moved on
...to Xfce4 4.4, that is. I've finally heeded the urgings of my fellow Xfce enthusiasts dostrow, nichoj, et al, and moved my laptop over to the latest Xfce 4.4 prerelease. Sometimes as a developer, you have to live somewhat on the bleeding edge, in this case, a couple of dozen entries in package.unmask. Yow! Hot stuff. The new Xfce has changed considerably since 4.2. It more resembles a traditional desktop environment, but it still retains the speed and ease of use that it had from the older days. That said, some configuration changes have been made. Configuring the panel is a little less intuitive; the same control works for both the icon strip at the bottom and the window list at the top. (So don't just kill the panel process entirely!) No more xftaskbar4 to kill. 
There are still a few outstanding bugs, such as missing icons from things like the main configuration window, missing panel plugin icons (none for cpu-freq), and missing icons for mail and webbrowser in the terminal Applications menu. Also missing is the old ability to change the icon spacing in thunar. Though a host of other features have been added, folder views take up way too much space. Need the icons to be spaced about half as far apart as they currently are.
Also, the new battery applet is not nearly as helpful as the old one. For example, even though lm_sensors doesn't work on this laptop whatsoever, the basic thermal zone info from ACPI was parsed by the battstatus applet (don't ask me why, I'm just glad it did). It displayed temperature, battery charge, and an indicator whenever the fan turned on. Handy, right? Well, the fan indicator is still there, but there's no provision for temperature display anymore. WEAK. Grr. I'd downgrade, but the stable version blocks the masked version. Anyone know a fix-it for this?
Speaking of WEAK, my back has taken a sudden turn for the worse over the last couple of days. Earlier this week (i.e. before I started my new schedule on Wednesday), I was almost back to normal. I could walk without limping, at least most of the day. And now...now I'm not doing so hot. Some excrutiating twinges, and constant pain every step. It's a little better than it was yesterday, but I for sure need to get to the doctor's office and get that x-ray done. The doc said it'd take a minimum of six weeks to heal, and at the end of that time, I can say that I'm definitely not recovered. %$^&# sciatica. And at my age, too. I'd hoped to be well by my wife's birthday and Christmas, but doesn't look like that will happen.
Maybe I'll be fully healed in time for SCALE in February?
wiping out, moving on
There were some good comments on my last journal entry, thanks to everyone who responded. I'm happy to say that some of the problems have been dealt with. I've been talking to several developers who are rather likeminded; just check Planet's entries for the last week or so.
Anyway, I've decided to give my trusty ol' lappy das boot, by which I mean "the boot" rather than "the boat." 
It's had Gentoo (Jackass! 2005.1, yay for my old project) installed on it since August 31, 2005. And what with one thing or another, it's just been slowing down. It's got a strange partition layout on it, too. A whole unused 10GB ntfs partition (never got around to installing Windows), a smaller Linux test partition, and the main desktop stuff. Rather inefficient usage of the 60GB disk, considering its recent use. The slowness, combined with space issues, and the fact that I haven't updated it since before gcc-4.1.1 went stable on x86 means that I've decided to just reinstall. Why spend a week compiling when everything will likely break if I try to simultaneously migrate to modular Xorg and switch from gcc-3.4, as well as all the crazy kernel/udev/nvidia/madwifi updates?
Time to wipe the disk and move on to something more recent. I've spent today moving /home to my new USB key and dumping it to my AMD64 box. It really highlights the slow-as-molasses USB1.1 on the laptop, as well as the crappy I/0 and slow system bus. I'll be doing some smarter performance tuning this time around, as well as installing only Xfce. I've been running mostly in Gnome because of some weird Xfce/Fluxbox issues, but with only 128MB memory, any and all workloads are just about unbearable.
Of course, the simpler solution would have been to just plug the laptop drive straight into the IDE cables on the AMD64 box for the updates, but unfortunately, the drive uses some weird laptop-only ATA/power combo connector, not the standard IDE connector. Oh well. I don't mind trying out the Installer LiveCD, especially since I'll have nothing to lose.
Guess I have to go re-read all the changes I've been making to the installation handbooks.
Sleep, Or a Lack Thereof
I've been having trouble sleeping recently, more than usual. I hardly got any sleep Sunday night, which was probably more due to napping Sunday afternoon than anything else. But the end result was that I probably spent about 2 hours sleeping, but still got up at 8am to get ready for work.
So I figured Monday night I'd be exhausted and I'd sleep well. I went to bed around 10pm, and fell asleep very quickly. However, I woke up at 1am. I had a lot of trouble falling asleep after that, maybe getting another 2-3 hours of sleep in before finally getting up at 7:30am. I felt tired, and not really rested (and I still feel kinda tired).
I'm not really sure what it is. Is it physical or mental? Am I not comfortable in my bed anymore? Is it too noisy? Too warm/cold? Has there been a lot on my mind lately that's keeping me from sleeping?
I really don't know. There's been a decent amount on my mind lately, but it's mostly work stuff, and I tend to be pretty good about leaving work stuff at work. Life stuff... well, I guess there's been a bit on my mind there as well, but I don't think that's been keeping me awake.
I hope it's not my bed. A new mattress isn't cheap.
Temperature is a good question. My bedroom is a couple degrees hotter than my living room because of the computer equipment. Still, if anything I feel a little chilly in my bed (sans blankets). I think I feel relatively comfortable.
Noise is a possibility. A few months ago I added a small dedicated Linux box as my router. It has a single 80mm fan that's a bit noisy. I should replace that with a quieter fan. Also, the CPU fan in my desktop machine could stand to be replaced, as it's not the quietest thing in the world. THe other fans in my computer are all variable-speed and relatively quiet.
So I guess I'll try replacing some of my noisier computer fans and see if that helps. I also came upon these noise-absorbing blocks, though I'm a bit skeptical. They also carry noise-absorbing lining material, though that's a bit more pricey. Ideally, I'd like to just move my computer out of my bedroom, but I don't have another place for it. If I ever move into a larger apartment with a spare room, that would work, but until then I'm stuck. I've also thought about building a low-noise, low-power NAS box to move all my storage out of my desktop. With that, I could conceivably leave my desktop off a lot of the time, or maybe even think about moving to a laptop-only configuration. I think I'm a ways off from that, though (maybe after I buy an Intel-based Mac laptop in a couple years).
Finding a good heatsink/fan combo for an old Athlon Socket A/462 motherboard isn't as easy as I'd hoped. The board also has very little clearance around the sides of the CPU socket, so smaller is better. It would be nice to get away with just a tallish heatsink, but the older Athlons probably run too hot for that.
Following Directions
Sigh. I know people don't read directions. I know that, when you want to get someone to read something, brevity is better: the less there is to read, the more likely the recipient is to read it.
But when the first line of a Bugzilla mail says "Do not reply to this email. To comment on this bug, please visit: (URL)", you'd think that people would, you know, just click on the damned link. How is it easier to hit reply, delete "bugzilla-daemon@xfce.org" from the "to" line, and paste my email address in there?
(Ok, spambots, have at the bugzilla-daemon address. It goes directly to /dev/null anyway.)
So now, Xfce Bugzilla emails start with this: "DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL. Also, do not reply via email to the person whose email is mentioned below. To comment on this bug, please visit: (URL)."
Hopefully that's clear enough, and not too long for the ridiculously lazy among us to read.
Following Directions
Sigh. I know people don’t read directions. I know that, when you want to get someone to read something, brevity is better: the less there is to read, the more likely the recipient is to read it.
But when the first line of a Bugzilla mail says “Do not reply to this email. To comment on this bug, please visit: (URL)”, you’d think that people would, you know, just click on the damned link. How is it easier to hit reply, delete “bugzilla-daemon@xfce.org” from the “to” line, and paste my email address in there?
(Ok, spambots, have at the bugzilla-daemon address. It goes directly to /dev/null anyway.)
So now, Xfce Bugzilla emails start with this: “DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL. Also, do not reply via email to the person whose email is mentioned below. To comment on this bug, please visit: (URL).”
Hopefully that’s clear enough, and not too long for the ridiculously lazy among us to read.
Long Day
Today I was at work from 8:45am until 7pm. While that may not be particularly impressive in the long run, it's quite a bit for me. While I didn't particularly appreciate spending the majority of my waking hours there, it's nice that the work is starting to interest me again. I'm getting to do a bit of software work. Even if I'm not really writing new code yet, digging into the Linux kernel for debugging purposes is pretty fun.
Anyway, I want to get to bed. I've been getting up early so far this week, and I'd like to keep it up.
Bye-bye, Kitty, Again
I don't know what's going on, but the second of our three cats had to be put to sleep last night. She was diagnosed with kidney disease a few days ago, and wasn't given a lot of time. She did ok for the first couple days (albeit being tired and sluggish), but started getting sick yesterday. She seemed to be in a lot of pain, so Dad had her put down; really, the only merciful thing to do.
What to say about Gwynna... She was the youngest one, about 7 or 8 years old, I think. I didn't know her as well as the others, as she was taken in around when I left for college. She was a beautiful cat, mottled brown/orange and grey. She was very personable, and meowed all the time, sometimes seemingly for no reason. She always wanted attention, sometimes at the expense of the other two cats.
I'm not sure what else to say... I'm still a bit stunned that two of our cats have died in the past 2 months.
Xfmedia 0.9.2 Released
I was bored last night, and decided to try to fix a few xfmedia bugs. It was looking fairly decent, so I figured I'd put together a new release, since it's been over a year since the last one, and several fixes have accumulated since then. Anyway, feel free to go download it from the page above, and/or check out the summary of changes.
Auto update the background list for Xfdestkop
I have written a quick script to update the list of the images for the background in Xfdesktop.
#!/bin/sh
# Update the background.list so the new downloaded wallpapers are available
# to show up in Xfdesktop.
LIST=$HOME/.config/xfce4/desktop/background.list
echo "# xfce backdrop list" > $LIST
find $HOME/images/background/ -type f >> $LIST
Note: change in the last line the folder to the backgrounds.
This script can be either putted in an .zshrc file. Or better, if you use Xfce, save the script, under the name update-desktop-list.sh for example, to your personal bin folder (in my case $HOME/.local/bin) which is correctly set in the PATH, and run xfce4-autostart-editor. You can add the command update-desktop-list.sh.
Finally you have to set up Xfdesktop to use the list (located at $LIST) of backgrounds. Go to Settings > Desktop manager, and select the list as the file. If it doesn't exist run the script a first time.
Drivel
For the hell of it, I installed Drivel. I'm not sure if I prefer blogging from a "normal" web client, or from a local client, outside the web browser.
One deficiency is that Drivel (2.0.3) seems to be unable to set more than one category for new posts. Unfortunate.
This might be out of scope for the app, but a more robust post manager might be nice. Currently you can see recent posts in a dropdown menu, but to do anything with them, you have to load the post. I'd like to have a window with a list of posts, sorted by date, category, whatever, and be able to do various things with that.
Maybe I'll play with it again some other time; it looks like a neat piece of software.