Eugenia on JDS2

So, it seems Eugenia didn’t like JDS2 much. But considering it’s never been touted as anything other than JDS1 plus system management tools, and it’s still aimed squarely at the likes of tightly-administered banks and call centres, I’d have been more concerned if the review hadn’t been padded out with some stuff about the games
not working properly.

Sure JDS has bugs, and I’d be the first to admit that some of them aren’t too hard to find if you’re not one of our target users (and Eugenia knows exactly who they are). But at the end of the day I’d rather that Sun continues to fix them based on customers’ rather than journalists’ priorities, even if the odd predictably-unflattering
review ensues.

Quids In

Off to Belfast in the morning for a long weekend. Despite having grown up with pounds and pence in Scotland, digging some out for the short trip up the road from Dublin has made me realise just how old-fashioned they look nowadays.

Private Joke

Apparently our new Sun Ireland intranet site no longer allows us to see all our local colleagues’ mugshots, because doing so constitutes a “privacy issue”. I wonder if they’ll be taking down all our cubicle name plates too, in case we accidentally go round to somebody’s desk and see their face.

Contrasting Fortunes

Have spent most of today hacking away at gnome-themes again, trying to fill in the holes that our accessible themes currently leave on the development branch of JDS. If GNOME is serious about accessibility, ‘provision of a high contrast application icon’ really should be a mimimum integration criterion.

Will be spending the rest of the afternoon sticking my oar into the FTP login and Connect to
Server dialogs again, though, which should be more fun 🙂

Top tips

It’s official– I am personally going to throttle the next person who commits a Foobar Preferences menu item to the JDS build tree with the tooltip:

   [Configure|Set|Change] your foobar [options|preferences|settings]

:o)

Crash… ah ah!

*Sigh*… having spent the last few weeks upgrading the kernel on my laptop and getting everything working just the way I wanted, the hard disk fairies came on Friday and sprinkled their crash dust all over the innards of my trusty Travelstar.

A quick trip to Peats at lunchtime is called for I guess…

Java Desktop System Release 2 was announced this week, which includes some cool new enterprise management features and Java development tools. The only downside is that it’s still based on relatively old versions of GNOME and the GNU/Linux kernel, but hey– Release 3 should take care of that 🙂