Stuart Herbert

We\’ve been able to rate MP3\’s in various players for years, but one of the really useful features of Apple\’s iPod is the way it can automatically build up playlists based on the ratings you set. So which CDs on your iPod contain the most songs that you rate?

One such CD on my iPod is Mundy-Turner\’s excellent Crooked House. Kristi and I first saw them a few years back at the annual Cropredy music festival. IIRC, they had one of the opening slots (I think it was on the Saturday) - not the easiest time to be on stage - and they really got the crowd going. They\’re comparing this year\’s festival - it\’s a shame they\’re not playing this year.

Crooked House is full of excellent folk music - it\’s worth buying just for The Transportation of Sarah, but the song that strikes a chord most with me is Markham Main, about the UK Miners Strike of 1984-1985 and those caught up in the middle. Markham Main Collery is in Armthorpe, South Yorkshire, and it\’s where my late grandfather worked at the time of the strike. I\’d have been 11 years old at the time, and the only memories that I have are of watching TV reports of violent confrontations on the picket lines.

Some twenty years on from the strike, there are many communities across the North of England - and in Wales - that have never recovered from the loss of the UK coal industry. Some of these communities had been built because the mines were there … and without the mines to provide jobs, their whole reason to continue to exist has gone. Economic regeneration has been successful in some cases. South Emsall has become a hub for redistribution centres because of its close proximity to the A1, but nearby Grimethorpe remains one of the most depressing legacies of the decline of the mining industry.

I\’ve started keeping a closer eye on the daily Freshmeat announcements, looking for web-based packages that I think would make for interesting additions to the packages available through Gentoo. I doubt I\’ll have time to add even a tenth of these myself, but hopefully by mentioning them here, someone somewhere will make up an ebuild for one or two of them.

To get the ball rolling, we have:

• Estraier, a personal full-text search system
• mod_transform, an XSLT processor for Apache 2 (their mod_svn_view module might also be worth a look)
• XWeb HTTP server, a single web server that supports CGI scripts
• xinabase, a spider-based search engine for small to medium sites
• LogBot, an IRC bot that creates XHTML logs
• Xtreme Board, a bulletin board (forums) system.
• refbase, a multi-user interface for managing scientific literature & citations
• Php AMX, a web-based interface to Half-Life servers that uses MySQL and AMX plugins

and, from yesterday\’s Freshmeat announcements:

• QuikWiki, a Perl CGI Wiki engine
• MyServer, a web server (watch out for the annoying CPU-hog-of-a-scroller on their homepage tho)
• Monkey HTTP Daemon, a web server
• mod_musicindex, an Apache module displaying your MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files
• ATutor, a Learning Content Management System
• php-Timesheet, a web-based time management program
• PmWiki, a wiki engine

… and with all honesty, I can\’t decide whether it\’s really worse than KDE, or just as bad.

The file selector has come in for a lot of stick in various reviews, so let\’s get that out of the way first. Personally, I think it\’s okay. It lacks any obvious ability to preview a graphic image (this is 2004 isn\’t it, and not last century?), and I do hate the way that it always defaults to my home directory (rather than the directory I last opened a file from in the app), but other than than it doesn\’t seem too bad.

Like KDE, Gnome could do a lot better with supporting Xinerama desktops. If you want to use a background image, there\’s no ability to centre or scale the image on each of the two desktops. This seems silly. Gnome damn well knows about the desktop being built from two physical screens, because of the way that it maximises windows and lays out the panels. The way that both Gnome and KDE fail to handle this well falls somewhere between carelessness and thoughtlessness.

There are sometimes significant delays between typing into a window, and the output appearing. This is not a busy machine, so CPU is not a scarce resource.

I was surprised to find that the window manager (metacity I presume) doesn\’t do basic snap-to-window type stuff. It\’s something that has been around for years. It seems reasonable to expect a high-profile project like Gnome to use a window manager that can do today\’s basics.

The Gnome menu looks very empty if you\’re used to the KDE menu. I was surprised to find that we still install Gnome and KDE with independent menus. I\’d have thought someone would have actually done something about that by now.

So what about Nautilus, and it\’s infamous \’spacial mode\’? Well, it\’s just like using RiscOS from 15 years ago - except that the RiscOS desktop could do more. Nautilus may be great at previewing the contents of files, but it can\’t do basic things like create symlinks from any of the menus. It\’d be better if there was a way to make Nautilus reuse the same window, instead of opening a new window every time. UNIX systems tend to have deep file trees, and having to close Nautilus windows all the time soon gets annoying. Nautilus is still crash-prone too. By the time something reaches version 2.6, you expect it to be at least a little dependable.

Maybe I\’m doing something wrong, but Gnome\’s font-chooser seems to be ignoring all the nice fonts I\’ve been installing after starting my Gnome session. Mozilla will happily pick them up, but Gnome won\’t. Another small disappointment. You can change the default front for gnome-terminal, start up a new terminal, and watch it use the old default font (even though the profile says to use the system-defined font). The font-chooser doesn\’t filter out non-monospace fonts when you go to select a new monospace font.

So, if first impressions last, what impression has this evening\’s quick play with Gnome 2.6 made with me?

On the plus side, Gnome has always looked better than KDE (which is monkey-butt ugly - there\’s just something about it that no theme can fix), and is definitely much faster (even prelinking can\’t hide the fact that KDE ate all the pies). But those points are quickly out-weighed by the items I\’ve listed above. If Gnome is an example of the sort of engineering that RedHat and Ximian (the two places where most of the Gnome people seem to work) aim to achieve, then Microsoft has nothing to fear until core attitudes and behaviours change.

I\’m starting to see the whole Gnome / KDE inter-project conflicts as more than just a toolset clash. It\’s really starting to look like a battle of style (Gnome) vs substance (KDE). Maybe I\’m old-fashioned, but I\’d rather look good by doing a good job than just look good for the sake of looking good.

Maybe Gnome-2.6.1 will be better.

shfs 0.34 came out yesterday. I version-bumped net-fs/shfs to match.

Quite a few changes in this release. Here\’s the new features:

• post-install (and pre-remove) script hook
• new CONFIG_DEFAULT_UID and CONFIG_DEFAULT_GID config file variables
• hook in pkg_prerm(), so that emerge -C removes all virtual copies
• webapp-config will not die() after verifying all params
• webapp.eclass reminds people to manually use webapp-config when USE=vhosts
• if USE=-vhosts, emerge will upgrade packages seamlessly, and remove old versions of the package
• HTML versions of the man pages are now included
• per web-server configuration files can now be installed (required by trac)

and here are the bug fixes:

• webapp-config –list-installs now works when wildcards not used
• webapp.eclass will refuse to emerge a package if there\’s something in the destination directory that webapp-config cannot upgrade
• webapp.eclass will no longer remove the master copy when re-installing
• $MY_HTDOCSDIR can now be server-owned or config-owned

In particular, I\’m hoping that (with this release), it\’ll be possible to make new releases of webapp-config available for testing before marking them as stable. At least until the XML metadata change is ready to deploy

… is that it\’s actually quite frightening just how much PHP programmers sometimes need protecting from themselves.

I\’m pretty sure work will be interested in this right now, so it may be turning up in Gentoo during the week. I\’ve patched my local copy of mod_php, and so far my site seems to be running without any problems

It\’s currently marked ~x86. The ebuild installs for me, but I\’m not able to test it right now (combination of a KDE upgrade and hardware problems). I know that there are NX users out there who are upgrading to 1.3.2 at the moment, so I\’m confident that they will let me know if there are any problems.

The ebuild for phpBB has been updated to work with webapp-config

I think I\’ve managed only one lesson with my students since returning from speaking at the php|cruise at the start of March. Me bad

I\’ve added one new feature to webapp-config-1.9dev today.

• emerge -C will try to remove all virtual copies of the package before removing the master copy

I\’ve also updated webapp-config so that it won\’t abort part-way through an installation any more. This is by popular request. Unfortunately, this does mean that webapp-config will now happily delete and overwrite any files it comes across that are in the way of the install. webapp-config v2 will feature a true preview, so that webapp-config won\’t start writing files at all until it\’s confident of 100% success.

I\’ve also fixed webapp-config –list-installs so that it works when you don\’t use wildcards. Doh!

That still leaves three major features to add before webapp-config 1.9 is released. Drop-in support for webserver conf files is next. I\’m leaving the pkg_webapp_install() hook until last.

Best regards,
Stu