I was in Copenhagen at the weekend. It’s pretty when the sun shines, and it has a nice mix of european quality of life with British-style consumer choice. Specifically, I mean, there’s pavement cafés, but you can also get bagels and vegetable samosas at the 7-11. I notice these things. It’s also expensive like London, and they talk funny.
The Illums Bolighus design store was probably my favourite part, with all kinds of attractive minimalism. It’s far better than the tiny Danish Design Center.
I hoped somebody would manage to do this already, so I’ll blog it to keep the idea out there.
As far as I know, the Nautilus maintainers would be happy to show folder contents inside spatial Nautilus windows, like the old Mac Finder in this screenshot. This would solve the many-windows problem (even with the undiscoverable shift-and-open feature) without breaking Nautilus (*cough*Ubuntu*cough*). It just needs somebody to implement it.
Update: Michael Lewandowski provided an updated MacOS X screenshot of the same thing, so I replaced the
MacOS 8 screenshot from MacTech.
I am also getting a lot of empty comments that are crashing pyblosxom on this blog entry. I’m not sure what that’s about yet – I upgraded pyblosxom from 1.1 to 1.2 yesterday. I will try to remove them when I notice it happening.
I was really pleased to get a big libsigc++ patch a few days ago from Régis Duchesne at vmware, to fix some crashes that affect a libsigc++ technique they are using. It required significant time, and a deep understanding of both libsigc++ and C++ templates in general. In mature projects, maintainers are often left to fix the difficult/not-fun stuff themselves, so it's uplifting when somebody takes some of the weight off. Thanks Régis.
I put together a more presentable/expandable web site for Glom. I used MediaWiki again, because it works so well.
As I mentioned a few days ago, there's a chance of some really cheap accommodation for GUADEC attendees.
I think lots of people want to use this, but so far only 6 of you have told us. Have all our penniless students become rich 4-star hotel types? If not, you need to tell us today. Email me, or guadec-list at gnome.org, or put your name on that Wiki page.
This is the last chance. We can't afford to waste GNOME Foundation money (or my money) by booking places that won't be used.
I started Glom's Reports feature. So far it does simple “by” reports, though I still have to add the summary (sum, average, etc) part. I'm fairly sure this is all most people need, and they can use Postgres directly if they have more advanced needs.
The appearance can be improved by changing the CSS, and/or changing the XSLT that produces the HTML.
That's probably the last big check-box feature for Glom, though I've added so much new functionality recently that there's certainly many bugs to be fixed.
But after spending four months working intensively on this, it's time I looked for more freelance work to pay the bills for a while. Of course, I'd love for some company to sponsor further work on Glom, so I can use my time sensibly.
I'll be in Copenhagen from Friday 20th May to Monday 23rd May, so fun folks there should email me. We're staying in a B&B in Christianshavn.
Last time I was there it was GUADEC 2, I had a broken ankle, and it was cold, so I hope to do Copenhagen properly this time.
We've just confirmed details for the GUADEC Party on Monday 30th May. The place looks hip (do you kids still say that?) and perfect for meeting lots of people all together. Drinks until 11pm, and some finger food, are included in the 20 Euros entrance. That's a good deal.
But we're still hoping to find a party sponsor to make it free. If you think GNOME needs to be more fun [1] then this is something you should support, and something you want to be associated with.
[1] Personally I'd never go back to those "fun" days of unstable and undocumented (*cough*bonobo*cough*) APIs, unclear scope, lack of direction, opaque decision-making, reinvention-instead-of-cooperation-with-mozilla-and-kde, and debian-style drawn-out release tensions. Frustration wasn't fun. Getting stuff done is fun. Innovation now means building things, and that was the point for me all along.
I'm trying again after my previous mailman failures. I've learnt that mailman just does not work with virtualhosts, because it hardcodes one user and each virtualhost runs scripts as a different user, and because virtualhosts (because of suexec) refuse to run scripts from common places like /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/.
So I've created a virtualhost (which requires a subdomain, but lists.gnome-ev.de is OK to have anyway) just for mailman and installed mailman from source in the virtualhosts's allowed cgi-bin path.
However, it still complains that it's not running as the www group, even though I configured it from source like so:
./configure --prefix=/srv/www/htdocs/web10/software/mailman --with-cgi-gid=ftponly --with-mail-gid=ftponly --with-groupname=ftponly --with-username=web10
GNOME Deutschland now has a new wiki-based website. Hopefully this makes it easy for the whole community to easily make changes.
I chose MediaWiki and am generally pleased, particularly by the extremely easy install. I considered the moinmoin wiki, as used by live.gnome.org, but it doesn't seem to allow page moves, or show full page history. It turns out that MediaWiki doesn't really move pages either, like Twiki, but it does allow some reorganisation.
Twiki does all these things, but I've found in that past that it's far too difficult to install, and quite complex for users.
I haven't yet figured out how to group pages together. moinmoin and Twiki both let you add sub-pages, though it's a bit odd with Twiki. We could simulate this with filename prefixes, but both live.gnome.org and MediaWiki seem to force the title of a page to be the name (location) of a page, with automatic capitalization. That's also obviously a problem for localisation with mediawiki. But I can see how it makes things simpler for people at first.
Update: Dave Neary pointed out that I'm wrong about moinmoin and live.gnome.org – there is a rename action at the bottom of
the pages. And I remembered the one thing I like most about mediawiki – linking is explcit, so it does not make a WikiWord out
of techy words, or encourage writers to neglect their spacebar.