Harsh J

Development’s been slow and the beta test by me turned out to be nightmarish. Yet screen-shots say its not, cause they are just beautiful!

Anyway got this news from the Linux and Open Source Blog at Wordpress (Run by E@zyVG) that KDE4’s wallpaper contest result has been announced and the result is this piece of blue beauty:

EOS by Vlad Gerasimov

Truly an amazing piece of art!

By the way, do check out the animal-skin wallpapers included in Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 flavor. The Kubuntu has a blue Elephant skin bonus while Ubuntu has the brown Elephant skin bundled along.

Looks like no one remembers this awesome science fiction craze of 1990’s anymore?

Most of you would have seen the 1997 movie “Starship Troopers” which was quite a good movie of its time. There also was a sequel to it called “Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation“. I just caught up with these two movies again this month on DVD and it bought back the good old memories. Got to love guns, power suits and interstellar air-crafts just like the Halo series.

Do any of you remember the “Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles” series which used to air on AXN around 2001 or so? It was a series representation of the Starship Troopers film adaptation and was fully CGI, way too good for its time! Just recently learnt that it had over 7 campaigns while only 3 were aired in India. So being how easy it is to acquire DVDs in 2007, I got them all, full 8 DVDs of all the campaigns in order:

• The Pluto Campaign
• The Hydora Campaign
• The Tophet Campaign
• The Tesca Campaign
• The Zephyr Campaign
• The Klendathu Campaign
• The Trackers Episodes along with the Bonus clips, and finally,
• The Homefront Campaign

It’s too bad the series ended in a cliff-hanger and the planned sequel was never produced since the company behind this masterpiece ran out of money and disappeared off the globe.

But anyways, you can wait for the third movie sequel “Starship Troopers: Marauders” coming up next year with an all new story.

You know what’s a Marauder if you’ve seen the Roughnecks series.

Read more: [ Wiki ] [ TrooperPX ]

GNOME has been working quite silently on creating its own flavor of an Online Desktop like gOS and Zonbu but being non-commercial at that.

From their Web-Page at Live.GNOME.org:

Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Firefox, Salesforce.com, and countless other organizations are changing the software we use by shifting applications from the desktop operating system to the web.

The goal of the GNOME Online Desktop is to adapt the desktop to become the perfect window for online applications like GMail, Photobucket, Facebook, EBay, Wikipedia, and countless others that user and developer momentum is shifting towards.

You can see an Alpha-Release Screenshot of it here and a full tour by RedHat Magazine of it running on Fedora 8 here.

GNOME Online Desktop is bundled with Fedora 8 I guess, I haven’t tried it yet and thus unsure of it.

Instructions for building it on other distributions like Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc can be found at the JHBuild page of its Website. I’ll try building it on my current Ubuntu - Gutsy Gibbon - 7.10 box once my exams finish by 5th December.

Do check out their Vision page and some Slides from their first presentation.

This … might not be useful to all of you out there, but those new to PyGTK (Python binding for GTK) might find it so.

Ok, so you generally create a stock icon’ed Button like this (For OK, as an example):

Button=gtk.Button(stock="gtk-ok")

Now as you might have noticed, directly setting the label for a stock icon button doesn’t change it. So here’s an easy way to do that:

Label=Button.get_children()[0]
Label=Label.get_children()[0].get_children()[1]
Label=Label.set_label(”Custom Label”)

Thus the “Ok” string changes to “Custom Label” just like this:

I wish it could auto-set the label when called with the normal routine like below:

Button=gtk.Button(”Some Label”,stock=”gtk-some-stock-button”)

Credits to PyGTK Mailing List Archives.

Am now trying to make my GNOME as functional as possible rather than making it decorative. So far I’ve disabled Compiz-Fusion, keep the default optimized theme on, reduced the menus into showing only what I need and now I’m attempting to stop GNOME’s minimize and maximize effects.

I noticed that minimizing windows in GNOME (No Compiz-Fusion enabled) had this silly style of showing a black border closing down.

Something like this, when captured in action:

Its not much I know but being Linux, it had to be flexible enough to get that minor distraction removed too. And since it was a minimize-effect, it had to relate to Metacity, the default Window Border manager in GNOME.

After a little searching in the Configuration Editor (gconf-editor), I found the key which not only disabled this tiny effect but also produced a whole new effect called ‘Wireframes’. I can’t capture them as a screen-shot for unknown reasons but this new thing also shows the scale of the Window, just like Compiz-Fusion’s scale plug-in, only without it!

Try it by following the below:

1: Press ALT+F2 and type “gconf-editor” without quotes.
2: In the dialog box that appears, expand the apps tree and under it, the metacity tree and under the it, open the general folder. (i.e. Navigate to Apps / Metacity / General).
3: Select the key called - “Reduced Resources”.
4: You’re done! Try Min/Max a window and then try Moving it around to see Wireframes in action.

Ahh, long time since an over-hyped post!