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Sunday 13-07-2008: Please stop this GNOME Tabs Stupidity

EDIT: As I expected the tabs thing is a prank! Take a deep breath everyone and relax.

I really hope this GNOME 3.0 Tabs “mania” is a prank, because it just seems so, sooooo stupid. Really. It’s like flushing down the toilet all of the UI simplicity that GNOME is supposedly aiming for.

Here is a mock-up screenshot of how GNOME 3 Release Name “Tabs” could look like if this insanity becomes reality. (Click “Full Size” bottom-left in the popup for a good resolution)

  • Why the hell would I want to have Tabs in my movie player? Am I going to watch two things at the same time?
  • Why the hell would I want to click on Tabs like insane in my instant messenger where there is already perfect treeview based organization and protocol icon-based indication? I will be happy to have a search box, but tabs? - No, thanks.
  • Also why would I want to have Tabs in my audio player when there is already a treeview with different Views to select (Playlists and others)?

So, yeah, in case this isn’t a prank… please don’t do this to us!

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Saturday 12-07-2008: Weekly Movies Review

Cinema

The Forbidden Kingdom

A discovery made by a kung fu obsessed American teen sends him on an adventure to China, where he joins up with a band of martial arts warriors in order to free the imprisoned Monkey King.

Disappointing. Very childish and completely lacking a culmination. There is one average fighting scene between Jackie Chan and Jet Li and that’s about it. A very bad try to Americanize.

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Kung Fu Panda

Po the Panda is the laziest animals in all of the Valley of Peace, but unwittingly becomes the chosen one when enemies threaten their way of life.

Unfortunately all of the funny moments were in the trailer, so it ended up being a bit of `a disappointment seeing the movie, probably due to my high expectation. After all this is supposed to be a kiddies movie so I’ll give it…

My Rating: 3 out of 5

Hancock

A hard-living superhero who has fallen out of favor with the public enters into a questionable relationship with the wife of the public relations professional who’s trying to repair his image.

Enjoyed. The movie came as a surprise as I was expecting yet another comic book super hero movie, but it’s not this at all. I guess many people were disappointed, but for me it was a breath of fresh air. I can’t tell you more without spoiling the movie for you, sorry.

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Famed archaeologist/adventurer Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones is called back into action when he becomes entangled in a Soviet plot to uncover the secret behind mysterious artifacts known as the Crystal Skulls.

Waaaaay too cheesy compared to the originals. Also … come on … they’ve managed to squeeze in both a nuclear bomb explosion and a flying saucer as unrelated events. Mr. Jones is and looks too old already. The whole idea of pushing an “young Indiana Jones” throughout the movies was ridiculous.

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5

DVD

Sin City

A film that explores the dark and miserable town Basin City and tells the story of three different people, all caught up in the violent corruption of the city.

Despite being artsy, gross and with a few good catch phrases this movie was completely pointless.

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Sky High

Set in a world where superheroes are commonly known and accepted, young Will Stronghold, the son of the Commander and Jetstream, tries to find a balance between being a normal teenager and an extraordinary being.

Very simple, easy to watch and enjoyable movie.

My Rating: 4 out of 5

Zodiac

Based on the Robert Graysmith books about the real life notorious Zodiac, a serial killer who terrorized San Francisco with a string of seemingly random murders during the 1960s and 1970s.

I really wasn’t prepared for a 3 hours long documentary-style movie where nothing really happens at all.

My Rating: 0.5 out of 5

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Wednesday 09-07-2008: MSDN Search shows Mono results

  • Today I accidentaly MSDN searched for Win32SetClipboardData (our P/Invoke method name in Mono WinForms) instead of SetClipboardData and guess what… I ended up with 5 Mono results in front of me. I found it amusing considering the fact that this was MSDN Search after all. A screenshot in case they “fix” it. (Click bottom-left “Full Size” after the pop-up shows)

MSDN Search shows Mono results

  • You might think I have a lot of tabs opened in Firefox, but I should mention that I closed twice more prior to taking the screenshot. BTW, thank you, Tab Mix Plus guys, for the multi-line tab bar.
  • Holy cow! GNOME’s Nautilus with tabs (still looks butt ugly, but oh well)…
  • Fixed my last Mono WinForms regression caused by my recent parented forms fixes.
  • Have been poking Mono WinForms Clipboard code all day trying to get my head around it and see how it would be best to implement custom formats support. On X11 I can implement that reasonably “easy” with some minor XPlatUI API change and some extra cases to binary serialize/deserialize the clipboard, which will surely involve some trickery. For Win32 the one important question, which probably Jonathan Chambers can answer best (he worked/works on our COM support), is whether we support MS COM. It seems when Win32 DnD support was written that wasn’t the case, so if you want to see some impressive code that does COM without actually doing COM (yes, you heard me) take a look at our Win32DnD.cs.
  • I felt loved today. Last week I received a Mono T-Shirt and stuffed mono monkey (thanks Jonathan), an openSUSE 11 box (thanks openSUSE guys for valuing my quite small contribution of filing bugs) and today I almost got another UPS package. I am saying almost, because I missed the delivery. I am wondering what’s it going to be. I haven’t ordered anything and I have a very pure guess that it might be an openSUSE T-Shirt. Can’t wait to see what it is and then make a photo session of all my new stuff, hehe.
  • I promised my girlfriend I will be running with her tomorrow bright and early morning. Holy spaghetti monster, please help me.
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Tuesday 08-07-2008: Weekend Updates

  • Watched the Norwich Lord Mayor’s Procession sitting comfortably in my chair behind my huge window. Was great fun and OMG there were guys dressed like Star Wars characters in the Procession (Norfolk’s Star Wars club or something).
  • The Linux UVC Video Class Driver managed to get squeezed in in kernel 2.6.26-rc9. It was supposed to be added to the kernel in 2.6.27 (as my previous blog post on the matter informed), but I guess because the driver is self-contained it won’t cause regressions. Alos it’s fairly well tested already.
  • I have updated pidgin-otr and libotr for openSUSE to version 3.2.0 in the GNOME:Community repository. pidgin-otr is an Off-the-Record Messaging plugin for Pidgin.
  • I have fixed a “bug” in my Disqus WordPress Widget that caused TinyMCE editor to fail to load. The bug was super-awesome - some weird unicode char at the end of the .php. (wtf?)
  • Jumped up-up and down like a mad man at a Drum’ n’ Bass party in Norwich. Seems like the people that listen to non-Rock/Punk/etc music in England are a minority. I don’t count “House” as music. Also I guesss I should mention that my style of preference is the classic Goa Trance sound and some more organic sounding Psychedelic Trance.
  • Tasted Tequila Rose Strawberry Liqueur, which was quite sweet for my taste and didn’t give me the thrills of drinking the plain ol’ tequila.

Tequila Rose Strawberry Liqueur

  • Got rid off my crappy blue-greenish WordPress theme and replaced with this new cool and simple one. It’s called blog.txt.
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Wednesday 02-07-2008: Disqus WordPress Widget Plugin

Today I made my baby steps in PHP (yuck) and I hacked up a Disqus WordPress Widget Plugin. It can be found here, where you will find the download and the same information as below.

Description

This plugin adds a new widget which can show statistics for your blog’s/forum’s Disqus comments: most popular discussions, top commenters, recent comments.

Installation instructions can be found in the readme.txt file and a working sample you can see in my sidebar on the right.

Configurable are:

  • Color Theme
  • Number of items to show
  • Default tab view (most popular discussions, top commenters, recent comments)
  • Whether to show the standard Wordpress widget title bar
  • Title of the widget in the title bar

Screenshots

Disqus Widget SettingsDisqus Widget

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Tuesday 01-07-2008: Support for 100+ webcams in Linux 2.6.27 (USB Video Class Driver)

Update: The driver actually managed to get squeezed in in 2.6.26-rc9.

According to a thread on the Linux uvcvideo driver mailing list if everything goes well we will see it included in the 2.6.27 kernel!

What is this uvcdriver and why is this great news? According to Wikipedia:

“The USB video device class (also USB video class or UVC) is a USB device class that describes devices capable of streaming video like webcams, digital camcorders, analog video converters, television tuners, and still-image cameras.”

So, yeah, uvcvideo is a driver for the above for Linux.

And this is great news, because:

  1. UVC is a standard and according to a source from the mentioned thread it is required for Microsoft Vista certification, so hardware vendors “have to” implement.
  2. It means out of the box support for all those standard-compliant webcams, which is pretty much all of the webcams integrated in laptops it seems. Also most new USB webcams(?).
  3. 100+ webcams are already reported to work out of the box and probably twice as much work as well, but aren’t reported to the author of the driver.

Kudos to Laurent Pinchart the main developer of uvcdriver.

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Monday 30-06-2008: My Bachelor degree and the importance of the Free and Open Source Software

I have successfully completed my Honours Bachelor of Science (HA Bsc) in Software Engineering degree with the highest possible mark/result - a First (yay!). My studies took place in the University of Hull (United Kingdom) for the duration of 3 years. Lovey department/university in a suckabolic city. But who cares about the city anyway.

3 years… It’s amazing how time just flies by. I feel like if it was just yesterday. My experience during this time probably deserves a short summary after all, so here I go.

To start with I have quite enjoyed the degree as it was done in the University of Hull. Along with the theory came a lot of practicle “exercises” in the form of coursework. Those included cool stuff like:

  • Developing a full blown windows mobile application on real devices with GPS (in C#)
  • Developing two games in C++ and C#
  • Developing a compiler (in C)
  • more that I can no longer remember

and well of course the boring stuff like Databases and some maths in the first year.

Overall I don’t feel like the degree was very demanding. It might sound really bad, but I haven’t actually read anything else, but the slides from the lectures. Hell, I even missed a large portion of my lectures. During those 3 years the only book I needed (for the degree) was during the first year… a Maths one. This is probably due to my previous knowledge on most of the subjects and the ability to quickly read up and grasp the technologies. But overall, the key role was played by my involvement with the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community. I used my free time to work on different projects and to learn new exciting things on my own.

The importance of my (and in general the importance for all students) involvement with FOSS is outlined in a good presentation done by an actual student based on his personal experience, which unfortunately I am unable to dig out of my history/feeds ATM. Summed up (by me) and I can confirm from personal experience it is something like this:

You get to read a lot of code, written by different people. It teaches you and you get to know what bad code and good code looks like, what a good and a bad design is, so you don’t write lame student code and don’t end up with pumped up confidence and the wrong impression of the quality of your code. In addition you get to interact and work on something real and used by others in team with developers from all over the world, etc. etc. The list of benefits is endless.

Simply put, based on my FOSS experience I did all the coursework the proper way - not some hacky crappy code that works-ish, but well designed and developed code (where the scale for good and bad is the existing code out there). I usually ended up designing and developing beyond the requirements (but not beyond the coursework specification), which benefited me IMHO a lot.

What’s next? Thought Msc (Masters of Science) in .NET Distributed Systems Development. Fascinating, heh.

YAY for me and YAY for Free and Open Source Software!

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Monday 30-06-2008: Diablo III !!!!!!111111ONEONEONEELEVEN

Dudes, I am so freakin excited! Diablo III is official now - http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3!

Edit: I should probably point you to the good coverage by Ars Technica at http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080630-eight-years-in-the-making-blizzard-unveils-diablo-iii.html.

Edit2: “It’s official” == it has been started / is in developement

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Wednesday 23-04-2008: My Personal Apology for “shrugging”

It turns out that 5 years ago or even more, when my English wasn’t very good (not that it is now) I’ve stumbled upon the English verb “to shrug” and I’ve assumed that it means “to scratch (my head)“. Since then I’ve used “/me shrugs” probably a gazillion times during technical discussion on IRC. I was merely intending to mean “/me is scratching (head, thinking hard on what was said)“.

Please accept my personal apology if I made you feel ignored or disrespected in any way! It wasn’t my intention!

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Wednesday 02-04-2008: Mercurial - my 2 cents

I was fixing a couple of Audacious bugs and adding session management support when I first had to use the Mercurial source control management system and initially I quite liked it.

  • It’s fast, simple - comes with just enough commands
  • It’s consistent - one executable to rule them all, unlike GIT and its gazillion of executables.
  • It’s extremely easy to configure external tools for diff and merge, e.g kdiff3. For comparison in GIT merge tool is also as easy to configure, but there is no way except by an external script to set the diff tool. That’s mostly because most of the tools require 2 files to compare and not a patch.
  • Has Bash completion out of the box. GIT has bash completion, but at least on openSUSE I had to download “it” and add it myself.
  • It’s cross platform.

The initially spotted simplicity actually made me think it can help me to achieve the following work flow quite easily:

Branch for each (or at least bigger) feature/bug –> Work over time on the bug/feature and once it’s ready … –> Squash merge the bugfix/feature branch into the main one (merge as a single commit and also drop the branch’s commit history in order to prevent pollution of the main branch with private intermediate work) -> Drop the temporary branch

Now here comes my disappointment…

Even though Mercurial supports branches, the ones that can live inside the working copy (called “named” branches) cannot be dropped/deleted. Also squashing wasn’t supported, but cherry picking changes is via the shipped Transplant extension. So at the end of the day those long lived branches cannot be used for any temporary work. The short lived branches are in Subversion style - a clone in a different directory. Yuck!

Of course there are like 5-6 commands you can type in to do some magic to workaround this (delete a named branch), but I don’t like magic. Also there is an experimental 3rd party extension (not shipped with Mercurial) that provides  support for “local” branches. Experimental things to manage my code is not for me. And the last thing to mention is that Mercurial has decent built in support for patch queues, but again not much benefit work flow wise compared to Subversion. Also no good subversion “integration” is offered by Mercurial or its tools (only one-way).

Looking on the good side of things reading about Mercurial wasn’t a complete waste of time and due to its simplicity it helped me to get my head around new concepts very quickly.

For now I am very happy of what GIT has to offer me and the two-way Subversion “integration” via git-svn is great.

P.S: The Audacious/BMP/XMMS code is one of the worse I’ve ever seen. Looking forward to new Banshee.

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