Today I ran into this nice article about great hackers, and I recalled that I've been collecting various articles that I thought were worth remembering. So, now, I'm putting them on the web, because good articles should be shown to the world. See them on the readings section.
Last week, on The Register, there was an article about the music tastes of various IT people, that was kind of funny. Wait till you see the wrath of the goth sysadmins. ;-)
In other news, did you know that the magic number identifying Java .class files is 0xCAFEBABE? And this is only the beginning of the hex fun. And there's more! :-)
Also, how many types of bugs did you know of?
Man, Everything2 is dead funny! (not to mention informative! ;-) ). Look what I ran into. LOL! :))
Just as I was complaining to Igor about the attitude of the GNOME developers, I saw this article on slashdot. It's an article announcing the birth of the project GoneME, a possible fork of GNOME, meant to "take the project in a new direction".
While I have my doubts about the mileage this project will have, given it's "ranty" nature, I do think that it's about time for someone to step up an do something about the current state of affairs.
I have recently installed GNOME 2.6, switching from IceWM, and while I like the eye-candy a lot, I still have some issues with it. It seems to me that the GNOME developers thought that their software will only be used by beginners, so they took all kinds of decisions that should have been configurable (i.e. Button Order, Spatial Browsing, etc.). In my case, it was the Window List Applet that ticked me off, by not having any way to specify the maximum button size, and by sorting the windows in another order than chronological (i.e. older windows to the left).
No problem, I said, there should be an option, hidden somewhere in GConf. WRONG! The settings for the Window List Applet that can be found in GConf are exactly the same ones you can find in the preferences dialog. No "advanced preferences" here. Just sit back and relax, the GNOME developers know better than you how you should be using your desktop.
So, I started thinking of writing a patch to fix this problem. But before doing that, I thought I'd google a bit to see if I was the first one to have this particular wish. Well, what do you know? I'm not the first one to have this problem. A guy actually wrote the code to fix this issue, more than half a year ago. Did that patch get included in GNOME? No. "Why?" I hear you ask? Because that would "induce too many toggle buttons"...
Don't get me wrong here. I'm a huge fan of Havoc Pennington's work, and I think the UNIX Desktop owes him a whole lot of gratitude, but I think he should be less afraid of experimenting things. In this particular case, no one said that there should be a toggle button for this option. A GConf entry would have been just fine. If you care about this issue, dig for it.
A more general solution to the "GNOME Determination Problem" (as I call it) would be to add all these wild patches people ask for, but make them optional. If they are of dubious value, such as my pet bugfix was, they should be left in GConf. GConf should be modified to send a weekly/monthly/etc. report (with the user's consent, of course) to the GNOME developers, showing which keys were modified. If many users modify the same options, those settings should be promoted to the UI. These reports could also give a clue to the developers about what "sane defaults" actually means to the users.
Who knows, maybe someday GNOME will re-invent itself, and I won't be forced to classify their developers into "undecided" and "holier than thou"...
Comments?
Well, it seems that seeing the site growing is a very good motivator. After a sleepless night of hacking, there they are: the comments are ready!!! More precisely: you can now post your own comments about my rants. Just click on a story's title or on the link below.
Enjoy, and may $DEITY protect us from the dreaded XSS and all other exploits and abuses! :-)
As soon as I get some food and some sleep, I'll post the code powering this humble website under the GPL. Once again, stay tuned! ;-)
In Latin, they say "De gustibus non disputandum est.", which means "There is no arguing taste". I usually agree: "There is no arguing my taste". ;-)
All jokes aside, I have reached the conclusion that, in each nation, there is a kind of music you can always associate with the lack of education: music for the unwashed masses. You can usually recognize it by the fact that it's all that's playing on the mainstream radio stations.
I don't really know what that music is for other countries, but here in Romania, the traditional "Romanian folk music", which was sort of melodic, has been displaced by the infamous "manele". I'm not saying that educated people don't listen to them, but they are the exception, not the rule. The opposite is also true: there are certain kinds of music that only educated people listen to. Jazz comes to mind, as an example.
I'm not exactly a jazz-man myself, (although I enjoy it -- I usually go for rock music), but one thing is for sure: I don't like Hungarian folk music. [ That does not mean I have anything against Hungarians; some of my best friends are Hungarian. ] Which brings us to today's story...
I live in a university hostel. So, I was prepared for late-night, noisy student parties. What I didn't expect was this non-student neighbour of the hostel making so much noise as to be more annoying than all the student parties I had to hear, all year round.
He/she saw fit to show me (and all my unsuspecting neighbours, for that matter) his/her entire collection of Hungarian folk music. I'm usually pretty tolerant with these things, but after 12 hours or so of ethnic instruments I've had enough.
"Fight fire with fire", sez me. "I'll show him a taste of my sound system". So I set up my speakers on the window, facing his direction, and played, as loud as my hardware allowed, "Seek and destroy" from Metallica.
"That'll teach him!", I said to myself and went outside to evaluate the "damage" I had done. But, alas!, my speakers were no match for his! It was as though a mouse was trying to strangle an elephant. Disappointed, I was ready to give up, when the unthinkable happened: his music stopped! Victory!!
I stopped my music too, but I've reached the following conclusion: "I need to buy bigger speakers!" ;-)
Ahhh... the silence... gooooood silence... :-)
Finally, after countless efforts to defeat my laziness, I have a blogging system to show to the world. It wasn't easy, believe me, but I'm actually rather happy with the result. What do you think?
Next: adding a comments section to each story, so that these pages won't be like the TV (one-way only), and you'll actually be able to tell me what you think. Stay tuned. ;-)
Well, if you can see this, the blogging system must be working.
How are you gentlemen!!
