We all want to run Linux on 64 MB of RAM. But Ubuntu Lite’s way is not the right one.

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Task Dialogs. Yes, they’re on Vista. We should have them too, if anything because they seem to be a great idea. Huge action buttons (hard to miss with mouse pointers), clear and easy-to-read text, and an API that encourages sane usage.

Yes, I’m aware that we could do the same with (at least) GTK+ buttons with a few layout containers packed in. Now, where’s the easy-to-use implementation in a vein similar to the Response abstractions in GTK+?

As the final deadline for my thesis on Open Source approaches fast, I’m hard-pressed to find conclusions and projections to be made out of a full 5 months of academic work.

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Yay! Since I had to scratch an itch (in the words of the famous paper The cathedral and the bazaar), I wrote a quick application to remove duplicate mail messages from MH folders. Give it a spin.

Short review: they suck.

I’ve been looking for blog editors lately, and I stumbled upon Gnome Blog and BloGTK for replacements of the sluggish WordPress post interface.

None of them worked for me.

• Gnome Blog is way too simple. I had to hack the source because it insisted that my weblog was under /wordpress on the Web server. Maybe for quick musings, but that’s it. There’s no way to select categories (no, not even a single category). It handles image uploads, but sadly it doesn’t generate thumbnails automatically (a must for me, because I’m used to FilePress). There’s no way to edit old posts.
• BloGTK+ is way too buggy. The interface is okay, but spartan. It does not seem to handle image uploads, nor do thumbnail generation. It does not support more than one category. None of the blog APIs work as advertised. The only one that delivers the full content of my existing articles (the Blogger API) does not deliver neither categories nor post titles. The other ones eat my text… fortunately I never hit the Save button. Plus, the preview pane insists on parsing my UTF-8-encoded text as ISO-8859-1, thus presenting the tilde A uppercase problem.

So, in summary: Seth and Jay, get your act together or turn the projects over to people devoted to blogging.

Exploring: Fighting Daemons goes against the practice of having separate daemons in GNOME.

I disagree.

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This is gonna be absolutely awesome, and potentially extremely useful for our company, since we run an LTSP terminal server, and only our KDE users get the famous “X minutes before shutdown” message submitted by wall when reboots or downtimes are scheduled.

Here it is: Ikke’s Blog - Good old messaging

Tips for the writer:

• Catching wall messages is actually easy, all you have to do is open a pty like kwrited does, and that makes it possible.
• Of course, catching write messages would actually require that the writer writes to your opened pty directly.
• And catching talk messages wouldn’t be bad nor difficult, if you could keep a lightweight talkd that relayed talk requests to your running Gossip or Gaim instance and used the popup mechanism to announce talk sessions, much like ktalkd does.

By now, most of you know that Mac OS X includes advanced visual effects, powered by Display PostScript and accelerated 3D hardware. Contrary to most people’s opinions, those effects do help in making the Mac user interface more aesthetically pleasing and usable. And Windows Vista is also including a variety of new visual effects in its user interface.

So, where do we stand in relation to our competition?

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