Nethazard.net

Estoy muy emocionado porque han aceptado mi platica en el CONSOL.

* Usando Git: control de versiones distribuido
o Gabriel Saldaña Torres

Sesión Técnica - 1 hora Aplicaciones Aceptada

Tambien estoy algo nervioso porque es mi primera platica. Pero creo que todo saldra muy bien.

Eso si, estoy de acuerdo con Zodman y los tres puntos que debe curbir el CONSOL. Son basicos!

1. Alojamiento
2. Comidas
3. Transporte

Minimo el alojamiento que es lo mas importante. No me gusta estar buscando donde quedarme o quedarme lejos de donde esta toda la banda para la conbebencia.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Today Facebook released an animation javascript library that modifies CSS properties on the fly. You can download it and use it on your webpages.

Its a very light (10.4 Kb compressed version) animation library and its very easy to use. You can chain events or animations to create the effects you want. You can download it on the facebook developer’s resources page.

A typical effect used in websites is the flash effect to alert or notify of some action.

Here’s all you need to accomplish that:


<a href="#" onclick="Animation(this).to('background', '#fff').from('background', '#ffff4b').go(); return false;">Flash</a>


The syntax is easy. All you need to do is call Animation(this) on your element and then specify what CSS property you want to change on the .to and .from methods. In this case: go from yellow background to white background. The last .go() method tells Animation to run the specified animation.

You can also mix animations or transitions instead of playing one animation after another. For this you have to use .checkpoint() function and .duration() to specify how long the transition will take (in milliseconds). The checkpoints indicate when the second animation will start playing, allowing you to tweak the default behavior of playing one animation after the other one stopped.

So you can basically change anything: colors, widths, lengths, margins, positions, etc. For complete documentation of the library, go to the Facebook Developers Wiki. Its worth checking out.

Its a very simple syntax, with familiar terms (CSS properties) and very lightweight compared to using Prototype and Scriptaculous. Maybe Scriptaulous syntax for doing some animations is simpler or shorter, but you must load Prototype in order to use it, so that makes it heavier. Plus, you need to know the Scriptaculous effects functions and sometimes they are not that tweakable.

Its also nice to see Facebook releasing some open source code (BSD licensed) and contributing back.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I’ve been using the KDE4 from the Ubuntu Gutsy repositories for two days now, and I know there are a lot of missing features but here are my top 5:

1. Printers: they are missing from the kde4 settings manager program. I know its not a full all bells and whistle final release, but can this be skipped from a (any) release?
2. Widgets: Okay, the fact that KDE4 can now have widgets is nice, but why are all the widgets useless? Why not show off the widget potential with cool things, like a full RSS reader, a system services monitor, or a blog publishing widget? Or maybe just have something plain simple but useful like a calculator. No, they give us a clock and a battery monitor. Sounds like the Windows 1 TV commercial with Steve Ballmer: “A clock!”.
3. Copy and Move: One of the main reasons I started loving Konqueror was because it had a Move To and Copy To option on the context menu. Its very helpful to move files around without having to open windows or drag them. On Dolphin, this features is missing.
4. Shutdown Menu: I felt kind of in Vista land when I pressed the Shutdown button from the new Kmenu and then got asked again if I wanted to shutdown or logout. The Kmenu already presented me those options, and I chose Shutdown, why ask again?
5. Switch to Next/Previous Desktop Shortcuts: I mentioned it in my last post and even there’s been updates to the packages, this keyboard shortcuts are missing on the settings. Its annoying to use the mouse to do such a thing, and the Expose-like feature is still not responding 100% of the times.

Which ones are yours?

Popularity: 18% [?]

Today was the official release of KDE4, and the Kubuntu packages are already available for download and use.

Here’s a screenshot of my current desktop:

How to install?

If you want to install KDE4 in your current Ubuntu or Kubuntu Gutsy is very easy.

First add the repository to your sources list:

sudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add this line at the end of the file

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main


Refresh your packages
sudo aptitude update

And install kde4-core if you want the basic installation.
sudo aptitude install kde4-core

If you want all kde4 packages that are available, install the kde4 package.
sudo aptitude install kde4

The configuration process will ask you if you want to log in with gdm, kdm or kdm-kde4. Choose the one you like.

Finally, logout and log back in, choosing the KDE4 session from your login manager.

First Impressions

My first impressions of the released KDE4 were positive. Taking into account that I tried all release candidates in Live CD, the quality of this released version is actually usable and comfortable. The libraries might be stable release quality, but the applications are still a bit rough on the edges.

K Menu

The kmenu changed a lot. It feels very Vista-ish (which i dislike) but you get used to it very easily. The search is fast and the navigation is not that cumbersome as the Vista menu.

Animations

To really enjoy the experience you must enable the animations. Open the System Settings KDE4 on the K menu. Kcontrol is gone in KDE4, and replaced with this System Settings. Its like the Kubuntu Control Panel layout. Choose Desktop, and enable all desktop effects. Also check the effects on the Advanced tab.

There are a lot of animations I didn’t expected on KDE4, and it looks very promising.

Dolphin

I definitely recommend you to set Dolphin as your default file manager. Maybe you will enjoy it as much as I do.

For some strange reason, the kubuntu packages dont have Dolphin as the main file manager, it has Konqueror. To enable Dolphin as the default file manager, just open Konqueror, go to the Tools menu, then Configure Konqueror. Now select the File Associations button and under inode, select directory. Move Dolphin to be the first option on the application preference order list and save the changes.

Dolphin on KDE4 is great! The panels, the file tree structure, the info pane, all worth having there. The icon animations on the info pane look awesome. And the greatest of all is the embedded terminal (press F4 to display). It changes directory to the current directory you are browsing. Nice touch.

One bug I’ve noticed is that Dolphin opens the file with right and left click. So even it launches the menu for the icon, in also opens the file, and then some error pops up. Its not as annoying as it sounds though.

The Panel

On the RC releases, the panel was not configurable at all. On these release, the panel is still not that customizable, but at least it displays correctly the system tray, clock and virtual desktops. These are configurable, but not as much as in KDE3. Still cannot resize the panel or move around the widgets in it.

Missing Features

There are a couple of missing features. One of the most noticeable, for me, are the KWin shortcuts. There is no option for “switch to next desktop” keyboard shortcut, so I’m stuck with Ctrl+F1 through F4 to switch desktops. I’m used to configure Ctrl+Alt+Arrows to do this depending on the desktop I’m in (got used to it from my Gnome usage days). The expose feature is smooth and nice, but I can only activate it once and only once if I move the mouse to the left top corner. The next times I want to activate expose, I have to press Ctrl+F10.

The screenshots and video recording don’t come up. The zooming and looking glass didn’t work for me either. Also the panel clock can only display one timezone (I usually look at 3 different timezones I’m interested in).

Also I noticed that the GTK theming option is missing from the Settings manager. GTK based applications (Firefox) look…ugly.

And of course, as being a recent release, there are lots of applications that need to release their KDE4 version. Amarok for KDE4 is not on the kubuntu repositories yet and I’ve been trying to check that one out, since its one of my favourite KDE apps. My other two favourite KDE apps also need their KDE4 update: Yakuake and Katapult. Although you can still use them.
missing switch next desktop, bug in expose corner.

Conclusions

There are lots of features I haven’t discovered yet and there’s still a lot of polishing to do on it, but its beautiful, fun and safe to use. I’ve been using KDE4 at work for the whole day, and I know its very premature to say it, but I think its a great release, great changes, and with a very, very promising future ahead.

Popularity: 100% [?]

This is one of those “must have in written format” things, so it MUST be on my blog for future reference.

My resolutions for 2008 are:

1. Learn Lisp (Emacs lisp and/or CLisp)

I’ve been reading a lot of things about Lisp, and my editor of choice has been Emacs for almost all the past year. I’ve wanted to make some tweaks to some Emacs modes I have, but I can’t understand Lisp yet. Also, I want to know why a lot of Lispers feel like they know it all.

2. Get my University diploma

I finished my classed, but I still need to present my thesis, which by the way is on Rails, and pass my examination to finally get my diploma.

3. Get involved in an open source project

I’ve been wanting to contribute but most importantly, learn from others and collaborate for a long time. I still don’t know exactly which project I want to get involved with.

4. Use Emacs for more tasks
5. I want to use Org mode to organize my tasks and agenda. Use more weblogger mode to publish here. Use Gnus as my mail reader, and even give EMMS a try to replace AmaroK.
6. Use Git with ALL my projects

Its better and easier for me. Branching and mergin is fast and easy, and I can have my own history of commits before commiting to everyone else. I want to use it even at work, where we use Subversion. Not because it was already there (I implemented version control there because there was none) but because some in the team use Windows machines, and getting Git on Windows is not a point and click task. TortoiseSVN was more adequate for those non commandline users. Hey, at least there’s version control now in that software shop.

7. Exercise on a constant daily basis
8. I have some health issues that I need to work out. And by working out I mean it literally. There’s no medicine for this but to exercise and have a better condition.
9. Publish quality posts on my blog more often

This one is self explanatory. Specially I want to improve my writing skills.

I hope to accomplish them all.

Image by Sergei Yahchybekov. Thanks for licensing it under Creative Commons.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Its been a while since I made changes to the blog, and its been also a while since I’ve been wanting to do such changes.

I was tired of the old theme and it didn’t had the sidebar on single posts to easily jump to another post from there. I think that good navigation is key to any website, commercial or personal.

Although some might disagree, I find dark backgrounds with light text easier on my eyes to read. Besides, there’s rumors that its also energy efficient. It was hard to find a nice dark background theme for Wordpress, but after reviewing several, I found Insomniac by Benedikt Rieke-Benninghaus very pleasing after some tweaks here and there.

A must have for a Wordpress theme for me is:

• Dark background and light text
• Big font size
• Nice contrast colors
• Modern look

Another substatial change is that I’ll be normally posting in English, instead of my mother tounge Spanish. I just want to share my blog to more of my friends, and they happen to speak English. I think it will be more universal to do so. Also, for some weird reason, my mind works in English most of the time (you know…when you speak to your inner self in your mind), so expressing my mind will be faster and easier in English (yes I’m weird). Of course, when necessary, spanish written posts will appear. Maybe it’ll all depend on my mood and my need to express myself in one way or another.

And the latest change is the blog name change. Since the postings will be in English, the title didn’t help much. Besides, its been mentioned to me that my blog title “Pensando en voz alta” is kind of a ripoff of DHH’s blog, the Ruby on Rails creator. And since I’m out of ideas right now, I’ll simply use my domain name as the blog title. I’d also like to change my domain name, but I’ve had it for so long, and as I already said, I’m out of ideas, so I can’t get rid of it.

So I want to start this year with this changes. New year, new blog theme, new blog title, new blog langague in posts.

Popularity: 30% [?]