This just in from Fintan:
Thanks to Jamie O'Leary of DIT Netsoc we have a venue available for the first Irish OpenSolaris meeting. So, the time and venue DIT, Kevin St @ 6:30, Tuesday 27th Sept Primary Speaker Darren Moffat, Solaris Security Architect and then a general discussion on what people would like to get out of the UG. Further details and directions for the exact location in DIT will be sent out before the UG meeting.
Some nice photos from (roughly) my part of the world, taken by Brian Dowdy when he was over for the recent Sun (Fitba’) World Cup in Edinburgh.
A few weeks ago I posted my initial reaction to the new ‘Add to Panel’ dialog that had snuck into Ubuntu Breezy, and it wasn’t very positive 
It also provoked the most comments I’ve ever had on a blog entry, many in agreement, and some not.
To his credit, Manu took my comments very well, pointed out one or two things about the design that I hadn’t noticed, and asked me if I’d blog about it again once the design had settled down a bit.
So, here I am looking at it again.
On the positive side, it now fits on an 800×600 screen, and the categories are all filled out a bit more, so the initial “what a waste of space” reaction is gone (although it still hits a bit if you scroll down to the Internet and Multimedia sections, which only have one item apiece in them.)
To be honest, I don’t think I’m ever really going to like the OSX SystemPrefs-like layout; the first impression you get when the window opens is that the icons are arranged almost randomly, because they’re sorted in three dimensions rather than the simple alphabetical list we’ve all become used to. The description of each applet is also rather hidden away (near the bottom of the dialog), compared to the old design where it’s right beside the applet in question. Tooltips might work better here.
The search box is promising, but needs a little more work to be spot on (ignoring, for the moment, the fact that it works like nothing else in GNOME). It filters the visible list based on what you type, searching both the applet names and descriptions. So, typing ‘sound’ will leave you with just the “Volume Control” applet on display. It doesn’t actually select any results, though, even when there’s only one matching applet, so you can’t just hit Enter straight away to add it. Nor are the results ranked in any way, so if I search for ‘log’, I get ‘Blog Entry Poster’ and ‘Log Out’ in that order, even though it’s most likely ‘Log Out’ that I’m looking for. That’s probably not a big deal with the small search domain we’re dealing with here, though.
Another problem is that the applet descriptions can’t (and shouldn’t) include every word that a user will search for. As an example, the first four search terms I used to try and ‘find’ the Rhythmbox applet were MP3, CD, player and jukebox, none of which gave me any matches. We’d probably need some sort of hidden keyword system for this to work as well as Apple’s does.
Other minor gripes are that it doesn’t currently allow multiple selections, and longer applet names get clipped. A bigger issue is the icons on display don’t seem to respect the current theme, which will need to be fixed to be considered accessible.
Verdict: it’s a lot better, and I expect I could live with it. But personally I still prefer the old one
And here was me thinking Bastien was going to a proper uni… turns out it’s really just Battersea Poly
An interesting defection indeed.
So, I guess 2.12 is the first major GNOME release in a long time where we’ve really made no attempt at any sort of UI review. Either this means we don’t need them any more, which would be great, or we (the GUP team) just suck granite pebbles for not getting around to it this time 
Oh, it’s the “England and Wales” team now is it, Bastien? (Actually that’s another reason the whole thing annoys the rest of us… there have been plenty Welsh and yes, even the odd Scot turning out for the Podgy XI over the years, but it’s funny how they’re all “English” when they win…)
As for hoping Motherwell lose… that’s more of a racing certainty than a flight of fancy I would wager! But that’s one thing I do have in common with England fans– when you lose most of the time, it turns winning into an occasion that the glory-hunting Rangers/Celtic/Man Utd/Chelsea/big-club-of-your-choice types can never truly appreciate
So, it looks like England are going to win some burned sticks of wood because, essentially, it rained a lot. According to the hype in the media, this is about as exciting as cricket gets, which says it all really.
Michael Sheard died yesterday at the age of 65. Anyone under the age of 30 will probably recognise the RADA-trained Aberdonian from his roles in The Empire Strikes Back and two Indiana Jones movies.
For those of us on the wrong side and living in the UK, though, he will forever be the scariest schoolteacher on the planet– Maurice Bronson, the bespectacled, be-wigged languages teacher at Grange Hill, and arch-enemy of artistic, chain-smoking rebel pupil Danny Kendall (who, after two years of running battles in the corridors, was to die in Bronson’s car when he blacked out at the wheel after stealing it).
They don’t make them like they used to…
Last week saw the 700th anniversary of the execution by the English of William Wallace, a cultural icon to Scots around the globe.
Forget what you saw in Braveheart; most of that was Hollywood tosh– if nothing else, Mel Gibson is about a foot shorter than the real thing. (Hence the in-joke in the movie about him “not being tall enough”.)
Wallace did lead the Scots to an unlikely victory over the English at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, but almost certainly without having painted a saltire on his face. The English won the return leg at Falkirk the following year, however, though Wallace escaped. In the aftermath, he relinquished his title of Guardian of the Kingdom of Scotland and Leader of its Armies, which had been deferred upon him by Robert the Bruce (later of spider fame) after Stirling Bridge. He was jointly succeeded by Robert himself.
In 1305, Wallace was betrayed by Scottish baron Sir John de Menteith, who delivered him to the English near Glasgow (in an area ironically called Robroyston). He was marched down to London, and tried for treason. “I cannot be a traitor”, Wallace said, “for I owe (Edward I) no allegiance. He is not my sovereign; he never received my homage.”
Unsurprisingly, Wallace was found guilty, and, at Smithfield, on August 23rd, 1305, he became only the second person to be hanged, drawn and quartered. His head adorned a spike on London Bridge, and his limbs were separately dispatched to Perth, Stirling, Berwick and Newcastle, so that no shrine would be available to his followers.
Needless to say, the Scots were a bit peeved about this, and in the following 10 years, under Robert the Bruce (who became King of Scotland in 1306 following another victory over Edward I), they finally saw off any English pretensions to control the northern British kingdom, most notably at Bannockburn in 1314. In 1328, the English conceded that Robert was king of an independent nation, which Scotland remained until 1603, a year which saw James I of England and VI of Scotland become the United Kingdom’s first monarch. Despite that small setback, we’re still just about holding ’em off to this very day
