Monday, May 19, 2008

Busy busy busy

If you've been desperately waiting for my weekly UIA status update, I'm sad to report that I'll no longer be posting those. You can track the team's progress via the development schedule page on the wiki. Never fear, if I have something interesting to share, I will make sure to post for you!

I've started helping out with Tasque maintenance, so I triaged a bunch of bugs and applied some patches. I think we'll be ready for a new release soon. I like working on Tasque; it's a fun project.

I installed openSUSE 11 Beta 3 in a VM last week. It's looking pretty good! The new intlclock applet is very cute with its weather integration. In openSUSE 10.3, I struggled a lot with package management...YaST's GTK+ interface was easy to use but crashed a lot, zypper had a very nice CLI but was ridiculously slow, and I ended up using the ncurses YaST UI, and leaving it up all day so that I could avoid the slow repository updates. In openSUSE 11, things are worlds better:
  • Zypper is wicked fast, and is now my favorite way to manage packages. All it lacks is tab-completion of package names, but running `zypper se somepackage` is so fast that I don't mind too much. ;-)
  • YaST's GTK+ interface has been updated to GTK2 (so it fits in with the rest of my desktop), no longer pops up a kabillion windows when you install packages (so I can, you know, use my computer while I install stuff), and seems really stable. I found some usability problems, but Sunday I wrote a patch and this morning Michael Meeks committed a modified version of it. YaST's GTK+ code was really easy to follow, by the way, considering I'd never looked at it before. Kudos to the YaST team!
I hope Firefox is better on openSUSE 11. Maybe it's just my crufty 10.3 install, but I've always had freezing/crashing issues with FF2 and FF3. It seems to be running fine in my openSUSE 11 VM, so I'll keep my fingers crossed. Looking forward to doing a clean install of openSUSE 11 on my main machine soon.

Oh and by the way, I'd like to toss out a quick immature Fuck You to Blogger for never auto-saving my posts, constantly crashing Firefox this morning, and having some weird display problem where the "Compose New Post" page has teeny tiny fonts. I guess I shouldn't care too much about the display of the page, since I apparently can't use it to write posts anymore. Normally FF3 restores the contents of text boxes after a crash, but for whatever reason this is not supported by Blogger. Hooray for using Tomboy as a text editor. :-/

Next, spiders...

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