October 2007 archive

Robert Heinlein Describes the Situation

Way back in 1939, in his first published science fiction short story:

There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

–Robert Heinlein, “Life-Line”

I haven’t read the story, but that seems to apply very well today whether it’s Disney buying Congressmen and longer copyright terms, or Microsoft and many …

Subversion (SVN) GNOME Nautilus Script Helpers

Update, 3 November 2007:

Found a better solution: Jason Field’s NautilusSvn. More SVN features, much better integration with Nautilus, and uses emblems to show file and directory status. There is a .deb file that installed easily on my Ubuntu 7.04/Feisty Fawn machine. And it’s free as in GPL v2. Thanks, Jason!

Use NautilusSvn instead of my meager scripts!

Update, 6 November 2007:

I wrote another post about NautilusSvn and replacement emblems.

Update, 22 February 2008:

Jason’s site has been down today. Acting as a backup, here are the files I downloaded back in November:

nautilussvn_0.9-1.deb (25 KB)
NautilusSvn_v0.9.tar.gz (25 KB)

Hopefully jasonfield.com will be back soon and then I recommend going there for the latest and greatest.

Extend the file manager with right-click popup menu options for adding, updating, and commiting SVN files, as …

NetBeans Update, Briefly and Vaguely

Following up on my previous, surprisingly popular post about NetBeans, I finally wrote a Java GUI program with it. Simple program, but the writing of it confirmed my initial impression that NetBeans will be a good Java IDE for me. I’ve been avoiding the learning curve of Java GUI, but this weekend I thought of something I figured I could manage. It went pretty well, and I’ll be writing another post about the program soon. I still have a lot to learn, but I’m confident now I’ll be able to muddle my way along.

Random bullet points:

I certainly haven’t put the Matisse GUI builder through its paces yet, but I’m still impressed by how robust and full-featured it is.

The overall environment still feels comfortable to me …

Turning off trackbacks/pingbacks…

I don’t get a lot of legitimate trackbacks, but lately I’m getting an annoying amount of spambacks, so I’m turning them off for now. If you’re one of the few kind folks who occasionally point my way (I’m looking at you, Open Source Community) :-), please consider a “manual” ping in comments.

On the other hand, I’m getting almost no comment spam, which I credit to the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin, previously mentioned in a post about my WordPress Plugin Binge last month.

Bad Behavior is another good tool and currently stops a couple of thousand access attempts per week. Akismet is super, but anything that it catches is something I then have to deal with. I’m not getting all that many spam trackbacks, but the …

HOWTO: Rotate JPG images in GNOME’s Nautilus File Manager

Originally published 6 October 2007 in Free Software Magazine. It was pointed out in the comments there that Nautilus Extensions is another way of customizing Nautilus, and that the extension nautilus-actions should be used instead for what I’m trying to do here. I had seen Extensions mentioned as a more powerful alternative at gnome.org, but I still like scripts for this job. However, I should at least acknowledge Nautilus Extensions as another option.

I recently went looking for a way to rotate JPG images from within Nautilus, and found a nice way to do this and more. It’s not difficult to customize the right-click popup menu in Nautilus to perform custom actions on files. Here are some instructions and scripts to get …

The Sad Plight of Some People

photo by crowt59

From the Minneapolis StarTribune:

Mark Evenstad and his family, for example, were perfectly content with their 6,500-square-foot house in Woodland on Lake Minnetonka. But when a much-admired house down the street came on the market, they couldn’t say no even before selling their current house.

Evenstad thought it would take six months to sell the two-story brick house, originally priced at $2.3 million. After nearly two years and a new price of $1.895 million, showings have been modest. And somewhat frustrating, too.

A prospective buyer looked at the house eight times to see it at all times of the day — and then wanted to see what it would be like to wake up there. So Evenstad quickly refurnished parts of the house, which had been vacant, with bedroom furniture,

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