColumns was going to be an accented nightmare, and I thought nix more of it.

Until my pet project needed a way to visualize a tree of items. Sigh.

The nuts of the beast piece of work fine, but there are still a ton of details to work out before it's up to snuff for my projection (and who knows, possibly Nautilus next?) The TreeView itself is an HBox, which has a new TreeView packed in every time the selection changes and any views further down the widget are destroyed. Each TreeView has a model that is set from a filter model of the previous model, so that we're only seeing the section of the tree we want in each cascaded tree.

The columns were really the biggest problem I hitting, every bit yous tin't add a GtkTreeViewColumn into multiple GtkTreeViews; instead, I created a class that has well-nigh the same interface every bit GtkTreeViewColumn (with some details needingly removed, and some details left to be reimplemented nether the new course), but creates a new column every time a new GtkTreeView is packed into the parent TreeView. All of the new columns backdrop are linked to the central column, such that when someone changes the TreeViewColumn in any way, all of the created TreeViewColumns are also automatically updated with the same details.

It's still very much a work in progress, and it needs a good cleanup earlier I go whatsoever further on it. But it was interesting enough for me to desire to share it. If you're interested in any more details, yous can e-mail me well-nigh information technology or notice me on IRC. For now it's shelved and then that I can become back to work on hating GooCanvas's silly canvas API and my pet project (and yes, I'll announce more details when it'southward actually more than fairy dust and graphite on sheets of tree).

And my sticker surface has a laptop to prove it.

Brilliantly retold by our pal Rupert on GimpNet, "Nautilus bugzilla is pretty much like whack-a-mole" (–interatom, April 23, 2004). Equally I'm feeling the demand for a bit of hammer time after a short hiatus due to family unit troubles, and to whack as many of these moles equally possible, and just equally a general friendly reminder for future reference for those also writing software in the community, I would like to direct your attention to a nice piece of documentation written by someone on the GNOME Documentation Team some fourth dimension ago (I would love to credit them for this, if you lot happen to know who it was peradventure):

Installing a Thumbnailer Plan in GNOME.

This document is the practical "How-to" guide for installing thumbnailers for whatsoever arbitrary format of your liking. If y'all detect that "application/x-arbitrary-filetype" is not getting thumbnails and you would like information technology to, please consult said certificate, file a bug against the piece of software relating to "awarding/x-arbitrary-filetype", inquire them to provide a program or control-line statement suitable for thumbnailing said documents, and update their software packages as to install said plan in the fashion described above. Tada, no more than complaining nearly the lack of thumbnails on OpenOffice documents, EPS/Postscript documents (should exist handled already by Evince these days), Word Documents, EXE files, and yes, fifty-fifty Folders if y'all wish.

(Equally an aside, does anyone know why OpenOffice doesn't supply a thumbnailer by default? I know they have a GNOME support package, this seems similar it would be 1 of the almost obvious things for said package to contain, particularly as the thumbnailer itself could be as simple as a couple of lines of already-written, but in need of a slight-update, python code to extract the thumbnail from the ODF zip. This is already a very old bug in Launchpad.)

This postal service closes GNOME bugs numbered #500519, #377786, #363006, #347694, and presumably issues #84927 if someone wanted to write a (light-headed) thumbnailer for "inode/directory".

In other news: I will be attention UDS for the first time ever, provided I can find time to actually buy the tickets ;), to aid work on the Jaunty Jackalope and the never-catastrophe boxing of Ubuntu Desktop Integration. Thank you Canonical for your considerations and generosity. It will exist great to get to meet with the rest of the team and discuss the hereafter direction of the GNOME Desktop in Ubuntu.

lockettpribue.blogspot.com

Source: https://blogs.gnome.org/awalton/

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