WordPress update
I just updated wordpress on this blog to 2.0.1 (2.0.2 was giving me problems). I also approved a bunch of comments that seemed to be genuine. There were over 200 comments in the moderation queue, so if I deleted your comment as spam, I’m sorry, but I really didn’t feel like spending more than a few minutes on it.
I also installed Spam Karma 2 to help with the spam problem, so the comment moderation queue shouldn’t need to be checked, and comments that are good should appear immediately.
Post authors: if you don’t like the WYSIWYG post editor, disable it on your profile page.
Ecological Footprint Revisited
Just an update from my post yesterday: Since I have many non-US readers, I'll point out that the site claims that the average "ecological footprint" for people living in the US is 25. So I'm at least below average for where I live, though we have a pretty high footprint in general.
Really, I kinda think this site is mostly a silly scare tactic to get people thinking about how much they consume and impact the environment. Which is a good thing, of course, but their methods leave a bit to be desired.
According to my score (the lower of the two), if everyone lived like me, we would need 3.9 planets. Jasper lives in The Netherlands, and while their average much lower than in the US, he even overshoots it by quite a bit.
They claim that the actual per-person resource availability (on a global scale) is 1.8. That means in order to have a stable ecology, the actual worldwide average needs to be 1.8. I'll admit that I'm not as eco-friendly as I could be, but I'm by no means a huge offender (by local standards, anyway). That means there are plenty of people "worse" than I am. If that's truly the case, shouldn't the planet be an uninhabitable wasteland by now?
There's a pretty in-depth FAQ list about the footprint quiz. They seem pretty serious about pushing its accuracy, and actually claim that they're being conservative. Since I really don't have the time or inclination to research this properly, I can only take it with a grain of salt. If anyone is interested enough to look into it and comment here as to what all of this means and how these numbers are calculated (and why we aren't all dead yet), I'd be curious to hear it.
Footprint
No, not the memory footprint of Xfce. My ecological footprint according to this site.
CATEGORY / GLOBAL HECTARES
FOOD / 1.5
MOBILITY / 1.7
SHELTER / 1.7
GOODS/SERVICES / 2.7
TOTAL FOOTPRINT / 7.6
Not too bad, you would say, considering Brian got 24, but…
IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 4.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.
I don’t know where they got this figure, but I have a very hard time believing that. I have a small car, a small house, produce little waste and usually don’t fly. That should be below average, except maybe for the 130km a day I have to drive, so let’s say average, not 1.5 times higer.
WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 4.2 PLANETS.
Oops ;-)
Getting up on time
Brian, I thought the way to make sure you get up when the alarm goes of is to put the alarm clock somewhere you can’t reach from your bed ;-)
Ecological Footprint
This is pretty interesting. I won't vouch for their accuracy or objectivity, but it's worth thinking about. For the record, my "footprint" is 24 if I include the flying I do for business (~100 hours total), or 18 if I only include personal travel (~25 hours total).
I think my lack of a commute really helps keep my mobility score down.
Getting Up On Time
As most people I know are aware, I have major issues getting up in the morning. In general, I set my alarm for anywhere between 8am and 8:45am (depending on when I go to bed), but I rarely ever get up when the alarm goes off (there are exceptions, but I'm talking about the general case here). On a normal workday, I'll usually actually get out of bed anywhere between 9:30am and 10:30am. Now, this is mostly OK in the sense that I usually don't need to be in the office that early, and I usually stay later than most people. However, it's just a shitty habit, and I hate doing it. I'd set my alarm for 9:30am or 10am, but I'm afraid I'd end up snoozing and getting up 1-1.5 hours later.
So I think I'm going to try this exercise to help me get up immediately after my alarm goes off.
The idea is pretty simple: when you go to bed, you decide that you want to get up at a certain time. Presumably, before you go to bed, your conscious mind is pretty rational and coherent. However, when your alarm goes off, you're still pretty foggy: your conscious mind is not capable of recognising that, were you in your right mind, you'd make yourself get up. So you make excuses, and carry on an internal semi-conscious dialogue which eventually convinces you "a few more minutes" won't hurt.
So the solution is to take it out of the hands of your temporarily-impaired conscious. Condition yourself to get out of bed immediately when the alarm goes off. Make it a subconscious action. Actually teach yourself to get up when the alarm goes off, when you're fully awake. Pick an afternoon, get in your pajamas, make the bedroom dark, as much as early-morning-ish as possible. Set the alarm clock for a few minutes in the future, and lie down, curled up in a sleeping position. When the alarm goes off, don't think: take a deep breath, stretch your arms and legs, and get up. Then start to do whatever you'd usually do right after you get up. Then repeat this for a few hours. The idea is that, if you think at all when the alarm goes off, you're not there yet. It needs to be an automatic, subconscious, conditioned response.
It seems a bit wacky, but I have very little to lose, and if it does work, quite a bit to gain. The one hurdle I see is that I need to make myself go to bed earlier at night. 2-3am just isn't going to cut it. But that's something I can handle with conscious discipline. We'll see how it goes.
Update: There's also this article, which I'll need to follow in parallel, about becoming an early riser.
Xfce 4.4-beta
First I have to say that Xfce upstream rocks. Benny is quick and responsive to bugs and requests, even though there's so much on his plate from Thunar alone. I asked for a small feature, and it was added in a very short time.
Xfce 4.4 and Thunar are shaping up to be an even better, speedy desktop environment. This is the most impressive release yet.
And on the Gentoo side of things, dostrow pushed out an excellent set of 4.4-beta ebuilds to package.mask within a couple of days of upstream's release. Thunar et al. are a joy to use.
Thanks for all your hard work!
How Does it Work?
Best README section ever:
You can also install files into your favorite directory by supplying setup.rb some options. Try "ruby setup.rb --help". Since we don't really know how setup.rb works, we've included the English-language version of the setup usage file. Enjoy.
Ok, maybe not best ever, but amusing, nonetheless.
State of the Intersection
(Yeah, that's a lame play on "State of the Union". Sorry, I'm retarded.)
A few people have asked me what's up with xfmedia, since I haven't done any work on it in months. So I figure I'll write a little about the various projects I'm working on.
xfdesktop
Clearly I've been putting most of my effort on xfdesktop lately. The icon view refactoring and file icons stuff was a lot of work, and we've been trying to get 4.4.0 out for a while now. Now that we're in beta and thus feature-frozen, I should only be doing bug fixes on xfdesktop for the next couple months or so.
xfmedia
Due to all the work on xfdesktop, I haven't touched xfmedia in many months. No, I haven't abandoned it. I intend to get back to it soon after Xfce 4.4.0 is out. Don't hold your breath for any new great features, though. The focus of my next release is going to be mostly user-invisible: I'm refactoring the codebase to make it more maintainable and extensible, which will save me a lot of headaches and fix some long-standing issues I have. It'll also hopefully lead to a sane, reasonably-useful plugin interface, unlike what we have now. I've decided that one I'm happy with the plugin interface, that's when I'll release xfmedia 1.0, with probably a couple RCs before that.
mailwatch
For the most part, I consider mailwatch finished. It does basically everything I wanted it to do, and supports all the protocols I thought would be useful. It's remarkably stable, and I don't think there's much to do with it. (I'm sure someone will go and prove me wrong now.)
transd
I intended transd as a kind of throwaway thing just to see if I could get it to work. But apparently a fair number of people have found it useful, and I'm glad. There's one small thing I'd like to do with transd, and that's to integrate another mode of operation that sets all inactive windows semi-transparent, and the active window opaque. I already wrote a quick-n-dirty standalone app to do this, but it couldn't hurt to consolidate it into transd.
xfce4-perl
I haven't touched the Xfce perl bindings in a while, but I'd like to have these polished and ready for 4.4.0. It shouldn't be too much work, I don't think. I need to finalise the bindings for libxfce4panel, and check over the libxfce4util and libxfcegui4 bindings, but otherwise it's in good shape, I think. I'd also like to write a bunch of test cases for all the parts of it, but I'm not sure of the best way to do GUI test cases that fit into perl's testing framework.
garxfce4
I worked on GarXfce4 before we had Benny's awesome graphical installer, so predictably my interest in maintaining GarXfce4 has waned. It might not be a bad idea to update it for the 4.4 betas and RCs, however, since they probably won't be packaged by many distros, and we need all the testing help we can get. We'll see if I have time. It's not really all that difficult to update; it's just a little tedious.
So that's more or less everything I'm working on. There's another project that I don't really want to talk about quite yet, but I've been devoting a good amount of energy to it in the past couple weeks, so likely that will take up some of my time as well.
Google SoC
We've been discussing submitting Xfce for participation in Google's Summer of Code program, and even came up with some good project ideas. Unfortunately, we got rejected. Boo on Google.