Documentation has to be written, bugzilla has to be managed, user questions have to be answered. I thnk that many people get the impression that by writing documentation they’re not really helping. After all, no one uses the docs, and they’re not taking the load off of anyone.

Totally not the case! If the docs were well written and up to date, then people wouldn’t ask so many silly questions. Devs do write docs, and it eats up time – time better spent fixing that segfault. So if you want Xfce not to crash, and you can’t program, the best bet is to write good docs so that we can do the job.

And people will praise you and love you forever. I certainly will. And if you are good enough, maybe the good docs will become one of the selling points of Xfce. There are projects out there who has the extensive availability of documentation as one of its selling points (Linux distros for example, whose use of man pages blows the mind of many a former Windows user).

Want us to fix your pet bug? Help us keep bugzilla clean! Have a killer feature you’d like to see? Stay active in the mailing lists answering questions! If you are good at your self appointed job, then it doesn’t take much till your part of the team – and isn’t that what you really want?

Good little boys and girls might even get a shiny @xfce.org email address . . .

Then this happened.

For the safety of mankind, I had to warn them

What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3)
created with QuizFarm.com

That said, several people wanted to be sure we were all here. Short answer: Yes. Xfce development is still happening. Long answer, I’m tired and my butt hurts from sitting in an office chair all day, so Dev News has slacked to an all time low.

Seriously, no joke, this system is as bad as DRM.

The trouble with DRM is that it essentially treats content owners as criminals, restricting their use of property they own, even when that use is legal.

I don’t know how it works outside of the USA, but you own that car, payments or not. A contractual defaulting of that property to someone else in the case of failure to meet payment does not make it any less your car.

Presume this: you buy a house with a loan from the bank, using the house you are purchasing as the collateral – a mortgage. What if the bank made it so that the key to your house doesn’t work? It’s not their house! Yes they loaned you the money, and yes it is within their legal right to create a contract that makes your life a living hell (by not letting you into your own freakin’ home) if you don’t pay. But it ain’t ethical.

I haven’t watched “real” television since May 7th 1989.

That said, I’m hoping to free up some energy for programming efforts I actually like. The problem with working a job in a field that you consider your hobby, is it saps your energy to pursue your real life, and to pursue your hobby as a hobby. Perhaps now Mousepad will get back into shape.

I have a roadmap of sorts for Mousepad. My goal is to get the Mousepad rewrite up to the functionality of the last release. The only real difference should be that Mousepad will be more maintainable than the old Leafpad mess, and potentially faster. This should only take a day or three, should I find the time. This will become the 0.3.0 release. The 0.3.0 “series” (har har) will be the last of “classic” Mousepad.

The goal for the 0.3.0 series is to have a text editor that opens fast, provides no real frills, and has no dependencies outside of those provided by or required for the current stable version of Xfce.

0.3.1 – recent file support. I have a half finished little lib that handles the spec, which I will likely polish off.

0.3.2 – session support. If 4.4 is out, we can just depend on libexo outright, if not, we’ll probably want have a little “miniexo” inside the Mousepad tree.

At this point, I’d like to begin taking Mousepad in a somewhat more feature heavy direction. That may upset some people, who are just looking for a Notepad clone. These people may fork with my blessing. They can move to requiring libexo for session support, using the recent file support that will appear in Gtk+ 2.10, and maybe even using D-bus to keep all Mousepad windows shoehorned in the same process. Up to them. I need a little more from my text editor than that.

The new goal of Mousepad is to be a fast and slim general purpose text editor, much in the vein of BBedit (the classic Macintosh editor) and Nedit (the greatest editor ever that doesn’t use Gtk). Tentatively this is the direction at that point.

0.4.x – Syntax highlighting (with GtkSourceView, or possibly Scintilla)
0.5.x – Tabs.
0.6.0 – Miscellania – templates, open as copy, revert to saved, yadda yadda. The tiny little time savers release.
0.7.0 – Scripts. Little snippets of code in any language which can either process the whole document, or just a selection.
0.8.0+ – The future! GtkSpell, maybe? Toolbar perhaps? A real plugin system? A function browser?

Syntax highlighting and tabs are no brainers as features, and will likely be simple to implement. After that, I’ll need a little input from users, so all of this is subject to change.

A real concern I have is that by adding features I lose what makes Mousepad appealing now (speed, simplicity) while not bringing enough to the table to be useful relative to older text editors (Vi, Emacs, Nedit, or my console editor of choice, Joe), thus bringing the Gedit hell to Xfce. I think I can walk that line. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I just have to show you the one true auteur left in all of film: Robert Vince

Which B-Movie Badass Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Wow. Sony – You’ve made my day.

Trojan Using Sony DRM Rootkit Spotted

I understand the reasons that it is supposed “unintuitive” but I still believe them. Allow me to forumlate the objection in a way that seems novel.

Once Monty reveals the Donkey, and you are given what is in reality a new problem – pick a door with a 50% probablity of any one being the right one. The thing is that switching from your originally selected door doesn’t change the probability of the door being the right one. Merely the act of revealing the donkey behind one of the unselected doors does.

So what’s critical is selecting a door under these new odds – which is exactly what Monty is letting you door. The key for me is that even choosing to keep the door you already have is a selection.

What am I missing?

I think I may do a little review of this new still pre alpha browser. When I first heard of it I was very dubious about it. But after only five minutes of use, I “get” it. Flock may not be the browser for me, even when completed, but I understand the Flock philosophy now, and understand why it’s developers seem so excited.

At heart, Flock seems to be gunning for making the read/write web we were all so excited about 10 years ago but didn’t get. It’s tactic is that sites like del.icio.us and tools like weblogs are effectively adding the write/share features of the old Web vision on top of the current read/display web that we’ve got – so why not make a browser that combines all those things transparently. For example, when I say that I’m blogging this with Flock, I don’t mean that I surfed to the WordPress login with Flock, I mean that I used Flocks built in blogging tool to write this blog – Flock autodetected how to connect to the XML-RPC service that WordPress provides, and is making this post for me. All I needed to do point it at blog.xfce.org and enter my information.

Jack Thompson has, as a sort of grandstanding piece of satire, proposed a particularly violent video game scenario, with the intention of donating $10,000 to charity, should the game be produced.

I myself am not ignorant in the ways of public manipulation. This is a win – win for Thompson. If the game isn’t made, then he spins this as reveling the hypocrisy of the video game industry. Blithely ignoring that studios exist to make money, and producing a game that is directly insulting to their target market is tantamount to suicide, Thompson will claim that the absence of his game points to a hypocrisy in the industry. Underneath, Thompson will say, they know that such a game would cause a flowering of violence in the real world.

And if the game is made? Thompson has created a scenario so horrific that the studio who made it will have made only more evidence for Thompson’s claim that we are all depraved, vicious peddlers of filth and darkness to the fragile and pure children of America.

Thompson misses the essential truth – that America is a disgustingly violent place. The fragile and pure children are nowhere to be found. We live in a culture of violence, in a time of unjustifiable military action, in land stolen from it’s native people by application of force, whose media from Saturday morning cartoons to the evening news is saturated by blood. One wonders if perhaps Thompson himself carried violence in his heart – is this scenario of his what his dreaming self wants to do to the video game industry? When Jack Thompson writes the name “Osaki Kim” does he breath the words “Jack Thompson?”

More to the point, does old Jacky boy not realize that he has created the perfect opportunity to satirize himself, and display as only interactive fiction can, his own lunacy? Showing, in grim high def 3-D detail, the senseless murder of pale, scrawny, geeky high school aged video gamers, innocent and defenseless, by a man who has been told by his culture to take retribution out of the hands of the court and into his own will not help make Thompson’s case.

Thompson is saying very little new – writers, filmmakers, musicians, all have been blamed in the past for our cultural degeneracy. What Thompson adds to the mix is his subtle finger pointing at us, the gamers. Saying that it is our weakness of character, our support for video games that is the real cause of rape and murder – effectively, Thompson is blaming me and mine. Thompson still lives in a world where gamers are the minority, and can be blamed for those things which are epidemic to this country. And that is so insulting, and so irresponsible, that I believe Thompson’s charge must be taken up.

Games can contain stories, and stories can contain ideas. All Thompson sees is gore and robots, just as all my grandparents heard in the Beatles was sex and drugs. He cannot see the ideas, and as a man with no soul he cannot see the power of storytelling. He has presented us with a scenario which a talented game designer could turn into a bleak tale of individual madness, the culture that praises and nurtures it, and the idiocy of the scapegoat.

I truly hope that someone with the talent and the balls takes up the task.

And then the bastards sent submarines after the Titanic.

I have never been so afraid in my life. The terrible pressures of the deep on those tiny vessels, the accumulated silt of ages, the monsters that lurked below. Every image became a nightmare. God help me, I was scared of the shrimp.

I switched to novels. Dad gave me 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

And now my irrational fear of those which goes *SLORP* in the eternal night of the deep had a concrete form in the Giant Squid. Lord of all that is Evil and Slimy, I can’t eat teriyaki sauce to this day, the association of slimy food to the slick, oily skin of Nemo’s Bane is so strong. Worse, this childhood fear had been stirred up with the discovery, several months past, of the (I shit you the fuck not) a goddamn collosal squid. They just keep getting bigger and bigger. My only comfort has been that every giant and (*shiver*) collosal squid discovered has been dead or dying, bodies swollen with shrimp and evil in the bellies of sperm whales – sperm whales, in whom I have no fear, due to the comraderie of mammalhood.

My one salvation: I have been spared the horror of seeing the things live, seeing how they move, as they must, swimming in an abyss cold as space, yet filled with a dark Cthuloid life.

Well fuck a duck

I’ll cover both weeks – sorry about the delay.

Ah well.

Press

Linmagazine

Linmagazine, an Israeli Linux site has a translation of our update on the status of 4.4. If that’s your bag baby, check it out

It’s all just a bunch of funny squares to me.

Announcements

Xfmedia 0.9.1

Brian Tarricone released Xfmedia 0.9.0 on the 10th, with a nice bundle of additional features (like tag editing), bugfixes (like a fix for ASX playlists), and seven new/updated translations.

Not four days later, Brian followed that up with 0.9.1, which fixes a until-now elusive crash with Gtk+ 2.8.

Xfmedia has been my default player for some time now – I only need Gxine for it’s browser plugin. If you’re looking for a no nonsense player with a small footprint and few dependencies, this may be what you are looking for.

The NEWS file
Source download

Clipman Plugin

On the 15th Nick Shermer announced that he was working on a personal update of the Clipman plugin for the panel, which can be used to keep a clipboard history.

Nick followed this up with a new version of the plugin. It is far more customizable and slick than it’s predecessor, providing the ability to exclude selection data, customize the number of items in the history, persistent clipboard across sessions, and more.

Nick’s announcement
Source download

Updates

Mailwatch

Mailwatch, the anointed successor to the mailcheck plugin was ported by Jasper to the new panel API.

Brian is reported to have said “that’s just freakin cool.” This being the first major plugin ported caused a small comment from Brian on the new panel API. Jasper has yet to answer. So pooty on you Brian.

I’d go so far as to call it “tubular”. If I was a Ninja Turtle

Panel

The new experimental panel continues to be in flux, as is to be expected from pre alpha software.

However, most of these changes are minor, or cosmetic – Jasper opening up the floor for discussion has gotten some feedback on how to make the panel cover corner cases, but nothing critical has been rethought.

Hopefully, the panel will reach a stable enough state in the near future that third party developers can plan to be ready with upgrades to their plugins for 4.4

Brian finds a convenience API confusing
Benedikt asks for valid .desktop files
Container plugins? Probably not
Default plugins

Thunar Extension Framework

Benny has begun implementing a powerful framework for extending Thunar, the new file manager for 4.4.

There are a number of niceties in the works. The first is a more than coincidental similarity between Thunar’s framework, and the one found in Nautilus. The primary differences exist to cut down on memory usage, and should be minor enough to allow a large number of Nautilus extensions to be ported to Thunar, and to permit those with experience writing Nautilus extensions get up and running with Thunar in short order.

Benny also plans on providing an embedded Python interpretor so those of a reptilian persuasion can extend Thunar as well. There is no word from the Perl or C++ binding developers on their intentions regarding adding support for Thunar, yet, but we can hope.

The announcement of Thunar extensions quickly turned into a discussion on whether or not it would be possible to extend the VFS that Thunar uses. The short answer: not yet. See the thread for the long answer.

Preliminary docs extensions
The whole darn thread

The Lists

Orage Sync
Dennis Tuchler wanted to know if Orage could sync with an external device.

It will if someone wants to donate some hardware

Orageballs
Korbinus put together a quick and dirty collection of tarballs and screenshots for Orage

Funniest. URL. Ever.

The End

It seems that I have been sending with the wrong email address to the Xfce lists on occasion – as such some of my emails have been missing. I assure you that nothing I said was insightful.

Brian is in China for this week. Which is why I can get away with that pooty comment.

If you like this update, then consider dropping me a comment. I know its vain, but I like knowing that you read this. Also, the grammer police amuse me.

First off, nine times out of ten, if you have unimportant UI bits you’ve screwed up. Second, if an important bit of UI needs “highlighting” you’ve almost certainly screwed up.

Icons are not workarounds, they are the key to the whole visual metaphor. Several papers have discussed the power of pairing a visual and a lexical stimuli for increasing accuracy and response time in a number of tasks.

Give someone a set of words, and ask them to select the one of them according to a criteria (Like picking the menu item which will save the file from the list of menu options), and it will take them several milliseconds to find it.

Give them a set of images with the same criteria (”Find the toolbar button that saves the document”) and they will take several milliseconds.

Pair the two together (image plus text) and it will take less time to select the menu item.

This makes it pretty clear that eliminating icons throughout the system is a net loss. What is still ambiguous, from a scientific perspective, is what happens in the mixed case – in other words, what is the performance change for the case where “important” bits of the UI have icons and “unimportant” bits do not.

I strongly suspect that performance of selecting a specific “important” item will go up marginally at best (and I could make a strong argument that would theorize performance would plummet, in most cases) and that performance will be so much worse for selecting “unimportant” elements of the UI, that the effect would be a net loss.

I’d be happy to test this out, however, using Gtk+ specifically, if one of you happens to have a grant?

I also generated some anonymous criticism of my writing on OSNews. Which was probably warranted. Ah, well. I’ll never get that Linux Weekly News job now.

Press

OSNews

OSNews recently had a discussion around last week’s 4.4 update. Mostly it was salivation over the new additions, additionally moistened with praise.

Hidden inside a discussion of the most recent Gnome release was evidence that other people are catching on to what many of you already know: Xfwm4’s compositing manager doesn’t suck.

Xfce 4.4 preview discussion
The compositing manager, buried amongst other Gnome talk

Announcements

libtubo and fgr Released
libtubo (tube in Spanish, for those chuckling right now) has been released. libtubo has, until very recently, been internal to Xffm, and is the core of Xffm’s communication with outside applications.

fgr is another part of Xffm picked for a separate release. fgr is an alternative to the trusty find command, using grep to do filtering on file content.

These releases are a part of the ongoing effort to break Xffm into separate pieces, both libraries and applications. This is interesting in and of itself, as Xffm began its life as an integration of disparate Xfce tools. However, much has been added to Xffm that may be more interesting in their own right.

The libtubo website, with API docs
fgr website and man page

Xfce-Perl 0.001

The new Perl bindings for Xfce libraries has seen its first official release. Available both from subversion and from your local CPAN mirror, this package makes it easier to write desktop applications in Perl.

Despite the pessimistic version number, the bindings “are relatively complete, and you can access most of libxfce4util and libxfcegui4″. Let’s all give Brian a hand

Brian’s announcement
Xfce-Perl’s website

Orage

Those of you who have been following along at home know that the old, simplistic Xfcalendar has been on its way to becoming the new, iCal based Orage.

It seems that day has arrived. Current subversion trunk has now reached sufficient completeness, that the name change is official. Orage is a significant change from 4.2’s Xfcalendar, and where it heads from here should prove interesting.

Orage announcement

Wewa Announced

Ah, but what, you ask, is Wewa?

Wewa is a third party web suite being built using Gtk+ WebCore.

By third party, we mean it’s not being developed as a core Xfce component. By web suite we mean a web browser, mail client, and a rss aggregator.

It is unclear which of the Xfce libraries Wewa is going to require – it’s in the very early stages. Obvious possibilities are the XfceRc functionality, and the resource lookups. Also, there was some mention made of using the Thunar MIME system. All of this speculative, as no code has been released. There is, instead, a tantalizing screenshot.

Wewa in action
Jonas’s announcement

Updates

Evolving Panel Framework

After the announcement of the new panel framework last week, Jasper changed the plugin API somewhat, and released new docs. The new libxfce4panel library provides the services needed to write new panel plugins.

It also seems that XFC, PyXfce, and Xfce-Perl, will have bindings for this new library, allowing plugins written in C++, Python, and Perl.

API docs
Ongoing thread from last week

Thunar Thumbs

Benedict has added support for displaying thumbnails to Thunar, and has asked users to test the performance.

Currently, Thunar does not generate thumbnails, so you will need to have an application which does do so and uses the thumbnail spec in order to see any.

Give it a shot, and let Benny know what you think.

Thankless work
Thumbnail screenshot

Xfdesktop Minimized Icons

Back when the Earth was cooling, and CDE reigned, application windows would minimize to the desktop, as icons (that’s why they call it “iconify”). Xfce had a similar feature in the 3.x series which was lost during the 4.0 push.

Xfdesktop brings this functionality back to the surface, with iconified window support now in SVN. With Thunar and Xffm providing more “classic” icons on the desktop, Xfdesktop keeps it’s niche by going a different route, providing what a small, but important and vocal, chunk of the userbase has clamored for.

Brian’s announcement

The Lists

Automounting

Samuel Wright asked about an Xfce automounting solution. He was given some tips

Ivman, Knoppix, and GVM

Pager Urgency

Will Thompson wanted to know if he could submit a patch to make the pager highlight windows with the URGENT hint set.

Yes

Default Protocol Handlers

Fabian Neumann asked if Xfce has a way of storing default protocol handlers for things like mailto: and http:. The short answer is “not yet”

But Benny had a neat suggestion

The End

That’s all for this week. Next week I plan to not only be on time, but bring the snarkiness back up to their usual levels.