Posted on October 6th, 2008 by admin
Backing up my home folder this weekend, in readiness for the Ubuntu Intrepid beta I spotted some unusual path names scroll by:
~/.local/share/applications
~/.local/share/desktop-directories
~/.local/share/gnome-do
~/.local/share/mime
~/.local/share/Mono Paint
~/.local/share/Trash
~/.local/share/tracker
It turns out that the hidden folders $HOME/.local/, $HOME/.config, and $HOME/.cache are default values, specified by the Freedesktop.org Basedir specification. To override these values one may set some environment varibles:
$XDG_DATA_HOME for user [...]
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Posted on September 28th, 2008 by admin
It’s been Five years since I moved to Birmngham, to begin work with Defence Estates. I’ve enjoyed my time there, the people are fantastic and I’ve learnt much. It’s now time to move on; I want to find new challenges and broader horizons.
If you’re looking for a DBA, a system administrator, someone skilled in GIS [...]
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Posted on September 20th, 2008 by admin
In Fitts’ Law and Minimalism vs GTK+ and Qt I complained about the excessive use of borders and padding in GTK+ and Qt. Here’s what I’ve got so far (click for unscaled versions):
Although work in progress still, I think the window looks cleaner already. Most importantly the chat history scrollbar now lies flush with the [...]
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Posted on September 18th, 2008 by admin
It all started with the Pidgin chat window, which is surrounded by several pixels of padding. To my eyes the padding doesn’t achieve anything, it just wastes space and detracts from the clean, minimalist lines of the Buddy List. After much fumbling, I managed to change it in the Pidgin source code . Bug 6987 [...]
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Posted on September 18th, 2008 by admin
Anybody who tried to register on this blog during the last 6 months or so, would not have received an activation email. So many people will have been unable to comment. If this has happened to you sorry for the inconvenience.
This Wordpress installation can now send emails, thanks to the Configure SMTP plugin by Scott [...]
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Posted on July 7th, 2008 by admin
On 31st March the British Standards Institute (BSI) submitted an updated vote of approval, on ISO 29500 (MS OOXML). The move surprised many, myself included.
In September 2007 the BSI had voted ‘No - with comments’, attaching a long list of reasons. The response had been prepared in the open over the web, using the BSI [...]
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Posted on July 5th, 2008 by admin
My first ever LugRadio Live was LRL 2006, which was the perfect opportunity to pickup CDs of the then newly released Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.
My last ever LugRadio Live is LRL 2008, which will be the perfect opportunity to pickup CDs of the now newly released Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS.
See you there, July 19th - 20th.
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Posted on June 25th, 2008 by admin
Dear web 2.0 coolios,
Please stop writing comment systems with half-assed threading. I understand you had to replace all those icky newsgroups on usenet, but you could have done a better job.
Take a look at Google Groups, Gmane. See how all those conversations are nicely grouped together? See how nobody is writing @previous_author? Please sort it [...]
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Posted on May 31st, 2008 by admin
The term “unlimited” has been stretched in various ways over the last few years. Usually it’s been qualified, limited if you will, by some undefined fair use policy in the small print. Well now those hidden limits are getting aired. If you squint, Tiscali’s current TV ad admits a 3 GB limit for their headline [...]
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Posted on May 13th, 2008 by admin
By default the proprietary driver for Nvidia cards on Linux fires an interrupt for every frame drawn on screen, whether it needs to or not. This increases power consumption. To avoid this use version 100.14.19 or later of the driver (the nvidia-glx-new package in Ubuntu 8.04 provides 169.12) and set OnDemandVBlankInterrupts to true in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. [...]
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