Ha! Pirates.
Can’t stay behind now, can I? Gotta keep with the theme of the week…
Software patents :(
Quick summary:
- The (elected) European Parliament is opposed
- A large fraction of the (elected) national parliaments is opposed
- Danmark has officially requested the subject to be changed to a B-item (i.e. further discussion needed)
- The Danish request had support from several other representatives in the counsel
What to do, what to do?
The (non-elected) European Counsel decided to rubberstamp the decission as an A-item (political agreement, no discussion necessary). Right…
The reason given? We are adopting the position for institutional reasons so as not to create a precedent which might have a consequence of creating future delays in other processes. Bah.
An evil goblin, maybe?
I usually don’t post here, but this blog is too quiet these days. The calm before the 4.2 storm, maybe?
So… let’s write some pointless chatters.
First, I’m sure there is an evil goblin in my house. I’ve lost two of my three computers in a month, including the laptop (fried CPU and hard-drive failure), and my main machine behaves oddly, whereas it was working like a charm since my last Debian installation in 2002… I’m going to install again the whole system tonight and/or tomorrow and/or the day after, so I’ll unplug myself from the internet and I’ll be back asap. I don’t know yet if I’ll choose Debian again, or switch to lunar linux, even if I’m not a source-based distro fan, for a compile-time duration question.
You may have noticed that xfce.org now only shows one screenshots page. This allows to decrease drastically the bandwidth usage, including the distributed one, and finally, I prefer it like this. On the other hand, I’ll try to create a page somewhere else in order to show all the numerous and nice Xfce 4.1.99.x screenshots that the users have sent to me, probably on the Xfce goodies server.
Maybe you have noticed that the FAQ (and overview and documentation pages) have been rewritten too. If you have other Q&A ideas, they are welcome, as long as they are hm… relevant :P
I’m glad that Benedikt’s new Terminal received quite positive feedback. It’s a really great terminal application.
At last, here is a screenie. Of what? Of my desktop! You know, the one that the evil goblin is trying to annihilate. Why the hell couldn’t I show my desktop like everybody does already?? ;))
cu
Ask a silly question…
In the process of putting off most of my work until next week, I decided to have some fun with this quiz:
"Which OS are you?".
Not too bad, I think:
Sofar for president
If I were American I’d vote for sofar.
He’s much better at fixing things than any of the other candidates. You want proof? This blog is working again, isn’t it? Thanks to sofar!
xfmusic4, goneme
those of you following the xfce4-dev mailing list know that i’ve been working on a lightweight music player, which i’m calling xfmusic4. i’ve made a couple alpha releases, and put up a public CVS repository. more info can be found on the project page.
apparently a critic of gnome has decided to put his money (or the OSS equivalent) where his mouth is, and has formed the goneme project. i think it’s nice to see someone stop complaining and actually do some work, but, after reading his arguments about what’s wrong with gnome, it sounds to me that he’s just mostly ignorant and uninformed, and, in some places, blatantly incorrect. my prediction: he gets a lot of support initially, but mostly from a crowd that doesn’t have much development ability to speak of. the project produces little code beyond the simple patch that’s already up there, and fizzles out relatively quickly.
on an unrelated note, planets gnome and freedesktop are linking to us now. i wonder if they did that before or after i put up links to them here. probably before… i’m not that special ^_~. anyway, if anyone gets here from there, hi guys!
ok, i’ll stop editing this post after this one, i promise. i came upon this, some usability info on .desktop files. we should probably start doing something like this for xfce. i’m kinda against the “GenericName” concept – i think it really dumbs down the user experience. there are many many windows users that honeslty believe that microsoft internet explorer is “The Internet”, and i don’t want to see similar things happening in our world. at the same time, i feel for new linux users that fire up their desktop and have no idea what any of the apps do. i wish menu items would display tooltips when you assign them…
WM eye candy
i was poking about on slashdot, and noticed an article about sun’s “looking glass” window manager. it renders windows in 3D, presumably using your hardware’s 3D acceleration (i hope). they have some screenshots up, and they’re pretty nifty. i can’t say anything about how functional that kind of stuff is without actually trying it, but it sure does look cool.
Menu shadow effect for gtk+-2.4.3
Hey, I took some time to prepare RPM packages and pre-patched source archives of gtk+-2.4.3 with the menu shadow patch applied (the patch remains the same and applies fine on gtk+-2.4.3)
Updates from the usual xfce page or from Sourceforge.
Add some noise to this blog
I saw this on Planet Gnome: a very interesting read about copyright and DRM; a guy from EFF gives a talk for Microsoft to explain why DRM is bad for bussiness and society.
Also, we need more off-topic (non-xfce) blog entries. Everyone else has them ;-)
state of free software
Just a small observation. I just read this message.
It used to be the case that a holiday would be a good opportunity to hold a meeting of free software developers; now apparently it is a reason to postpone it. The times are changing it seems.