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Gnome global menu and Gnome Do in action
My last laptop was the IBM Thinkpad x40 with a 12″ screen and a resolution of 1024×768. I used it both private and for work for over five years several hours a day and wore down three batteries in that time. With such a little screen you find yourself exploring ways to get the most out of your screen. Since I prefer the keyboard over the mouse any day I’m not forced to have big icons and menus all over the place.
Here are the steps I’ve taken (things I’ve removed) and how get things done (without them).
Firefox
Press “View / Toolbars / Customize…” and remove anything except from the back, forward, location bar and search bar. Also select “Use small icons”. To stop loading a page just hit escape, to reload use F5 and home use Alt+Home. To get to the location bar hit Ctrl+L and to get to the search bar hit Ctrl+K. I also hid the Bookmarks toolbar (because the suggestions in the address bar usually gives me what I want… alternative you can give bookmarks tags (keywords) which you can type in the address bar to open the bookmark.
Bottom panel
I’ve removed the bottom panel on my Ubuntu installation since it had nothing I’d ever use. Hide all open windows or “Show desktop” is easily accessible using Ctrl+Alt+D. I never used the Trash icon i really rarely delete anything and when I do I usually hold shift while doing so (which skips the trash can) which leaves me with the “Window list”. The window list show the open windows on all workspaces and although I use tabs whenever I can get away with it (Gedit, firefox, terminal and sometimes Nautilus) I still usually have about eight open windows spread over my six workspaces. I’ve come into the habit of using the same workspaces for the same tasks (often one application). Example:
- Workspace 1: Email
- Workspace 2: Browsing
- Workspace 3: Terminal
- Workspace 4: Virtual machines
- Workspace 5: Documents using OpenOffice or PDF using Evince
- Workspace 6: Editor (mostly emacs but somtimes gedit).
This way I alwas know where the application I want for the task at hand is. I use the keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+Alt+arrow keys) to get to it. I always know where to look for an application. Having all applications on the same workspace and use Alt+Tab or the window list I would have to use my eyes to locate and identify the application I want. So I find this method much faster. Just to be on the safe side I put an other applet called “Window Selector” in my panel in case I ever found myself in need of being able to select a window with the mouse. I sometimes use to show me a list of all the applications I’ve opened.
Gnome do
I can’t remember excatly how why or when I started using Gnome-Do but it is one of those things you didn’t know you needed until you started using it. It is one of the most powerful and versatile tools I’ve ever used on my desktop. Although its not there yet it certainly could be for the desktop whan a terminal is for a server. At the moment I’ve mostly use it to start applications, play, pause and skip music and start, stop, suspend and snapshot virtual machines in Virtualbox. Though I’m pretty sure the use of Gnome-Do will keep growing on me.
Global panel
After I found my self not using the application menu to start stuff anymore I decided to remove it from my top panel to get the extra space and test gnome-global-menu. I belive the gnome-global-menu project was inspired by Mac but whether Apple came up with the idea themselves or they got inspired somewhere else I don’t know. I the top of this post you can see how my desktop looks at the moment (just installed Ubuntu Lucid).
I’m a proud adventure game fan boy and have enjoyed countless hours in the company of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Legend of Kyrandia among others. ScummVm have helped to re enjoy many of these titles after replacing my preferred desktop system with Linux.
When the news reached my ears about “Tales of Monkey Island” I was very exited. But also nervous if would be able to play these episodes without Windows… but fear no more.
It is possible!
My system:
- Nvidia graphic card
- Ubuntu Karmic 64bit
- Wine from special package archive (to get native pulse audio support)
The episodes install on all Wine versions I’ve tried on so far (several guides on the internet suggests not to check for DirectX, though I haven’t personally experienced any difference).
When the game starts you are asked to provide the serial number. In this phase I’ve encountered trouble several times. Earlier providing the serial number only worked in old versions of Wine (like version 1.0) but this time I got it working with the newest version of Wine (which at the time was 1.1.32). Also I had to delete my .wine folder in order to reset wine because I apparently had some IE6 leftovers in there which otherwise would mess up the registration.
After activating the episodes you need to install D3DX941.dll into .wine/drive_c/windows/system32. Remember Linux is case sensitive so it is possible to have several different files with the same name except for the case. If it still doesn’t work make sure you only have one d3dx941.dll and that it’s not the one provided by wine (which won’t work).
Now the game starts… but for me the sound jittered. After looking around I found that it was ALSA interface in Pulseaudio which kept loosing the “connection” re initiating it. My saviour was Neil Wilson who have packaged Wine with a native pulseaudio audio plugin. This did the trick for me and Tales of Monkey Island is now very much playable at least for me 
Today I updated Wordpress which went smooth so I decided to fix a problem on my blog which appeared when I first migrated to Wordpress. I’m using the plugin Markdown for WordPress and bbPress so I can write posts with Markdown syntax and I use code sections heavily. The problem was that using special characters like: & ” ‘ within code paragraph would look like this:
& ” ‘ < >
For now I just reverts posts upon displaying so the html entities are replaced by special characters. I know this is not the right way but its temporary 
I asked on the Wordpress IRC and a nice guy called ‘ansimation’ gave me this to work with:
function reconvert_pre_entities( $d ) {
return preg_replace_callback('/<pre>(.*?)/sim', create_function('$matches', 'return( html_entity_decode($matches[0]) );'), $d );
}
add_action('the_content', 'reconvert_pre_entities' );
When I get a little time I’m going to incorporate this into the Markdown plugin so it wont affect any of the other blogs not using Markdown.
Tags: markdown, plugin, wordpress
After reading the the Gnome 3.0 announcements (Vincent Untz, Andre Klapper) yesterday and reading The Plan, I don’t really know if I got exited or dissapointed
Anyway Gnome works very well for me already (version 2.26) so I guess the limited amount of visible changes is a plus for me after all. But one thing I would like to see integrate and officially backed by the Gnome Team is Gnome-Do. My desktop experience took a great leap forward after getting used to this way of interacting with my computer. I while back I read a very exiting blog post about incorporating Gnome-Do to the very core of Gnome.
Now THAT would ROCK HARD for something to include in Gnome 3.0
I had quite some trouble finding a way to convert an avi video file to flv.
I really wanted to use gstreamer since it had worked very well for me for other conversions in the past. The reason for this conversion was that I had a video on my digital Canon camera (in avi format) and I wanted to publish it on the web using the defacto standard… flash video (flv).
After lots of googling I found FLV Conversion Tips by Brendan Howell so I’m not to take credit for this.
I didn’t want the sound so I removed it from Brendans original example:
gst-launch -v filesrc location=canon.avi ! decodebin name=d ffmux_flv name=mux ! filesink location=output.flv d. ! queue ! videoscale ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=320,height=256 ! ffenc_flv ! mux.
I my search for a solution I found another link with some gst-launch examples you might find interesting.
Tags: gstreamer
I have been meaning to blog about this for a while now. When contacting the Hotmail mail servers to send email your mail server will be presented with strange message in my opinion.
First find the servers which receives email for the hotmail.com domain:
dig mx hotmail.com
which will return something like the following:
hotmail.com. 3600 IN MX 5 mx1.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com. 3600 IN MX 5 mx2.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com. 3600 IN MX 5 mx3.hotmail.com.
hotmail.com. 3600 IN MX 5 mx4.hotmail.com.
Now try contact one of these on port 25 (just like mail servers does):
telnet mx1.hotmail.com 25
Notice the greetings message from the server:
Sending unsolicited commercial or bulk e-mail to Microsoft's computer network is prohibited.
Other restrictions are found at http://privacy.msn.com/Anti-spam/.
Violations will result in use of equipment located in California and other states.
Bringing it to peoples attention that sending unsolicited commercial or bulk e-mails is prohibited is fair enought even though I doubt many will read it But is it really nessesary to threat to use equipment, and why is California emphasised?
Just found this on the Ubuntu forums:
Lenovo Blogs – Linux Follow Up
I would be very interesting indeed
Last friday I got a new computer. After gotten my girlfriend to play World of Warcraft we suddenly found ourselves in the dilemma: 2 people wanting to play but only one computer… mine. I took the consequence and bought a new one – a Shuttle. A really cool little fukka for me – and the old one for her
A first I thought that it would take her a long time to figure it all out but she seems to has gotten a hold of all the keys and stuff really fast.
She always says that she is to stupid to play games and for while she had me convinced. I usually thinks that one can learn anything, if you set your mind to it… and now she proven me right.
Right now I’m sitting in a train on my way to Randers, 4 hours from where I live with train. I have some work there tomorrow and have left my girlfriend at home (propably playing World of Wracraft). No worries, she told me that she had made her homework before I went out the door 
I have just finished the movie “Sound of Thunder” – like Triumph would have put it: CRAP! Seriously, I mean it. The story wasn’t convincing, the acting was bad and the effects was really bad. Well I killed some time in the train. I saw a WoW movie about taking down Razor from BWL… Gloin now I’m prepared
Today I recieved my Ubuntu Hoary CD’s YAY…
To bad I have been running Breezy for almost a month now
Anyways – I got a version for Power PC and for AMD 64… I know just for whom
Several times I have had “great fun” converting filenames from the old 8-bit locales to use the new UTF-8 locales. Everytime, I used some time to find find a tool for it because everytime I forget the name of the tool convmv.
The fuckup usually shows itself on the file server (Samba) where the users happily uses æøå for filenames.
Now I’ll blog about so hopefully next time I can remember the name of the tool or atleast just make a search on my blog.
Debian has packages in their repository bu for SLES you need to download the tool manually. I found the tool on download.com
