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Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
Feb
8
I’ve been looking for a good way to “jabberify” some of my online tools. Since any Web 2.0 application worth the name has an open API, I figured it must be possible to talk XMPP to them. I wanted to get to my calendar info, online bookmarks, TODO notes and perhaps even to Gmail via just a standard Jabber client and was looking for a bot that would do it for me – if something is hackable, someone must have hacked it!
The IMified buddy adding an important task to my RTM list
Well, turns out that now someone has! I found about IMified, an instant message buddy that will connect you to Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, Blogger and a number of other services, plus offers a simple notes list, todos, and reminders on its own too. I’ve played with it a little, and it works rather well after the initial unstability (the service was launched just four days ago.) You can add the buddy to most of the popular IM services but we Ubuntu users of course only use Jabber since we like our freedom :)
The interface is nice, and works great on my mobile phone too since IMified doesn’t hit my screen with too much verbosity. Yet it always providies clear instructions, I haven’t been lost once. Google Calendar has some timezone problems, and the Remember the Milk functionality could be more advanced (and no, you don’t get mail notifications), but IMified certainly has my support – I won’t be studying XMPP on my own any time soon :)
Done!
Jan
10
Fresh from my mail inbox:
The old stable release Debian GNU/Linux (codename ‘woody’) has been archived. The official source for this distribution is the dedicated archive host called archive.debian.org. It is no longer available on regular Debian mirror servers. After four and a half years this marks the final end of life for GNU/Linux 3.0.
I will remember Woody as one of the greatest distributions of all time. My all-time favorites so far: Red Hat 6.2, Mandrake 8.2, Debian Woody, Ubuntu Dapper. Once in a while everything is Just Right, and you can enjoy an innovative, yet stable, system. Thanks to the Debian community for the great time I had with this best of Debian releases!
Dec
24
I’ve always wondered why people like the OSX look so much, even to the point of modifying their GNOME desktops to look somewhat similar. So I decided I’d see for myself, following Artificial Intelligence’s instructions. I stumbled on his desktop screenshot on the Ubuntu Forums and liked it.
Clean desktop:
As it says on the wallpaper :)
With a few widgets:
Thanks for the inspiration and the instructions, AI!
Dec
6
There are great community support options for many Linux distributions, and people do use them. Here’s the official Ubuntu support channel right now:
989 people.
Now, even 100 newbies can have a lot of problems and questions, and most of the time new users are not very good at describing the problem they are having. They don’t know how the system works, they don’t know about log files, let alone their locations.
A large part of the traffic on the #ubuntu channel consists of discussions similar to this:
nubi: help! my linux is broken! none of my cool games work, only minesweeper and same game
master_foo: so you're saying tetris works but doom3 doesn't?
nubi: yeah
master_foo: sounds like your graphics acceleration doesn't work. which graphics card do you have?
nubi: huh? how do i know?
master_foo: could you paste your dmesg, xorg.conf, the x error log, and the output of lspci and lsmod to the pastebin?
nubi: of course not. what are those things and where do i find them? i just want to fix enemy territory!
Then begins the endless hunt for log files and trying to upload them to a public pastebin for debugging, while trying to ignore the 200 other discussions going on at the same time on the channel. None of this is very much fun.
That will change once we get Upstream integrated into our distributions. Upstream is a nice python utility that changes the part of finding and uploading relevant log files into this:
Now the discussion can be more like this:
nubi: help! my linux is broken! none of my cool games work, only minesweeper and same game
master_foo: you're having video problems: fear not, nubi! run the Upstream Log Uploader from the System menu
nubi: ok found it
master_foo: tick the "video" and "kernel" options, then follow the instructions. when you're done, paste here the url you get
nubi: http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/123456
master_foo: i'll take a look at that and your problems are solved in no time at all
nubi: wow this is so cool. upstream changed my life
master_foo: yes, the upstream team really is a valiant and talented group of people
nubi: i agree. debugging was never so easy before.
Of course, master_foo himself rocks just as much, for volunteering to be there for nubi on his own valuable time!
Dec
1
ToPaZ Now! or, The topyli Non-Interface
Tagged with howto, system, ubuntu | 3 Comments
Project ToPaZ is the collection of blue-sky ideas and more serious plans that people have thought up for the as-of-now mythical Three Point Zero (ToPaZ) release of GNOME. I personally don’t think that GNOME 3.0 will be a huge change in the nature of the desktop interface; instead, ToPaZ ideas are penetrating the current desktop, and 3.0 will simply mark incompatibility with 2.x, caused by migration to GTK+ 3.0 one of these days.
The best part of ToPaZ, however, is the very fact that it doesn’t exist. So, we are all allowed to dream up our own vision of what it would be like. In my own opinion, ToPaZ means first and foremost a non-interface that is as invisible as possible, leaving only the user and her data into the desktop computing equation. I have been experimenting with existing GNOME technology to achieve a task-oriented environment where I can ignore the interface as much possible.
So here goes. Presenting the topyli Non-Interface, where people, documents and events are first class objects. Ideally, you should never start an application on the topyli desktop, but simply work on tasks, contact people, and find information.
Here’s what you should see when you login to the topyli desktop in the morning:
In other words, not very much. A transparent panel at the top of the screen, with a few objects. It is important to place the panel to the top instead of the bottom of the screen. We still won’t be able to get rid of windows and applications, and those will have their controls at the top. Therefore, it makes no sense to make your mouse travel all the way to the bottom of the screen to work with panel objects.
According to Fitt’s Law, the corners of the screen are the most important spots of the whole desktop, because they are the easiest to hit with your mouse. The current GNOME default layout takes this into account and tries to use the four corners as efficiently as possible, and Ubuntu does even better, moving the trashcan from a desktop icon (where it would be covered by windows most of the time anyway) to an applet in one of Fitt’s corners.
The topyli desktop only has two widgets for interacting with the system, so I only use two corners, saving valuable screen space. At the left Fitt’s corner lives the Deskbar Applet, my primary “interface”. This is where you enter commands for the machine to act on. Next to it is Tomboy, a brilliant, Wiki-like personal note taking application. At the right corner sits the window selector applet, which lists all your open windows, including minimized ones. Next to it is the notification area, where applications will notify you of events that need your attention. In my case, it permanently houses the XChat systray and Gmail notification icons, which tell me about new IRC and email messages.
Notably, the window list (or “taskbar” to Windows users) is gone, as well as the workspace switching applet. I can switch windows with the window selector on the right or by typing a window’s title (say, a document title in a word processor’s titlebar) into the deskbar applet. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+UpArrow brings up the workspace selector to the middle of the screen. The calendar applet in the middle is big enough to hit quite reliably even if it’s not in the corner.
Naturally, the action of focusing the deskbar applet is bound to a key, so you don’t actually have to use the mouse to reach your primary interactive device. I recommend the Menu key between the right-hand side AltGr and Ctrl button, or the Windows logo button on the left if you have those.
One thing I definitely don’t want is persistent icons on the desktop, where they would be inaccessibly buried under windows most of the time. The deskbar is smart enough to find the folders in the root of my home directory, because I keep a rather flat hierarchy, like so:
Of course, I use the Nautilus file manager in spatial mode by default, so that all my folders open at the same place and size where I last left them. Sometimes an old-fashioned file browser is still in order, but that’s no problem since we can order one from the deskbar:
Of course, I almost never want to browse my files. I want people, documents, and events, right? Well, the previous screenshot should show some promise of that, with the deskbar in all its glory. It reads what i’m typing at real time, and will happily
- search all my files for whatever I type in. Not just filenames (who remembers those anyway?) but their entire contents, which are constantly indexed by the Beagle daemon,
- browse all the installed applications (and their descriptions) for matching ones and offer to start them,
- go online to search the mail in my Gmail account and search for matches (thanks Stuart’s Gmail plugin),
- find names and addresses in my address book,
- see if any events in my calendar match what i’m typing,
- see if any open windows have titles similar to the typed string,
- offer to find the definition of my search string in the dictionary,
- see if anything in my Epiphany web browser bookmarks, or browsing history rings a bell. Epiphany works much better than Firefox here!
- if i enter a calculation, perform it (with Spooky’s calculator plugin)
- do drastic system stuff such as logout, reboot or shutdown the machine
- and of course offer to search google, and my vast collection of online bookmarks on Diigo, by tag or full text search
Keeping an address book, mailbox and calendar locally on my machine would be rather silly. The Deskbar can search my Gmail account, and Gmail is accessible from any machine or handheld device. The Evolution Data Server can fetch information from online sources, so I keep my calendar and address book on Scheduleworld‘s servers, and subscribe e-d-s to their iCal and LDAP services. Scheduleworld supports SyncML, which means my Nokia E70 phone always has the same information as my desktop:
And while we’re at it, why not integrate everything with the Google personalized home page itself as well since Scheduleworld supports it :)
All in all, while not ToPaZ, I find my topyli desktop experment rather successful. Using no non-existing future technology (which is very difficult to come by anyway), I think I’ve greatly simplified the typical workflow, compared to anything I’ve used before:
- Press the Menu button, tell the Deskbar what you’re thinking about
- Do your stuff
Any suggestions for improving the system are welcome of course!
Oct
18
Package page outsourced, new packages
Tagged with system | Comments Off
I’ve always liked keeping my stuff on Other People‘s servers so I’ve taken my "Packages" page offsite. The package files themselves were never on this site but at Box.net, I simply wrote a local page to describe and point to them. Now I’ve moved the packages to eSnips which sucks a lot less than Box.net(*). eSnips also lets me add nice descriptions for each package, so a dedicated "Packages" page is no longer needed here. Subsequently, I moved the link to the packages from the sidebar’s Site Menu to the topyli on the Web section. Let’s see if you can find it! :-)
I also uploaded a few new packages:
- The new, Cairo-based, purrty Murrine GTK+ theme engine
- The latest (and last) svn snapshot of the Exaile! media player for Dapper (synic has upgraded to Edgy.) synic did provide a .deb but it already depended on too new a libatk1.0-0. So I built my own package
- A new F-Spot
- gaim-extprefs and gaim-guifications which work with gaim2 beta3.1
- Last-exit 2.0
I removed two obsolete packages:
- Exaile 0.1
- gnome-phone-manager 0.7 since it has been uploaded to Dapper as a backport and you can apt-get it
(*) Not that Box.net really sucks a whole lot. Their services were always available, and one shouldn’t be too picky when you get free storage. I just didn’t particularly like their user interface, and WebDAV didn’t work too well.
Oct
17
NFS mount works now on Nokia E-Series
Tagged with mobile, system | 2 Comments
Stumbled upon this post by Pasquale on the p3nfs Google group and immediately had to try mounting my new Nokia E70‘s filesystem. It works!
So far I’ve had to browse the files as root in order to be able to modify them. (That’s why you’re seeing the good ol’ mc file manager instead of Nautilus.) Also, unlike the nfsapp I used on the 9300, this one binds to channel 5, which almost got me tricked. (The python nfsapp is very fresh indeed, which means there’s no documentation at all.) Otherwise, life is good!
Jul
12
Non-ugly face for Last.fm
Tagged with system | Comments Off
Iain has released Last Exit 1.0 so that I can listen to my favorite music from Last.fm with a cool GTK player instead of Last.fm’s own unwieldy player. Ross has built packages. Thanks for improving my work environment a little more!
I have been able to avoid the Last.fm player by using Vidar’s LastFMProxy, which has enabled me to use any player but that has cost me quick access to the all-important "love" "skip" and "ban" buttons, which remain in the web browser. (Skipping is possible inside your player but it’s tricky.)
I want to take this opportunity to recommend Iain’s awesome Last Exit web site as a model for anyone who is planning a new site. Iain also promises to be available for web development but his rates are very high.