Invasion of the Forums

So recently, some $user entity joined a particular mailing-list. And starts asking questions. Nothing wrong with that!

Granted, quite a cannonade of questions. Sure, we can handle that. Showing off a profound lack of understanding what he’s dealing with. Right, we are patient, usually, and can explain (again) or point to specific doc sections (yet again). Asking quite dumb questions, often with a confrontational undertone. This is where it gets annoying.

Today, that new kid in the kindergarten came to an obvious conclusion. We need a proper forum! This current $thingy is unberable. And he would even provide the forum. No, wait, he already got a domain… Mind you, the $thingy he uses is a popular “forum frontend for mailing-lists”. I’ll try hard not to mention the name.

So he uses a third-party forum to access a mailing-list, because he can’t handle the mail. Can’t handle the forum either, obviously. And takes the forum front-end’s flaws as evidence a mailing-list is unusable, and we need a forum. This logic strikes me.

Did I mention the list’s topic is about email, quite in-depth, filtering, from an admin‘s perspective?

So he got his shiny new domain. I guess he’ll sit there forever, eye-balling his precious forum, constantly reloading the gazillion threads he started to see if anyone answered his questions. He forgot one thing, though — the knowledgeable folks who actually can answer his questions, and properly maintain the forum.

On to more productive things…

2.17.3 is OUT

We are pleased to announce the release of GARNOME 2.17.3 — ahead of the official GNOME release, which is expected to be announced soon (read hours). After constant updating, tweaking and testing, especially the last 2 days, the actual release was smooth and quickly done.

Get the code while it’s hot, and fix (ok, or report) bugs before anyone else does. Get the love now!

xsnow ?!

Dave, you are so right, xsnow is a great app for the holiday season (as is my “special” music CD dated 1994, but that would be a different story).

I first saw this years ago on my account in a Sparc Station pool. We have been limited to using OLVWM, but the admins where kind enough to add xsnow by default to the session early Dec. Nice surprise. I quickly got that for my own machines…

However, you probably do recall correctly, and there is an issue with running xsnow on a GNOME Desktop. At least it has been last time I checked. The issue is, that the snowflakes properly work with the background image, but cause “severe damage” to the icons on your Desktop. A snowflake falling right through these icons leave a trail behind, re-rendering the background image, instead of the icon. Just a couple of minutes, and you won’t see any icon unless you “wipe off the snow” with the mouse or, even better, a larg-ish window.

I spent some time hacking a custom version (2 years ago?), implementing some code from xpenguins. It kind of worked, and supported command line tweaking, but anything close to a smooth re-rendering appearance really hogged my CPU.

From your screenshot, it looks like there are no Desktop icons. So that would be the reason, why it now “works” for you running GNOME, I guess. Or maybe there finally *is* a fix? I need to check that… 🙂

(Unfortunately you still won’t see this on p.g.o, so I am going to poke you on IRC instead.)