Monthly Archives: February 2006

Icon removal issue

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It seems that some icons got removed from the gnome-icon-theme recently which has caused both problems and some debate. To me there are two issues here. The first is that I think we should start seeing our collection of icons as part of our ABI stability promise. Removing and changing icons names at regular intervals have been the norm for some time now, and as someone who has worked on maintaining themes its been a pain. Application developers and users also have a right to be upset if icons they IMHO rightly could expect to be there suddenly are gone and their applications breaks due to it.

The issue of wether we should have those icons displayed in Nautilus is another separate issue. I don’t have any strong feelings on it, but I think it would have been a better approach to at least add an option of getting those textual descriptions back through a gconf key enabling emblems. So that the people who wanted to keep textual descriptions could do so by enabling one gconf key and emblems would appear where before ‘hardcoded’ images where used. That solution would also allow for a more i18n friendly setup.

Drawings of Mohammed

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The recent ruckus about the caricature drawings of Mohammed is curious.
The reactions seems a bit misplaced considering that there have been much harsher criticism published of Islam and Mohammed in various books, papers and tv programmes over the last few years than these drawings.

One thing is clear to me. If there is anything that needs to be kept it check through public criticism so is it religion. The Church too used to try to keep criticism silent by calling upon blasphemy. They
didn’t stop with the calling upon though, but had people arrested or killed too. Either directly our through local governments under their sway. Luckily Europe has left the dark ages behind and through public criticism of the church and christianity the era of englightenment came about.

Today I was shocked to find that the Catholic church dared bring forth a statement that they want to bring back the bad old times where they and Christianity where impossible to critisize. The Vatican stated the following – The right to freedom of thought and expression … cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers. Right, so let the book burning start again eh? I guess they would love to burn the Da Vinci code for instance.

That there are violent reactions in the Islamic world is of little suprise, most of these countries are poor underdeveloped dictatorships, rallying against the evils of the free world is the bread and circus those governments provide for their populations, to keep the population to occupied to wonder why their glorious political and religious leaders are unable to provide them with anything but anger and poverty.

GNOME Webshop available or ?

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One thing that was worked on by the board last year, or mostly by David Neary, was getting a GNOME webshop going.
Well it seems we got beaten to the punch. Well at least we know what the Gnome looks like now :)

Good wine experience

I used to play the Magic the Gathering card game a lot some years ago. I came across an advertisement for a MtG computer game the other day which made me remember that there used to be a computer version of the original card game. I found the demo online of the original game and tried running it under Wine. Worked like a charm, I was almost suprised when both the installation and running of the game worked perfectly. Only minus was that sound support didn’t seem to work, but still I had some fun hours playing with the simple demo decks :) Good going Wine hackers.

Virgin Radio UK

Usually when you contact a media company through their public communication channels you feel you are sending stuff into the void.
I have had a very positive experience with
Virgin Radio UK in this regard as they have updated their streams page fixing all the issues we have pointed out with them, randing from playlist problems to misnamed stream naming. Anyway now their streams
have perfect playlists and correct naming. A few bugs to sort out on our side still to handle everything, but I am sure we get there. Thanks to James at Virgin Radio for his help and assistance.

Emusic followup

Also Edward at the office signed up for emusic now. He tends to download whole albums more than me so the lack of a nicely working Linux client came up. Found the open source EmusicJ created by Robin Sheat. Works very nicely.