That said, when compressing your next file, you might want to consider trying lzma -2, it compresses slightly better than bzip2 –best, while still being approximately as fast as gzip –best… Seems like a nice trade off…

The original Arduino IDE is written in Java however, and that makes for poor integration on the Linux platform, particularly with Ubuntu Unity. Luckily enough someone has been busy to do a simple rewrite of the original IDE in Python and GTK, making a fully Linux native IDE, and it’s called Gnoduino, and I even have a PPA for it.

I did a screencast on the general topic of Arduino and the differences between the original IDE and the Gnoduino IDE:

You can also download the video for offline viewing if you prefer.

SSSU for HP StorageWorks Command View EVA
9.2.0
Version: %s
Build: %s
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Error closing https connection
Total regression differences = %u
Press return to exit
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This is obviously a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (why?).

Currently by default the icons in the Launcher are all “backlit” with a background color, you can turn that off, to only have running programs backlit (to make that fact extra obvious). You can make this the system-wide default like so:

$ sudo  gconftool-2 --direct \

  --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \

  --type int --set /apps/compiz-1/plugins/unityshell/screen0/options/backlight_mode 1

Next, the Launcher auto-hides whenever you move a window into it (for example maximize a window). I don’t really like that, since I have too much horizontal screen estate anyhow, so I’d like to Launcher to permanently claim it’s space (again as a system-wide default):

$ sudo  gconftool-2 --direct \

  --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \

  --type int --set /apps/compiz-1/plugins/unityshell/screen0/options/launcher_hide_mode 0

Some other tips, you might find handy:

If you want to move Launcher buttons around on the Launcher you need to drag button off before you can move it. This makes moving buttons around a very conscious action, preventing the mouse-challenged people from accidentally moving them around.

Also you might have noticed that left clicking a Launcher button will only start an application once. So for apps you might want to start multiple times like a Terminal you’d need to search for the app to start it a second time, which would be rather time consuming. Luckily the Unity designer thought about this, so left click will start an application once (prevent people from accidentally starting most apps twice). But if you do want to start an app twice or thrice you can just middle click the Launcher button.

And last but not least, this wallpaper may be of use to you.

However, there are two caveats, since new users still get the default fuzzy rendering. Also some apps like to ignore your own font rendering settings to a degree, at times Firefox and OpenOffice.org have been guilty of this (IIRC). They actually seem to use use your system fontconfig settings.

So to change the system wide default font rendering settings for GNOME:

$ gconftool-2 --direct \
    --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults \
    --type string --set /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/hinting full

You can change the system fontconfig settings like so:

$ sudo -s

# cd /etc/fonts/conf.d

# rm 10-hinting-slight.conf

# ln -s ../conf.avail/10-hinting-full.conf

# exit

What do you think? Is the hacker logo overlay too distracting?

First download the source package here and unpack it:

# mkdir gnome-colors

# cd gnome-colors

# tar zxvf ../gnome-colors-src-5.5.1.tar.gz

You’ll note that there is a themes directory, with a file per theme, for example the gnome-noble theme:

Name=GNOME-Noble

Distribution=gnome-colors

LightFolderBase=#bd97b9

LightBase=#ad7fa8

MediumBase=#75507b

DarkStroke=#5c3566

Now we want to define our own theme, and I’ll be taking Solaris 8‘s magenta (#b24d7a) window border color as a base. This basically means we’ll use #b24d7a as MediumBase, but then we’re left with the question how to derive the other colors. The colors are defined as hexadecimal RGB values. And RGB is a crappy way to calculate relations between colors. So we want to convert these values to HSV and calculate delta’s between MediumBase and the other values.

RGB #bd97b9 is 306, 20, 74 in HSV with delta 14, -15, 26

RGB #ad7fa8 is 307, 27, 68 in HSV with delta 15, -8, 20

RGB #75507b is 292, 35, 48 in HSV

RGB #5c3566 is 288, 48, 40 in HSV with delta -4, 13, -8

Now our new Magenta MediumBase is RGB #b24d7a is 333, 57, 70 in HSV, if we apply the delta’s in HSV and convert back to RGB We’d get the following theme file:

Name=GNOME-Solaris

Distribution=gnome-colors

LightFolderBase=#f58ea4

LightBase=#e6758c

MediumBase=#b24d7a

DarkStroke=#9e2f69

Save it as gnome-solaris in the themes folder. Then run make dist in the gnome-colors folder. Then go have a cup of coffee, it’ll take a while.

• Open the image you want to tint in GIMP
• Now add a new layer on top of the image
• Select the color you want to tint the image with (R43, G0, B30 for Lucid Purple)
• Bucket fill the new top layer with the selected color
• Set the layer mode of the top layer to Hue

Voila!

The most problematic part of this all, is the notion, it’s all okay, “because it’s easy to change back”. This is the biggest bullshit argument in history. First how easy it is to do anything is very relative… There are lots of computer users which are simply not capable of changing this default, or any default at all anywhere… I suppose this is the audience where they intended to receive this revenue from… Since lots of default-changing-capable folks will most likely be changing back to Google anyway.

And of course there is a bigger point to be made here. I don’t want any external party to have any influence on how my operating system is defaulted. I mean… Will the release after Lucid have the Picasa/SmugMug uploaders disabled in F-Spot, only leaving the Flickr uploader available, because Yahoo paid for it. The other uploaders would obviously be “easy” to add back, because then it would be all okay… And an advertisement here-or-there never hurt anybody too…

While I do get it’s not particularly easy to build a stable company on open source software, and we shouldn’t expect Mark to endlessly pour money into Canonical, but we could ask ourselves, how viable Ubuntu would be in the long term if these kinds of decisions need to be made.

I’d much rather have them cut back on shipments of free CDs amongst other things…