Planet Openbox

Miklos Bacso: Amusing: Drawing Illusion

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:34:23 +0000

David Barr: lessr

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:42:20 +0000

I saw this theme on box-look today, it is for keybinding people, it is not something I’d use (i’m all about the ~~mouse~~ Trackball) but I like the idea and it is clean, different and well executed.

A screenshot (on box-look)

K Mandla: Begone, foul dwimmerlaik! … Leave the dead in peace

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:27:46 +0000

After four months of relative inactivity it has become clear that there was little or no intention on the part of the owner of the previously mentioned wounded Pentium 4 machine, to acquire the parts necessary for the successful rehabilitation of said machine. For that reason, and for lack of a viable role for yet another [...]

Miklos Bacso: FYI: Coldfusion FirstDayOfWeek()

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:26:27 +0000

Since ColdFusion doesn't seem to have a FirstDayOfWeek() function (correct me if I'm wrong), here is a little function to get the first day of a given week in the year:

<cffunction name="FirstDayOfWeek">
    <cfargument name="Week" required="yes">
    <cfargument name="Year" required="no" default="#DateFormat(now(),'yyyy')#">
    <cfset fd = Year & "-01-01">
    <cfset nd = DateAdd("ww",Week-1,fd)>
    <cfset ntm = (DayOfWeek(nd) - 1) * -1>
    <cfset nd = DateAdd("d", ntm, nd)>
    <cfreturn nd>
</cffunction>

Usage:

<cfoutput>#FirstDayOfWeek(34,2008)#</cfoutput>

Output:

{ts '2008-08-17 00:00:00'}

Note: This assumes Sunday as the first day of the week. To change it to Monday as the first day, modify the line ntm=(DayOfWeek(nd)-1)*-1 to ntm=(DayOfWeek(nd)-2)*-1 ...

Miklos Bacso: Elsewhere: Emily Bear

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:44:35 +0000

More...

Miklos Bacso: FYI: Home sweet home

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:16:51 +0000

Back from Hungary.. What a crazy two weeks. I'll have photos developed soon (mostly black and white)... I might even start a new site for it, or change osenoa up again for the fall season. We'll see. Anyway for now, check out my sister's flickr stream.

Akkana Peck: Fast Pixel Ops in GIMP-Python

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 04:30:23 +0000

Last night Joao and I were on IRC helping someone who was learning to write gimp plug-ins. We got to talking about pixel operations and how to do them in Python. I offered my arclayer.py as an example of using pixel regions in gimp, but added that C is a lot faster for pixel operations. I wondered if reading directly from the tiles (then writing to a pixel region) might be faster.

But Joao knew a still faster way. As I understand it, one major reason Python is slow at pixel region operations compared to a C plug-in is that Python only writes to the region one pixel at a time, while C can write batches of pixels by row, column, etc. But it turns out you can grab a whole pixel region into a Python array, manipulate it as an array then write the whole array back to the region. He thought this would probably be quite a bit faster than writing to the pixel region for every pixel.

He showed me how to change the arclayer.py code to use arrays, and I tried it on a few test layers. Was it faster? I made a test I knew would take a long time in arclayer, a line of text about 1500 pixels wide. Tested it in the old arclayer; it took just over a minute to calculate the arc. Then I tried Joao's array version: timing with my wristwatch stopwatch, I call it about 1.7 seconds. Wow! That might be faster than the C version.

The updated, fast version (0.3) of arclayer.py is on my arclayer page.

If you just want the trick to using arrays, here it is:

from array import array

[ ... setting up ... ]
        # initialize the regions and get their contents into arrays:
        srcRgn = layer.get_pixel_rgn(0, 0, srcWidth, srcHeight,
                                     False, False)
        src_pixels = array("B", srcRgn[0:srcWidth, 0:srcHeight])

        dstRgn = destDrawable.get_pixel_rgn(0, 0, newWidth, newHeight,
                                            True, True)
        p_size = len(srcRgn[0,0])               
        dest_pixels = array("B", "\x00" * (newWidth * newHeight * p_size))

[ ... then inside the loop over x and y ... ]
                        src_pos = (x + srcWidth * y) * p_size
                        dest_pos = (newx + newWidth * newy) * p_size
                        
                        newval = src_pixels[src_pos: src_pos + p_size]
                        dest_pixels[dest_pos : dest_pos + p_size] = newval

[ ... when the loop is all finished ... ]
        # Copy the whole array back to the pixel region:
        dstRgn[0:newWidth, 0:newHeight] = dest_pixels.tostring()

Good stuff!

Lostson: qlwm

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:31:01 +0000

So recently I discovered qlwm which is a small and very light Window Manager. It is quite refreshing actually. It is written using the Qt toolkit, and if your like me and are a little disappointed with the direction KDE is going this might be right up your alley. It is not very full featured yet but does everything one really needs and is very snappy. Seems to be only one developer at this time, but maybe with the way things are going with KDE more people might join the foray and help out.

Like I said there isn't a ton there yet but I dont think that is really the goal of the developer here, I believe it is made to be light and fast. When starting qlwm you will be greeted with a small bar at the bottom and a blue background. In the panel is a desktop switcher, clock, widow list menu, and application menu. The application menu is sparse but you can edit it to your liking with a simple text editor. All in all I have noticed some quirks but nothing that is a show stopper for me. Seeing as how I like using the Qt toolkit this gives me a light and versatile Window Manager that I can play with. Along with Qt-Apps to find other Qt applications I can make a very light and resource saving desktop, that is simple and easy to use and doesn't kill a machine. So if you are bored give qlwm a shot you may just like it.

David Barr: Theme Editors

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:53:30 +0000

A super famous person commented on my last post. After I found out what ‘nargery‘ meant I was flattered by it. The whole idea of theme editors was mentioned, luckily I have an opinion on that too. Let’s start with Sawfish, because I like Sawfish.

You can basically (if you have the time and lisp skills) make sawfish do and look like anything, I really liked the dragdome theme, for example. Sawfish however had a theme editor (which I believe they are fixing up right now, or they are making rep-gtk work with the new glade or something) . The theme editor was quite good but it did not expose all the possibilities of themeing that sawfish had (which would have been impossible). Therefore using it you were restricting yourself to the limits of the theme editor not the limits of the themability of Sawfish (for example the Crux theme would not be a possibility).

It is a little known (maybe) fact that Openbox used to have a theme editor called stylebox, which went further to expose most of the options possible in Openbox, in this you could, in theory, make any theme/style combination that would be possible for Openbox, so by using the theme editor you really were cutting out the learning curve without also restricting the possibilities, unlike the sawfish theme editor. Word on the street is there is another theme editor in the works*

But would it really ever be possible to make a good theme editor for Metacity? As far as I can see any theme editor would either restrict themeing possibilities or be so grossly bloated, vast and unusable that it would probably be easier to do the thing in a text editor. So again we have compromise, usable but restrictive or unusable. (I cannot even begin to imagine how it would handle drawing the button images for example). Either way I would say it may not help Metacity’s themeing problems, such as they are, and may only serve as a crutch.

Another issue; I think there is some snobbery about using images in Metacity (I think it is lazy, but it might be a good thing, i do not really know if it would make things slower or not?). I have never tried but I wonder if they would produce true rounded corners? It would be nice to see a new batch of metacity themes included with gnome that showed off different features (and are not hacks of each other). Does Clearlooks even support shade et al?

I did some of the themes included in openbox, and I was more interested in making sure they touched on as many different styles and stuff than really if they were stunning (some are not like amazing…). I try to keep the clearlooks one as up-to-date as possible as well, both in following the clearlooks metacity theme and with openbox developments, i think it is missing the menu separator right now. I use themes to learn from so i guess other people do too, it is less painful that reading and writing documentation.

I think the new openbox theme editor will be cool though (it already looks amazing right now) and from the looks of it it will cover most, if not all, possibilities (the joy of having a smaller theme format). On the other hand, The Sawfish one will probably have the same issues of it just placing images around the window, when sawfish can do so much more) . I think that if there were a metacity theme editor people would be churning out theme after theme as dictated by the limitations of the editor.

I think the problem with themes is that they require a combination of technical and artist skills, theme editors could help bridge that gap a little, but as with most things you end up back at a text editor for the fine tuning. It would be so much easier if there just one nice theme, like for the mac (the buttons on the mac are just pure beauty for me and I hate buttons) but where is the fun in that?

Also people would not get to say “OOOhhhhh like a bike shed” and everyone loves a phrase that is over used, fucking annoying and patronising. In fact I think that is why there is a communication breakdown between theme makers and developers, because whenever anyone has an opinion on a theme matter, the knee jerk reaction is ’shut up with your bike shedding’. Original and constructive.

Anyhow I will stop there or else the vitriol I hold for many things will spill.

*this is less an urban rumour and more a brute fact

Crimeboy: new default application icon

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:00:48 +0000

[caption id="attachment_89" align="alignnone" width="315" caption="new default application icon"][/caption]

Brandon Cash: Giving GNOME Panel some love

noreply@blogger.com (cai) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:44:50 +0000

When it comes to user interfaces, I'm a big fan of CompizConfig Settings Manager (CCSM). That is to say, I'm a big fan of CCSM's menu. It is minimalistic (I'd prefer to call it streamlined), but above all, useful. There are many different categories of plugins for Compiz, so separating them is an essential task. The beauty behind CCSM's menu structure is that it is extensible: the "preferences" and "advanced search" buttons appear very different from the category buttons, but behave in a similar manner.

This concept needs to be applied to GNOME's Panel when adding new applets. The current method of adding applets just lists a bunch of applications with only alphabetical organization. Chances are very good that you only want to have a few of these. Maybe some you'd like to hide (Brightness Applet? Kind of useless on my desktop.), maybe some you'd just like to be able to find quicker.

My proposal is to add categories and use an interface similar to that of CCSM. I have created a mockup in Glade to reflect this:

I did the mockup in Glade rather than the GIMP for several reasons:

It shows how simply it can be done in GTK+; each menu button is a GtkLinkButton

It gives authenticity in the outcome: this is how the dialog will look (see notes below)

I can easily change the mockup based on GTK+'s rules, adding any suggestions I may get

In the current version of GNOME Panel, you have a set of buttons on the bottom of the dialog (i.e. "back" and "add" or "forward"). Whether the button reads "add" or "forward" depends on what you are adding. If each applet is clickable to bring you to the next stage, you no longer need to press this button.

In my concept, when you click on an applet on the right, the content of the dialog will change to reflect that applet. The menu stays on the left, displaying information about the applet and offering a "back" button in case of a misclick.

Notes:

The icons are merely placeholders, as are the items themselves. Categorization of applets can wait for another day.

CCSM has a different colored background for the icons on the right. It would be beneficial to have that in this dialog as well.

Comments or suggestions? I'd love to hear what you think, good or bad. You can also leave comments on the Bugzilla entry.

David Barr: If metacity is like cheerios; openbox is like muelsi

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:21:06 +0000

I like the metacity blog, it is quite fun to read, well written and kind of interesting. Today I was reading this. I have a weird interest in the Metacity theme format, possibly because it is largely undocumented and a mystery to me, possibly because I generally hate all available Metacity themes (yay!! lets have crappy ’rounded’ corners). In my opinion the weakest, most ill advised part of the Metacity theme format is the chop off blocks in a corner bit. It looks dreadful and only makes people do bad things.

Everyone is all about an svg crazy Metacity. Let’s not kid ourselves svg will make thing slow right now, and while Metacity is no slow coach neither is it a speed demon.

For me the Biggest problem with the current format is that it is kind of hard to use and things are not helped by the woeful lack of documentation for it.

Your average themer is lazy, this is a fact (myself included). It is not hard to make a theme, it is just hard to make a good theme.

Because the Metacity theme format is quite complicated most people start off (i think?) the back of an old theme, which can be good and can be bad, but I think time has proven that it hasn’t really helped in the originality stakes (While Clearlooks is an OK theme (metacity and gtk) it is hardly stunning.) and the metacity-2 theme format has not been very widely adopted because of it (in my opinion etc).

In my own brief toe dipping into metacity themes I was somewhat comforted that all I wanted to do was make a clone of an openbox theme, the world was not my oyster. It took some searching to find out how to implement shade, above and sticky. The buttons which are drawn by lines are quite crappy, mostly because I am too lazy to figure it out (see above lazy point) and that dropping in an image to excuse my laziness was not an option for me (i had agreed this to myself sometime earlier).

Compared to (say!) the Openbox theme format which is quite simple, well documented and a bit limited, I think *box themers have to try harder to make something better, but this is not so bad as there are clear limitations about what can and cannot be done. In Metacity these limitations are much less restrictive and much less obvious, so there are less clear or well defined parameters.

I think where I was going with this was that the Metacity theme format already seems quite flexible; if only it were better documented it may bear better fruits. The svg option might be easier and let more (does the gnome project need more?*) ‘themers’ become involved, but it would slow it down a take up development time which could/should be spend on stability and other annoying bugs and maybe more important features.

It won’t kill you to sit down and drudge through painful amounts of Metacity themes to learn a trick from each of them, but it isn’t fun. A window manager should first and foremost manage windows, themes are just a bonus.

A poor workman blames his tools etc. ;)

*no, it needs better themers or people willing to put more time and effort in.

Akkana Peck: Pho 0.9.6-pre1

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:30:00 +0000

I've been using my pre-released 0.9.6-pre1 version of pho, my image viewer, for ages, now, and it's been working fine. I keep wanting to release it, but there were a couple of minor bugs that irritated me and I hadn't had time to track down. Tonight, I finally got caught up with my backlog and found myself with a few extra minutes to spare, and fixed the last two known bugs. Quick, time to release before I discover anything else!

(There were a couple other features I was hoping to implement -- multiple external commands, parsing a .phorc file, and having Keywords mode read and write the Keywords file itself -- but none of those is terribly important and they can wait.)

It's only a -pre release, but I'm not going to have a long protracted set of betas this time. 0.9.6-pre1 is very usable, and I'm finding Keywords mode to be awfully useful for classifying my mountain of back photos.

So, pho users, give it a try and let me know if you see any bugs! It's my hope to release the real 0.9.6 in a week or two, if nobody finds any monstrous bugs in the meantime.

Get Pho here.

Og Maciel: Pandora swag

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:14:37 +0000

Today I received a mysterious package in the mail. Turns out it was some swag from Pandora: a hat and some stickers.

You know what the best part was? Not the cool hat or stickers, but the letter that accompanied the items in the envelope. It was actually manually signed (i.e. not a print out) by Lucia Willow, Community Manager, and Tim Westergren, Founder. It is the kind of attention to details that makes a huge difference!

Og Maciel: Recipe for a good translation team

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:06:02 +0000

A while back I was asked by a member of a Ubuntu translation team (who shall remain anonymous) about how the Brazilian team’s workflow worked and how we managed to maintain our position among the top translated teams in Rosetta. What follows was my reply to this person. I hope it will prove to be useful to any other team out there who may be struggling with the same issues. I’m also interested to learn how other teams managed to keep their members involved and/or how others can benefit from their experience.

|> Now, the LOCALE translators have some organisation problems and some
|> problems to find good guys for translating ubuntu. When I saw, how
|> complete is the brasilian translation i get an idea. Maybe you or some
|> of the other translators may help us.

Hi there Anonymous! The translation process of free software has been the reason why I joined the masses of the free software world. It is a very rewarding experience when you see people being able to take advantage of open source software in their native tongue.

The Brazilian team has proved to be an interesting experience for me. I was the second person to take on the lidership of the team, and I’d like to offer your my opinion and insight as for why we have managed to grow and maintain a pretty decent track of quantity and quality.

I think that anyone who participates in open source communities likes to have a sense of direction and ownership. By that I mean that people like to know what is going on, what they can do (but not in generic terms; they need specifics) and what the roadmap is. When people see an organized team and specific goals set out, it makes them want to participate too.

How can you do this? Simple. Start simple… Schedule IRC meetings on a regular basis so people can “update” their status as well as discuss priorities and give feedback on what is working and what is not. Speaking of priority, create a list with the software packages the translators should focus on during the period (a weekly sprint? monthly?) so that once you reach that mark people will have a feeling of accomplishment! They will like that feeling, I can guarantee you… and they’ll comeback for more!

Also, set up a wiki where people can put their names next to the packages they’re currently working on, so that new collaboratores don’t work on the same packages as other people. Set up a program where current team members would have to “adopt” a new translator and show him/her how everything works, as well as be responsible for reviewing and providing feedback. The current member will feel that he he/she has ownership of the process and team as a whole, and that is very rewarding. The new translator will have a feeling of direction… and that is very rewarding as well! It is a very good cycle that can strengthen the entire team, no matter if they’re “veterans” or “newbies”.

Lastly, let everyone know that their word counts! Assign a current member as your right hand and share the responsibility of the administration of the team (ownership, remember?) It is the job of the administrator to make decisions on behalf of the team, but it is just as important to heed to the team’s members interests and ideas. Having someone who you trust to bounce off ideas is a sure way to make sure you stay on track as well.

As far as how we keep the quality of our translations? Many of our members, myself included, work with the upstream teams for GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc and try to stick to their translation standards. I suggest you take a look at the following web site: www.open-tran.eu. It is a great service that allows you to see what terms the upstream teams are using in their translations and allows you to also follow the same pattern.

Well, these were the things I did back when I was the leader for the team. I’m sure the other guys will be able to provide you with some more tips.

Tim Riley: Beijing Olympic medal tally for our Campfire bot

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:28:00 +0000

I’ve recently been working on a bot framework for 37signals’ Campfire web chat system. We use Campfire at work and it’s been great for having fun together and increasing team cohesiveness.

Having a bot in the room is also good for random quotes, Chuck Norris facts and comic strips. We also plan to add a few useful work-related things, such as git & subversion commit messages and server monitoring alerts.

The bot is plugin-oriented and easy to extend. Check out the code on github. It’s still in flux and I would love to hear any feedback.

This afternoon I hacked together a little plugin to report the Beijing olympics medal tally, thanks to an idea of Sean’s. The code is highly specific, but it shows how easy (and fun!) it is to add a command to the bot and scrape data off the web using hpricot.

Here it is:

require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'

class BeijingTally  PluginBase
  
  on_command 'tally', :tally
  
  def tally(msg)
    output    = "#{'Pos.'.rjust(6)} - #{'Country'.ljust(25)} -   G -   S -   B - Total\n"
    rows      = ((Hpricot(open('http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/INF/GL/95A/GL0000000.shtml'))/'//table')[1]/'tr')[2..-1]
    rows.each_with_index do |row, i|
      cells   = row/'td'
      output += "#{strip_tags_or_zero(cells[0].inner_html).rjust(6)} - " # position
      output += "#{((i == rows.length - 1) ? '' : strip_tags_or_zero(cells[1].inner_html)).ljust(25)} - " # country
      output += "#{strip_tags_or_zero(cells[-5].inner_html).rjust(3)} - " # gold
      output += "#{strip_tags_or_zero(cells[-4].inner_html).rjust(3)} - " # silver
      output += "#{strip_tags_or_zero(cells[-3].inner_html).rjust(3)} - " # bronze
      output += "#{strip_tags_or_zero(cells[-2].inner_html).rjust(3)}\n"  # total
    end
    
    paste(output)
  end
  
  private
  
  # Take away the HTML tags from the string and insert a '0' if it is empty
  def strip_tags_or_zero(str)
    (out = str.gsub(/]*>/, "").strip).blank? ? '0' : out
  end
end

Akkana Peck: GetSET: Teaching Javascript to high school girls

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 19:54:00 +0000

Every summer I volunteer as an instructor for a one-day Javascript programming class at the GetSET summer technology camp for high school girls. GetSET is a great program run by the Society of Women Engineers. it's intended for minority girls from relatively poor neighborhoods, and the camp is free to the girls (thanks to some great corporate sponsors). They're selected through a competitive interview process so they're all amazingly smart and motivated, and it's always rewarding being involved.

Teaching programming in one day to people with no programming background at all is challenging, of course. You can't get into any of the details you'd like to cover, like style, or debugging techniques. By the time you get through if-else, for and while loops, some basic display methods, the usual debugging issues like reading error messages, and typographical issues like "Yes, uppercase and lowercase really are different" and "No, sorry, that's a colon, you need a semicolon", it's a pretty full day and the students are saturated.

I got drafted as lead presenter several years ago, by default by virtue of being the only one of the workshop leaders who actually programs in Javascript. For several years I'd been asking for a chance to rewrite the course to try to make it more fun and visual (originally it used a lot of form validation exercises), and starting with last year's class I finally got the chance. I built up a series of graphics and game exercises (using some of Sara Falamaki's Hangman code, which seemed perfect since she wrote it when she was about the same age as the girls in the class) and it went pretty well. Of course, we had no idea how fast the girls would go or how much material we could get through, so I tried to keep it flexible and we adjusted as needed.

Last year went pretty well, and in the time since then we've exchanged a lot of email about how we could improve it. We re-ordered some of the exercises, shifted our emphasis in a few places, factored some of the re-used code (like windowWidth()) into a library file so the exercise files weren't so long, and moved more of the visual examples earlier.

I also eliminated a lot of the slides. One of the biggest surprises last year was the "board work". I had one exercise where the user clicks in the page, and the student has to write the code to figure out whether the click was over the image or not. I had been nervous about that exercise -- I considered it the hardest of the exercises. You have to take the X and Y coordinates of the mouse click, the X and Y coordinates of the image (the upper left corner of the <div> or <img> tag), and the size of the image (assumed to be 200x200), and turn that all into a couple of lines of working Javascript code. Not hard once you understand the concepts, but hard to explain, right?

I hadn't made a slide for that, so we went to the whiteboard to draw out the image, the location of the mouse click, the location of the image's upper left corner, and figure out the math ... and the students, who had mostly been sitting passively through the heavily slide-intensive earlier stuff, came alive. They understood the diagram, they were able to fill in the blanks and keep track of mouse click X versus image X, and they didn't even have much trouble turning that into code they typed into their exercise. Fantastic!

Remembering that, I tried to use a lot fewer slides this year. I felt like I still needed to have slides to explain the basic concepts that they actually needed to use for the exercises -- but if there was anything I thought they could figure out from context, or anything that was just background, I cut it. I tried for as few slides as possible between exercises, and more places where we could elicit answers from the students. I think we still have too many slides and not enough "board work" -- but we're definitely making progress, and this year went a lot better and kept them much better engaged. We're considering next year doing the first several exercises on the board first, then letting them type it in to their own copies to verify that it works.

We did find we needed to leave code examples visible: after showing slides saying something like "Ex 7: Write a loop that writes a line of text in each color", I had to back up to the previous slide where I'd showed what the code actually looked like. I had planned on their using my "Javascript Quick Reference" handout for reference and not needing that information on the slides; but in fact, I think they were confused about the quickref and most never even opened it. Either that information needs to be in the handout, or it needs to be displayed on the screen as they work, or I have to direct them to the quickref page explicitly ("Now turn to page 3 in ...") or put that information in the exercises.

The graphical flower exercises were a big hit this year (I showed them early and promised we'd get to them, and when we did, just before lunch, several girls cheered) and, like last year, some of the girls who finished them earlier decided on their own that they wanted to change them to use other images, which was also a big hit. Several other girls decided they wanted more than 10 flowers displayed, and others hit on the idea of changing the timeout to be a lot shorter, which made for some very fun displays. Surprisingly, hardly anyone got into infinite loops and had to kill the browser (always a potential problem with javascript, especially when using popups like alert() or prompt()).

I still have some issues I haven't solved, like what to do about semicolons and braces. Javascript is fairly agnostic about them. Should I tell the girls that they're required? (I did that this year, but it's confusing because then when you get to "if" statements you have to explain why that's different.) Not mention them at all? (I'm leaning toward that for next year.)

And it's always a problem figuring out what the fastest girls should do while waiting for the rest to finish. This year, in addition to trying to make each exercise shorter, we tried having the girls work on them in groups of two or three, so they could help each other. It didn't quite work out that way -- they all worked on their own copies of the exercises but they did seem to collaborate more, and I think that's the best balance. We also encourage the ones who finish first to help the girls around them, which mostly they do on their own anyway.

And we really do need to find a better editor we can use on the Windows lab machines instead of Wordpad. Wordpad's font is too small on the projection machine, and on the lab machines it's impossible for most of us to tell the difference between parentheses, brackets and braces, which leads to lots of time-wasting subtle bugs. Surely there's something available for Windows that's easy to use, freely distributable, makes it easy to change the font, and has parenthesis and brace matching (syntax highlighting would be nice too). Well, we have a year to look for one now.

All in all, we had a good day and most of the girls gave the class high marks. Even the ones who concluded "I learned I shouldn't be a programmer because it takes too much attention to detail" said they liked the class. And we're fine with that -- not everybody wants to be a programmer, and the point isn't to force them into any specific track. We're happy if we can give them an idea of what computer programming is really like ... then they'll decide for themselves what they want to be.

Brandon Cash: Sunbird + Provider + Google Calendar = Awesome

noreply@blogger.com (cai) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:06:08 +0000

I've always been pretty skeptical when it comes to calendar software. You update your online version through Google Calendar, and it'll propagate down to whatever clients you need it to... But what if you want to update your local version? There's an extension to Sunbird (Mozilla's calendar program) called Provider for Google Calendar, which Just Works. When you add a new event to your local copy, it sends it off to Google Calendar. Whether you're checking from home, school, work, or anywhere, all of your calendar events are synced.

I set up both Thunderbird with Lightning (which adds your calendar into Thunderbird), as well as a standalone copy of Sunbird. This way I still see my calendar and can update it when I check my mail, as well as gain quick access to it without the overhead of Thunderbird.
I'm absolutely loving this setup. If you check your calendar from multiple locations, I'm sure you would love it as well!

Now if I could just find a decent way to get gnome-panel's clock applet to recognize these... Does evolution-data-server update its calendar without me opening it?

Akkana Peck: In Praise of Logical AND. In Censure of Invasive Cookies.

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:10:00 +0000

The tech press is in a buzz about the new search company, Cuil (pronounced "cool"). Most people don't like it much, but are using it as an excuse to rhapsodize about Google and why they took such a commanding lead in the search market, PageRank and huge data centers and all those other good things Google has.

Not to run down PageRank or other Google inventions -- Google does an excellent job at search these days (sometimes spam-SEO sites get ahead of them, but so far they've always caught up) -- but that's not how I remember it. Google's victory over other search engines was a lot simpler and more basic than that. What did they bring?

Logical AND.

Most of you have probably forgotten it since we take Google so for granted now, but back in the bad old days when search engines were just getting started, they all did it the wrong way. If you searched for red fish, pretty much all the early search engines would give you all the pages that had either red or fish anywhere in them. The more words you added, the less likely you were to find anything that was remotely related to what you wanted.

Google was the first search engine that realized the simple fact (obvious to all of us who were out there actually doing searches) that what people want when they search for multiple words is only the pages that have all the words -- the pages that have both red and fish. It was the search engine where it actually made sense to search for more than one word, the first where you could realistically narrow down your search to something fairly specific.

Even today, most site searches don't do this right. Try searching for several keywords on your local college's web site, or on a retail site that doesn't license Google (or Yahoo or other major search engine) technology.

Logical and. The killer boolean for search engines.

(I should mention that Dave, when he heard this, shook his head. "No. Google took over because it was the first engine that just gave you simple text that you could read, without spinning blinking images and tons of other crap cluttering up the page." He has a point -- that was certainly another big improvement Google brought, which hardly anybody else seems to have realized even now. Commercial sites get more and more cluttered, and nobody notices that Google, the industry leader, eschews all that crap and sticks with simplicity. I don't agree that's why they won, but it would be an excellent reason to stick with Google even if their search results weren't the best.)

So what about Cuil? I finally got around to trying it this morning, starting with a little "vanity google" for my name. The results were fairly reasonable, though oddly slanted toward TAC, a local astronomy group in which I was fairly active around ten years ago (three hits out of the first ten are TAC!)

Dave then started typing colors into Cuil to see what he would get, and found some disturbing results. He has Firefox' cookie preference set to "Ask me before setting a cookie" -- and it looks like Cuil loads pages in the background, setting cookies galore for sites you haven't ever seen or even asked to see. For every search term he thought of, Cuil popped up a cookie request dialog while he was still typing.

Searching for blu wanted to set a cookie for bluefish.something.
Searching for gre wanted to set a cookie for www.gre.ac.uk.
Searching for yel wanted to set a cookie for www.myyellow.com.
Searching for pra wanted to set a cookie for www.pvamu.edu.

Pretty creepy, especially when combined with Cuil's propensity (noted by every review I've seen so far, and it's true here too) for including porn and spam sites. We only noticed this because he happened to have the "Ask me" pref set. Most people wouldn't even know. Use Cuil and you may end up with a lot of cookies set from sites you've never even seen, sites you wouldn't want to be associated with. Better hope no investigators come crawling through your browser profile any time soon.

Akkana Peck: Back from OSCON

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 06:00:00 +0000

No postings for a while -- I was too tied up with getting ready for OSCON, and now that it's over, too tied up with catching up with stuff that gotten behind.

A few notes about OSCON:

It was a good conference -- lots of good speakers, interesting topics and interesting people. Best talks: anything by Paul Fenwick, anything by Damian Conway.

The Arduino tutorial was fun too. It's a little embedded processor with a breadboard and sockets to control arbitrary electronic devices, all programmed over a USB plug using a Java app. I'm not a hardware person at all (what do those resistor color codes mean again?) but even I, even after coming in late, managed to catch up and build the basic circuits they demonstrated, including programming them with my laptop. Very cool! I'm looking forward to playing more with the Arduino when I get a spare few moments.

The conference's wi-fi network was slow and sometimes flaky (what else is new?) but they had a nice touch I haven't seen at any other conference: Wired connections, lots of them, on tables and sofas scattered around the lounge area (and more in rooms like the speakers' lounge). The wired net was very fast and very reliable. I'm always surprised I don't see more wired connections at hotels and conferences, and it sure came in handy at OSCON.

The AV staff was great, very professional and helpful. I was speaking first thing Monday morning (ulp!) so I wanted to check the room Sunday night and make sure my laptop could talk to the projector and so forth. Everything worked fine.

Portland is a nice place to hold a convention -- the light rail is great, the convention center is very accessible, and street parking isn't bad either if you have a car there.

Dave went with me, so it made more sense for us to drive. The drive was interesting because the central valley was so thick with smoke from all the fires (including the terrible Paradise fire that burned for so long, plus a new one that had just started up near Yosemite) that we couldn't see Mt Shasta when driving right by it. It didn't get any better until just outside of Sacramento. It must have been tough for Sacramento valley residents, living in that for weeks! I hope they've gotten cleared out now.

I finally saw that Redding Sundial bridge I've been hearing so much about. We got there just before sunset, so we didn't get to check the sundial, but we did get an impressive deep red smoky sun vanishing into the gloom. Photos here.

End of my little blog-break, and time to get back to scrambling to get caught up on writing and prep for the GetSET Javascript class for high school girls

. Every year we try to make it more relevant and less boring, with more thinking and playing and less rote typing. I think we're making progress, but we'll see how it goes next week.

Miklos Bacso: FYI: In Budapest

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 08:51:31 +0000

Arrived in Hungary safe and sound. Walked around downtown Budapest... man that city has a lot of history. Looking forward to spending the rest of the week exploring the area. Watch my sister's space as she'll probably be posting a few pics soon.

Christopher W.: August 2008 Desktop

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 01:02:43 +0000

Visible Applications: Openbox 3.4.7.2, Thunar, Sonata, rxvt-unicode, irssi, & GNU IceCat.

GTK Theme: Clarity
Wallpaper: Hardy-Simple Colors
OB Theme: Clearlooks
Icons: Tango

Dave Foster: Nitrogen 1.4 released!

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:46:49 +0000

Last night I released Nitrogen 1.4, check the page for release notes. In particular, thanks to Helge Larsen for being very helpful with debugging a pretty bad X error bug that randomly affected other people too, esp. those running Xinerama.

Miklos Bacso: Stupid World: What in the hell??

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:04:36 +0000

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2008/07/31/6316716-cp.html

Christopher W.: Theora & Vorbis natively supported in the next version of Firefox

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 02:09:12 +0000

While browsing through my favorite news sites today I discovered that the nightly builds of Firefox now include native support for Theora and Vorbis (which includes support for the HTML5 media elements).

It is really great to see that they are taking the initiative add this along with their other changes slated for version 3.1. If anything else it will at least help show users that there are formats available for them to use which are not proprietary.

Og Maciel: BarCamp Raleigh 2008

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:03:21 +0000

This weekend I’ll be attending BarCamp Raleigh for the second year in a row. Together with a couple of fellow rPathians, I’m planning to pitch in the following talks:

Building GNU/Linux appliances and deploying them in the clouds
How to participate and contribute with open source projects like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Openbox, etc

If you’re one of the lucky ones who managed to register in time for the event, tomorrow there will be a get together (think drinks, snacks and all the trilug geeks you can fit in a bar) at Tyler’s Tap Room (map). Check out this post for more info.

I look forward to attending this event and meeting some of you folks.

Miklos Bacso: Elsewhere: horpa meets Kertész polaroids

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:23:53 +0000

http://algieba.com/blog/index.php?img=153

Og Maciel: Building a GNU/Linux Appliance: Step 1

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:04:34 +0000

As some of you may know, I’ve been doing a great deal of testing for rBuilder Online, rPath’s online community service for all your GNU/Linux appliances needs. As a QA Enginner I have a chance to play with the most innovative technologies we create (and dare I say some of the coolest things in the system/package management world?) before it hits the general public.

It is because of this work and my recent super involvement with our products that I decided to create a videocast on how to create a virtual GNU/Linux appliance using rBuilder Online. My objective is to show just how easy it is to package your software and distribute it to as many different environments and architectures without having to do a lot of heavy lifting. This videocast is the first step toward this goal, recorded this morning with no script or preparation what so ever. Please be gentle.

* Direct link here.

Some useful links for you to follow along:

Recently I have been working with another contributor for the XFCE desktop environment to build an appliance with code pulled directly from their versioning source control repository. This allow us to work with the applications as they currently exist in development and work on any issues that are sometimes hard to catch without actually using the software.

Please feel free to ask me anything related to the process of using rBuilder Online and sign up for a free account!

Og Maciel: Talk to your kids about Linux

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:04:08 +0000

Snagged from the original “Cautionary” strip.

Talk to your kids about Linux

Og Maciel: Yv Scarlett Maciel: the first year

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:14:59 +0000

Yv Scarlett Maciel: the first year

As I uploaded 10000 pictures into F-Spot tonight, I got lost in the memories of people, places and events that they brought back… everything starting with the birth of my first daughter Yv. I cherry picked a few pictures of her first year and created a set. It is amazing how time does fly… she’s going to be 7 at the end of the year!