If it's one thing I hate is online paper work, I hate registering to a million web sites and keeping track of my usernames on every one of them, well it looks like neither do the google people, and thet have come up with this wonderfull thing called "Google Friend Connect" which is free painless way to make your site social and get away with all this without knowing how to code.
Basicly you create your site add content to it, put Friend Connect on it, and when a visitor comes, he/she can comment on your articles without registering. Some may say "But that's possible right now, you just add a captcha to keep the evil spirits away.", the answere is "Yes you can!", but that's basicly anonymus, Friend Connect howerver uses your identity, so in practice, your contact photo will apear next to your name and comments, and you don't have to enter your name or upload your photo.
Friend Connect works with Google(bet you've never guesed that),Yahoo, AIM and OpenID accounts, they provide your identity the web site provides the content, fair enough. So I have a nice web site, and more half of the would has eihter one of these accounts, why should I make them create another account just for my site while they could just log in with these and do their thing, I don't even have to code these features, I get them for free. Yes I mean, I copy paste some code that I don't care about, and suddenly my site becomes social.
Heck this is what web supposed to be in the first palce, a place where mashups happen, I give the content, google gives the identity, I don't have to work all day, coding logins, registrations and profiles, visitors can enjoy my site without paper work, what more could you ask for?
Disclaimer: Google Friend Connect is alpha, but it shows a lot of promise to make the web a better place.
miercuri, 8 aprilie 2009
duminică, 25 ianuarie 2009
To use or not to use, that is the question
To judge something, first you have to look at it closely, study it, and make your conclusions at the end of the day, when you are done with it.
We all make mistakes, admitting it is the first best thing to do, a few days ago I tried Debian, just because, I was fed up being forced to use third party packages on Kubuntu just o get a working KDE3. I have spent days experimenting with KDE4, it's not a bad concept(plasma) but it's still lacking the simple things I want, and as I saw it, it is not going to change in the near future, so I decided that until 4.3 I am definetly staying with KDE 3.5, to me it's the best desktop. Debian made me even more upset than Ubuntu did, I downloaded the DVD, and it didn't even give me a choice, it simply installed GNOME by default, this made a very bad first impression.
After installed Debian, I immedialty installed KDE, just to see that they have included the new version of Adept, which couldn't even manage repositories.
Conclusion, Debian didn't really catch my attention, so I moved on to Open SUSE, which was strange at first, because I was used to deb.....but SUSE's instlaller beats Debian's and Ubuntu's, it simply shows the options you need and doesn't bug you with stuff that you don't care about. SUSE's installer, actually asked me what I want: GNOME, KDE4, KDE3 etc.
After I installed SUSE, I was fascinated that Firefox actually blends in with the KDE, I don't know how they did it, but it rocks. KDE3 is super fast, also KDE4 programs start really fast too, I couldn't belive my eyes, maybe it's got something to do with this being a 64 bit SUSE.
My choices
I choose KDE 3 destkop over plasma just, because, I want to move my applets(read widgets on plasma) on the panel where I like, the plasma panel simple aligns them to the left and doesn' t let me move them where I want to. Plasma is themeable, but I didn't find, a theme that I like, and since it doesn't let me choose a picture as a background for it, I had no options left.
The all new kopete has even worst yahoo protocol support than the 0.12.7(last stable KDE 3) version, so KDE 3 won here again.
Kontact (KDE 4) on the other hand won my vote, just because the new KMail is cooler than the old one!
On SUSE, I got the KDE 4 version of Krusader which worked fine.
Amarok, aside my problems, with talking to Amarok developers, I really think that Amarok 1.4 is one of the best music players there is, but Amarok 2.0 is a dissaster, it's featureless and ugly too, I wrote a lot of posts about this, so I will not repeat myself I'm even looking for Amarok alternatives.
I'm a Konversation fan, so the Kubuntu-Quassel decision, made me really upset. No offense, I have nothing against Quassel, It's just the ignorance that makes me angry: dropping Konversation from Kubuntu just for a few megabytes, is anything but a valid reason.
Conclusion
I will definatly, not give up on KDE, like Linus Torvalds did, he was right, but not about KDE, but about Fedore agressively upgradeing to KDE 4, just because they wanted to look cool. But I will always use what's best for what I want, let it be a program, a desktop enviorment, a distribution.
We all make mistakes, admitting it is the first best thing to do, a few days ago I tried Debian, just because, I was fed up being forced to use third party packages on Kubuntu just o get a working KDE3. I have spent days experimenting with KDE4, it's not a bad concept(plasma) but it's still lacking the simple things I want, and as I saw it, it is not going to change in the near future, so I decided that until 4.3 I am definetly staying with KDE 3.5, to me it's the best desktop. Debian made me even more upset than Ubuntu did, I downloaded the DVD, and it didn't even give me a choice, it simply installed GNOME by default, this made a very bad first impression.
After installed Debian, I immedialty installed KDE, just to see that they have included the new version of Adept, which couldn't even manage repositories.
Conclusion, Debian didn't really catch my attention, so I moved on to Open SUSE, which was strange at first, because I was used to deb.....but SUSE's instlaller beats Debian's and Ubuntu's, it simply shows the options you need and doesn't bug you with stuff that you don't care about. SUSE's installer, actually asked me what I want: GNOME, KDE4, KDE3 etc.
After I installed SUSE, I was fascinated that Firefox actually blends in with the KDE, I don't know how they did it, but it rocks. KDE3 is super fast, also KDE4 programs start really fast too, I couldn't belive my eyes, maybe it's got something to do with this being a 64 bit SUSE.
My choices
I choose KDE 3 destkop over plasma just, because, I want to move my applets(read widgets on plasma) on the panel where I like, the plasma panel simple aligns them to the left and doesn' t let me move them where I want to. Plasma is themeable, but I didn't find, a theme that I like, and since it doesn't let me choose a picture as a background for it, I had no options left.
The all new kopete has even worst yahoo protocol support than the 0.12.7(last stable KDE 3) version, so KDE 3 won here again.
Kontact (KDE 4) on the other hand won my vote, just because the new KMail is cooler than the old one!
On SUSE, I got the KDE 4 version of Krusader which worked fine.
Amarok, aside my problems, with talking to Amarok developers, I really think that Amarok 1.4 is one of the best music players there is, but Amarok 2.0 is a dissaster, it's featureless and ugly too, I wrote a lot of posts about this, so I will not repeat myself I'm even looking for Amarok alternatives.
I'm a Konversation fan, so the Kubuntu-Quassel decision, made me really upset. No offense, I have nothing against Quassel, It's just the ignorance that makes me angry: dropping Konversation from Kubuntu just for a few megabytes, is anything but a valid reason.
Conclusion
I will definatly, not give up on KDE, like Linus Torvalds did, he was right, but not about KDE, but about Fedore agressively upgradeing to KDE 4, just because they wanted to look cool. But I will always use what's best for what I want, let it be a program, a desktop enviorment, a distribution.
joi, 8 ianuarie 2009
Non Biased Kubuntu 8.10 Walktrough part1
Last time I wrote how ugly Kubuntu 8.10 looked in my opinion, but time has passed and Intrepid had time to evolve and mature.
This time I will install Kubuntu on a real computer not rant about neither the color scheme, the installer style and so on, I will mainly focus on usability, performance and what I can do with Intrepid.
The target machine is an Acer Aspire 5101 with a "wonderful" ATI video card and both hard drive and CD/DVD drive is connected via USB.
My goals are:
1) install the system
2) configure the network
3) update the system
4) install drivers
5) customize the look and feel of my desktop
6) install and customize firefox
7) install firefox plugins, java and restriced codecs, play an mp3, play a movie, play a streaming movie from the internet
This first part contatins 1-3 and the first part of 4.
1) The installer is pretty good, since it has an option that will not load a whole desktop just the installer and the installer it self is pretty simple. I like the partioner but maybe it should have a fourth option that would be like the 3rd(manual), but less techincal, for example instead of "ext3" there could be "Linux file system"(yes I know the drawbacks too, but for the experts the 3rd option would remain). Note: the windows xp partitioner is no diferrant.
2) Since I don't have dhcp on my machine that provides the internet, I need to configure the network card manually. Note: I don't need dhcp because I identify my laptop by IP address.
The installation didn't take long, when the desktop is started I get a Notes and a Folderview plasmoid, in which I really don't seem the point, cause a Folderview plasmoid will not bring back the good old desktop feeling if it's not the desktop itself.
The systray icon has a context menu New Connection, when I click it, it gives me what I want, and nothing more, which beats the old KDE 3.x based network manager. It asks me for a connection name and has an autoconnection option, this is very sweet for my laptop, because I need to change my connection options depending on where I am, so this profile system helps me a lot.
After setting up my network connection I imeadiatly change the K menu back to the traditional menu, because I'm too old schoolish for the new one. I start konqueror, and try to access kubuntu.org, but it doesn't work, so I open up a konsole just to check that the network manager did absolutely nothing, so I double check it, it's correct, so I enable disable, but nothing.
Since the network manager seems to be on vacation I set up the conenction in the command line with ifconfig and manually create resolv.conf:
sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.69 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
sudo -s
echo "nameserver 192.168.0.11" >> /etc/resolv.conf
sudo route add default gw 192.168.0.11 eth0
I have network connection, but I had to do it via command line, even a basic interface for these command would have been better than provide a network manager that doens't work. This issue doesn't fit in the annoying category rather in the "makes this whole system unsusable to anyone who doesn't know the above commands". And to think this was a simple manual ip address assigning, I rather not look into setting up a PPPoE connection. It doesn't even realise that I'm connected to the internet after I connected myself with the commands above.
3) After 2 minutes I managed to calm down from my previous experience, I decided to continue and update the system, right after I did some kind of language update with some language installer. It's very strange that I get stuff like this on start, the language files should be alright by default, but as I was saying I clicked the update icon, again the new adept updater looks much more sensible than the old one, but in this case it actually works.
A very strange thing is that It doens't show an exit button after update, the developers probably tought this was obvius.
Since I did a kernel update I get the restart icon in the systray, which asks me again if I should restart, but if I wait 30 seconds it will restart anyway, so I don't really see what's the point other than showing of that effect.
After clicking on the restart button, instead of waiting 30 seconds, everything except the mouse dissapears, and nothing happens, and no CPU/disk activity. I got tired of waiting and presed the shutdown button(on my laptop) so it would emit a shutdown signal on, and at least I was able to shut down my laptop without having to wait 20 minutes for fsck next reboot.
4) I start up my laptop once again praying that I will not have any more issues again.
Kubuntu started up fairly quickly, and I clicked the hardware drivers icon in the k menu to address the hardware issues. I selected the ATI/AMD proprietory FGLRX graphics driver and pressed activate, but nothing happend. I pressed Close but still nothing happend.
I feel that I wanted basic things, that any simple user would want, but with the exception of the installation none of them worked without pain, I hope I will have better luck next time.
This time I will install Kubuntu on a real computer not rant about neither the color scheme, the installer style and so on, I will mainly focus on usability, performance and what I can do with Intrepid.
The target machine is an Acer Aspire 5101 with a "wonderful" ATI video card and both hard drive and CD/DVD drive is connected via USB.
My goals are:
1) install the system
2) configure the network
3) update the system
4) install drivers
5) customize the look and feel of my desktop
6) install and customize firefox
7) install firefox plugins, java and restriced codecs, play an mp3, play a movie, play a streaming movie from the internet
This first part contatins 1-3 and the first part of 4.
1) The installer is pretty good, since it has an option that will not load a whole desktop just the installer and the installer it self is pretty simple. I like the partioner but maybe it should have a fourth option that would be like the 3rd(manual), but less techincal, for example instead of "ext3" there could be "Linux file system"(yes I know the drawbacks too, but for the experts the 3rd option would remain). Note: the windows xp partitioner is no diferrant.
2) Since I don't have dhcp on my machine that provides the internet, I need to configure the network card manually. Note: I don't need dhcp because I identify my laptop by IP address.
The installation didn't take long, when the desktop is started I get a Notes and a Folderview plasmoid, in which I really don't seem the point, cause a Folderview plasmoid will not bring back the good old desktop feeling if it's not the desktop itself.
The systray icon has a context menu New Connection, when I click it, it gives me what I want, and nothing more, which beats the old KDE 3.x based network manager. It asks me for a connection name and has an autoconnection option, this is very sweet for my laptop, because I need to change my connection options depending on where I am, so this profile system helps me a lot.
After setting up my network connection I imeadiatly change the K menu back to the traditional menu, because I'm too old schoolish for the new one. I start konqueror, and try to access kubuntu.org, but it doesn't work, so I open up a konsole just to check that the network manager did absolutely nothing, so I double check it, it's correct, so I enable disable, but nothing.
Since the network manager seems to be on vacation I set up the conenction in the command line with ifconfig and manually create resolv.conf:
sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.69 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
sudo -s
echo "nameserver 192.168.0.11" >> /etc/resolv.conf
sudo route add default gw 192.168.0.11 eth0
I have network connection, but I had to do it via command line, even a basic interface for these command would have been better than provide a network manager that doens't work. This issue doesn't fit in the annoying category rather in the "makes this whole system unsusable to anyone who doesn't know the above commands". And to think this was a simple manual ip address assigning, I rather not look into setting up a PPPoE connection. It doesn't even realise that I'm connected to the internet after I connected myself with the commands above.
3) After 2 minutes I managed to calm down from my previous experience, I decided to continue and update the system, right after I did some kind of language update with some language installer. It's very strange that I get stuff like this on start, the language files should be alright by default, but as I was saying I clicked the update icon, again the new adept updater looks much more sensible than the old one, but in this case it actually works.
A very strange thing is that It doens't show an exit button after update, the developers probably tought this was obvius.
Since I did a kernel update I get the restart icon in the systray, which asks me again if I should restart, but if I wait 30 seconds it will restart anyway, so I don't really see what's the point other than showing of that effect.
After clicking on the restart button, instead of waiting 30 seconds, everything except the mouse dissapears, and nothing happens, and no CPU/disk activity. I got tired of waiting and presed the shutdown button(on my laptop) so it would emit a shutdown signal on, and at least I was able to shut down my laptop without having to wait 20 minutes for fsck next reboot.
4) I start up my laptop once again praying that I will not have any more issues again.
Kubuntu started up fairly quickly, and I clicked the hardware drivers icon in the k menu to address the hardware issues. I selected the ATI/AMD proprietory FGLRX graphics driver and pressed activate, but nothing happend. I pressed Close but still nothing happend.
I feel that I wanted basic things, that any simple user would want, but with the exception of the installation none of them worked without pain, I hope I will have better luck next time.
luni, 5 ianuarie 2009
Happy flaming new year!
Today I've red a strange blog post on planet KDE titled "KDE Trolls, eat this". When I looked at the title I immediately realized that this is a must-read post. The posts starts with a beautiful artwork that symbolizes love among other things, but right after that inspiring picture there was a message of hate:
"Anyone else noticed the extreme amount of hate & trolling against KDE lately, and especially against KDE 4? I have a special message for you trolls:
You're fucking idiots."
As I wrote in one of my comments I understand the frustration of developers but this had been taken a little way too far...
After this horrible message we have a description of what happened, where we are now and what happens next:
"For your consideration:
1) they ignore you
2) they laugh at you
3) they fight you
4) YOU WIN.
(we're at stage 3 now)
"
Okay he must be a prophet...The "YOU WIN" part reminds me of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MUAa3kuN3I
After posting the comment I realised something I did not before: this post came from amarok blog...
I don't know why but this is the second post(first was meant for me) that calls people idiots... there's gotta be an explanation for this...but I haven't figured it out completely yet. But it has something to do with someone writing "X suxx because Y" but some people neglect the "because" clause and call the author a troll. I've said in in a comment too, wonder what will these furious guys have to say to that, propbably delete my comment, but at least this post is not moderated like MR. ISUCKROCKSOFUCKINHARD's post.
"Anyone else noticed the extreme amount of hate & trolling against KDE lately, and especially against KDE 4? I have a special message for you trolls:
You're fucking idiots."
As I wrote in one of my comments I understand the frustration of developers but this had been taken a little way too far...
After this horrible message we have a description of what happened, where we are now and what happens next:
"For your consideration:
1) they ignore you
2) they laugh at you
3) they fight you
4) YOU WIN.
(we're at stage 3 now)
"
Okay he must be a prophet...The "YOU WIN" part reminds me of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MUAa3kuN3I
After posting the comment I realised something I did not before: this post came from amarok blog...
I don't know why but this is the second post(first was meant for me) that calls people idiots... there's gotta be an explanation for this...but I haven't figured it out completely yet. But it has something to do with someone writing "X suxx because Y" but some people neglect the "because" clause and call the author a troll. I've said in in a comment too, wonder what will these furious guys have to say to that, propbably delete my comment, but at least this post is not moderated like MR. I
marți, 30 decembrie 2008
FFC 0.1 RC2 is out
It has being long but it's finally here. Sadly I had to rethink my previous decision, I wanted RC2 to be database stable, but it's not, cause I wanted to clean up the database a little, hopefully RC3 will have this.
The main reason behind RC2 is the GPL compatibility, added copyright to all headers so that this would be finally clear. Planning on improving this, for example listing third parties seperately somewhere.
As I've read the changes of PHP 5.3, I was thinking of using the namespace feature, but decided to do that in future releases, since FFC relies mostly on singleton Objects, so adding this feature in the future hopefully won't break compatibility.
I know I've just released RC2 but RC3 is just a few bugs/tweaks away from being out and currently the differance between RC3 and the final version should be bugfixes only, I'm not planning to release an RC4.
The main feature of RC3 will be the removal of the obsolete 'texts' and the addition of a clean room user class implementation that actually works.
0.1 will be the first stable release so I will really work hard to make it a worthy release, it will probably get several patches afterwards. The only thing that is still lacking is documentation, but hopefully this will be resolved too in the future.
The main reason behind RC2 is the GPL compatibility, added copyright to all headers so that this would be finally clear. Planning on improving this, for example listing third parties seperately somewhere.
As I've read the changes of PHP 5.3, I was thinking of using the namespace feature, but decided to do that in future releases, since FFC relies mostly on singleton Objects, so adding this feature in the future hopefully won't break compatibility.
I know I've just released RC2 but RC3 is just a few bugs/tweaks away from being out and currently the differance between RC3 and the final version should be bugfixes only, I'm not planning to release an RC4.
The main feature of RC3 will be the removal of the obsolete 'texts' and the addition of a clean room user class implementation that actually works.
0.1 will be the first stable release so I will really work hard to make it a worthy release, it will probably get several patches afterwards. The only thing that is still lacking is documentation, but hopefully this will be resolved too in the future.
duminică, 28 decembrie 2008
XUL Fail
Let me get this straight, I open an RSS link in Firefox, it displays it, then I save it, and when I view it, I expect to see the RSS file, instead I get a strange XHTML file with XUL stuff, with a comment(probably from a Firefox or Mozilla dev) saying that XUL sucks....now aint that a .... fail!
Looks like Mozilla's usability team was on vacation when they designed this new "Live bookmark" system, even if I expected to save the RSS in Firefox's graphical presentation I would want to do it without XUL, embedding XUL in XHML beats the whole purpose of saving something in XHML anyway, cause there are a lot of browsers(likely every non-firefox browser) that do not support XUL. Even saving this in a JPG would have been more usefull.
joi, 25 decembrie 2008
Amarok2 the final chapter
As an update to my previous posts it looks like the Kubuntu devs will be pushing mysql on the official Jaunty CD just because Akonadi needs it(and Amarok too, at least to waste some resources):
"I'd like to see KDE 3 libs off the CD for Jaunty, and if possible Qt 3 too. With Akonadi bringing in mysqld we'll need all the space we can find. One of the last hangers on to Qt 3 is OpenOffice, anyone feel like reviving OpenOffice KDE project for Oxygen and Qt 4 support?"
source: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3805
Now what did I tell some ignorant people a few weeks ago.... that's right: Amarok 2 is wasting resources by using MySQL embeeded instead of using a real mysql server like Akonadi does, and that most destkop distributions will probably include mysql server by default just for the sake of akonadi anyways, so adding a possibility for Amarok 2 to use that would be a sane decision.... no one belived me back then, instead they released Amarok 2 with some minor bugs like "Album covers are still getting mixed up." and "Amarok wouldn’t play files which filenames contain diacritics."(guess that's not top priority for some people) (source: http://polishlinux.org/kde/kde-42-beta/).
Well I guess Jeff 'IROCKSOHARD' Mitchell (that's what he calls himself, see Amarok's about dialog) must be proud, expecting every future kubuntu user to have two mysql instances running just so that his ego can ROCKSOHARD, ohhh well, they could at least have fun renameing thousands of files, because of Amarok2's "minor" bug. Keep up the good work!
"I'd like to see KDE 3 libs off the CD for Jaunty, and if possible Qt 3 too. With Akonadi bringing in mysqld we'll need all the space we can find. One of the last hangers on to Qt 3 is OpenOffice, anyone feel like reviving OpenOffice KDE project for Oxygen and Qt 4 support?"
source: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3805
Now what did I tell some ignorant people a few weeks ago.... that's right: Amarok 2 is wasting resources by using MySQL embeeded instead of using a real mysql server like Akonadi does, and that most destkop distributions will probably include mysql server by default just for the sake of akonadi anyways, so adding a possibility for Amarok 2 to use that would be a sane decision.... no one belived me back then, instead they released Amarok 2 with some minor bugs like "Album covers are still getting mixed up." and "Amarok wouldn’t play files which filenames contain diacritics."(guess that's not top priority for some people) (source: http://polishlinux.org/kde/kde-42-beta/).
Well I guess Jeff 'IROCKSOHARD' Mitchell (that's what he calls himself, see Amarok's about dialog) must be proud, expecting every future kubuntu user to have two mysql instances running just so that his ego can ROCKSOHARD, ohhh well, they could at least have fun renameing thousands of files, because of Amarok2's "minor" bug. Keep up the good work!
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