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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Sedona, Arizona: Cathedral Rock

Red Rock State Park, Sedona, Arizona.
1600 x 1200
Self service wallpaper: 1280x1024 1280x960 1152x864 1024x768 800x600 640x480
Shared with: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Shot with: 2 mega-pixel Olympus D-520 camera
Related: Sedona, Arizona: Doe Mountain

Mah Na Mah Na » Scrubs » Martin Sexton, 'Diner'

It all started when I had my daughter sitting on my lap and I decided to play for her:
Mah Na Mah Na

(Bummer. The original video had the sound removed. Substituting a similar one.)
Which she seems to enjoy. (Me too!) In the related clips, I saw one for The Muppets meet [Scrubs], and watched that [...]

Don't forget...

Bill Gates says that patents stifle innovation and competition:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. [...] The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of [...]

New Dirs in Gutsy: Documents, Music, Pictures, Blah, Blah

photo by mrmanc
I had mentioned my encounter with some new directories in Ubuntu 7.10, the Gutsy Gibbon:

Documents
Music
Pictures
Public
Templates
Videos

These showed up on an upgrade from 7.04 Feisty Fawn and on a fresh install of 7.10. On installs of previous versions, there has been the Desktop folder, and I've kept that around as a special dir that [...]