Diverse

1.I really want some tagging for my files. How can I do it? I know about desktop search and use it up to some point, but Amarok gave me the habbit of tagging and I can’t stand their missing from my FS. Yes, I know, I have to give a try to NEPOMUK from KDE4. Do you know about some other simple solution?

2.I hate Raiffeisen, both in Romania and Austria. If “hate” too tough replace it with: “I am very dissapointed with the services”.
-today I wanted to make a transfer and they told me I can only do a transfer in the place where I have done the account. I asked if I can do it with cash, the answer was no. I asked if there is any way to do it there, the answer was no. I was so lost and surprised that I just tried to fake a smile, say goodbye and left.
-the e-banking was not working. Went to the bank, the lady didn’t know why it was inactive, she said that in a few minutes should be activated. When I last checked (3 days after the happening, it was still not working).
They are generally slow. The employees are not as polite and helpful as they could be (except from the ones in Roman).

3.In Debian there exists a software named Cycle (page on Sourceforge). You guessed it, it is about women’s cycle. Citation from the description:

Cycle is a calendar for women. Given a cycle length or statistics for
several periods, it can calculate the days until menstruation, the days
of “safe” sex,[...].

NOTE: This program is not a reliable contraceptive method. It does
neither help to prevent sexual transmision diseases like AIDS. [...]

I am pleased to see this is a GUI program. I only note it for being interesting. The next one will be noted for being funny.

4.PornView, is an image viewer that appears in my list of Debian software. It was covered for its name before, so I won’t do it again. Page on Sourceforce.

5.KDE has made some excelent advances. In two or three weeks since the last compilation the following have happened:
-the panel received a new design that makes the tab of one window distinguishable from the tab of another.
-Plasma crashes less often and when it crashes it doesn’t massively reset the panels, desktop and other related settings. It still does reset some of them.
-I haven’t seen any KWin crash.
-the panel is now stable, its components can be moved without any major oddities.
Excelent work, the first two points already made try the new KDE for longer.

Using the microphone in Debian – I hope Windows XP works on my laptop

Update: Using the ncurses program “alsamixer” I was able to get decent settings and make the mic. work right. Unlike KMix and Alsamixergui, changes made with alsamixer were applied. It is also keyboard friendly (it’s stupid console in fact, couldn’t be otherwise). I’m still thinking about other OS, this was too big a hassle

VoIP is finally reaching us, and offers prices that are unbelievably good. Buy credit from a VoIP provider (TerraSIP in my case), start a VoIP program (WengoPhone in this Debian case), do some settings to the program and call home. I have mention that quality is also surprising, I guess that in more than half of the case it is better than phone to phone. Being abroad this means very important savings.

And I did this, until Debian sabotaged me. To make the microphone work correctly on this laptop, a fair bit of experimentation is necessary, I did that and everything worked. After some time, with no conscious ALSA related changes on my system, this doesn’t work anymore, and the sound is no longer clear. It now misses all the higher frequency sounds and transforms them in squeaks.

The bad thing is that I don’t know where the problem is coming from, and more, I have no idea how to solve it.

Here’s a picture showing Alsamixergui with the best settings I could get. The program has tons of controls and none of them is explained. Googling didn’t give me too many answers. Some of the controls cannot be used (although KMix uses them, but to no effect), and also the range of possible combinations, without using a manual, is frightening.

So counting the sacrifices done for running Debian:
-no 3d acceleration -> No playing CS with friends. No other interesting gaming. I never got too far with Blender to feel the need for real 3d, but I will.
-problems with opening fancy shit office documents, not using proprietary math software from the university, others like this -> A few bad marks and some time wasted.
-calling at home from abroad with prices as much as 15 times higher than the VoIP ones. Well, this is the hot point, the costs are directly measurable as money. I guess now I have enough reasons to leave the Debian away.

So, where to?
I guess Windows XP/Server 2003. (The Vista saga is also written on this blog, and it is also not happy.) After about 3 years of running Linux on an underpowered desktop (but at least with good sound ), I have to give up goodies like KDE+Kwin, a decent console, nice package management from Debian, easy development with Qt and easy plugging in of external libraries, the Xorg middle click paste and easy switching of users and desktops. The good thing is that Amarok, Kate, Konqueror, KOrganizer and others make their way to Windows, I will be able to use the decent Visual Studio debugger and some others.

There are alternatives, but with shortcomings:
KUbuntu, I’am afraid they will try on me stuff like PulseAudio, the kernel TCP/IP bug (they didn’t release this one after all), and other half working thinks.
SuSE looks attractive, but it seems they said goodbye to KDE 3 and I guess there are not as many programs as with Debian.
Mandriva. My all time favorite, although the lack of proprietary packages (and also free ones) makes it hard to use.
And also, there’s no guarantee the sound problems will go away, while with Windows I have high hopes they will.

Oh, and later random thoughts:
-the man/woman/guy/dude (I didn’t dig to see who he/she is) from linuxhatersblog said he would stop. I still think he knew a lot more about Linux than I do.
-I still hate AMD/ATI for tricking me into buying a laptop with a radeonhd “supported” shit video card. I hope they will get their shit together though, as competition is always good.
-I will ask some help from some ALSA guys before leaving Debian. I would do some coding myself, but it’s a bit beyond my power.
-I think this message has a record number of “shit” words, I think 5 if we include this one. There is no f-word though. I hope there’s none on this whole blog.

Liberation Sans – what a nice surprise

I have long been a fan of non antialiased Tahoma fonts for the desktop, but the times have changed. Currently I am workingon a laptop, which has a slightly larger DPI than the average LCD screen. On this laptop screen I like Liberation Sans better than good old Tahoma. This is a really nice surprise.

Another change that came with working with another computer is that now I can use the Plastik theme for KDE 3 instead of Keramik, as on this more powerfull computer the Plastik performance hit is not noticeable. I like Keramik a lot, as it looks so much alive, but it has many squary edges.

Will come back with screenshots, stories about doctors that don’t look at me if I don’t seem to be really ill, the Pesenka lyrics that ang posted on my blog and how to these Russian lyrics. I also prepared a list of things I don’t like about Timișoara (people who know me are probably already bored of this subject) but that would seem unapropriate now that I am leaving the country for a long time.

Sunday’s frustrations, debugging Amarok

Just before the Amarok developers moved to the next version of Amarok, they just made the current one almost tolerable. Only one important bug still …bugging… me: with many songs in the playlist, immediately after playing a song Amarok would start using the hard disk like crazy for at least 20 seconds (thess seconds easily become minutes if some other process wants to access the hdd ).

Report the bug, a developer tells me that they no longer maintain it.
Hooray, this is my job, let’s repare The Amarok. So here I am, 5 hours after starting this, staring at a GDB console… Of course I did absolutely nothing. Spend a lot of time trying to work with the Kdevelop project that comes with the sources, uselles, absolutely. Screwed my Amarok configuration (at least I have backed up the postresql database). Also found a “HACKING” file inside the sources, it says nothing but uselles shit, something regarding the coding styles. Why the fuck you care about coding style when it is so hard for an Amarok outsider to get something working?!. You won’t have contributors anyway .

Oh well, if there will be a next time, I will ask for some help to avoid such a waste of time.

I once read an article about software that is forever at version 0.8 because programmers rewrite it again and again, but I am not able to find at the moment. It had a very nice name, something like “software in eternal puberty, looking for care”…, whatever, I will come back if I remember.

What if the KDE project adopted Emacs… :D

I have always looked at Emacs like it is some mysterious charmed software able to do magic on text, but not magic enough to really learn it. I gave it 3-4 hours tries a few times but I never found it convincing enough (it may be that it is not that magic?! ). The first problem with it is the interface, until lately it simulated all user interface with some ugly and hard to use widgets or whatever shit toolkit from the 1980’s. Now it has more normal widgets, provided by GTK but this is still not enough. The status thing is still text and artificial, the user interface is still too different, etc.

The biggest problem is that it doesn’t invite me to learn. I mean, the software should be able to meet my small needs no mather how stupid and untrained I am at the beginning. Like the Kate thing, it is always a text editor. You have lots of shortcuts and options, you may learn them as you use the software, but it is at any time able to function like a most basic editor.

Example using Emacs: by default it has a most annoyng setting to beep the computer integrated speaker whenever you scrolled and got to the end of the buffer, or any other error. I needed to do a search on google, and then edit some weird, LISP like, .emacs file multiple times until I placed piece of code in the correct region of that configuration file. Then there’s the brace matching that many editors signal for no mather what file type, emacs only does it when you type the character, for anything else I need to go through the multi-level menu galore (and I didn’t find it until today), good that they are breaking menus, at least.

So, what I was thinking is that someone (not me) wrote a KDE port of Emacs. Think of that: some Emacs that actually looks good and is usable by normal non-tech+Emacs PhD people. This learn step by step thing is something I like about software from the KDE suite, the software may be some unexplored teritory, but you learn it little by little, this applies for example to the whole KDEPIM suite, the first PIM suite I ever used (and the best). Probably the rule would be to make it simple enough to help anyone do their job, and featured and configurable enough to keep the advanced users happy.

I didn’t come back to edit the LyX article, I will do it next time.

“Vote for Bug” and “Privacy Concerns Two (as in ACTA)”

1. Please go to the KDE bugs page and vote for one of the most stupid bugs the Linux desktop has: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149676
It seems to me that having this written here is the most polite way of people get interested with this bug (as long as I am not able to provide a solution myself), as other means had no effect.

2. The most outrageous idea ever is brought to our attention by LWN. Customs police should have the right (and obligation ?) to search through a traveller’s electronic documents to see if he carries pirated multimedia. This shit seemed has a name: ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), and a wikipedia page : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement . Of the fears:
-for one right (copyright) you negate many others. The most important. Why should someone look through my files.
-makes for spying.
-looks like 1984 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four) is coming to us very fast.

Too good that we don’t have yet technologies to guess what’s in ones mind (with our current understanding it looks imposible to copy a man’s mind without touching it somehow by mechanisms of the observer’s effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenberg_uncertainty_principle).

Aside the important stories:
The second part of my message has changes to make it to a new article, as it goes very well my last post. By the way, since then: I bought a USB flash; I changed the server through which I send my e-mails, it’s google no more; and from time to time I use the Yahoo search engine.

Of course, at this moment Yahoo looks very good to me, as managers had the guts to refuse Microsoft, altough may not bring the most of profit to the shareholders. It’s refreshing to see that you can hold a business for other reasons than making maximum profits (though it may not be the case for Yahoo). I hope to see times when Romanian companies will try to solve other problems than having the maximum of profit.

Continuation of the first “Privacy concerns” article http://alecs1.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/my-privacy-concerns/.

Hello?! Display producers, you can continue evolution now! (part II)

This is a continuation of the first article, found at http://alecs1.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/hello-display-producers-you-can-continue-evolution-now/. It is not as full of information as the previous one, but it may get more.

I took again the time to test these DPI settings, on KDE 4 this time, and again the results are mixed, very much like the previous ones. Typical buttons resize nicely to fit the text, but everything else is not so shiny. There are two big loosers in this episode, the Oxygen decoration and the Start menu.
So here they are:
96 PPI with the Oxygen style and window decoration, with non working hardware acceleration therefore so no shadows, therefore hard to understand which window is which. Antialiasing always activated.

200 PPI, everything else the same. The window title no longer fits inside the decoration. Also notice the progress bar showing how much space is left, very sexy at these dimensions, I like it.

400 PPI. The window decoration is a bit ridiculous. The clock is not showing anything now.

Here comes the sweetest part, the „revolutionary” start menu versus the classical one at 400 PPI.
The new one (Kickoff I believe they call this sweetheart) would not fit even if it had two screens, so I didn’t know how to use it to logout:

The old one did its job better and filled the screen and showing me more buttons:

A very nice thing about KDE now is the icons, which may have any dimensions you want. So unfortunately Vista is still a bit ahead, let’s catch up.
Oh, and here is how to change de PPI / DPI without restarting the xserver:

xrandr –dpi value

That’s all about other people’s work, next time about my own.

Kate on Windows

The KDE developers do a great job, as always, and they are moving the KDE 4 programs to Windows.

I use Kate for all my text editing (I don’t do office, I hope I never will) and I am quite dependent on its shortcuts and facilities. Coming back on Windows at work, I have to choose something to suit my needs. Notepad++ is a surprinsignly good editor and this is what I currently use, only its silly name kept me from trying it. What Notepat++ is still missing is a better autocomplete, some smarter code folding, some code formating options and a few more configuration options. I also tried Jedit and a few others. I don’t count in the commercial editors, which may be even smarter.

So here is Kate on Windows:

Unfortunately it will take some time until a stable version comes out, the current one doesn’t really work, it only managed to open one file from more than 10. People who want to give a hand in testing KDE, this is your chance.

What is really nice is the way the KDE installer works. Coming from the Unix world, where people put effort into having nice packaging, KDE offers a Cygwin-like installer that gives an interface for choosing which programs to install, where to install and so on, and from how the interface looked, it am almost sure it could also do the updates.

I shall come with back with some details in installing and configuring Cygwin, Launchy, Katmouse and others, in order to make these pesky Windows computers be a bit more tolerable.

For those who will say about XEmacs/Emacs and Vi, I did try XEmacs a few times, but:
1.It is totaly different from conventional editors that I would have to spend quite some time to get used to it
2.Emacsen are somewhat ugly and non standard on the desktop, with the current ones not looking like the rest of the desktop, and the previous ones even having some really nasty menus and scrollbars.

Hello?! Display producers, you can continue evolution now!

For quite a while the pixels per inch value (PPI, very similar to DPI) of monitors has stagnated. In fact, if I remember correctly it has somewhat gone down (when I first bought my first display I could find a 19″ 1600*1200 lcd, now I can’t, I might not remember correctly though).

So here we are, today we have the same 96 PPI we had maybe 10 years ago (someone please confirm), though IBM made a 204 PPI monitor in 2001. Some things improved, but colors and PPI are mostly the same.

The first source of information on the problem is on Anti-Grain Geometry page about fonts: http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/. On a discussion on sayit.ro someone has pointed out that the Windows desktop would be very hard to use with larger PPI because of the way it scales its contents (and so producers would have nothing to gain from providing monitors that few would buy).

The question was if Windows Vista is capable of producing nice results. Not (wanting to) having such a system I had to google, and it seems Vista does the job: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20061211/vista-dpi-scaling/.
Notice the details of the icons in the taskbar at the 480 DPI. They are lovely.

I had too see how my desktop would do, and the results are mixed:
Default, around 96 DPI:

200 DPI:

480 DPI:

(I have only a KDE 3.5.5 for the moment, so please someone give links to some screenies with Gnome and KDE 4.)
As you can see the text is ok, menus, standard buttons and the window decoration work well, the rest not really.

There are some things to note though, it appears the Vista Aero thingy is does things a bit different from what KDE programs do. Vista uses its compositing engine and keeps the correct proportions, like vector graphics, while the KDE programs have to resize themselves to have the right height and width as they can. Of course, I would appreciate some details about Vista here too, and also some information if non Microsoft programs perform as well as those frome the picture.

So this is it, Vista is able to do it, the open source programs will catch any gap in no time, please provide us with nice displays. IBM has been doing this since 2001: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T221

So, anyone who has details please share them.
In xorg.conf you have to write the dimensions of the screen in milimeters (that is: resolution / DPI * 25,4), and it works at least for the ATI driver. I don’t know how to change DPI settings without logging out. Here is how my monitor sections looks now:
Section “Monitor”
Identifier “17” LCD”
Option “DPMS”
VertRefresh 50-75
HorizSync 38-83
#96 DPI
# DisplaySize 338 270
#120 DPI
# DisplaySize 270 216
#200 DPI
# DisplaySize 162 130
#480 DPI
# DisplaySize 67 54
EndSection

This article continues with part II: http://alecs1.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/hello-display-producers-you-can-continue-evolution-now-part-ii/

KDE 4, new build, probably the last for this year

Again, a lot of hours of a beautiful Saturday wasted with KDE 4. As a normal user I think I can only get frustrated. Report bugs, if they are not crashes they are here to stay. Go on the KDE IRC channels, learn to use IRC
(then, try to convince Opera to keep logs, switch from Opera to Konversation and see how that program will be difficult to use in such subtle ways that I can’t even describe why it doesn’t work as I would like).

Very nice the krush day irc channel . There were at most 30 people, and nobody was able to test the bugs I asked them to.

I will come back to try new KDE technologies only when I will also be ready to write some KDE code. I felt like there is no sense to try to help with KDE unless I am a developer.

And that Plasma thing. Damn the Plasma, it is so incomplete and buggy.