the (un)real thoughts of realbt

Meet Dashboard. Very cool. This thing has some serious potential to be useful (now if only it played better with KDE…). There are some cool screenshots over here.

I have a thermal printer sitting atop my desk at work. Actually, it’s sitting atop my tower that is lying on it’s side (but that’s another story). I have an Epson thermal partial-cut receipt printer. It’s pretty cool, this little thing. But what I really want to know is: how the hell do thermal printers work, and why is it that after a while, the thermal print on the (thermal) paper fades away? I used to have a thermal fax machine, and the print would just sort of randomly fade away if left long enough. It’s odd.

Yesterday, Mandrake and HP announced an alliance to ship low-cost PCs pre-installed with Mandrake Linux 9.1. This is great news. Mandrake is a fabulous distribution — it really is (and it happens to be what I run at home).

Seeing more and more Linux distributions marketted toward the average end-user, at a realtively low-price too, makes me quite happy. I’m glad to see new competition for Microsoft. But, I have to wonder — of these distributions (Lindows, Lycoris, Mandrake and RedHat probably being the most popular pre-installed) which ones really are the easiest for the non-techy end-user to get along with?

My bet would be Lindows. They offer a service called Click-N-Run which enables Lindows users to easily download and install new software. It’s probably similar to the rpm-system that Mandrake and RedHat (and SuSE and …) use, but a little more stream-lined. After I install new software via an rpm-file on Mandrake, I have to manually figure out where the application was installed (ie., what path), and what the application executable file is called. Usually it’s pretty easy to guess from the package name. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, no changes are ever made to the menu system (be it KDE’s or Gnome’s). Not such a big deal for me, but for new users really annoying. Putting all of this in writing makes me wonder whether I’m out of my mind — because, really — why on earth wouldn’t you add it to the menu?

Back to Lindows. The problem is that there is an annual subscription fee to use Click-n-Run. While it’s still cheaper than Windows, especially since most software for Linux is free, I wonder whether end-users will appreciate that the same way more open-source-friendly people would.

Earlier this year Mandrake was in some financial trouble and filed for bankruptcy protection. Hopefully this deal will help them recover. I don’t want to lose my Mandrake distribution!

Wow, you should see my super amazing, unbelievable, “Brett you are so cool”, “you work too hard”, “what did you do on Canada Day?”, my back hurts, my eyes are sore, I’m-even-impressed-with-myself progress on picGo. Of course, you can’t actually *see* it yet since it’s still under (and on) the development server (ie., my home computer), though I will hopefully soon be moving it to verification (ie., a secondary account on the web server in which the production picgo.com exists).

Tonight I tweaked the database structure a little to make room for some improvements I’ve decided to include in this version rather than wait until later — improvements which include threaded comments and notifications (more on this feature later). I’m also breaking down some handy functions into a utility class rather than having everything stand-alone. I rather like this idea. I also tested the migration script I wrote (a bunch of insert … select sql statements) to see if everything will work as it should without the album owner’s having to tweak their galleries — and everything looks great.

On Canada Day I re-designed the management interface and gave it a whole new look (now red, rather than green). I started the import wizard (which I also worked on tonight) and nailed down the actual process. I find that thinking through the algorithm before writing it is so much better than just sitting down and coding and changing your mind 5 times during the process. Yes, I’m being fascetious — obviously it’s better to do this, and it’s not something I “find” — it’s something I just “know”. The problem is that despite “knowing” this, I often “find” myself doing just the opposite and writing heaps of code only to realise it’s not very useful …

I’m also planning on implementing, at some time or another, something to allow you to do some live modifications to photos: re-generate thumbnails, replace photos (say you needed to touch something up …), rotate, etc. I seriously think this will come later, though.

The new picGo (that I’m calling version 0.5; the one in production is 0.2) has a total of 8 database tables, whereas the old one only had 5.

Once I finish the management interface, I’m going to move back over to working on the end-user gallery (which is looking quite pretty, if I say so myself) and continue working on a new “skin” (ie., stylesheet).

I hope to have 0.5 in production before the end of July when I go on holiday. That would be nice. Even if there are a few bugs to iron out, it’ll still be more stable than the current version.