Oh Pete, I deliberately didn't use your name because I wasn't attacking you in particular; I was aiming at the completely misleading article whose pagerank you (and Digg) increased to the point where it achieves higher results in searches for "XDS drag and drop" than the XDS specification itself. Please don't take it personally.
Of course, you still fail utterly for not providing any explanation of why you were so pleased to have this feature in your original post, and for not linking to, say, the GNOME 2.20 release notes, the relevant bug, or just writing something that won't feed anti-GNOME trolls for the next five years. But I'm glad to see that I've at least provoked the former, even if you also called me an ass at the same time. :)
Also, note that the bug in Nautilus is still open - there are still patches for the list view to test/improve, and other opportunities to extend XDS support to the rest of GNOME.
Posted: 27 Sep 2007 00:00 |
Recently, people linked to a random news site claiming GNOME has added "XDS support" in 2.20. XDS is an extension to the XDND drag-and-drop protocol.
This is very misleading. The headline reads as if GNOME has not had any drag-and-drop support until now, which is ridiculous. The Digg headline was even worse: "GNOME Gets Real Drag n' Drop Support with XDS". Bullshit.
What actually happened is that Nautilus (the GNOME file manager) has received a patch to support this extension in the main window bit. It will probably help File Roller act more intuitively with respect to dragging files to Nautilus windows, and it is a good thing. It won't work with Nautilus's list view, yet. It is also possibly the least interesting of the new features in GNOME 2.20. It deserved one sentence tagged on to the File Roller bit of the release notes. I am not going to "scream with joy".
Incidentally, GNOME 2.20 is a fantastic release, and has caught me by surprise. EOG (the image viewer) has been almost completely rewritten. Evolution now has several small new features that I've been wanting - new mail notifications, and warnings about missing attachments. There's some nice GNOME Keyring integration going on... even the default theme looks shinier. So, there are plenty of other, better features to say "finally" about.
Posted: 25 Sep 2007 00:00 |
Today, I finally found a place to live in Rugby. It turned out that a landlord friend of my boss had a room to let, in a very convenient location. I'm within ten minutes' walking distance of the station, the town centre, and the (hopefully soon to be) new office. It's also quite cheap (university accommodation prices), with all utilities and bills except internet access included in the rent. Yay.
I need to move my belongings from Coventry to Rugby; most of the stuff I have with me can probably be carried on the train in the morning. I might stay one more night here, so I can go to the techteam stuff in the evening tomorrow.
It's still pretty easy for me to visit Warwick, especially at weekends, especially if there's convenient crash space in Coventry. So, I can attend XINGs and pub socials, if CompSoc doesn't object too much. :)
Posted: 25 Sep 2007 00:00 |
My first day at credativ went well. In the morning I updated some RHEL packages on a couple of test servers. I suspect the live systems will be next.
In the afternoon I copied over some PostgreSQL configuration tuning for an upgrade from 7.x to 8.x. I'm getting up to speed with the various systems - there's even the threat of fixing bugs in Java code, in the future.
Posted: 17 Sep 2007 00:00 |
I just realised that my new job title is 'Technical Engineer', so will probably annoy Sadiq.
Posted: 14 Sep 2007 00:00 |
Late on Tuesday evening, I successfully got a branch of Choob to run without its 'Object DB'. Presently, it runs only a few of the more simple plugins - for instance, the 'Alias' plugin is not supported, so I spent a couple of minutes trying to work out why it wasn't replying to commands.
With ODB gone, vast swathes of complicated parsing code can be removed from the bot's core. JJTree should no longer be needed to compile the bot. The next step is probably to consolidate the core database code using Hibernate, and then get the more complicated plugins to work again.
Orthogonally to this, I'd like to kill HorriblePerlScript.java, and perhaps also design a nicer plugin system that lets Eclipse work with plugins as (shock) actual Java files. I suspect I'd need some help with that, though.
Posted: 14 Sep 2007 00:00 |
So, during a conversation at PyCon UK, Keith White noticed that he owned the same model (HP nx6325) laptop as me. He also informed me that his processor was 64-bit, and asserted that mine probably was as well.
I was sceptical. It's a Mobile Sempron - last I checked, all Semprons were 32-bit. Of course, I don't keep up with hardware at all. Checking /proc/cpuinfo:
tim@regulus:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 76
model name : Mobile AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3500+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 800.000
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow up pni cx16 lahf_lm extapic cr8_legacy ts fid vid ttp tm stc
bogomips : 1597.70
clflush size : 64
The 'lm' flag means 64-bit. So intuitive and obvious... so I guess that's one more thing to try when I get around to reinstalling my laptop.
Posted: 10 Sep 2007 00:00 |
My conference tradition is to occupy myself with activities completely unrelated to the main topic. For instance, at DebConf I hacked on GNOME stuff, at GUADEC I hacked on Debian stuff, and at LinuxConf.eu I did very little. At PyCon UK, I've built the wireless-dev tree of Linux, and got the new b43 driver to run.
So, it works. It appears to have increased the transmission power of the card, and limits the bit rate properly, so should work at longer ranges without fiddling about. Having said that, I've been using it all of five minutes, so all kinds of bugs could be lurking around the corner.
I think I'll now take a look at Jackfield.
Posted: 09 Sep 2007 00:00 |
Of course, there are no packages for Jackfield yet. Rather than mess about with installing Jackfield, I badgered Stuart Langridge to do it for me.
So, I now have a working shiny clock thing. Making packages for Jackfield requires solving a few problems, like gconf keys for showing Jackfield and multiple instance detection.
Posted: 09 Sep 2007 00:00 |
I've accepted a job at credativ, in Rugby - I start on the 17th. This means I'm preparing to move back to the Coventry area. (I just can't get away.) It's very exciting, and all that. :)
I celebrated today by getting an overpriced lunch at Starbucks. The other thing I've splashed out on has been a bunch of German reference books - I want to brush up for communicating with the German branch. I believe I'm going to be sent to Germany for a few days to meet the rest of the company, soon.
I'm still planning to go to PyCon UK this weekend.
Posted: 07 Sep 2007 00:00 |
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Tim Retout tim@retout.co.uk
JabberID: tim@retout.co.uk
I'm afraid I have turned off comments for this blog, because of all the spam. Let's face it, I didn't read them anyway. Feel free to email me.