daily accomplishements

Personal, technology, ubuntu, , , , , , , ,

Work:

  • just typical work

Home/other:

  • Created an entry level account for someone who already had a professional account :/
  • hopefully convinced my father to take the 46g fish tank for his oversized goldfish
  • forgot to feed fresh or saltwater fish or top off water or add carbonate to saltware – damn
  • started work on cleaning up/optimizing a customer laptop. Get to install ubuntu dual boot as well. Not sure how much he’ll actually use it but he’s slightly interested.
  • Updated Ubuntu 10.04 test laptop in preparation for tomorrow’s alpha 3 release.
  • ooo  .. reminds me, have to remove source from hardy on my apt-mirror to free up some space. Only a couple months, no need to have source locally.

I guess that’s it. Not an overly productive day. I need to find a heading that best fits computer work at home. Ideas welcome.

goodnight

GM to shut down hummer

Personal
This is actually a REAL Hummer ... and my car 🙂

Less than a month after General Motors extended its contract to sell its Hummer brand to China’s Tengzhong automaker, The General has announced that it will not complete the deal. According to a statement released to the media Wednesday afternoon, GM will permanently wind down the off-road division as a result.

GM shut down its Pontiac and Saturn brands last year, and sold off Saab a few weeks ago.

“One year ago, General Motors announced that we were going to divest HUMMER, as part of focusing our efforts on Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac going forward. We have since considered a number of possibilities for HUMMER along the way, and we are disappointed that the deal with Tengzhong could not be completed,” said John Smith GM vice president of corporate planning and alliances.

“GM will now work closely with HUMMER employees, dealers and suppliers to wind down the business in an orderly and responsible manner.”

GM says it will continue to provide Hummer parts and service to customers around the globe. All Hummer warranties will continue to be honored.

http://www.leftlanenews.com/gm-to-shut-down-hummer.html

It’s about time. These things were’nt worth the rubber they drove on.

what did icons ever do to you anyway?

FAIL, linux, technology, ubuntu, , ,

Here’s another reason why removing menu icons in Gnome (as well as removing the choice to turn them back on) is a bad idea. What about the 3rd party applications that rely on menu icons that are now turned off by default with no easy way for the average user to turn them back on?

My example is a project called Gnome SSH Tunnel Manager (gSTM)
The application creates ssh tunnels using an easy interface. It sits in the notification area with easy 1-click(right) access to turn tunnels on and off while showing their running status with a red or green light next to the name of each saved tunnel.

This application uses menu icons for it’s status icons as well as the Quit button at the bottom and “show gSTM” button at the top.

with menu icons
with menu icons
without menu icons
without menu icons

Gnome hates icons

FAIL, linux, technology, ubuntu


I originally posted this to the gnome-list mailing list in the hopes of reaching
some type of authoritative response.
So far there has been no response from anyone close to the developers in question.

This “bug” was brought to my attention when I recently tried out Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2 to see what new improvements Ubuntu and Gnome in general had. Upon going through my usual routine of setting preferences to my liking, I could not find the option to put back the menu icons in the 3 main menu’s provided by Gnome in the top panel. Only some of the icons
are shown, others are not. There used to be a setting to bring them all back. This was previously just an annoyance to have to complete the look
of the menu’s.

I went to #ubuntu+1 on Freenode and asked if this lack of preference was just a temporary setback in the alpha developemnt of Ubuntu. I was
pointed to this “bug”:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=592756

Reading the first comment:

“Discussed many times. We should remove the interface tab. Basically
everthing there is a user experience design cop-out. It only belongs in
a tweak UI tool – – but only if someone cares enough to write one.”

“Discussed many times”
Discussed where? Were Gnome users asked for feedback on this decision?

“It only belongs in a tweak UI tool – but only if someone cares enough to write one.”
User experience preferences for gnome should now be the responsibility of third party developers who might or might not develop tools to put
back user experience preferences which gnome developers created and then removed in the first place?

The rest of the comments in “bug” are people disagreeing with the original developer in his decision to remove the preference competely.
Save for 1 developer who agree’d and implemented the descision stating “majority of users”. What majority of users? So far I’m seeing most
people disagreeing with the descision. Not to mention, I don’t see the majority of users requesting preferences be removed regardless if they
are of interest to them or not. Why this descision? Is this preference really that much of a bane on the system resources? Why are we removing
half the icons from the menu’s making them looked half finished and unpolished? Why not remove all icons and be done with it?

I voiced my opinion in the comments of this bug just like the “majority of users” were doing. My comment and one other was removed and my
account on bugzilla disabled.

So, where does a user go to voice his opinions on this type of developer decision where said developers will read it and hopefully impact the
descision? Where can a user submit feedback on bringing back a preference that was removed?

Can we please get this preference put back? I don’t care where it is, but we shouldn’t have to wait for a third party tool to reimplement
preferences to finish the look of the menu’s that have already existed but were removed.