tigert.com | my life and stuff um, what do I write here?

Yum.

6 people. 1 gallon of clam chowder. Yum.

Boston again..

So, there's a bit of snow this morning. What's the big deal guys?

Me, Jakub and Ken seem to be the only people walking outside this morning, apart from the people pushing a snowblower in front of them..

Jakub will probably post photos once we dry out and the cryocenic effect wears off a bit.

Trow: Sorry I didnt catch up with you last night - my plane was delayed 2 hours due to hydraulic problem, and then the snow made the boston traffic crawl, so it was like 9:30 pm when I got to the hotel.. Some other time..

Speaking of the desktop notes applet..

The desktop notes is great, I tend to use it a lot to keep notes of small ideas and things to remember - I also like Tomboy, but this is nice for quickie things. Tomboy is nice for mind maps and the like. It's great that the notes are hidden from the window list.

But, wouldn't be great if one could "shade" the notes (roll-up to a titlebar only) so that the first line of the note would form the title. The problem with the current notes is best described with this image:

Wouldnt it be much nicer if you could do this?

And could still see the first lines, so you would know which one is your "TODO" and which one has the meeting notes from yesterdays meeting.. And it would be nice for private stuff too, that you could "fold" them shut on the desktop.. For the same reason I dont think always on top is a good idea by default.. I think of those as desktop items rather. There's the "show desktop" functionality (that could use some love too, to implement the good ideas people had) and well, the window manager provides the "on top" functionality if you *want* to have notes on top. I dont think it is a good idea to make it the default.

Of course, I havent checked out the latest CVS, so maybe it's all changed already

Re: Bounties

Nat, when you mention the idea to "spec something up and put a bounty on someone implementing it" - I think it is a good idea, almost essential. A good spec will be a great help for the person implementing the feature, and also, because we as humans can have very different ideas about how something should be done, it can be a good way to make sure everyone understands the request clearly. Especially if someone wants to learn programming skills by claiming a bounty for motivation - the spec will be a good guide if it is good and well thought out.

Then again, another interesting idea: Could there be bounties for concepts? I am talking about bounties to write the functional spec itself? One of the very important things we need in Gnome are good ideas and good designs for things. Its not that we dont have smart people - we do. But we cannot have too much.

Why didnt anyone tell me this earlier??

Try this if you feel like poking your X config by hand and if you use a laptop with a touchpad.

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
EndSection


So, what does it do then?

• It adds scroll-areas to right and bottom edges of your touchpad, so you can scroll as if you had a wheelmouse, by moving your finger on the edge of the pad.
• It also seems to inhibit movement if you touch the pad accidentally with the edge of your hand while typing.

Nice. Something that should just be more widely used as default. (more info here)