Dean Sas’s Weblog

Gnome Contact Manager

// December 15th, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Chris Lord has created another frontend to Evolution Data Server, well at least the contacts bit. It looks quite nice, and obviously preferable to using Evolution.

Evolution Data Server (or E-D-S) stores information on contacts, calendar events and to do lists inside Gnome, however there aren’t many (any) ways of putting data into E-D-S, except through Evolution itself. Evolution which is primarily a Microsoft Outlook clone, is basically an email program, that is nasty. The contacts/calendar functionality which i’ll use irregularly, isn’t worth swapping my almost perfect email client which I use all the time, and I refuse to use both.

The other problem with e-d-s and contacts is that of data sharing, syncronising to my iPaq is more effort than it’s worth and there is no way for thunderbird to access my contacts stored away in evolution data server.

This makes it hard to benefit from some of the tasty integration
work that’s been put into Gnome.

However with more attention being focused onMultisync and similar projects, hopefully there’ll soon be a break through where everything works nice together.

Couple More Links

// December 2nd, 2005 // No Comments » // General

Here’s a couple more links I’ve been reading lately, I can’t remember where I picked them up from…

Daily Mail Watch – A site showing and dissecting Daily Mail covers, usually targetting the predictable mail things. It’s worth a read, as site laughing at the Dacre Facists usually is.

They’re currently auctioning one of the free Daily Mail CDs on eBay and giving the proceeds to a charity for asylum seekers. I put in a bid on it, but quickly got beat..

I’ve also been delving through the archives of Go Flock Yourself, a blog dedicated to talking straight through the web 2.0 hype. It’s quite vitrolic, but also amusing.

Personally I’m still wondering what the 0 is for in web 2.0

Web Design Advent Calendar

// December 2nd, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

24 Ways (link courtesy of Jamin) are a site showing a new web design tip/trick every day. They started on December the first and are doing 24 tips, one each day until christmas.

They’ve started off with one quite interesting one – a very quick intro to prototype – an ajax library and one quite noddy one – a lesson on what an em actually is.

I’ve subscribed to their feed, it could be interesting.

Google Analytics Hole

// December 2nd, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Whilst talking to Nick about tracking weberrific using Google Analytics and how to set it up so we could both access statistics, I thought I’d track it via my sign-up as Nick doesn’t have one and signups are blocked.

However the link to “add new website profile” had dissapeared from my control panel, yet the helper text underneath telling you where to click was still there.

Presumably they’d done this as they can’t cope with the sign-up demand.

On the off chance, I browsed through the html source, and on line 204 the signup link was there, it’d merely been commented out. So I just used that and it worked fine.

Quite weird that if google wanted to stop sign-ups they’d comment the html, rather than commenting out somthing out.

Participation

// November 4th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

After deciding to actually do something to contribute to free/libre software instead of just doing IRC/forums tech support, using it and filing bugs, I finally got off of my backside…

First of all I translated F-spot – a photo management tool. I haven’t kept up on this with recent versions and Gareth Owen has since been updating any strings.

Secondly I now have editing privileges on Gnomes Bugzilla, so I’ve been triaging a few bugs when I’ve had time.

I’m just trying to think of some programming projects to do, creating an extension for epiphany sounds appealing but it seems a little daunting at present.

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.

Vi

// July 22nd, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

While at work I spend probably upwards of three quarters of my time in vi, or using the ksh in vi mode. Now my fingers are expecting it everywhere, from text entry in word, to scrolling in every other application. I now resent having to move my fingers from the home row and grit my teeth everytime I realise I must, wishing everything had a Vi compatible mode.