Disappointment
Ah, leave it to today's Slashdot poll to hit the nail right smack on the head. Yay option #2. sigh
Appfinder integration in panel
Hello people!
I’m finally back to xfce development. I apologize for my missing but i’ve been a lot busy with work and university. Now i hope to have some free time to dedicate to this fantastic project.
I’ve just committed a new patch to Xfce4-Appfinder widget, to re-enable drag and drop to other applications. It works as in the past and it send the name of the dragged .desktop file to the dropping application.
Xfce4-menueditor already support appfinder dnd for adding new entries and i’ll hope panel will do it soon.
What are your impressions about Appfinder?
Cheers,
Eduard
Two Dot Oh
Against my better judgement, I upgraded my weblog to Wordpress 2.0. Seems to be working ok so far.
GStreamer + DRM
Looks like GStreamer will support DRM in the future. What a damned shame. I'm definitely going to stay away from GStreamer now. I refuse to support a project that supports technologies that restrict what people can do with the things they buy.
I don't care about the supposedly-practical arguments: "well, there's DRMed content out there that we can't play, so we should support DRM." I don't want to be able to play DRMed content. I don't want DRMed content, period. The only way I will accept playing DRMed content is via a device or piece of software that permanently strips said DRM off the content, or can decrypt the content in a free (as in beer and speech) manner that can't be revoked or removed, such as how libdvdcss allows me to play encrypted DVDs.
If the content "owners" are going to treat their customers like criminals, then I might as well just become one.
Warm!
It's December 20th. Winter. It's 11:00 at night. It's 65°F outside. Isn't that ridiculous?
SPAM!
This has to be the funniest spam I've read in a while:
Hello, I am David Smith for Dailywillsupplies.We would like to buy computer accessories.Please can we have Pentium P4 3.0 775 pins computer processor?Or can you please tell us the brand of processors you have in stock and the price per unit of product.We are interested in buying in large quantity of 50 pcs,would like to have the quote for this product and also like to know the best form of payment for this transaction.We await your reply. Thank you. David SMith.
Interestingly, it was sent to my @ece.cornell.edu address, which I haven't used for anything in over two years. I'm actually surprised it's still active. I guess they forgot I left.
nVIDIA Hateage
nVIDIA has released the first driver in the 8xxx series for their video chipsets. The release notes look pretty sparse for a major build number jump. I was told that the issue with X eating 100% CPU would be fixed in this release, but it looks like it isn't. I'm getting the same "Xid" messages in syslog, along with "NV(0): WAIT (.....)" messages in the X server log which I don't believe had been appearing before. Unlike before, I can't save the X session by killing and restarting xfwm4; I have to bring the entire X process down remotely.
I've disabled window drop shadows for the time being to see if that helps solve the problem. Update: It doesn't.
I'm really getting sick and tired of this. nVIDIA appears incapable of releasing a stable driver set. I understand that X.org 7.0 hasn't been released yet, and Composite is new and experimental, but many other chipsets (such as the ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 in my laptop) work nice and stably with Composite and Exa enabled in the 7.0 release candidate. Just another data point in the huge mess of reasons why OSS is better than closed-source proprietary shit. I tried the OSS nv driver earlier, but simply moving a translucent window across half the screen took about 5 seconds. Not pleasant. I tried nv's experimental Exa support, but it crashes the X server on startup. Oh well. If I knew more, I'd try to hack on it.
I'm seriously considering tossing this card and buying an ATI instead. At least they release partial specs so OSS devs can write accelerated 2D drivers, even if the 3D acceleration is still a bit of a mystery. If my little 4-year-old laptop can handle Composite, I'm sure a newer board can as well.
Alternatively, anybody know of a decent video chipset with stable OSS drivers with acceleration that can handle Composite, without breaking the bank?
Update: As ElAngelo points out, nvidia released a quick fix-up release to hopefully fix the problems I'm experiencing. So far so good. On a side note, with the old drivers, it seems that disabling fast writes and sideband addressing seems to help the problem quite a bit: I didn't get a lockup for a couple days, vs. the usual couple hours.
Of Warts and Hogs
Which Hogwarts house will you be sorted into?
Your in-depth results are: Ravenclaw - 12 Gryffindor - 11 Slytherin - 10 Hufflepuff - 8
“Use KDE” — Linus Torvalds
He-he. That’s just funny. Ah well, it may even get some bugs fixed after lots of discussion. In the mean time there is still the entertainment value, from comments like this one.
Now, back to fixing the panel customization dialog… I’ll have an alternative implementation available for testing/criticizing soon.