Blig

Ubuntu 8.10 instructions updated

suasol — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:46:06 +0000

9.04 comes with grid installed, but if you have an older distro this is how to install:

http://wiki.compiz.org/Plugins/Grid

Testing your app in a different language

suasol — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:34:04 +0000

I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know much about translating apps, even after writing an app with over 30 translations. When you’re part of the gnome project, they just appear by magic and I have had my head somewhat in the sand since when trying to test I invariably got:

% LANG=otherlang.utf8 ./myprog
(process:20007): Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
Using the fallback 'C' locale.

A little googling led to various command line invocations of locale-gen & suggestions of hand editing config fies by people who didn’t understand it all either.

So I’m glad to say that all thats needed (in ubuntu 9.04 anyway) is really to check a few boxes in

System->Administration->Language Preferences->Install/Remove Languages

Hide files in nautilus by glob pattern

suasol — Sun, 10 May 2009 11:13:05 +0000

Bye-bye *.pyc

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311010#c10

Grid now part of official compiz distribution

suasol — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:07:20 +0000

Yay, it’s official.

BTW if you need to compile for older distros, the source location is now http://cgit.compiz.org/compiz/plugins/grid Note that you’ll need an older version (e.g the “compiz-0.8″ tag) to work with your older compiz.

Checkinstall – wonderful

suasol — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:37:53 +0000

As a developer you often end up installing random extra software because your distro hasn’t caught up yet. And despite best efforts end up with cruft from old installs.

Enter checkinstall. Instead of “make install” run “checkinstall” and it will make a binary package (deb,rpm,etc) of the files which would have been installed. Now they show up in the package manager and are easily uninstallable. Wonderful.

HDD Suspension. Brilliant.

suasol — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:21:57 +0000

There was an annoying low level hum coming from my case. I recently upgraded to a fanless motherboard, fanless graphics card and thought the old el-cheapo case fans were the culprit. I replaced them which helped somewhat but nowhere near as much as I’d hoped.

Enter this mod: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8240

Simple, cheap and extremely effective. Not a common combination! You’ll need roughly 60cm per drive. Less than a pint of beer for a whole raid10 array!

New release fixes “gap bug”, respects window size hints

suasol — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:20:58 +0000

A bug which intermittently caused a gap to appear at the bottom of the screen has been fixed. (The bug is worthy of a post in itself!)

Size increment and minimum size hints are now respected. If a window is too big to fit into the allotted grid, it will do the nearest possible thing, possibly spilling into adjacent cells.

The code has been tided somewhat in preparation for inclusion in the official compz fusion package.

As usual, get it from

git clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/users/stevek/grid

See also the wiki for install info http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Plugins/Grid

Grid wiki now open

suasol — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:04:39 +0000

http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Plugins/Grid

So far I’m just using it to keep track of interesting feature ideas.

Beware of future creep

suasol — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:42:30 +0000

Nice article which puts a name to the way your junior programmers try to justify their 11 callbacks, all methods virtual and factory singletons when all you need is a single C function with the right parameters.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1324-beware-of-future-creep
It’s certainly a grey area, but it’s the mark of a seasoned programmer that they can make the correct call.

Personally, I see a dividing line between public api (the api which covers 85% of customer needs) and the “implementation” api which is notionally public but actually very few people use.

I can tolerate a little baggage in the public api if it becomes more robust to future refactorings (especially a class of refactorings, not just a single one). There’s no place for cruft in your implementation api however because that usually contains the difficult stuff and the interfaces reflect to a much greater extent the underlying implementation which may be changed any time.

New grid release adds “middle resizing” & xinerama support

suasol — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:23:56 +0000

Keys 2,5,8 now resize to the middle third on the second press. Thus it’s now really easy to create a 3×2 grid.

I now consider grid to be feature complete. The only things left are polish – respecting window minimum size hint and window size increment (for terminals). Animation would might be a nice option if somebody would like to submit a patch.