Farewell Tel

After a couple of weeks of speculation, former England captain Terry Butcher is officially departing his post as Motherwell boss to take up the reins at Sydney FC in Oz.

He’s been at the helm since Motherwell went into administration in 2002, and despite the sort of budget that entailed, nonetheless took us to a couple of cup semis, one final, and consecutive top six finishes in the SPL. While sometimes guilty of displaying all the tactical subtlety you’d expect from a 6’4″ centre-back, Big Tel did a sterling job under the circumstances, was well-liked by the fans and the media alike, and goes with everyone’s best wishes.

Assistant manager Maurice Malpas takes over, with his former Dundee United and Scotland teammate Paul Hegarty rumoured to be joining him as number two.

apt-get install java

From now on, that’s pretty much all you’ll need to do to install the latest JRE/JDK on your Linux box1… Sun have just changed the way they license Java binaries to Linux (and OpenSolaris) distros. Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo are already taking advantage of this, along with NexentaOS, BeleniX, and SchilliX on the OpenSolaris front. Read the DLJ FAQ, or get more info at the jds-distros project website.

1 Ok, actually it’s apt-get install sun-java5-[jre|jdk]

That was close…

Kudos to the Thunderbird team for adding a neck-saving feature (maybe it’s been there forever, but I’ve only just encountered it tonight)… an alert that pops up when you try to send a mail using the keyboard shortcut rather than clicking Send. How I’ve laughed in the past whenever I’ve sent incomplete/embarrassing/borderline-litigious emails by mistake (usually when trying to use some other keyboard shortcut, followed by Enter) before I’d counted to ten and rewritten them :)

Now, you could well argue that it’s a poor shortcut (Cmd-Enter on Mac, presumably Ctrl-Enter on others) that’s easy to hit by mistake. But it’s kind of a standard one these days, so the warning is appreciated in the meantime until they pick a better one.

Road to Hell and Back

Went along to the last night of Chris Rea‘s farewell tour at the Olympia in Dublin last night… the tickets were one of last year’s Christmas presents, so I’d been looking forward to it for a while!

I hadn’t bought any of his albums for a few years, so I was a little surprised at just how rootsy/bluesy a lot of his recent stuff was… although with post-near-death projects like Blue Guitars under his belt, I don’t suppose I should have been. Not that I was at all bothered by that; I enjoy a good bit of blues guitar as much as the next man (although I can take or leave the lyrics, but that’s true of most of the stuff I like). Julie much preferred the songs from his more chart-bothering days though– “Road to Hell”, “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)”, “Let’s Dance” et al. Even on those, she thought there was a bit too much guitar noodling, and normally I would have agreed, but I didn’t mind it last night… mostly I because I can’t remember the last time I saw a slide guitarist play live, so I was too busy trying to watch and pick up some tips :)

Was a wee bit disappointed that he didn’t have anything to say for himself during or afterwards, given the “end of an era” nature of the evening, but maybe he’s just one of those guys who prefers to let his music do the talking. And nobody could begrudge him that.

All over the Places

While working on a proposal for desktop defaults for our next version of the Java Desktop System, I’ve been somewhat perturbed by the mess that our concept of “Places” is in.

These screenshots are from Ubuntu Dapper as I’m on my Powerbook at the moment, but IIRC the vanilla community version isn’t significantly different (except for the Documents ‘place’ that Ubuntu has– but we have that in JDS too so that’s part of my problem as well). I have one bookmark and a few network places set up– this is one of my everyday, working desktops, so my experiences are presumably fairly typical.

The user’s first encounter is most likely on the Places menu on the panel:

Places submenu on main menu

Then when they open a file, they get this collection of Places instead– now their bookmarks are at the bottom, and they can choose from devices that weren’t available on the Places menu:

Places sidebar in file selector

Using nautilus in spatial mode, we get this different content and ordering again– and a third different term for the home folder:

Places menu in nautilus spatial mode

And using nautilus in Browse mode, the Places sidebar and Go menu don’t even agree with each other, let alone anything else:

Places sidebar and Go menu in nautilus browse mode

Now, obviously a wee bit of context sensitivity is appropriate… in the file selector, you’re unlikely to want to open files from the CD Burner or Trash locations for example (although I’d be quite happy to allow opening from Trash– I always get annoyed at OSes that force you to drag things out the trash before you can look at them again). But surely we can do a better job of consistency here overall? My Places are my Places wherever I’m accessing them, and in general I’d expect to see the same ones in the same order.

Or is it just me…?

Ten Years On

It’s ten years today since Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 pupils and their teacher in the small Scottish rural town of Dunblane.

I won’t make much of a fuss about that because the townsfolk themselves have decided not to, but I do still remember the morning I parked up outside work at Bournemouth Airport, and heard the news on the radio. It was all rather surreal, as many generations of my family (including my brothers, but not me) grew up in Dunblane; my parents were married there, some of their friends still live there, and my grandparents are buried there. Although I’d never lived there myself, I’d had enough of a connection with the place over the years to realise how utterly improbable a setting it was for such an event… but I suppose that’s what people always say.

Ack! FUI!

Glynn mentioned Marney’s departure1 and her Bonehead List… just to remind folks we’ve had a (slightly older and slightly GNOME-ised) version of this list on the GUP website for a couple of years, which I’d encourage everyone to think about before they start a new project. It’s interesting to see how the list has evolved since Marney worked in the Accessibility Program Office, and as Sun have become even more involved with open source projects… I should probably update the list on the GUP website accordingly.

1Which I’m also sad about… Marney was one of the people who interviewed me for my job at Sun, and was my dotted-line manager for a couple of years.