Archive for January, 2006

Uncyclopedia is a pure source of wisdom. You really gotta check it out. Let's see some parts of the Sex article:

The easiest way to have sex is with a woman (if you're a man) or with a man (if you are woman). Or both (If you are Oscar Wilde). You can have sex with people of the same sex as you, but you'll be called gay, freak or sinner.

or

You can also have sex with animals like: chickens, dogs, horses, Llamas and Michael Jackson. It's not recommended that you have sex with the following animals: bees, Gnu, Elephants, and Oompa Loompas.

I guess that explains everything.

I've just committed the basic frame handling functionality to the CVS. Frame handling in UC is part of an advanced interaction design which eliminates the need of more windows.

The concept is that the applications is composed of one, and only one window. Why? Because fiddling with tons of windows is not much fun. I heard many people talking about how much burden handling many windows is and I have the same opinion on the issue.

Here is a little demonstration to show you what I'm talking about. Just to make it clear, the file operatons are not implemented yet. Here's the initial state of UC:

Let's say the user wants to configure the listing of the right panel. Then (s)he presses the "Set Listing" toggle button on the right panel. Here's what happens:

As you can see a tabbar and the related tab appears on the left panel frame. There is no overlapping like in the case of an additional window. It's simple and beautiful.

I've made many changes to the codebase in the last few days and I didn't clean up the code so it's a bit messy now. Apart from small refactorizations, I guess I overuse accessors a bit. I need to educate myself more on the topic.

As a last note it's nice to see how friendly the Free Software Community really is. When I requested a logo designer in the help wanted section of SourceForge, I got many help from more people and they were very kind and willing to cooperate. I've experienced the same attitude on the GTK IRC channels and mailing lists also.

I've just succedeed configuring ALSA. I needed it badly because Skype captured /dev/dsp every time I used it and I needed to quit and restart it in between conversations whenever I wanted to use another application which produced any sounds. It frustrated the hell out of me.

I needed a solution that allowed applications to output sound at the same time. There are more ways to achieve that commonly using various sound servers in the past, but every such server must be supported on application level and they are generally not supported widely by most applications.

Fortunately ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture is here for a while to replace OSS. You should read a bit background on ALSA to understand why it is here and what can it do for you. It is also useful to know about its configuration file and plugin system.

ALSA seems to be pretty well supported by most applications and whenever it's not, it can be used with the aoss compatibility script to provide an enviroment for legacy OSS applications to use ALSA.

It was extremely easy to set up ALSA for me. I put up the alsa-utils and alsa-oss packages on my Debian SID box, did an alsaconf which took care of loading the needed modules and modifying the related configuration files accordingly. After that the default PCM device was initially configured to use dmix which was exactly what I wanted. You only need to configure ALSA applications to use ALSA and start non-ALSA applications with aoss.

ALSA works fairly well for me since I set it up, although Firefox doesn't seem to like it when using with Flash. It freezes if I close http://pandora.com after listening some music. I've found a great HOWTO which details configuring many popular applications to use ALSA so you might want to check it out.

I just finished shopping when I heard some strange noises. As I got out it wasn't hard to tell what caused it. It was 100 meters from my apartment. You gotta watch out for crazy drivers.

I took this shot with my Sharp GX-25. The best phone I've ever had.

Just to let you know, if you've got a better phone than mine, I hate you.