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.
MySpace for the Dead
Incredibly disturbing and morbid site of the day: MyDeathSpace.
Little Kids
I just read the cutest story ever about a little kid and computers.
Why Kill Good (Fake) People?
Ok, so if you haven't caught up on this season of 24 (i.e., if you haven't seen up to tonight's new episode), and intend to watch it later, stop reading. There will be spoilers. You have been warned.
Ok, are you gone yet? Good.
So in the past three episodes, they've killed off an assload of people. That's nothing new for 24: they kill off people (even main characters) all the time. Aparently, fans actually complained that not enough people died in season 4. Weird. Whatever.
Anyway, first they killed off Edgar. Now, Edgar wasn't your typical hardcore main character: he was just a tech guy, and essentially was Chloe's bitch. But they killed him off in episode 1 of this little three-episode arc. It was pretty sad. Then, at the beginning of episode 2, they of course had to show it again in the previouslies.
Then they killed off Lynn. Now, Lynn was pretty much a jackass. He just wanted to control CTU, even though Bill was doing a pretty damned good job, got in the way, didn't trust anyone, and basically sucked. It's essentially his fault that 40% of CTU got killed by the evil plot-device nerve toxin. But he died heroically, saving the people that survived the initial attack. It was heartbreaking. In all fairness, it was probably more heartbreaking when the random red-shirt trapped with Lynn called his young daughter to say goodbye, but still, it was pretty damned sad.
And then, the crap-fest began. Tony, fraught with grief after learning of his wife's death, wanted to kill the bastard responsible. But of course, CTU needs this dude for interrogation. So finally, when Agent Random Torturer Guy finally says that Evil Bastard is in a coma and useless, Tony knocks out Agent RTG and prepares to kill Evil Bastard with a lethal injection of some nasty shit. Of course, Evil Bastard was faking, wakes up at the last instant, and jams Tony with the needle instead. Tony falls to the ground, Evil Bastard escapes, and Jack runs in to find Tony, who soon dies in his arms. All of this happens in under two minutes, and the episode ends.
Then episode 3 starts with a shot of someone pulling a blanket over Tony's head. And that's it. He's not mentioned at all after that. Tony, one of the only three people remaining from the first episode of day one, on a show with a ridiculously-high body count, is dead. Tony, arguably the most kickass of them all, who has gone through a ridiculous amount of shit, got a 2.5-minute hollow-hitting death treatment. What the fuck is wrong with 24's writers? Could they at least give him a good, noble reason to die? Edgar's death was just sad. Lynn's death was of the heroic, giving-one's-life-for-redemption kind. Tony's death was brought on by poor reaction time, a grief-induced stupid plan of selfish revenge, and falling for the oldest trick in the book. Seriously, if you're getting tortured, and you have governent agent training, wouldn't you fake a coma? I was actually hoping that they'd pull a cheap shot at the beginning of this week's episode and resusitate him, if only so they could do a proper job of killing him off later in the season.
God dammit, show. I'm willing to overlook your blatant misuse and total misunderstanding of computer technology because you otherwise rock. But you just don't kill off my favorite character in such a meaningless way, and then toss it aside like it doesn't matter. You just don't.
Xfce4-Terminal future
Hello folks!!!
I’m rewriting xfce4-terminal.
You should already know that Benny’s Terminal is really ok with the common usage. It’s just a normal terminal, like gnome-terminal and konsole.
I really don’t want another terminal, with tabs and so on… So i’m working on a new restyling of xfce4-terminal based on a screen like concept.
I use screen everyday and i think it’s approach is ok for most advanced use… so why don’t keep the whole thing easy while focusing on functionality?
I’ve started to code some prototype and i’ll commit as soon as it will work :-)
Why Buy GOOG?
Here's an interesting perspective from a former Google employee, wondering why people buy Google's stock.
His point is that usually you buy stock in a company because you get something, such as maybe a) dividends, b) some controlling interest in what the company does with your money, c) some kind of special privilege for owning the stock, d) some kind of information as to what the company is doing or planning. But with Google, you get none of this. The current owners of the company have 10 times the shares privately held as there are shares publically available. They don't pay dividends, and say they never will. They're no less tight-lipped to you about the company's plans than they are to non-shareholders. So why buy GOOG?
I agree, for the most part, but when you buy stock in a company, if you're not doing it for the dividends or control, really the only thing you have left is the hope that you can buy it at a (relatively) low price, hold it for a while, and sell it at a higher price, thus making some kind of profit. (Of course, there are other things that can be involved, but I'm talking about J. Random Investor here.) For me, I don't think that's enough to warrant buying stock in a company. If my only hope for a return was a stock-price increase, I'd rather put my money into bonds, or mutual funds that balance investments to increase share price. Day-traders might find the buy low/sell high sort of thing appealing, but for a company like Google, it seems too risky if you're looking for a long-term investment.
Granted, if you had bought stock only a short time after the IPO, when it was going for under $150, you could potentially have a bundle now, as the stock peaked a couple months ago over $450. Even if you sold now, you'd at least double your investment (ignoring taxes and fees).
But how could you know that back then? At the time of the IPO, conventional wisdom seemed to be that it would explode for a short time after the IPO, and then stabilise to something under $100. Of course, everything is a risk with the stock market, and some people might have been willing to take more of a risk. Though the fact that it did hit $450, but is now down around $340, seems to indicate that it definitely has the potential to drop if/when investors seem to finally think the company is over-valued.
Anyway, what do I know... My experience with such things is minimal.
panel startup
We not very good at keeping this blog updated, are we? Previous post was Februari 5.
Anyway, I added some code to the panel to use a very nice trick by Frederico Mena Quintero to get a pretty graph of startup performance. Benedikt already did this for Thunar.
The first graph is here: http://www.loculus.nl/xfce/files/panel-startup.png.
Interestingly, I defer so much of the actual work until the panel is actually shown, that all most of the time is spent in the gtk_widget_show() call and handling of the signals that are involved in this.
I guess I need to add more mark points to conclude anything at all ;-)