Posts Tagged ‘gnome’

Two Major Annoyances in Ubuntu Hardy

Sonntag, August 17th, 2008

This is just a random rant. Feel free to ignore, rant back or help.

Flash sucks

First there were the problems with (the rather new) pulseaudio. You could not play flash sound and have a media player running at the same time. I installed flashplugin-nonfreebeta to get Flash 10 Beta, which seemed slightly better and works in Firefox (ok, last.fm eating 100% CPU), Epiphany and Opera, so I stick to it. Then, yesterday, after an update to this package, Flash stopped working in all browsers. Found no solution, switched back to Flash 9. Works in Firefox and Epiphany but NOT Opera. Argh. Haven’t tested audio stuff yet. All this switching and testing versions involves many browser restarts, X restarts, media player restarts and, in the worst case, media player library re-imports. Sucks.

Random Window Sizes for Firefox and Eye Of Gnome

Sometimes Firefox opens maximized (that’s good), sometimes “almost maximized” (that’s ok) and sometimes “almost maximzed but stretched to a different virtual desktop than it appears to be on” with the effect that Alt-Tab’ing to it doesn’t work properly (that’s unbearable!). Even worse with EOG (Gnome’s default image viewer): while Firefox only extends by some pixels into another desktop, EOG’s upper 20% of the window including the title bar are on the other desktop, which means no quick drag’n'drop or click to maximize to fix this annoyance, instead I have to maximize its window by the context menu in the taskbar. Sucks.

Quote: On Change and Decadence

Montag, Juli 14th, 2008

I don’t want to live in a world of arbitrary change for the sake of change any more than I want to live in a world of arbitrary change for the sake of Microsoft’s shareholders. Change for the better is good. Change away from the worse is good. But change in itself is a nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable thing, makes you late for dinner.

I want to live in a world where each program asymptotically approaches perfection and fits its ecological niche. I want to live in a world where programs have irrational version numbers and get a digit closer to them each release, where bug lists truly do shrink to nothing.

I want to live in a world of decadence.

Thomas Thurman on “gnome in the age of decadence”