Just noticed that OpenOffice.org finally got support for proper wordcount, i.e. you can get the stats for selections as well as for the entire document. Weeee….

Sayan and Shamashis

Had a brief rendezvous with Sayan and Shamashis. Nice to see them after a long time.

While browsing through Microsoft’s site for some typography related info, Epiphany suddenly came up with this:



< insert random conspiracy theory here >

Kurush

Came across this project. Judging by the screenshots - seems to be quite nice. But I think I’ll wait till a GTK2 version of GNUCash is out.

I normally use mpg123 or ogg123 to play my music files - running GUI apps to continuously play songs is kind of an overkill. However, one of my gripes about commandline playback was I could not perform stuff like seek, pause, etc properly. Today, I switched to mplayer - and I can do all the fancy stuff simply by using my keyboard - the arrow keys for seeking, ‘m’ for mute, ’space’ for pause, ‘>’ and ‘<’ for navigating the playlist. Quite cool…

Now I understand why Internet Explorer does not display PNG files properly. It does not use libpr0n. As mentioned in the libpr0n website, the goal of the library is to “is to render pornographic images in an efficient way”, and it’s a known fact that only porn websites use transparent PNGs. Mozilla uses libpr0n - so every picture is perfectly rendered to the very last pixel. Someone should tell the people at Microsoft to use libpr0n for Internet Explorer - hundreds of thousands of people are missing out on good quality, unadulterated porn simply because M$ won’t use libpr0n. Isn’t that pathetic ? Internet users of the world - arise - wake up - make Microsoft use libpr0n in IE.

For the humour impaired - I am disgusted about the broken PNG support in Internet Explorer, and being sarcastic.

A large portion of Fedora Core 2 (including GNOME 2.6 core, the redhat utilities and the installer) has been translated into Bangla. Some screeenshots of the installer are at the Ankur site.

Please note that there are a few issues with the Bengali rendering engine used in Fedora - we have proposed patches in the bug tracker, and they are expected to be integrated into the core very soon (maybe Fedora core 3). So do not panic if you see jafala and bafala rendered wierdly in FC2.

This has been a public service announcement.

Today, during the afternoon, I poked around with the JDS Live CD again - and found a few more interesting stuff. The “New Server” dialog found in older versions of Nautilus has been greatly improved - I think some ideas from this can be implemented in the “Connect to Server” dialog in Nautilus 2.6x.



The “Unlock Screen” dialog that comes with xscreensaver in JDS is also a lot less scary - I have been speaking about getting rid of the older dialog (with a “computer on fire” image) for quite a long time. Good to see that someone finally implemented it.

However, the administrative tool in JDS, YAST takes a long time to load - and some options do not make any sense for a Live CD. For example, there is a menu item called “Install drivers”. I clicked it, and YAST asked me to insert vendor CD-ROM. It is (a) not a very helpful message (how am I supposed to know what vendor ?), and (b) in a Live CD, you can’t insert a CD into the drive, unless you have two drives. The JDS devs could have simply removed this menu item for the Live CD version - it’s usually as easy as deleting a .desktop file.



Also - there are also some wierd usability issues with the GNOME theme used by JDS. The image below shows the top-right corner of an out of focus window. Can you see the maximise/minimise/close buttons ? I had to squint my eyes real hard to locate them (OK - I wear eyeglasses - but I don’t have any problems with seeing things at close range). Seems strange - for the Sun folks have contributed heavily to the GNOME Usabilty Project.



My final conclusion wrt JDS Live CD is that it is a great idea - but poorly implemented. Actually, someone at Linux.com has the same thoughts about JDS 2. It’s a real pity.

Icon for Blender

The icon that comes with Blender wasn’t looking very good on my GNOME menu. So I designed one myself. I think this one looks slightly better.

SM has bought a new laptop and I spent the morning playing around with it. It came pre-installed with Mandrake 9.1 - and my mission was to get kernel 2.6, Ximian OpenOffice.org 1.1 and GNOME 2.6 up and running on that. GNOME 2.6 and OOo wasn’t much of a problem - kernel 2.6 seems to have some issues. It takes ages to get past that “Loading 2.6.6 …..” message, and also, SM’s external USB mouse won’t work with it (I don’t have much experience with USB devices - so maybe I am being simply stupid here). There are also some issues with the firewire controller - but I don’t think that will be needed at this stage.

The horrors of setting up CUPS from scratch

ESR was right. Today, I had the misfortune of having to setup CUPS+Gimp-print+foomatic+ghostscript (from scratch) in my system. Chewing through verbose logfiles (around 10 MB in size) can be really painful. Anyway, in the end it turned out to be a permissions related issue, and I managed to get the thing up and running with my Canon BJC 2100SP printer.

Sun JDS Eval Live CD

Managed to get my hands on a Jun Java Desktop System evaluation Live CD. The basic structure of the CD is quite similar to Ankur Bangla Live CD - which isn’t surprising - since both use the same Morphix base for the initial bootstrapping. Once that is over - our livecd boots into a Mandrake derivative - while their’s boots into a SuSE derivative. Initially the desktop looks slick - but there are quite a few issues with the Live CD. For example, during bootup - the Morphix base complains about missing directories (deb, exec and a few others). This can be easily avoided - we faced the same issues during our development process, and we just added a few extra empty directories. This is quite a minor issue - since most people won’t be seeing these error messages as they are reported behind the bootsplash screen. However - once you are within the desktop - there are a few quite serious issues which Sun should have definitely addressed before going out with a public release. For example , there are two menu items called “New login” and “New login in a nested window”. When someone clicks them - a GDM login screen is supposed to appear - either in another instance of X - or in a Xnest window (the only condition being that GDM must be running from beforehands). But in the JDS livecd - none of these menu items work - simply because in a Morphix derivative CD - GDM is not normally run - GNOME is started from by running gnome-session via .xinitrc. Again - something is seriously borked with floppy mounting - when I tried to mount the floppy - I got the message “The /floppy symlink points to nowhere”. Now how on earth did they come up with that ? Frankly speaking, I am quite dissappointed - I really expected something better from Sun. Hopefully, the actual (installable) JDS is better.

Nor’wester

Towards the evening - we had a nor’wester here. Lots of fun - with branches and window shutters (broken off) flying around - people running around. After that the power went off, that wasn’t much fun.

Finally fixed the style sheet of FLOSS India to make it work with that Thing. There are a few alignment issues which need to be adjusted - but at least the ghastly < div > warping has gone. Will be looking into the alignment stuff as I get some more time. I also made some changes to the position of the hackergotchi heads - I think it looks better now - the previous positioning was too intrusive.

Also noticed the proposed artwork for Userlinux - it looks really polished. The paper airplanes are really looking good.

(well… kind of)

SM was consipiring to turn Planet FLOSS India into Planet Sankarshan - so this entry is to drive a spanner through his monopolistic schemes [--insert evil laugh here--]. I have also moved my blog from CLAI to Random Ink - and finally managed to make the transition to Wordpress 1.0.2. This thing is really good - only gripe being that the blog URL is stored in the database - and that can cause major a PITA situation when moving your blog around. I also added the final touches to the new design that I had for my blog (no tables - just plain XHTML and CSS foo). Of course now I need to check whether the design renders properly on that Thing That Shall Not be Named - I am already having major troubles with keeping Planet FLOSS India cross browser. These sort of things make me angry - very angry indeed (though, for the record, I have no intention of blowing up the earth). Meanwhile - Seth Nickell of GNOME HIG fame has posted his thoughts on Mono. I think he’s right on about this. The software patent issue is getting murkier every day - and things like Mono (which does seem to be very attractive from the developer’s point of view) make me very scared.

Anyway - I watched Bhuvan Shome this evening - dunno how I managed not to see it all this time. I also have plans to go out and see Mystic River - hopefully I’ll be able to get some time for that.