Dean Sas’s Weblog

First impressions of gnome-shell

// September 24th, 2009 // 42 Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

GNOME Shell is the proposed interface for Gnome 3, it replaces the window manager, the panels at the top and bottom of the screen and everything that sits on them. It’s in the repositories for Karmic, install gnome-shell and then run gnome-shell –replace to give it a try. You should note that it’s still under heavy development and isn’t finished, or completely designed yet.

I’ve not used it much at all and it does feel quite weird so far but it makes a refreshing change and definitely looks nicer. As it’s still very much a work in progress I’m sure it’s only going to get better. That said there are some downsides.

One of the main changes to my mind is that it does not have a window list on a panel. You switch applications by visiting the Activity “overlay” and then clicking on the window you wish to switch to. This doesn’t really affect me much in practise, I usually use alt+tab to switch windows anyway, where it does affect me is for applications that change the window title, e.g. messenger or gmail, I now have to cycle through alt+tab to check for people replying to me etc.

Rather than a window list the panel now lists the name of the currently focused application. It seems a bit useless, most applications have the application name as part of the window list and I’m not likely to forget the name of an application I’ve started.

As I’ve said gnome-shell replaces the current panels and everything on them (well except the notification area). This includes application launchers, it’s now quite a bit slower to open a terminal every time I need one. Hopefully this just needs some performance work to fix though. Previously I swung my mouse to the top of the screen and one mouse click. I now need to hit the windows key to bring the Activities Overlay up, wait a second and then type “term” and hit enter. It’s given me the impetus to make the apps I manually start via launchers on 90% of logins to auto-start.

The clock has regressed, it now no longer displays the date, or has it accessible at all and doesn’t have a calendar. I’m not sure how much of that is down to design or just a lack of time. It’s worth noting the storm in a teacupt when there was a proposal to change the Ubuntu configuration to not include the date.

There is also a sidebar which is turned off by default, apparently this is still very young and indeed it looks it. You can enable it by clicking on your name in the top right corner and checking Sidebar. By default it shows another, different, clock, some application launchers and recent documents. The application launchers as in the activity overlay seem to be hard-coded to open office and evolution, two apps I never use. I assume eventually they will be replaced with the most frequently used apps or be made configurable.

I’m quite conservative with my desktop usually, I like the default Ubuntu configuration and know it well. That said I’m enjoying using gnome-shell and intend to use it for a while at least. I’m looking forward to it evolving, including new concepts and growing more popular. The negatives I’ve noticed I think are mostly down to lack of time. I’m not sure if it’s going to be “ready” for the targeted date of next March and am not sure that it should be – there’s plenty more to prototype.

Added screen shots:

Student loans cost increase

// May 20th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

The Student Loans Company have just announced that they are to increase the real cost of post 1998 student loans.

Student loans are supposed to be linked to the lower of the retail prices index (RPI, a measure of inflation) and the Bank of England base interest rate +1%. The idea being that inflation does not erode the cost of the loan and so you pay back in real terms exactly what you borrowed. Thus the only cost to the government for the loan facility which encourages thousands of young people into higher education, is that of administration and of opportunity cost, and over the life term of the loan there is effectively no cost to students.

Unexpectedly, since this system came into place we’ve had a bit of a recession and now the RPI is at -0.4%. The government has decided to lower the student loan interest rate to 0%, which is 0.4% higher than the cost of living, meaning that students are now paying more for their loan than they have borrowed. This isn’t lots of money, about £40-£50 per year but government forecasts expect RPI to hit -3% by the end of the year, which is more like £300-£400 extra per year. This breaks the understanding that I think many of us had when taking out the loans.

If you feel strongly about this then please sign the petition or better yet, write to your MP. You can use my letter to Paul Holmes as an idea of what to write but please do not copy it word for word – MPs get that many copy and pasted identical letters that they don’t tend to pay them much attention.

Dear Paul Holmes,

I’m writing to you about the recent decision to lower the interest rate
of post 1998 student loans to 0% between 1st September 2009 and 31st
August 2010.

As you may know, student loans are linked to the lower of the Retail
Price Index (RPI) and Bank of England base rate plus one percent. The
aim of this arrangement was to keep student loans in-line with the cost
of living so that students will payback the same as they loaned in real
terms.

With recent figures showing that RPI is -0.4% and the government
setting student loans at 0% interest, students are now paying back more
than they loaned in real terms. It is only a small amount but the
forecast in the last Budget was for RPI to fall to -3%, which would
then cost students and graduates hundreds of pounds each year.

Given your record of voting against top-up fees I hope that you will do
what you can to oppose this.

Yours sincerely,
Dean Sas

Ubuntu One

// May 14th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

Dave wrote

The fact of the matter is there are proprietary drives in Ubuntu and you choose whether to use them or not, why should this service be any different?

I think the difference is that this is proprietary software (or at least the back end is) that is branded as Ubuntu. Personally I don’t have any problem with Canonical making money from this commercial service, just as I don’t have a problem with them selling Ubuntu t-shirts and mugs. My annoyance is Canonical using the Ubuntu branding to market a closed source program, when closed source programs are against the Ubuntu philosophy

At the core of the Ubuntu Philosophy are these core philosophical ideals:
1. Every computer user should have the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees.
Our philosophy is reflected in the software we produce and included in our distribution. As a result, the licensing terms of the software we distribute are measured against our philosophy, using the Ubuntu License Policy.
….
we are working to ensure that every single piece of software you need is available under a license that gives you those freedoms.

Gwibber themes

// May 1st, 2009 // 7 Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

I’m using gwibber for keeping up with identi.ca and twitter. I mainly use an eeepc while at home, so to get a couple more dents on screen I’ve recently been using the defaultsmall theme. This theme isn’t quite as nice to my eyes as the default theme though, it makes the background darker for one thing. I’ve patched the defaultsmall theme to use the background colours from the default theme.

Kudos to the gwibber team for making this so easy to do, it’s just a case of editing some css. I think I’ve spent more time blogging about it than doing it. There’s a list of gwibber themes if you’re looking for a change or inspiration. I encourage anyone more creative than myself to create their own gwibber themes.

To use my “realdefaultsmall” theme

1. mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gwibber/ui/themes/

2. cd ~/.local/share/gwibber/ui/themes/

3. wget http://www.deansas.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/realdefaultsmall.tar.gz

4. tar xzf realdefaultsmall.tar.gz

5. Start gwibber, open the preferences and choose realdefaultsmall from the theme list

Internets 1 Parliament 0

// January 21st, 2009 // 3 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

MP’s plans to make their expenses exempt from FOI requests have collapsed. It’s a humiliating U turn for the Labour party, who were planning to enforce a three line whip. The Conservatives seem to have received slightly better publicity by changing their minds about it sooner and insisting they were against the idea from the beginning. The turn around came after a largely internet-driven campaign against the plan began, and finished within a couple of days.

The MySociety blog has some interesting statistics on public participation of this campaign

MPs to conceal expenses

// January 18th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

Parliament have just spent upwards of £500,000 preparing to release data on expenses claimed by MPs. The government (and the conservatives) have now decided that this data should not be available to the public, making MPs and Lords the only public officials in the country that don’t have to make this information available to the public upon request.

First the House of Commons and then the House of Lords will vote on this on Thursday, if passed it will become law nearly immediately.

Tom Steinburg of My Society (the people behind theyworkforyou.com and writetothem.com amongst others) has published this request for action

1. Please write to your MP about this www.WriteToThem.com – ask them to lobby against this concealment, and tell them that TheyWorkForYou will be permanently and prominently noting those MPs who took the opportunity to fight against this regressive move. The millions of constituents who will check this site before the next election will doutbtless be interested.

2. Join this facebook group and invite all your least political friends (plus your most political too). Send them personal mails, phone or text them. Encourage them to write to their politicians too.

3. Write to your local paper to tell them you’re angry, and ask them to ask their readers to do the above. mySociety’s never-finished site http://news.mysociety.org might be able to help you here.

Closing bugs on Launchpad

// June 17th, 2008 // No Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

Christian, Launchpad Bugs (aka Malone) has an email interface you can use to receive and interact with bugs with which should probably satisfy your offline needs. See https://help.launchpad.net/BugTrackerEmailInterface

You can also change the status of bugs via the web ui by clicking in the ’status’ column.