I love ebay.
I used to own this as a kid but it disappeared at some point. We recently found this on ebay and had to buy it for the office.
You’re an instruction pointer. Your board is a flowchart of sorts. First person to have the highest value in their register and reach the end wins.
Hell yes.
I’ve been trying for a couple of days to figure out why a shaped window in Compiz doesn’t have a shadow. After looking through the Emerald and GTK+ decorators’ code, it seems that they only apply a shadow if the window has a titlebar decoration. This seems quite silly and limiting. Does anybody know of a way around this, or why we’re limited in such a way? Is this something that could be fixed?
Love,
Christian
It’s been about 5 months since I last gave a Review Board status update. Way too long, given how much has changed. So once again, let’s start off with a few stats.
Review Board has matured in recent months and has a very nice feature set. More and more we’re seeing and hearing about companies using it in one or more teams. I was even lucky enough to talk about it in the official Django Book
.
Development shows no sign of stalling. Our feature request list is a mile long, and our personal TODO lists are longer still. We’ve implemented so many new features and fixed so many bugs that I can’t even list them all, but let’s take a look at the highlights.
New Top-Level Features
Revision Control Systems Integration
Diff Viewer
Reviews
Dashboard and Review Request Lists
post-review
Distribution/Installation
What’s Next?
We have several things in the works. A couple of the major highlights would be a search interface and support for 3rd party extensions to Review Board. Stay tuned!
A Brief History of Boxes
In the days of old, working on your computer meant working inside a limited contained box. You could run programs but only one at a time, because running two at the same time would require two computers. This was the status quo for years. It’s just how computers worked.
Then a new technology changed everything. Multitasking. Now you could buy one computer and your operating system would allow you to run multiple programs at once. No longer were you tied to one box at a time. You could have one for your word processor, one for your spreadsheet, and one for solitaire. It was a spectacular invention, one that we quickly took for granted. Relatively few computer users today even know what it’s like to use a computer without this ability.
As time went on, new operating systems began to develop substantial user bases. The competition between them grew, and most applications were tied to a particular operating system. You were limited to one operating system at a time, and if you wanted to run two at once you would need two computers.
Then came modern virtualization, which shattered this barrier. Now you could have one or more giant boxes on your computer containing a full operating system, each with different applications running. These boxes could sit side by side. Some people are already taking it for granted. Soon grade school children will be using virtualization without even knowing that there was a world before it.
But up until now, working in a virtualized environment meant working in a big box on your screen. Sure you could have several going at once, but you realistically could only interact with one at a time. These boxes represented screens, and you can only fit so many screens on a single screen at once before you start feeling really cramped.
Shattering the box
Earlier this year, we released VMware Fusion 1.0 for the Macintosh. This was our first virtualization product for the Mac and it has been met with high praise. And jealousy. VMware Fusion managed to change how users thought about virtualization. Thanks to Unity, you were no longer forced into having a big box on your screen. With the click of a button, the applications inside your virtual machine would appear outside of the box, sitting alongside your other applications. The Mac users loved this and Windows and Linux users were left feeling like they missed out.
I can’t recall how many times I’ve been asked if Workstation is going to include Unity in Workstation.
The answer is yes. Well, eventually.
I’m working on adding Unity support to the Linux codebase, which may in time be part of Workstation or Player. This will allow your Windows and Linux programs to intermingle with the click of a button. As of right now, here are the current state of things:
Unity Today
Unity today works in Linux on my system. It’s known to work in Metacity but hasn’t been thoroughly tested in other window managers yet. The basic things you’d expect all work for the most part. The rest will come later.
What I have working today
So far, the very basic window management works today, for the most part. It’s usable just enough to go “Oh neat” and to play a game of solitaire.
Many things do not work today, though.
These issues are being addressed. In many cases where windows become “stuck,” simply leaving Unity and then going back into it should fix the problem.
Going forward…
There’s a lot we have in the works for Unity, and while I cannot yet talk about it all, the end result should be just awesome. I’m hoping to have a video demoing it at some point.
P.S. For those who notice the borders and VMware logo badges on the Windows windows in the screenshot and find them annoying, you will be able to disable them. The idea is to allow you to easily determine the guest windows from the host windows when the OS and theme are the same.
I may soon be adding my plasma TV to the list of broken things, I fear. I came back from vacation last night after a week and now twice while watching TV, the screen has turned all rainbowy for about 2 seconds. This has never happened before and I’m hoping I don’t see it again. But I know better.
Anybody else experience this, specifically with Panasonic plasma TVs?
So.. My Wii stopped reading discs. Just as I came home with Mario Galaxy. It makes some pretty sad clicking noises and then informs me that I should join in on its sadness.
I can’t say I’m at all surprised. I’m pretty good to my electronics. They just don’t return the favor. Let’s take a journey through the past.
There’s more. I just can’t remember off-hand. Either the quality of everything sucks these days or anything electronic just commits suicide in my presence. I’m not sure which.
(Apologies if this seems a bit ranty, but it is a rant, so…)
About a month ago, I decided to buy a new computer to use as a home theater PC and backup file server. I opted for a Shuttle, and with it came Windows Vista Ultimate. I had already used Vista a little bit at this point, but not on a day-to-day basis, so I decided I would give it a chance.
It’s a month later and I’m ready to wipe the partition. Vista is Microsoft’s latest greatest failure. Not since Windows ME have I seen an operating system cause so many problems.
Crashing Applications
Let’s start from the base case: Running your applications. Sure a lot of third party programs are marked as being incompatible, but would you expect your device manager or notepad.exe to run without problems? You might be wrong. It turns out a lot of people, myself included, experience crashes in several pre-installed and third party applications. Sometimes it’s while you’re using it, but often just quitting the program causes Vista to think it has crashed.
This makes for an unusable operating system. I have no idea if the program I’m about to run will survive more than a few minutes. The computer is essentially useless, and there’s nothing I can do about it, aside from installing another OS. Now, maybe Service Pack 1 will fix this problem, but it never should have been a problem in the first place. Extensive testing should have caught this. At the very least, my manufacturer should have seen this and never shipped Vista with this problem.
Vista UAC
The Vista UAC, or User Account Control, is Microsoft’s answer to the security problems that plagued previous versions of Windows. It’s brilliant in that it creates an excellent illusion of security, aggressively prompting the user for any action involving the system.
The main problem with UAC, though, is that the user is being bombarded with dialogs. Now, think about what happens when you encounter a dialog. Often times, you don’t read it, you assume what it’s saying, especially if you’ve encountered it before. I know of several non-techy people who blindly click dialogs, and that’s where UAC falls apart. There could be a virus on the system and the user, having had to click through these dialogs time and time again, may not realize that this virus-activated UAC dialog was not caused by their own actions and click through it.
Some people have no idea what goes on in a computer and assume that if the system needs to do something, there must be a good reason for it. Since the UAC dialogs are a bit cryptic at times, I can see users thinking, “My computer wants to do this, it must have a good reason for it!” and proceeding to allow the operation.
The UAC dialogs are also pretty verbose. If you perform a file operation in a system directory, you’ll get 3 confirmation dialogs. The first to confirm you want to do this in a system area, a second to ask if you want to go to the admin confirmation screen (why, I have no idea), and a third to confirm that the whole operation is allowed.
Now, think about when you create a directory. You’re performing two file operations. First, the initial creation of the directory and second, renaming the directory based on the name you gave it. This common operation will punish you with six dialogs!
</rant>
There’s more I could say but I won’t. I’m really looking forward to Vista SP1 with the hope that it will fix a lot of these problems, because as of right now, this is a really unstable, frustrating OS. I think it has potential if they can get these problems sorted out, though.
Oh, UI stuff…
I’ve been living with a very basic Sanyo phone for many years now, and decided to finally upgrade. My main requirement was a real web browser, and the iPhone fulfilled that nicely. Besides, I wanted to be cool and get all the girls, and what better way to do that than to carry around an iPhone?
I’ll talk in another post about what I think of the device, but one thing struck me as I begun to play with this phone. Apple may have just set themselves in a position to dominate the mobile application market. If they choose to.
Now hear me out. Companies such as Sharp and Nokia have worked hard on creating devices (the Zaurus and 770/N800 respectively) based on open source software in the hopes of creating a developer base. While this worked in both cases to varying degrees (lots of third party apps for the Zaurus and lots of great GNOME/Gtk+ improvements and apps for the Nokia devices), they’ve both had problems in terms of market share. You’re just not going to get every teenager, every student and every businessman wanting one of them.
I love my Zauruses, my Nokia 770 and my N800, but having tried to explain to people in the past what makes them so cool is difficult. They kind of get it with the N800, that they can browse the web and run applications and all that. Most people, though, are still so tethered to the computer that they don’t know why they’d care.
But an iPod? iPhone? People care about that. It’s trendy, it’s sexy, it plays their music and videos. Yes, the N800 does that too, but the out of the box experience is very different, and well, the kids just want an iPod. My little 7 year old sister has no idea what an “mp3 player is” but knows damn well what an iPod is.
Web development
Now, where Apple did well was to bundle both the iPhone and iPod with Safari and to put up guidelines for how best to optimize your websites for the iPhone/iPod form factor and visual style. Since then, many sites have provided optimized versions that work quite well, including Amazon, Meebo, NetVibes, Facebook, and Google Reader. And this all turns out to be quite easy to do, especially with Joe Hewitt’s iUI JavaScript framework for the iPhone.
So, we now have a de facto standard for miniaturized AJAXy web UIs for mobile devices, do we not? I don’t see anybody else developing for other mobile devices en mass in such a way that allows all this fancy web 2.0 stuff. What’s great is that aside from the CSS 3.0 support needed for some of the look and feel of these sites, and the viewport meta tag, they’ll work in any browser, mobile or otherwise.
Native applications
The one thing that these other devices do have over the iPhone/iPod is that you can actually develop applications for them. When the iPhone was announced, we were told that they would not be opening up support for third party applications. Of course, it didn’t take long for people to figure out how to jailbreak the device and install custom applications.
Now anybody with an iPhone can easily put their iPhone in a state where they can install custom applications on it. The installer that ships with the modern jailbreaking software is, from a user’s point of view, surprisingly nice and easy to use. It even handles upgrades for you effortlessly.
The pieces are now together for developers to create applications and for users to quickly find them and install them. The only gotcha is that this is not officially sanctioned by Apple, and we may find that this will break in future firmware updates.
If Apple was to reverse their stance and provide an open framework for developing applications for the iPhone and iPod, they would make these devices much more tempting to a wide variety of people. The gaps left by Apple (proper Exchange support, calendar synchronization, document publishing, instant messaging, etc.) would be provided by third party developers and downloaded by possible millions, legally. New companies would form to develop applications. Existing companies would port applications over. Life would be good.
Why didn’t Apple do this from the beginning? Maybe they’re just against a community of developers forming around this product, but I have a hard time believing that. Maybe it’s pressure from AT&T, but you can develop for other phones.
My hunch is that they just didn’t have enough time to do it right, given how much work it was just to get the thing out the door in the first place. If so, perhaps we’ll see official approval for third party application development someday.
It’s been just over a month since the last Review Board status update. I thought this time I’d start off with a few stats.
If you’re part of an open source project or company using Review Board, we’d love to hear from you and your experience. We’d like to make a list of who’s using Review Board, so if you’re able to list your project/company, please let us know!
Now on to the feature updates.
In the works is a much improved diff parser that won’t require lsdiff on the server hosting Review Board. This should make things a little easier for people installing on Windows, and it also cleans up the code quite nicely. This should be in sometime this week.