[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Name: Pete Zaitcev
Member since: 2000-02-23 20:59:15
Last Login: 2008-10-09 15:13:38
Homepage: http://people.redhat.com/zaitcev/index.html
Notes: This account is frozen.
Current log is at LJ: [link]
Do not click on the following links: [acct/], [diary/]
Recentlog levels: T=0 T=5
Ratings
report for: raph.
10 Jul 2008 (updated 10 Jul 2008 at 17:06 UTC) »
Follow focus nazi
I have a laptop with Synaptics touchpad, and one of the biggest annoyances in its implementation is how the "wheel" strips act upon the GUI element where the mouse is pointing regardless of the current focus. It took years to beat focus-follow-mouse people into a marginal submission, yet they still find every crack to seep through, like kerosene. Naturally, this behaviour is not tunable.
Another retardity in this area is the behaviour of the panel. Some genious came up with an awesome idea to flip windows if panel receives a wheel click. The problem with that is, a strip on the laptop is difficult to make to deliver just one click, so the function is useless to me. Also, it is too easy to hit the strip accidentially (which would not be a big deal if not for the enforced focus-follow). So, for one reason or the other, I would like to disable this behaviour. I don't even want to seek excuses for this wish. Just do it. But it's impossible.
So far the only group that displayed a clue in this was, strangely enough, Mozilla. They fixed bugs I filed and in general had an understanding of various input and display technologies, despite only being browser people. You'd think desktop developers would know how a touchpad differs from a wheel mouse.
UPDATE: Chris pointed out in comments that a fundamental reason exists why wheel behaves this way: the extra button events are mouse buttons, and those go where pointer points. I knew it, but it didn't click. I still think that applications should be able to work around this, although perhaps at the cost of some extra events being delivered.
Syndicated 2008-07-09 23:23:04 (Updated 2008-07-10 16:36:39) from Pete Zaitcev
Unforgivable
Here's what new pulseaudio does after update in Rawhide today:
<small>VLC media player 0.8.6h Janus
E: core-util.c: Failed to state home directory /q/zaitcev/.pulse: No such file or directory
E: core-util.c: Assertion 'fn' failed at pulsecore/core-util.c:1086, function pa_lock_lockfile(). Aborting.
Aborted</small>
Talkative library functions are bad enough, but aborting and taking down whole application?! How amateurish.
Go Seth!
I cancelled a yum update because I suddenly remembered that it's Friday and I had to download Tower of Druaga finale. It seems like only yesterday doing so involved ^a-c and kill -9, but today two ^c were sufficient. Yay.Jim's strategy
Jeremy posted a shorthand of a meeting with Jim, our CEO. I think it's pretty interesting, although it's not very new for me, because it's consistent with his internal message and I've met with him before.
Jim talks about the need to involve companies (and their member individuals) into the Open Source in general. I quite agree, although in my like of work I see it in a very narrow way. I interact with all kinds of customers. Some are used to the old, "black box" way. If a test round is needed, I send them a kernel, they run it, collect the results, I think about it, change something, send it again... etcetera. Other (for example, Stratus, Fujitsu) chose "open box" approach: they look at my patches and produce feedback on patches.
Even though I never play favourites with customer problems, "open box" people tend to come to solutions much quicker.
I used to think that there must be some downside to "open box", because they have to have some expertise in-house to deal with source, and expertise costs money. But it is more and more apparent that basic reading of the source is not black magic. Customers always have engineers who can read it. Sure, they may not have intimate understanding of it, but that's what they pay Red Hat for. The basic advantage is essentially free for them.
Another thing Jim talks about is taking a high road relatively Ubuntu. From ethical standpoint, he is right, of course. But I keep thinking... Ubuntu is popular. Not as popular as Windows, I guess, but it is a success, and you never argue with success. Fat lot of good will it do to Free Software if everyone moves to Ubuntu. Fortunately, Fedora is a success too, for now at least. But it looks like Jim just believes that truth will always prevail... I am not so sure. It is not how the world works.
Syndicated 2008-06-21 02:03:35 (Updated 2008-06-21 02:23:48) from Pete Zaitcev
Whitelist your cookies
I followed the suggestion at DaveJ's comments as an experiment, because I visit way too many forums and other identity driven sites, but so far it worked very well. There was not a single case of website failing to work with explicit permissions to set cookies, and the work required to add permissions was not too onerous.
It would be even better if Firefox threw up a dialog or something, to let me whitelist a website on the fly, without opening the preferences dialog with its tabs.
Zaitcev certified others as follows:
Others have certified Zaitcev as follows:
[ Certification disabled because you're not logged in. ]
FOAF updates: Trust rankings are now exported, making the data available to other users and websites. An external FOAF URI has been added, allowing users to link to an additional FOAF file.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
del.icio.us
Digg
Google bookmark
reddit
Simpy
StumbleUpon
Furl
Newsvine
Technorati
Tailrank