Category Archives: computer

Gnome 3 first impression

I’m finally able to write a first impression post about Gnome 3. As user I’m quite satisfied, I don’t look back the old interface, after around a month. I must admit, so far, I didn’t do fancy or heavy stuffs, but just some home usage, like reading email, websurfing, some light coding.

The new interface appear quite fancy and honestly smell like Mac OSX; sometimes I have the impression that I cannot use shortcuts for everything. After long usage, I also experiences huge memory leak, inthe scale of Gb, but I’m sure is a known bug and is due the jungest age of the whole product.

I like the new approach below the whole GUI, in particular:

  • the alt+tab is switching between all the application on any workspace, avoid you to find the application along the workspaces
  • the policy to remove empty workspaces, it helps to clean up the desktop and to have an additional workspace only when is really needed
  • the possibility to dimension an application to use only half of the screen (but in this case I don’t know how to use the shortcut, but the mouse)
  • the silent and integrated way the  notifications are shown for conversation and applications

I still haven’t understood

  • why the title bar of the applications that so huge! It use a relevant part of the screen
  • why the VOIP and instant messaging account are not connected automatically but I need to use empathy with the conseguence to have two application that do the same function and the chat windows are even not syncronized! – Probably a bug

Gnome 3 is a fundamental step for GNOME to follow the desktop and the usability evolution; the way people interact with interfaces is changing day by day, moreover now, towards new mobile and new pad devices.

I like it!

About these ads

I don’t

I don’t give a shit if Microsoft bought Skype. Their business.

I don’t give a shit if everybody want to use alternative software. I’ve been trying it long time ago, without success.

Update 13/05/2011@11:35: thinking that GTalk is a better solution than Skype, is simply bullshit :)

I want Fedora 15. NOW!

Today I woke up and I decided that was enough for Fedora 14. I upgrade straight to Fedora 15 rawhide.

Instead of reinstalling I just update with preupgrade. So far so good. Apart for a crash in the kernel during the boot, some errors in the configuration of the Xorg, kernel panic and random problem here and there, hammering, I finally managed to make it works.

Gnome 3 looks good.

I will write something about it soon.

Backup + Amazon S3 = Love

It’s about one year ago that I started thinking a new way to manage, think and perform backups. After wasting money in hard drivers USB and useless network sharing devices, I decided to open a new account of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).

If I have to describe in three worlds my first impressions, I would say: easy, cheap, clear.
Easy
because you need 10 minutes to open a new account, cheap because to the rate are low for a personal home needs (you might spend a lot if you have to move lot of data, like 100/1000 Gb), clear because the documentation is well done and is also possible to have a prediction of how much you are going to spend per month.

I’ve been using it since April, I’ve also found a nice backup software that support as destination location Amazon, already installed and integrated in GNOME: Déja dup. I made a backup few time only, moving from 40 to 60 Gb and getting a bill around 0.35€.
From May I will schedule weekly jobs and I will give you an update of how much I’m going to spend.

With Déja dup is possible, using GNOME, to retrieve the version of that file based on the date.

Road to FOSDEM 2010

As most of you already know (if you don’t, never mind, I will forgive you :D ), I’m going to give a lightning talk in the Free Java Dev room at FOSDEM about Groovy. The title will be “Groovy: the cool side of java” and basically it will be an hand-on speech. No slide, just code. I will start from a simple Java code and I will rewrite it in Groovy. During the demo/live I will give some basics explanation about how is groovy working and we will see the power and the value that Groovy add at the top of JVM compared with a static language like Java.

Here the code that I wrote:

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Collections;

class TestJava{
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      new DoStuffs().doIt();
   }
}

class DoStuffs{

   public void doIt(){

   List al = new ArrayList();

   System.out.println("* Initial size of"+al.getClass()+" :  " + al.size() + " with elements "+al);

   al.add("this");
   al.add("is");
   al.add("just");
   al.add("test");

   System.out.println("* Final size of"+al.getClass()+" :  " + al.size() + " with elements "+al);
   System.out.println("* Let's add some stuffs");

   al.add(2,"a");
   al.add(3,"cool");

   System.out.println("* Done "+al);
   System.out.println("");

   System.out.println("- Before ordering"+al);
   Collections.sort(al);
   System.out.println("- After ordering "+al);
   System.out.println("");

   List al2 = al.subList(2,4);

   System.out.println("- Sublisting "+al2);
   System.out.println("");

   if(al.size() > 0){
      for (int i=0; i< al.size(); i++) {
         al.set(i, al.get(i)+" \\o/ ");
      }

      System.out.println("Let's show the element in the reverse order: ");
      for (int i=al.size()-1; i>=0; i--){
         System.out.println("<"+i+"> "+al.get(i));
      }
   }

   if(al != null){
      List sub = new ArrayList();

      for (int i=0; i< al.size(); i++) {
         String el = (String) al.get(i);
         if(el.contains("t")) {
            sub.add(al.get(i));
         }
      }
      System.out.println("- After grep "+ sub);
    }
  }
}