To fix it, enter the following into a command prompt:

gconftool-2 –set ‘/apps/metacity/general/button_layout’ –type string “menu:minimize,maximize,close”

(Note you may have to fix some of the quotes, since the typographical quotes don’t work like “real” quotes in the shell)

An viola, sane titlebar button placement for your user account. I’m planning on building a little app in Quickly to do this push-button style. If / when I finish that I’ll put it in a PPA and post about it here. It will be of limited utility, but a good way to play with Quickly and setting up  a PPA. Anyway…

The improved boot speed is FANTASTIC. I haven’t actually timed it, but on this laptop it feels as fast or faster than resuming from a suspend, which I think is pretty impressive.

The visual tweaks are good (modulo titlebar idocy…) and I love the “Ambiance” GTK theme. I tend to like darker themes, and this is probably one of the best ones I’ve used.

Of course the version bumps in major apps is nice, and being able to run the latest firefox w/o repo jiggery pokery is convenient. My webcam is also working out of the box, a first on this hardware, and is even working in Flash. Chatroulette here I come! On the downside, I am getting playback hiccup in full-screened videos from Hulu, which I never got before. Hulu has apparently made some changes recently that makes it not work at all w/ 64-bit Linux, so maybe it’s related to that.

So, long story short-ish,I think this will be a solid release. I have my doubts as to whether or not it will meet expectations as an LTS release given the fairly large amount of very visisble tinkering that has apparently gone on, but overall I’m looking forward to it.

Can you tell me what’s wrong with this picture?

No?

Well, the problem with this picture is that fewer than a dozen pixels makes difference between clicking on “File” and clicking on “Close”. Perhaps even worse, less than 6 pixels mean the difference between hitting the main application launch button and clicking “Close”.

This is STUPID. This is going to piss off TONS of people. I’m a 15-year IT veteran and within 30 minutes of using this setup I accidentally clicked on the close button twice. What is the “normal desktop user” that Ubuntu supposedly targets going to do?

Ugh… seriously guys, it’s called Fitt’s Law. Look it up. It’s why things like this are BAD IDEA. If you are going to be making changes like this DO SOME FRIGGING USABILITY STUDIES.

I really meant to do a more thorough post on 10.04, but I have to go de-pressurize my brain after actually seeing this first-hand.

Today, I wanted to watch the progress of a long-running process (a backup) at the same time as I watched htop and slurm to keep an eye on performance values while it was running. My first thought was to figure out how to make screen cycle through different sessions automatically, every X seconds, like how many KVMs behave. Turns out there’s an even better solution. You can make screen operate split screen, so you can see multiple sessions all at once! Why oh why didn’t I take the time to discover this sooner?

1. Start screen.
2. Hit ctrl-a/shift-s to split the screen.
3. Hit ctrl-a/tab to switch to the other “screen”.
4. Hit ctrl-a/c to create a new session or ctrl-a/(screen #) to switch to an already running session.
5. Hit ctrl-a/shift-s to split the “screen” again if you like.

So this is what my screen session looks like now:
All the stuff I wanted to keep an eye visible at once. Awesome!

for i in `grep -lir oldname *`; do sed s/oldname/newname/ $i > $i.new; mv $i.new $i;done

It’s things like this that make working with Linux such a joy.

So, I decided to install Epiphany, the default Gnome web browser. Now, I’ve used Epiphany before and it had some pretty big rendering problems. So far today, no problems at all. And you know what? It feels substantially faster, a lot faster than Firefox. And the Javascript stuff on gmail and reader isn’t hammering my machine into oblivion.

Will I stop using Firefox? Probably not, there are a lot of extensions for it that I find pretty integral to my work, like the Web Author add-on and Firebug and a few others that slip my mind at the moment. I will, however, probably start using Epiphany for my normal browsing needs if it continues to perform well and Firefox continues to perform so poorly.

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.”

Awesome. I’ve often wished I had been alive to see or hear MLK Jr speak.

I’m having a bad Windows day. It seems like everything I try to do is getting hindered by some stupid Windows quirk. It’s like the damn thing is just an accumulation of work-arounds for poor design choices that were made 15 years ago. Nobody in the Windows world ever seems to really fix problems at their root, it’s always some sort of hackish lame-ass dodge that invariably introduces some obnoxious unintended consequence. I have to believe this is due to sales / marketing induced time-line / legacy pressure. The alternative, that they aren’t smart enough to realize what they are doing is lame, would just do too much damage to my already shaky faith in humanity.