Bearfruit

OK, I’ve been trying to think of a way to report this problem for a while. Who does it go to, GNOME HIG, Ubuntu, Usability, Art team? I’ll probably send it to all of them but in order to simplify my explanation, this blog post exists.

In brief: GTK dialogs are way too big and they tend to waste a lot of screen space. To demonstrate my point I’m comparing the File Save dialog from Gedit and Windows XP Notepad. You’ll see that the Windows XP dialog is far smaller and yet communicates significantly more useful information. This is accomplished because it makes more efficient use of the screen space. It does this without being any less usable, and actually, because of it communicates more useful information can be more usable under some circumstances.

OK, here’s the problem… you want to test a website by sending custom headers, but the website uses https. Normally you’d just telnet to port 80 like so:

telnet www.somesite 80
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.somesite


(Note you need to press enter twice at the end)

This would be a valid HTTP GET request and you’d see the server’s response headers and response data. But with an SSL website this won’t work at all. What do you do?

I have a few servers (virtual and physical) and all of them run Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (aka Dapper Drake). Until now. I did my first LTS to LTS upgrade and it went without a hitch. So now I’m running mostly 6.06 servers and one 8.04 server.

I was very brave, maybe foolish even. I didn’t create a snapshot of the server before I started. 8-) I just did the upgrade. Apache upgraded fine as did MySQL, Django, Python and Samba. There are some warnings about upgrading SSH in place but I did it and had no issues. There were numerous warnings about needing to upgrade grub that scrolled by but the installer handles these for you automatically so you can disregard the warnings.

I did this because I wanted to install couch db (via) which is an exciting distributed database project. My first impression is that it is an excellent and exciting project but I will do more investigation and report later. In the meantime, test the LTS to LTS upgrade!

Strong words, I know, and there are definitely some qualifying statements. I am not throwing out Eclipse just yet because it can still do some things that Netbeans doesn’t. But first, let me say that I’m excited by Netbeans 6.1, which is currently in Beta. I’m excited because I see in it a product that will challenge Microsoft’s Visual Studio, especially for new users and those doing development without a computer science background.

OK, so you’ve downloaded Parallels for Linux (if you have Ubuntu 7.10 you can just apt-get install parallels) and you’ve tried to get it working but the window is transparent. This seems to be because parallels has a problem with desktop effects enabled. Here’s how to fix it.

If you launch parallels using the below command it will work just fine:

env XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 parallels

Voila! It works like magic, now parallels works just fine.

I’m getting excited to see embedded Linux showing up in so many places. The reason I think it’s cool is because very often it can be hacked to do something far cooler than the original intent. By hack, I mean disassembled, modified or improved in some unexpected way.

The Kindle is an expensive e-book reader that has an innovative screen and form factor. It also has a cellular data connection so that you can download books and apparently surf some websites. I did not realize that it is based on Linux.

Have you wished you could easily access computers that are behind a firewall? Maybe right now you manually ssh into one and then ssh into the next.

Good news! You can now do it all in one step. It makes life so much easier. I’ve written what I hope is a thorough tutorial on how to do this. It looks long, but if you’ve been using PuTTY for a while you’ll fly through it. I’ve also included instructions for people who use OpenSSH (Linux or Mac users), though they have it far easier.

Ubuntu 7.10, which until recently was known as “Gutsy Gibbon,” has been released. As usual, the week leading up to release was killer. When it comes to the website there is just so much that has to be done at the last minute.

I frequently get frustrated with web graphics. I’ve been gradually switching over to using Inkscape and SVG (vector) based graphics and find that I’m bumping into a specific problem more and more - fuzzy lines. This happens in Photoshop, Gimp, Inkscape or whatever, however the problem is easier to bump into with vector graphics. Here’s a sample image demonstrating the problem:

So Ubuntu and Canonical are supporting GNOME’s 10th birthday. We needed to do something big and special on the website. I offered three suggestions ([see attached][1]) and we decided to use the cake idea. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any stock photos that looked good. Believe it or not, its remarkably hard to find plain white cakes. So I went to the store and bought one and photographed it myself ([see attached][2]). What fun!

Anyway, the end result is what you see below. Spread the word, the goal is to make GNOME better and the way to accomplish this is for more people to get involved.