Articles

Coffee crisis

My prized burr coffee grind broke this morning. No coffee, no wakey.

Søren Sandmann fixed GtkToolbar yesterday so I may toss the GNOME 2.4 build I've been keeping to run a few apps that don't like unstable.


Testing Planet GNOME

I just removed my permalink to test if that is what Planet GNOME is choking on.

Five Star Stories 15 and 16 just came in the mail. This is the greatest comic/manga ever.


My 2004 metadata plan

I've got a plan for dealing with metadata this year. It's not firm on dates, or priorities. I have a list of changes, and I'll tackle them as they seem most urgent or most beneficial. The general summary of tasks is, integrate with nautilus, make Storage with with libgda, add …


Missing Mark

I knew Mark Finlay through his emails. He was smart, insightful, and helpful. Most of all, he understood how people use computers, and he conveyed that knowledge to the GNOME community to make a great desktop. In every conversation that had an interface or usability issue, I waited to read …


I have seen enough of 2004, I liked last year better

This week sucked, rotted, bl owed. What this town needs is a Chinese or Indian restaurant that I could eat my sorrows away in. Monday Time Life, my employer, was purchased. In 60 days I'll know if I have a job. In the mean time I plan to switch to …


Nautilus directory loading strategies

A Medusa query of everything in my gnome2 build dir took 14 seconds 256 milliseconds to return 172,717 files, but display took 1 hour and 1 minute. Medusa knows everything but the icon, so msearch-gui had lookup the mime-type (again) in VFS to display the icon. Medusa could be …


Wanted: metadata server

The mime-type detection conversions on the GNOME lists is very tiring. This discussion has been focused on how to get the metadata for a file faster, but there is no issue with getting the metadata for a few dozen files. The real problems are:

  1. The directory is an inefficient mechanism …

GNOME Web sites needs more attention

I set the month of December aside for Web hacking, but I did nothing. I took every opportunity I had and played with Medusa, and planned my Storage changes for 2004. So I'm making my negligence public. There are dozens of quick fixes to make. The store application must be …


Medusa has secret mime-type search

While fixing the mime-type validation in the query optimization code, I realized that search URLs with mime-type clauses would pass through to the query engine. A quick test of msearch proves it. It looks like someone's good efforts to optimize the clauses before performing the query inadvertently added a useful …


Medusa search improvements

Having flu inspired me to work feverishly on Medusa. I've completely restructured msearch-gui. It's much more stable, and I squashed some bugs in the process. I cut some features I felt were frivolous. I don't think apps should be making private solutions for public problems: gnome-vfs needs a gnome_vfs_uri_is_valid, GDate …