Science is fun!
On my workstation, which is one of two machines I use:
[muks@jurassic ~]$ uname -a
Linux jurassic 2.6.24.4-64.fc8 #1 SMP Sat Mar 29 09:15:49 EDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[muks@jurassic ~]$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
326 ls
168 cd
92 git
74 clear
66 joe
30 grep
28 svn
15 ssh
15 cat
13 cp
I seem to use clear a lot!
GIMP 2.4 has been released! It is the culmination of many man-years of real effort by several developers from around the world. There are many new things to expect in the new version, with more features, better usability and less bugs. Uncork your champagne and enjoy by upgrading to it.
I installed Fedora Core 6 yesterday, after wanting a more mordern set of libraries (than FC5). FC6 has gtk+ 2.10.x and now that Red Hat is going to ship even RHEL5 with gtk+ 2.10.x, I’m considering making use of GtkStatusIcon mandatory and yanking older gtk+ support for Gum. Extras also has the newer (than FC5 Extras) gtkmm libs I want to try.
I’m extremely pleased with the use of the compiz extension and the various performance enhancements thanks to all the free software projects’ work. There are ext3 and DSO performance enhancements for example, and then this is GNOME 2.16 now. It feels like I have a newer computer. Opening files in EOG, Evince, etc. were really snappy. Dunno who are to blame for this 
. It may be that my machine was too new for an older distro and the hardware is only now fully supported. The desktop is snappy. Apps are snappy. And finally I got the AIGLX eye candy (Desktop Effects) working for the first time. Of course, it wasn’t without its set of problems, one of which was the dreaded “nobody cared about IRQ ###“. This is also the first time I’m using a 64-bit distro.. Enigmail didn’t work on x86_64 Thunderbird (this isn’t Fedora’s fault), and there were some other 64-bit woes to deal with (again not Fedora’s fault).
HOWTO: Someone in #fedora said I should write about this. In case anyone wants to enable Desktop Effects on Fedora Core 6 with an NVIDIA binary driver, here’s how you do it. It doesn’t work out of the box and a little simple setup is needed. Note that if this fries your computer, steals your puppies, or does other bad things, I am not responsible.
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "glx"
Load "extmod"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
....
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
# Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"
SubSection "Display"
....
EndSubSection
EndSection
I am a Firefox user. One feature I want in Firefox is the display of the Organization (O) field of an X.509 certificate when SSL is used. Firefox currently shows a yellow location bar with a lock icon to indicate that an authenticated SSL session is in use. Hovering the mouse cursor over the lock icon shows the signing certificate authority who issued the certificate. I think that people would care to see the name of organization it was issued to, more than the certificate authority’s name (as we already have a trusted list of CAs [hopefully] in our browser).
Opera has this feature and the following screenshots compare Firefox 2 Beta 2 (BonEcho) to Opera:
Firefox:
Opera:
See my name there in the Opera screenshot? Basically what it means is that the certificate which the server has was authenticated by the issuing CA to belong to a person/organization with that name, and the browser has verified it.
If the GPL’d source code of the OpenSPARC chip design, Open Boot PROM, hypervisor and other architecture tools wasn’t good enough to make you drool, a company called Simple RISC has made a derived single core design which you can simulate and synthesize using Icarus Verilog and other supporting free software tools on Linux. A great day for freedom!
Simple RISC says in the simulation docs that Icarus Verilog is much slower than other commercial software for simulation. However, there are other free software alternatives like Verilator (which claims that it’s about 100 times faster than Icarus Verilog) that one can try using.
Sun: Not being your apologist, but I know you’ve been getting some bad press in the freedom industry lately. What you have done with OpenSPARC rocks. I hope you think and make a right choice for the proposed open source JDK license.
Following Germán’s post, I have the following Nautilus thumbnail wishlist (as observed in GNOME 2.14):
. Those photographs of Costa Rica are wonderful.. it looks like paradise. It’s like that island in The Incredibles. I have a few questions:
Free software projects are ideal candidates to be run as co-operative societies. In fact, many free software projects are already run using such principles. While projects gear up with project management tools like bug trackers, source code repositories, etc. to tackle the development process, we are very poor in managing people. From personal experience, members of projects which have a large number of people involved need to be managed as people don’t always see eye-to-eye. So there’s the chance of conflict and if these are not resolved properly, and people carry grudges, it may hurt the project in the long term. Some projects however spend a LOT of time in “politics” and eventually lose focus and followers.
Usually people agree to democratic systems. If they’re aware that not one person made a particular decision, but a majority of the team believes that such a decision is best, then they’re likely to accept it and not carry grudges. Now that projects have directories of member users (typically for CVS/Subversion access and posting news articles on websites, etc.), it’s not an unusual request for members to be asked to check a “portal” atleast once a week. A quick-vote section can be created on the portal, where any member (committer?) can ask for an issue to be voted on. It should be painless and quick. Voting should not take more than a few seconds of time. Think Enemy Territory.
You login, you see that there’s an outstanding vote (or you’re mailed that there’s an outstanding vote). You vote by submitting a simple form. That’s it. All members can see the results of the vote and it expires in a few days time.. so if you didn’t vote, you lost an opportunity there.
Here are some examples of things which can be voted on:
Once the issues have been answered quickly, we can carry on with real work and not have complaining about them anymore. If someone disagrees, point a finger to the vote—not to a person. This can even be a panel applet.
. .