Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Woke up having a slight headache, probably because of the jet lag again. While waiting for the other guys to arrive we’ll go wandering about, the MIT building is a walking distance away. The walk should ease up recovery.

There’s no restaurant at the hotel, only a relatively small area for breakfast. Then again, it’s always better to concentrate on the essentials, the 24h coffee and complimentary net access makes up for it.

Checked my mail and my inbox had already exploded. Oh the work never ends…

I took a bus to work last two days for a change. It’s a bit over half an hour trip, little more than it takes to ride a bike, which gives you some time to kill. Naturally I tried browsing a bit, but alas within five minutes I was already feeling carsick, damn. 🙁

Convincing myself there are other ways to use it I tried the default Internet Radio channels. Connects fine, sound quality is rather good, for the moments you hear anything (2s music, 3s buffering, 2s music, 3s buffering, …) .. it was too much for GPRS, but that was to be expected. Might work with lower bitrate streams, but then, what would be the point?

As I seem to be ill-equipped to handle the device in a bus I need to figure out how to use it while riding a bike, which I do much, much more often anyway. One idea that comes to mind would be to mount it like an odometer and have it show a GPS map. Now that’s something I would be able to use 🙂

…at least when there’s no hint about the exact arguments you’re supposed to use.

Guess what parameters should you pass for sprintf(buf, _("memo_li_kb"), ...)?

1. Nothing
2. 0
3. (float)0.0
4. (long long)0
5. None of the above

Would it help if I told you valgrind is reporting Conditional jump or move depends on uninitialised value(s) if you use 2)?

As it happens the format string in this case is %lld kB but since the compiler never sees the format string (only the unique ID) it has no way of warning you when the argument type doesn’t match the format (warning: long long int format, different type arg (arg 2)). In fact all the “help” you get from the compiler is constant stream of false warnings (warning: too many arguments for format)

Now, repeat the exercise for unique IDs sfil_li_size_100B_10kB and sfil_li_size_10kB_100kB. You can probably guess the valid range in both cases, but see if it helps you 🙂

As an added twist after the format string bug was fixed the dialog in which it was shown was truncating the strings it was supposed to be showing. Earlier the string would be something like 4611910937274744832 kB because of the few uninitialised bytes, which is pretty much longer than the “correct” 0 kB.

Fix one bug and another one shows up. What else is new?

Found my new favorite useless warning dialog from Evolution. The old Failed to do foo: Success is beginning to grow old. This new one is better in line with the GNOME 2.x philosophy, keep it simple and short, and short it is:

The title says Evolution Warning so there’s still some room for improvement:

Ah, another Galeon 1.3 sucks rant (see also Erich’s comments). At first I thought to make a point by point reply, but I quickly realized I would’ve been mostly repeating myself. So I’ll just skip the points which are coming straight from GNOME 2.x and gtk+ 2.x, there’s no point in whining about Galeon working the way gtk+ does. And as it is a rewrite, things don’t suddenly just appear unless someone does the work and writes the code. So far no one has bothered to do so (just as no one has bothered porting the apparently “perfect” Galeon 1.2 to GNOME 2.x either.)

So let’s see the few points which we actually decided to make work the way they do.

Pressing Ctrl-U in the address line or any smart bookmark opens the source code of the current tab instead of just clearing the input field (without copying its content to the clipboard).

This is rather funny, actually, as Galeon is trying very hard to support Emacs-keybinding and in general trying to make some sense between actions with shortcuts in menus and actions built into widgets. The order in which keyboard events are handled in gtk+ is peculiar, but basically the ugly hacks in Galeon should ensure most Emacs keybindings (which conflict with HIG bindings) should just work. Of course this needs a setting similar to gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs" in your ~/.gtkrc-2.0

If you click the “New” button for opening a new tab, it always opens at the end of the tab list instead of directly after the current tab. So I always have to move that tab back to where it should be. This sucks in Firefox, too. In Galeon 1.2.x there was a switch for this behaviour (as well there is in Opera), so both behaviours were possible: “Insert new tabs after current tabs”.

The way tabs work in Galeon is that related tabs are kept together while unrelated tabs are opened at the end. A link on a page opened in a new tab is considered related, opening a new (blank) tab from menu or command line is not.

The bookmark editor in Galeon 1.3.x just sucks:

Ok, here at least I agree. I think there's only one person who really understands how the, IMHO over-engineered, bookmarks code really works and he hasn't been around for quite a while. The rest of us are just scared of that code, or something. Favicons work for me, though.

Not all configuration options can be changed using Galeon’s configuration interface nor using the GNOME Control Center. Which user knows that he can change even more options by using gconf-editor or opening the URL about:config by typing it into the address field?!? A big minus in ergonomy for GNOME 2.x and Galeon 1.3.x.

Have you ever actually looked at the number of options in about:config? I seriously hope you're not seriously suggesting moving them all in the UI. I think even Mozilla left out some options from distracting the user.

The basic principle with the preferences is rather simple, really. The defaults should just work. If most users are likely to want or need to tweak some preference it's in the UI. For niche uses there's gconf-editor an about:config.

I can't help it but the overall impression I got from the rant was basically Galeon 1.3 is different from Galeon 1.2... Well, duh!

The whole Galeon team will be in the GNOME Developer's Summit in Boston next weekend. You might want to bribe us with few beers to fix your Galeon pet peeves 🙂

“to enable more mature software at launch”

Uh, oh, the decision to ship with Duke Nukem Forever ® is backfiring…

The first patches leading to the next generation maemo have emerged in the form of porting various components to work with a newer version of D-BUS. The fun part is that the patches weren’t done by the usual suspects (we’re still quite busy fixing bugsadding the final polish) but from Philip Van Hoof who was apparently just having fun. Cool!

The patches should give us a nice kick start with future development that’ll start Real Soon Now. We’ll try to put more D-BUS -dependent packages available in the subversion repository as soon as possible just to keep you from getting bored 🙂

The Number 1 single was:
Donna Summer – I Feel Love

Date Engine – everyHit.com

For some weird reason I got this image in my mind of a baby being born listening to iPod nano. I’ve been suckered by advertising!

And speaking of Galeon, I’ve actually been using Epiphany as default browser for the last few days. When the fork occured I was estimating Epiphany would catch up with Galeon around the time for GNOME 2.10, at which point it would be pointless to continue with Galeon. In part Epiphany did that, in part it is wildly ahead thanks to epiphany-extensions. In part it’s still sadly lacking.

My biggest gripe has long been the lack of bookmark nick names; you assign (smart) bookmark a nick name like g for Google or pg for Planet GNOME and then typing the nick name in location entry will load that page, or run Google search using given terms. Beats the convenience of any entry completion popdown any time.

Now that there’s an Epiphany extension to implement bookmark nick names I am only little annoyed with certain braindamagefeatures, or lack thereof.

• location entry completion pops up rather than down under some circumstances (probably gtk+ bug)
• entry completion fails to consider some bookmarks (known bug)
• no tab-completion (instead hitting wwtab does some quite funny things in the location entry)
• new tabs are unconditionally opened in background (there’s a Python extension to fix that but it doesn’t support Ctrl or other modifier keys)
• fonts aren’t looking quite the same (and can not be configured, at least not from the prefs dialog)
• the history is stored in some bastardized XML file making history migration awful (it’s trivial to copy cookies and passwords, weird to see Mozilla be the more sensible one *grin*)

The only way to get a decent browser still seems to be to do-it-yourself.