Cerumbin
17. October 2006
Falls noch jemand das Glück/Pech hat katholisch zu sein, sollte er sich das Kabarett Cherubim unbedingt mal anschauen.
“API stable”
13. October 2006
Of course it is very nice to keep a platform stable over a period of time. But if we want to do that, we should do it correctly. And for me API stability means, that all widgets behave the same they behaved in the stable release before, even if the behaviour was a bit wrong in the previous release.
So Gtk+ 2.10 introduces this bug because the behaviour of GtkAboutDialog changed. I guess the behaviour was not correct before but that really doesn’t matter.
I just imagine how many bugs an application written for Gnome 2.0 and Gtk+ 2.0 will have today if it had not been changed since.
So please do not argue that there is not need for 3.0 because we don’t need API changes…
BTW, thanks much to Don Scorgie for helping so much fixing this help bug.
It’s over!
10. October 2006
It’s finally over now! I have written my last exam for the summer term yesterday! Damn, 5 exams in 4 weeks is really hard if three of them belong to those which are known to be the most difficult.
But it’s over, it’s over, it’s over!
libanjutamm arrives slowly
7. October 2006
In the little time I was not motivated to continue learning for my math exam on Monday I mostly finished libanjutamm. It is a bit of a hack anywhere but it is possible to get a plugin loaded in anjuta though implementing interfaces does not work yet. There is even a reference documentation!
Take a look at the Sourceview SVN if you want.
Anjuta Bounties
3. October 2006
There are now some bounties offered on the anjuta website. Feel free to take some them if you want to improve anjuta and earn some money. Thanks to donors to Anjuta Fund, notably Adam Dingle who would
be giving a significant amount of donation.
Of course everyone is also invited to fix others this. Check Bugzilla for open issues.
libthreepointzero (was: Gnome 3.0)
28. September 2006
Last night, I discussed with Philip about gnome’s api and it’s future.
As you can read in his blogs, there are some problems with wrapping the C API to modern programming languages:
- Lists (double-linked and single-linked)
- Trees
- etc.
For libanjutamm to become a really good wrapper, I would have to copy lots of code from tinymail which is not really a good idea. I was thinking about creating a libtreepointzero which does implement lists, trees and possibly some other stuff in a way that modern programming languages can you it. Philip already wrote most of the stuff for tinymail so the biggest advantage would be that it can be used by other applications.
If there are other people interested in this library, it would be important to have language bindings in a very early stage to be able to change the API in favor of having better language bindings.
This will also give me a nice point to demand a changed gnome 3.0 api.
BTW, Prashanth Mohan, what strange university are you at?
What about Gnome 3.0?
25. September 2006
Why and when?
To me, Gnome 3.0 (or ThreePointZero) looks like a phantom. There are several thoughts filed about it in the wiki but it’s completly unclear when work on 3.0 will be started and what will be the real goals. Nobody knows if 3.0 will come after 2.18, 2.20 or 2.22.
I personally think that Gnome 3.0 should come after 2.18 because the platform is mostly cleaned up and it’s really time for a break!
How I would like to see 3.0
-
Platform: Developers hate platform changes! So little changes here would be great. There are a few things which need integration for example GUniqueApp, a gnome-vfs replacement and of course all the deprecated stuff will disappear. A little API clean-up here and there would be good but I do not think that the changes should be that big as from 1.4 to 2.0.
Imporant for 3.0 is that people get more aware that for usual Desktop applications it’s much easier to use Python, C# or C++ instead of C and that (Gnome == C) != TRUE. That would also mean that really all needed libraries are covered by the language bindings. - Desktop: Most agreement seems to be in using a more document-oriented approach. This does not mean to force the user to use this approach but it should be made easier. There is this very cool gimmie project which might replace the panel somehow.
- Integration: It would be really cool if the user would not know wether an application he uses was made for XFCE, Gnome or KDE. It should simply work and look like any other application on the Desktop. FreeDesktop.org has come a long way but for 3.0 we would have the possibility to throw much incompatible ballast away. Of course this is an not a Gnome-only problem.
These are just my thoughts and don’t give to much about them because I am not a gnome core developer and I may even have missed lots of things that are already planned for 3.0.
BTW (and for me not to miss the link), Maintainer looks really cool!
Why DRM is not a solution!
22. September 2006
This is a reply to Rodney Dawes’ post on DRM:
Why DRM cannot work
DRM wants to make people able to hear their music or view their videos without seeing or accessing data. While it is no problem to encrypt data in a save way, it has to be unencrypted if the user wants to do anything useful with it. If it is unencrypted* the user is able to do anything with it that he wants and that’s not what the music industry wants. Houston, we have a problem.
* in the player, the hardware, in the air, wherever
Of course you can try to make it extremly difficult for the user to break your system but this leads to the crappy implementations you see all the time.
Why DRM is obsolete
There is a much better technique as DRM, that is signing the sold music/videos with a secret, unremovable key. This can be done to mp3 for example. Now, the user can do with it’s data whatever he wants but once he does something what law does not permit, the right owner knows who is to judge.
The only music shop where I buy only music using exactly this signing technology which was developed at the Frauenhofer Institut (where mp3 was developed, too). And therefore it is the only webshop where you can listen to legal music on Linux without doing any crap.
Vista RC1
16. September 2006
After registering at microsoft and downloading Vista RC1 yesterday (2,5 GB) I decided to give it a try today. I had not installed Windows on my Notebook after my harddisk died last time but had left 10 GB free space in the partition table.
Installation
After booting up from the DVD and waiting some time a complete graphical installation wizards starts. You have to fill out your language, your Key and accept the license agreement. There are two installation modes, “Update” and “Expert”. “Update” was not availible as I did not start the installation out of Windows. In Expert mode you have exactly one choice, the partition information. There is an fdisk front-end that looks quite good though it does not know about linux partition types and gave me a bad error trying to format a linux partition with ntfs. Anyway, after deleting my spare partition and letting it create it’s own one, Vista was installed without demanging my other linux partitions while overriding grub.
Two reboots are necessary until the installation is finished, after the first you can enter your username and choose the background picture.
Hardware
As expected, anything worked out of the box like it did with dapper. I have a Centrino notebook which has no special hardware.
– The WLAN drivers seem to be better in Windows because they connect faster. I hope this will improve in Edgy
– Suspend to RAM is also faster on Windows
Software
There is lot of stuff preinstalled I would rather not need, like Media Center. The new Internet Explorer looks interesting but I immediately downloaded Firefox 2.0 Beta which works very good, too. All in all, Windows looks very media centered and wants to lead you to buy DRM-stuff very often.
The “Run…” field in the menu has been replaced with something which is more or less simular to the Deskbar-applet in Gnome.
Look and Feel
If there is some bling in Vista, it seems to be disabled with my graphic hardware. I really look forward to AIXGL in Edgy which hopefully supports my hardware.
The default theme looks much cooler as the ugly used in Windows XP. IMHO Gnome should also use a better default theme, maybe even parts of this suggestion.
Conclusion
I am a bit disappointed so far. I had expected that they would include really cool features in Vista which would really make me think about switchting back to Windows but they did not. There is nothing with is not also availible in Ubuntu Dapper.
Musik befreit!
15. September 2006
Mit Erstaunen habe ich heute bei Heise Online gelesen, dass endlich das erste DRM-freie Musikportal in Deutschland eröffnet hat. Nicht nur das, sie haben auch wirklich gute Musik und lassen den ganzen Chartkram erstmal komplett weg. Die Preise sind zwar auch nicht günstiger als bei anderen Portalen, aber wenigstens kann ich die Musik gemütlich auf eine CD brennen, auf meine iPod überspielen oder auf meinem mp3-Server lagern und das alles völlig problemlos unter Linux. Wenn man die Preise mit denen von Amazon vergleicht, spart man aber dennoch ein paar Euro auch wenn man natürlich keine CD mit Verpackung erhält.
Ich hoffe das Portal wird ein Erfolg, deshalb will ich den Link auch nicht vorenthalten und entschuldige mich schon mal für die Werbung: Akuma.de.