Step back in time

Slightly crummy name, but great to see the first phase of the ZFS Time Slider project that Erwann, Niall and Tim have been working on coming together in time for our OpenSolaris 2008.11 release next month.

It works a bit like another company’s product of a similar name, except right now ours only takes regular snapshots to the same disk, rather than backing up to removable media (but we’ll probably end up doing that too). It’s not quite the auto-save function that Federico was talking about last week and at GUADEC, but it’s certainly nice to see some of the power of ZFS in use on the desktop at last.

HIG 2.2

I just bumped the stable version of the HIG to v2.2.  

Really it’s more of a 2.0.1 release, as none of the content has changed apart from the illustrations, which have all been updated to use the Clearlooks theme.  But given the number of people involved (Mihai Anca, Denis Anisimov, and Wouter Bron did the bulk of the illustrations) and the length of time it’s taken me to integrate them (about 9 months!), 2.2 seemed more appropriate…

(Unfortunately, nowadays you don’t get to see new versions of the HIG online until there’s a new release of gnome-devel-docs, and I know I just missed 2.24.0. But hopefully there’ll be another one along soon.)

Of course, this doesn’t address the more fundamental issue that the HIG now lags several years behind the curve of GNOME development. I’d like to think we’ll get around to doing something about that before the year is out.

On app-specific themeable icons

So, we’re attempting to follow this advice for a couple of OpenSolaris applications we’re working on.

It works fine for the hicolor icons, but the advice for themes that want to over-ride them is rather vague: “You can also provide icons for other themes in here [$pkgdatadir/icons], by installing them into a subdirectory for that theme.”The question is, who’s responsible for installing them? The theme or the app? Seems to me there are problems either way.

If the theme installs them, first it has to find out where that app installed its hicolor app-specific icons. It will usually be /usr/share/appname/icons/hicolor, but there’s no guarantee about the value of $pkgdatadir for any particular application.

Once over that hurdle, the theme is now stomping in the application’s territory. At best, uninstalling the app will leave a $pkgdatatdir/icons directory on your disk, containing a bunch of icons that aren’t going to be used any more. At worst, the app uninstall might just lazily blow away the $pkgdatadir directory altogether, wantonly deleting files that were installed by another package (the theme).

On the other hand, though, we surely can’t expect each app to be responsible for installing icons for every theme that wants to override them. Distros can of course patch those apps downstream with their branded icons du jour, but that will soon become cumbersome when there are more than two or three such apps. And independent theme artists, such as those who contribute to art.gnome.org, don’t have the luxury of patching any apps at all. So their themes would never be able to override app-specific icons.

So what to do? The more I work with themes, the more I wish they’d all go away and we’d just use a single, identifiably-GNOME look-and-feel like the grown-up desktops do 😛 

VirtualBox 2.0

Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0.0 was released today, and is available for download from virtualbox.org. New features include 64-bit guest support, host interface networking on Solaris and OS X hosts, support for nested paging on modern AMD CPUs, and a native front end for the OS X client (and a move to Qt 4 for the others).

More detailed changelog here.

Six Degrees of Richard Herring

The “Nationally Known Comedian” Richard Herring unleashed a thrilling new craze on the world during this week’s Collings and Herrin (sic) podcast… it goes like this1:

The aim of the game is to get between two specific Wikipedia entries using only the highlighted blue links. The player who navigates between the two pages within the fewest clicks, or uses the cleverest path is the winner. For example, to get from the Wikipedia page for American actress Argentina Brunetti to French anti-communist party La Cagoule, one could go via the following clicks:

  1. The Lone Ranger
  2. Chocolate
  3. Nestlé
  4. L’Oréal
  5. Eugène Schueller
  6. La Cagoule

(Argentina played a supporting role in the Lone Ranger in 1955, The Lone Ranger starred in a chocolate advertisment in the mid ninties advertising Rolos, Nestlé are a chocolate manufacturer, Nestlé are shareholders in L’Oréal, L’Oréal was founded by Eugène Schueller and Eugène Schueller provided financial support and held meetings for La Cagoule.)

Have fun.

1Description lifted from this RH forum to save me making up my own…

Tab frenzy

Have to admit I cringe every time somebody adds tabs to an application. Not because I have anything against appropriate use of tabs (and I’ll reserve judgment on which of the recent additions are appropriate for another day), but because it’s such a wasteful duplication of effort, with each instance doubtless having its own inevitable little bugs and inconsistencies.

The HIG advises against document-level tabs in an app, largely because at the time, the usability team hoped GNOME would have a tabbed window manager in its not-too-distant future. The tab-related activity in the past week has me thinking me that we need this more than ever! App developers shouldn’t have to implement basic window management features, and (perhaps more importantly) users shouldn’t be restricted to grouping documents from the same application into tabbed windows–with a tabbed WM, they could still do so if they wanted to of course, but they’d also be free to group windows by task or project, or indeed any other way they wanted.

Is it worth starting to think a bit harder about how a tabbed WM might work (I don’t think we’ve ever sat down to try to design one for GNOME, although I know at least one tabbed WM has been implemented before)?  Or is it just something that’s just never likely to happen?

Cruisin’

There probably aren’t many better places to have a beer and talk about GNOME, the universe and everything.

EDIT: Bit of a poor show on the communications front though– we knew nothing about the cake until it was finished (and have only just learned from Michael’s blog what it was for), or that we only had a few minutes to get off the boat the first time before it headed out again…

River cruise

A handful of my other photos of the evening on Flickr.

T -1 day

Like many of you, I’m sorting myself out tonight to fly to what will be my seventh GUADEC in Istanbul tomorrow. (I’ll actually be there for two weeks, as my wife is flying out after the conference to join me for a week’s vacation.)

Pleased that there’s a very healthy crowd of Sun desktop folks attending this year (18 at last count), and rumour has it we’ll have some OpenSolaris 2008.05 LiveCDs to be giving away, so you can play along live with John Rice’s talk 🙂 Hopefully I’ll also find a few interesting things to snap with the Lomo Fisheye camera I got for my birthday last month…

Après Match 2008

If there’s one thing that always brightens up RTÉ‘s coverage of the big fitba’ tournaments, it’s the Après Match team’s piss-takes of the Irish TV pundits, which are usually shown at the end of the live coverage or highlights programmes. They remind me a lot of the early Only an Excuse? sketches from back home.

I’d missed most of AM’s Euro 2008 efforts so far, so I was happy to find out tonight that they’re online here[1]. I presume the site will be updated as they do more throughout the tournament.

Naturally they’re much funnier if you’re familiar with the Irish TV stations’ football coverage, although the targets include the likes of Graeme Souness, Liam Brady and Frank Stapleton who are familiar enough to viewers in the UK and elsewhere. That said, they actually started with a Sky Sports send-up this year—just a pity Gary Cooke‘s impression of Andy Gray is one of the poorest I’ve heard any of them do, especially as Risteárd’s Richard Keys is right on the money!

[1] RealPlayer plugin required, and doesn’t seem to work with Firefox, I’m afraid