Colin Charles Agenda

While I am not a Jeff Waugh apologist (disclaimer: he’s a friend of mine, whom I met through the open source community), I find this kind of journalism, simply appalling.

Five whole pages over the running of a Planet? With pulling out details from the archives of lists? It clearly looks like Sam Varghese is a little bored these days. And iTWire, which is on my “daily” to read list, is on the verge of being removed. Its becoming drivel.

If Jeff was really doing a bad job, and this is after all the open source world, where is the fork of Planet GNOME?

P/S: For added value, read the comments.

Standardisation is important.

Tagging in Uploadr involves writing tags in the format such that its:
    australia victoria melbourne “notting hill” clayton

Tagging in ScribeFire, involves writing tags that are parsed in a different way (for Technorati):
    australia, victoria, melbourne, notting hill, clayton

Notice the commas (“,”)? Without them, your tags are all lumped together. I’m wondering if I should change Uploadr to similar behaviour as ScribeFire (or vice versa)? What do other applications do for tagging in a field?

It should be trivial to make this change, the question is if my patch will be accepted upstream. I’m already using a patched version of Uploadr, as I await the author to implement my patch (which adds a description field, which the Flickr API supports). Incidentally, PyGTK is pretty easy to get around with, with superb documentation making it easy for anyone to get on the bandwagon. More on pygtk programming later…

Technorati Tags: tagging, uploadr, scribefire, standardisation, tags, flickr, pygtk, firefox, gnome

Surely there must be a better way of handling this:

gnome-obex-server receiving lots of images from the phone

So, is this a bug or a feature? I need to see if OS X or Windows handles it differently? The smart thing to do would be to group it together, rather than having these many dialogs. Or maybe, just use the notification infrastructure and automatically accept it to a path of your choice (currently, it defaults to ~/Desktop so a quick mv operation has to happen later). The maintainer listed has switched to a Mac, so I wonder if this software is being enhanced further…

Sometimes, when I have my laptop, well, on my lap, I accidentally hit the F1 key when I really am aiming to hit the Escape key. I dislike Help popping up, regularly. In vain, I looked for a way to do this in System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts. I gave up, and thought maybe removing yelp might help. It doesn’t.

Is there any way I can disable F1 == help in GNOME?

Technorati Tags: ubuntu help gnome f1

gnash

I’ve not exactly seen much working with Gnash, which is what I have installed: gnash and gnash-plugin. A quick visit to Youtube, confirms that gnash is still not exactly usable, and the bug seems to be with ActionExtend and Super (AS inheritance) not being implemented yet. There is hope nonetheless, as Lulu TV also use these features, and are hosting the Gnash developers wiki, which might mean there’s some corporate backing of gnash development.

gnome-dictionary

gnome-utils provides the Dictionary, which is just a front-end to an online dictionary. This is great, but works horribly if you’re offline. Mac OS X clearly has the upside here, as I can just use the Dashboard dictionary applet to find words. It also comes with a working thesaurus, something the “Similar Words” feature in the GNOME Dictionary doesn’t seem to grok.

Deskbar

Like Quicksilver? You’ll definitely like the Deskbar Applet (deskbar-applet from Fedora Extras). Its not Ctrl+Space controlled, which it instead has picked up on Alt+F3 as the keyboard shortcut of choice. It has Beagle (Spotlight equivalent) integration, can connect to the Fedora bugzilla just via a bug number, and do so much more. I don’t have Thunderbird integration, and notice that its a planned feature for the future – I can’t hardly wait.

David Woodhouse: 30 May 2006:
I’ve taken to running Evolution in a loop: while true; do evolution; done
At least I don’t have to keep restarting it every time it crashes now — an event which occurs ten or twenty times daily.
Oh my gosh. So it wasn’t just me then. This weekend I let Evolution run its course, and I restarted it twice when I came to check up on it. I was wondering if all the mail was causing it to crash, but it wasn’t. No OOM messages that I saw in a log, just an empty workspace. I switched back to Thunderbird (which means no convenient way of reading email via ssh exec-ing imapd), thinking maybe it was just me.

Updated Fedora Core 5, on an x86 even. Just about 3 IMAP mailboxes, and several (~4-5) POP boxes. IMAP mail tends to be large…