23 September 2009
For some reason, the folks at GNOME (the “usability” team) decided to turn off icons in menus. Not only does it make them look ugly as hell, but it is nigh on impossible to navigate menus visually.
I am a very visually-oriented person, so this makes GNOME very difficult to use. I find myself constantly selecting the wrong items, even though removing the icons doesn’t actually change their position.
But as if that wasn’t bad enough, the “usability” team has taken the KDE approach to the problem. Rather than setting an obvious and sane default (i.e. enable icons in menus), there is a checkbox to enable the icons again. Brilliant! (not)
So you can go to System → Preferences (the first item in the menu, in case you prefer to navigate visually with icons like me) → Appearance (the second item in the menu), and under the Interface tab, you can check the box “Show icons in menus” to get the menu icons back, which gives temporary relief.
Like many GNOME features, this one is only partly implemented. GNOME’s new ‘feature’ also removes stock icons from buttons, and the above option does not put them back (well, seeing as though it is captioned “Show icons in menus” I don’t see why it would, but if you’re going to take the KDE approach, you may as well go the whole hog and add another option still).
At first, I thought this was a bug in Ubuntu Karmic (I am running the alpha on my desktop right now). While there’s nothing like being able to have the suspense of not knowing whether your computer will boot up in the morning, I thought this was preposterous. After I found out it was an intentional change (167 KB PDF), it now seems that it’s plain baloney.
Tagged: aargh, gnome, Ubuntu | 11 Comments »
19 July 2009
Yesterday, I begrudgingly decided I’d reactivate my Facebook account, after I had it deleted a few months ago. Without going into why I wanted to re-join, I was shocked when I logged in for the first time after reactivating it — all my personal information was still present. I have a feeling Facebook is breaking a bit more than Canadian law.
When I had my account ‘deleted’ a few months ago, I had the intention of leaving permanently — the fact that I have rejoined is irrelevant — I wanted to purge myself from the world of Facebook for good. However, during the period that I thought I was free, they retained:
- My e-mail address (understandable)
- My name (sort of understandable)
- My avatar
- My birthdate (uh…)
- All the registered applications and their settings (including OAuth associations with external accounts)
- My networks and friends (though my friends had no way to ‘un-friend’ me or view this status during this period)
I would have expected all the above to be purged, and was certainly hoping so when I requested the profile be deleted. I’m going to very strictly limit myself as to how much I post on Facebook in future.
Tagged: aargh, Facebook, legal, privacy | No Comments »
22 June 2009
This morning, on the train to TAFE, I fired up my Eee 901, resuming from standby. I was greeted by some pretty morbid messages in my tty:
[ 1589.499104] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6
[ 1589.499113] ata2.00: BMDMA stat 0x4
[ 1589.499125] ata2.00: cmd c8/00:20:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 16384 in
[ 1589.499128] res 51/84:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
[ 1589.499134] ata2.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 1589.499139] ata2.00: error: { ICRC ABRT }
[ 1589.499180] ata2: soft resetting link
[ 1589.685741] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/66
[ 1589.692501] ata2.01: configured for UDMA/66
[ 1589.692524] ata2: EH complete
And the OS promptly crashed. I rebooted, and GRUB told me that it “Could not load operating system”. Great.
I did an fsck, and I saw the most number of errors I’ve seen in my life, seconded only by the time I mounted my Linux drive in Windows using the Ext2 IFS driver, and Windows crashed.
fsck found lots of orphaned files. My /lost+found directory was 2.5GB in size. /etc was only 8.0K in size. It didn’t boot.
So, I tried to reinstall by using my trusty Ubuntu 9.04 on my USB flash drive. I repartitioned /dev/sda, but the Ubuntu installer subsequently bombed out, complaining it couldn’t mount the drive.
I’m typing this from my live USB. Luckily Ubuntu 9.04 comes with OpenOffice.org 3.0, and I’ve been able to copy my fonts from my second SSD, which was unharmed, so I can work on my assignments.
I fear the SSD is stuffed.
Tagged: aargh, hardware | No Comments »
30 April 2009
While I prefer the cold weather to hot weather (it’s much easier to warm up than cool down), it seems to have two awful side-effects.
One, it’s harder to get up in the mornings. I have enough trouble with that without the cold weather.
Two, mice have been raiding our house for comfort and shelter. Two nights ago, I caught a mouse in my bedroom. I closed the door, cornered it in the corner of the room where the bed is, and proceeded to sift through every single box under the bed.
Of course, the mouse was nowhere to be found, so I left the door open so he could find his own way out. And I just found their way out: through the front door. Turns out there is a slight gap on the hinge side of the door that the mice can squeeze through. How do I know? I just caught two in the act.
Mice: just take what you want (bedding, food, supplies) for the winter and leave us alone!
Tagged: aargh, real life, weather | 2 Comments »
26 April 2009
I just read that WordPress is holding a design challenge for a brush-up of the current administration administration interface for the upcoming version 2.8. Here’s an mockup of what they’re looking for in a new design:
I am very happy with the WordPress 2.7 interface, and I am even happier that it is going to be polished and made even better with 2.8.
Unfortunately, entrants to the challenge must be based on the .psd file by Matt Thomas, which in their own words is because:
We’re providing Matt’s .psd file for you to work from. Please do not create your own file and submit that, since if your design is chosen but your file isn’t in the right format, we won’t have time to let you fix it. Just edit over the layers.
The problem? .psd is the proprietary format of Adobe Photoshop, which is a proprietary program that costs hundreds of dollars that also only runs on other proprietary operating systems.
So because I choose to use free software for my day-to-day tasks which is morally better and technically superior (SVG is much better for such mockups), I and hundreds of other WordPress contributors would be unable to submit my designs for the competition because of the simple fact that they choose to be locked into a proprietary format.
Photoshop may be the most widely used mockup program among web designers out there. So what? It requires you to step into a world of proprietary non-free software that has ideals directly contrary to that which enabled WordPress to flourish in the first place, and expend hundreds of dollars that is simply unnecessary.
I don’t mean anything personal to anybody — at Automattic or Adobe — I just thought the folks at Automattic were into this whole open source thing.
Do not alienate the community that gives you your very existence.
The solution? Don’t just accept open formats created by free software; actively encourage their use — hire someone who knows how to use them.
Tagged: aargh, open source, WordPress | 11 Comments »
