Archive for October, 2005

I opened a support ticket on SourceForge on 2003-04-09. I asked them to create a new Trove category, called "File Managing" (yeah, my English sucks) or something like that. No relevant reply was made then and I also felt a bit stupid for bothering them with such an issue. Feeling stupid was definetly because of my low self-confidence at that time by the way.

I haven't tracked this ticket and only now, when I changed the project infos of Ultimate Commander, I noticed the entry "Topic :: System :: File Management" and I went after that. They closed my ticket and included my category on 2005-01-05!

It's the most exciting in the open development model. Every single individual can change this universe. 174 projects have registered themselves in my category so far.

I'm learning Gtk# these days. Well, I don't need to learn so much Gtk anymore, but rather C# which is very well-suited for creating GUIs. That's mainly because of several special language constructs like accessors and delegates. On the other hand it's a strict, strongly-typed language that is a little bit unusual for me after so much Python. This kind of strict nature of C# makes it able to run suprisingly fast. I cannot tell you some exact statistics on it, but some say in several cases C++ is only 2x faster than C#. I think the situation is not so ideal. I guess it's 5x or so.

I'm learning C# because I wanna rewrite Ultimate Commander in it. This has proven to be a hard task, especially because I want to make it very usable in terms of user interaction by specializing widgets to fine-tune some of their details which I think are important.

Gtk# has several nontrivial issues, so I hang out on the mailing lists regularly these times. I also began to help others as I have some experiences in Gtk. It feels good helping people.

I've googled the net for stuff I made to find external references just because of curiousity.

Here's what I found: Jono Bacon has blogged about one of my comments, a Japanise guy has blogged on my Metacity Explicit Flatness theme, and leastly, but not lastly another dude has made an XMMS skin based on my Explicit Flatness skin.

Nice! You gotta love Explicit Flatness, don't you?

Statistics

I'm just writing a statistics module in PHP for monda.hu. Google is insane! Its spider visits my blog for about 100 times a day! Freaks me out.

Web developers at Novell have an icredible sense on usability. They create exceptionally clear, simple, stylish and usable sites. Some examples are http://beagle-project.org, http://mono-project.com, http://tango-project.org, http://betterdesktop.org, http://hula-project.org.

Wikified Universe

Wiki is a huge phenomenon. It's not hard to see that Novell folks, like most people like MediaWiki the most, while DokuWiki and MoinMoin also seems to be very popular.

Smoking Bus Drivers

I travel every week back and forth between my home and the university by bus. Sometimes bus drivers begin to smoke while driving right in front of me. As soon as I smell that disgusting smell I politely ask them "Excuse me, could you please turn off that cigarette?". Although I always do this in a moderated tone, I could literally kill them.

Don't make me unleash my unstoppable fierce out to the world, because no one's gonna survive!

As a side note, it's funny that both the "bus" and "driver" words have computer related meanings as well as "smoking" is applied to hot girls.

Miguel Rocks!

Wow, I didn't know Miguel has superpowers! Cool!

As far as I know Entagged, written by Raphaí«l Slinckx is the most advanced audio tag handling library that exists today. It started out as tag editor, but its library became very powerful. Initially it was written in Java, but its author later ported it to C# which became entagged-sharp and eventually it had made its way into Beagle. Unfortunately entagged-sharp currently doesn't support tag writing as entagged does, it only supports tag reading, but it's still very usable in this early stage anyway.

BetterDesktop.org

BetterDesktop.org is here to do and propagate usability tests. I can only welcome this initiative. This project is launched by Novell. God bless them!

Free Culture

Larry Lessing - Free culture. If it sounds unknown to you, you should check it out. You can learn many things about the evolution of copyright. I should care more often about legal issues. This guy is the creator of the Creative Commons by the way and he has some great insights. This presentation is very unique and professional.

I've just released Coder Keymaps 0.4. Grab it while it's fresh! I made a new homepage for it which I think is very simple and usable. I love PHP for these kind of simple tasks which is a strange, but warm feeling.

Projects Updated

I've updated my projects page also. Now it contains all the projects I've made. Some other parts of my home page are restructured likewise to improve its usability.

I started to agressively work on monda.hu a month earlier or so. That was because I finally got some free time and I've been making promises to my mother for a long time that I'll make her a home page. She's a furniture painter folk artist and a good site may greatly increase her income and business contacts.

In the beginning I was thinking in coding all the stuff alone from the scratch which was very frustrating. After that, a light bulb appeared above my head and bang, the magical idea manifestated within me: reuse.

It sounds pretty obvious, doesn't it? I'm just thinking about why reusing wasn't the first thing that popped into my mind. After all when I start solving a problem, I generally immediately look for libraries that I can (re)use, so why the hell in this situation didn't I thought of reuse?

I think there are two main reasons:

1. Web applications differ from libraries. Libraries have a well defined interface, but application interfaces are generally loosely defined and arbitrary. Every application is more-or-less a discrete universe. I – in contrast to most Unix folks – even hate piping processes together because the stream flowing through them is an unstructured mess and I don't trust in that, unless it is something structured, like XML.
2. Bad experiences: I had some negative experiences installing various PHP applications in the past. I consider PHP basically a hack. The mere vision of variable names starting with the dollar ($) sign makes me feel bad. PHP has only one very big advantage in my opinion and that is wide deployment. You can really find it everywhere.

It was a good lesson for me to generalize the concept of reusable components in terms of web applications. I'm very proud of this work because I think I wisely chosed, configured and interlinked the components, namely DokuWiki and WordPress in a usable and elegant way. I've also took care of the details and hacked the source in many places to improve the look-and-feel and the general usability of the site.

WordPress Autoparagraphing Madness

My blog entries had an unnecessary newline in their ends which made the page layout a bit disturbing. I dwelved into the WordPress code and found the problem. WordPress autoparagraphs the blog entries which is a generally usable feature, but it conflicts with the DokuWiki plugin and this extra newline is its side effect.

In short one needs to comment out line #73 in <wordpress_root>/wp-includes/functions-formatting.php.

I found two great articles about hacking. The first is titled "How to Become a Hacker" by Nat Friedman and the second related article is called "Asay: So you want to start an open source project...". I think both of them are very true.

Fun

Check out these:

• Novell Marketing Videos

• Postage Paid Envelope Revenge

Wicked, wicked…

As the title says. Chnorm became more usable and totally pythonificated. Grab it and have a lot a fun with it!

I've used the Python optparse module for parsing the options. In its documentation there is a very good section about the concepts around the command line interface and its design as well as a criticism of some popular application that have a braindead CLI.

My Feeds Are Working

I've just fixed the links of my feeds so you can easily subscribe to them from now on. Just click on the little red thing in the bottom right corner of Firefox and you're on your way, cowboy.

I have just marked Rustic inactive. It was my second project on SourceForge. I wanted to have a home page that is very easy to use and navigate and that is very simple also. I made a simple engine based on the design of ESR's home page of that time. It had a header, a footer, every page had a description string and it also had a sitemap feature.

I've made something workable, but I was very inexperienced at that time and I haven't thought of many important aspects of the problem. I think the most relevant ones by importance are 1) editing throught the web, 2) a powerful authoring (wiki) language and 3) slim design.

Fortunately DokuWiki fulfills all my expectations. It complies with all the above points and doesn't force a strict structure like many CMSes, but freely allows one to arbitrary interlink the wiki namespace.

You can read more on installing DokuWiki for this purpose in one of my earlier blog entries, DokuWiki Adventures.

Stupid Favicon!

Have you ever tried to make a favicon for your site? I did and it really exhausted me. That's because for some stupid reason (the Windows version of) Firefox behaved strange. When I named the icon file the standard way favicon.ico and referenced to it from the HTML using the link tag, the following has happened:

I enter the address into Firefox and at the left side of the location bar the favicon is there. However I cannot see it on the tab of this page. Switching to another tab and switching back makes the favicon compeletly disappear even from the location bar.

So what did I? I renamed favicon.ico to monda.ico, modified the HTML reference and it worked magically. I'm using Firefox 1.0. it's maybe a stupid bug, but the thing I don't understand is that most sites use the standard favicon.ico filename and they do work. So what the hell is going on?