Dean Sas’s Weblog

Joining the bugsquad

// September 14th, 2006 // 1 Comment » // General

I’ve been using (unstable) Ubuntu as my full-time operating system for the last 18 months and one of my new years resolutions was to try and help out with open source software a bit more. So I’ve been volunteering some time to help out with testing and bug triaging amongst other things.

Anyway Tuesday night sfflaw made me member of the Ubuntu quality assurance team. Thank you Simon. See the Bug Squad page to find out how you can help.

Belated New Years Resolutions

// January 8th, 2006 // 5 Comments » // General

While I’m doing lists. This year I intend to:

• be healthier – early starts at work and getting the car haven’t been the best things for me.
• • Go to bed at normal times
  • Do some excercise – I’ve already been Thai Boxing, once. It’s a start.
• Get things done
• • Make a significant contribution to open source – probably Ubuntu, this year. No more procastrination.
  • Do more programming. – I want to get something done and usable.

Bets on me looking back on this in fifty one weeks time and saying “I haven’t done any of this” aren’t been took.

2005 Reviewed

// January 4th, 2006 // 2 Comments » // General

Here’s a quick run down of things that have happened in my world during 2005, it’s nice to look back and think.
To summarise: Passed my driving test, fell back in love with linux, finished uni for a year, moved back home, got a car, started my work placement, went on holiday, got a laptop.

Now on with the next year.

Post idea stole from Andrew Pollock.

Flock

// October 21st, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I’ve downloaded flock a firefox based web browser. It’s a basically reskinned firefox + some (well integrated) extensions. It aims to coexist with Firefox and not fork it, I suppose it’s vaguely similar to the ubuntu and debian relationship.

The new features include:

• A blog poster (which I’m writing this from), which is really intuitive, simple and requires no user configuration but currently it’s really buggy, and not usuable for serious use.
• Flickr integration including a new menu bar which shows pictures from flickr – this seems pretty useless to me.
• Bookmarks being completely del.ico.us based – no persistant local storage, tagging etc. This could give me the push I need to use del.ico.us, it’s currently too much effort in firefox.
• A pretty cool built in RSS reader that aggregates your RSS subscriptions, I’d use this instead of my current thunderbird RSS reader.
• The ‘Shelf’, sort of a scrap book where you can collect interesting items and quickly include them in a blog post for example. Which is quite cool, and saves opening up notepad, or using lots of tabs.

The CEO of Flock, Bart Decrem has said that he

hopes to have 100 million users within five years.

Flock, the New Browser on the Block

Which seems to me to be extremely ambitious as most of it’s advantages over firefox are stuff which don’t appeal to Joe Average – RSS, flickr and blogging. The kind of crowd that already know about firefox, opera, safari and others and those three probably barely have 100million
between them.

I can’t see me using Flock as my main browser for a few reasons:

• I can’t be bothered to import all the data that I have stored up in Firefox, and Flock offers no way of importing.
• The blog editor is pretty much unusable.
• I can’t see a way to search from the address bar like is possible by firefoxes ‘keyword’ functionality

It is only a 0.5 “developer” release and as such contains plenty of bugs. Particularly it seems with the blog poster.

I filed a bunch: 1345,1346, 1347, 1348 and 1349.

Pocket PC Today Theme

// June 28th, 2005 // 2 Comments » // Uncategorized

I’ve made a Ubuntu theme for Pocket PC, it’s not as good as I hoped, the colour seems to change from desktop to pocket pc :/, perhaps there should be more brown toolbars etc and a different colour background colour.

Here’s a screenshot:

There isn’t any of the image quality loss on the pocket PC either.

Download Ubuntu Pocket PC theme.

The theme is available under the terms of the GPL, and/or whatever the Ubuntu Artwork people prefer, depending on legality.

Ubuntu

// April 20th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

I’ve been using Ubuntu Linuxs Breezy Badger development version as my desktop for the last two days. This is because I’ve had a linux programming assignment to do and rather than ssh into the universities unix server and struggle with small windows and copy and paste failure, I thought I’d simply do it all in linux and use open office to type up my findings. As a whole it’s worked very well and I’m totally comfortable using the desktop environment. It basically feels more natural than windows to me I think.

This is usually where I’d write “but….”, however I can’t think of anything that just doesn’t work once the computer has been setup. The only flaw I’ve came across is that usb support can be a little iffy – but this is purely because I’m running the latest unstable “not meant for production use” version.

Setting the computer up was mainly fine apart from the fact that Ubuntu didn’t detect my Acer AL511 lcd monitor, I had to track down my horizontal and vertical sync rates on the net, then just add “HorizSync 24-61″ and “VertRefresh 56-75″ to my xorg.conf. Obviously this is too much for the regular user and should just work, but as regular users don’t go around installing operating systems it doesn’t really matter to them.

I’ve come to find it as a pretty good operating system and I think I plan on using it as my main desktop and only using Windows when I wish to do assignment work that requires it or play games. Now if only I could find an IDE as good as Visual Studio.net…

Ubuntu

// February 23rd, 2005 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

I’ve installed the Ubuntu “Warty” release and played around with it for a couple of days, configuring and exploring it. I quite like it, it has a nice, ungimmicky default theme, has firefox as the default browser and uses the very nice gnome 2.8. It seemed really easy to use, kinda ‘clean’ and well, just made sense. My camera got picked up fine. It was basically a joy to use. The best distro I’ve ever used I do believe. Gnome seems to have overtook KDE in my mind, KDE just seems so kind of gimmicky and vulgar in comparison, but without the user friendliness and stability to back it up. The one drawback I felt was the use of Open Office as the default office suite rather than Abiword and Gnumeric or similar, Open Office isn’t that pleasent to the eye, and the major problem is that it takes an age to start.

I felt that good about it I upgraded it to development version – “Hoary”. However I’m having problems with that. So I’m going to go back to Warty tomorrow.