Category Archives: General

Tim has some excellent tips for all you blogshare traders. Make sure you sell your stock before May 1st!

Short Reg article on Apple’s Piles – new ideas for their GUI. “Gestures” are talked about too.
I tried gestures for a while in my browser but they were too clumsy and difficult to use for me. They could make using a mouse easier for RSI suffers though.

This is Ireland’s entry in the Eurovision. We (the Irish public that is) went mad for several weeks to pick out Mickey Harte singing “We’ve Got the World Tonght”. Of course I watched it only because Martina was watching it!

Hi Tim! Nice site! One to read, and I’ve added you to my rss aggregator!

Seems that the Gnome Project has made Vera Fonts widely available now. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to install these (copy the local.conf to /etc/fonts, and copy the .ttf files into ~/fonts before running fc-cache)
I restarted Galeon and kmail to see what it looked like and initially I didn’t like the look of them. I’m still not sure about Kmail, but in the browser they might look ok. I think they look a bit “wide” or something. Time will tell, and I’ll post about this again tomorrow!

If you run IE6, do not visit this page! But if you use any other browser feel free to use the Internet 🙂

Raven Alder was invited to Dublin last month to speak at LinuxWorld. Here’s the very entertaining story of her trip to Dublin!

TransluXent: Translucent Windows for X

TransluXent is an implementation of an X Server which uses OpenGL for what would be the graphics card driver. As such it can easily offer translucent windows.

What I find interesting is the fact they used OpenGL as the backend “hardware” of the project. This abstracts the GUI completely from the underlying physical hardware and as long as there’s an OpenGL driver for a particular graphics card X could be made to run in exotic places and do strange things. Commercial OpenGL support for a lot of hardware is probably better than support for X so this is a boon!
My first thought was of a 3D GUI, where you traverse a 3D environment. Your applications live in different parts of the space. Loading an application like Open Office would be represented by a slowly advancing application. The app gets bigger and bigger as it loads (remember, this is in OpenGL, doing this in a decent card won’t hurt the CPU performance!) and finally appears to “snap” into place in front of you!
Keyboard shortcuts are simply a “run mode” or zoom. Would virtual desktops exist? Maybe virtual “application groups” instead.
Enough of that, I await the flaming comments from usability geeks that will surely descend upon me once I post this! *grin*

This is the first day I haven’t got spam in my inbox in a long time. It could be because I was at work until 7:15pm last night and picked up 2 before I left though..
Those 78 spams in my spam folder tells me SA is working away 🙂

It’s been mentioned elsewhere but I want to read this article at the weekend and if I don’t mention it here I’ll forget it!