Category: Work

Step back in time

Gah… spent half the afternoon today trying to work out why all my
autogen.sh scripts were suddenly and silently not generating configure
scripts any more. Turned out that my Powerbook’s clock had reset to
January 1 1904 when the battery ran out this morning (pmud
doesn’t seem to work on my G4, so I can’t predict when it’s going to
happen). But come on guys, some sort of warning message would
have been nice…

In other news, the Centra on the business park has finally seen the light, and is now selling both Diet and sugar-stoked regular Irn Bru. Now if only its Daily Record deliveries were a bit more reliable…

gcalctool colours

Spent a little time towards the end of last week working with Rich on bug #157962, to get some colour back into gcalctool. We haven’t yet come up with a complete solution, which would involve an option that picked colours from the theme by default (I’m still thinking about that one), but in the meantime you can now copy the cvs-supplied .gcacltoolrc file to your homedir to change this boring old look into something slightly more sexy. (Or, of course, you can invent your own colour scheme to match your GNOME theme du jour.)

Just Another Day at Sun…

Apparently, a plane was spotted circling a couple of Sun campuses yesterday trailing a “Just Another Day at Red Hat” banner. As one Sun wag put it, the conclusion to be drawn is presumably that a typical day at Red Hat involves going round in circles with your head in the clouds worrying about the launch of Solaris 10 :)

(Or, as another put it, “So Red Hat has moved from the ‘ignoring Sun’ to ‘laughing at Sun’
stage. On to stage three…”)

Accessible theme thoughts

[Also posted to d-d-l]

Since I seem to be spending most of my time playing catch-up with GNOME’s increasingly-sprawling accessible themes these days, I got to wondering if going forward we can’t put more of the responsibility on the individual modules to install accessible icons alongside their regular ones.

The current situation just doesn’t seem very workable going forward, if we’re considering accessibility to be a core feature. We don’t expect applications to submit all their icons to gnome-icon-theme for inclusion– they just install their own. A similar process for accessible themes seems like a logical extension to me.

Modules installing appropriate icons into $(themedir)/HighContrast etc. would be one way, assuming it’s actually possible to work out where those themes lives at install time, but that sounds rather ugly. Anyone any better ideas?

WAH

Spent my first full day working at home today since I got to the bottom of my VPN/wireless router problems. If Sun had their way I’d probably be doing it three or four times a week, but immeasurably improved as the experience is compared to teleworking over a dial-up connection, I just can’t imagine wanting to do it very often while the office is just a 20 minute drive away.