Older blog entries for gicmo (starting at number 36)

5:3 - Ausnahmezustand


Passau, one big giant party

But not only in Passau!


Yes, this used to be a street

It was a really hard match - a 120 minutes football thriller with a happy end for us! Too bad some Argentinians seem to be really bad losers. I know it is really hard to for them to fly home. They had higher expectations: some of the players and Argentinian newspapers even thought they "outclassed us" (Esteban Cambiasso) which I don't think is anyway near the truth. I honestly have a bit of Schadenfreude because I totally dislike this person who claims that his unfair football-playing is nothing but the help of God.

Strange things happen at GUADEC ...


All began with some giggeling from behind the fence. There was a group of GNOME Hackers sitting around a table at the GUADEC Camping and hacking for fun and profit when said giggleing was first to hear from across the fence. The source of this turned out to be 3 Irish girls and 1 boy. When I told them to come over may of us belived that they would instantly be scared away by all the laptops and geeks but guess what .. the total opposite happend!
The come over and were uber-excited. "This is sooo cute. ... Ohh look at the cute foot. ... It's called GNOME. This is soo cool!" And all we demoed was gnome-screensaver and gedit :)
Here is the group photo:

There are 3 errors hidden on this photo. Spot them!

The guy really seemed to be interested so we even handed out one of the Fedora Core 5 DVDs that were included within the GUADEC Bag.

Bling, Bling
ChipX86 mentions the post from Mike about Cairo and semi-transaprent windows. I did the same work a while ago to make Gnome Launch box have nice RGBA *bling bling*. Since we some to get a lot of duplicated code here I really whish we had that directly in gtk. Also a gdk_compositor_is_running or something like that would be very very nice. I know there is a way for some window managers (e.g. metacity) to tell you (over selections and stuff) but having that in gdk/gtk would be way nicer. The real reason I blog though is LbFrame. It is basically a frame with round corners which can also handle transparency if the compositor is running. Now with Xgl and AiglX maybe more people are interested to use it or use it as a starting point for their own widgets. Also if you are one of the lucky ones that have fast compositing, you should really give Gnome Launch box another try. I use it as my Alt-F2 replacement. And I have some patches in the queue to make it even more rocking!

Evolution + Scalix = Love
Today Scalix finally announced the Evolution Connector together with version 10 of their Server (including the free community edition). I have spent the last 3 of my university vacations in California to make this happen and it is a great fealing now that it is released. I am going to be in CA again for another 6 weeks starting from 27 Feburary to work some more on the Connector and Evolution. I totally love to work there and I specially wanna thank Carsten for being such a good boss and friend. Kudos to the whole scalix team! Go and try it out while it's hot ... :)

GMail + GTalk in the browser is crazy!
It's already working here ... not with my friend's gmail ... muahha :)

We have come a long way
I am doing something wrong now, I know it, but oh well whatever. First I wanted to write something up about the parallels of Rousseau's political theory and all this fuzz about community and decisions. Second I told myself to just not post a statment because I bet people will surely get it wrong and try to deduce my position on that affair from what I am going to write now. Be warned, don't do it! Well anyway here we go: In response to

• Profit:There is no damn natural law that businesses are there to make profit. What's the problem with break even? Go and watch The Corporation and see that even in the US it hasn't always been that way or read Profit over People
• Time: I still have to fix a lot of bugs that were introduced because bad desicions were made under time preasure. People *always* tell me: "But next GNOME release is only in 6 month!" Don't get me wrong here, I can see the point ...
• Users: So I hate that target group argument. Really. We should not have a target group but a target, or better a vision. I prefer the "make a damn rocking desktop" vision to the "get many many users" vision. Especially because we can achieve the second one by having the first one. (Again, don't get me wrong, 10x10 rocks.) And about that "don't let us hacker design the UI". Well I might not be a good designer at all, but I still feel that I can judge if I like the results or not. (I love nld10's panel btw.) I actually want to make a desktop that most people just love to work with, including us hackers. I mean think about how this whole linux thing started. I totally agree with the theory that software development is about passion. If I should spent my engery into GNOME, I want it tp be fun. I want a rocking desktop for myself!

To sum it up (in a declamatory way): In the first place I want a rocking desktop, not a good product. But thanks soo much Novell, Red Hat, VMware, Scalix ... for paying all the great people in the GNOME community for doing that.
Sorry for the bad english this time I was under time preassure :)

GNOME Desktop Mokups

Apropos rocking mokups; here is some more new, hot stuff:

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Made by jon "desplesda" manning. Send him your Feedback.
I like the Clipboard thingy ...
Read detailed information here!