Today I had to print +30 invoices. I had created 30 pdf’s but couldn’t find a way to print them all at once. In Windows you just drag them to the printer you want to print on (doesn’t matter what format) and Windows does the rest.
Does anybody know how you can do this in Gnome, this would be very handy at the end of every quartor 
A couple off weeks ago my Dell Latitude E6500 arrived, it was installed with a Windows 7. Off course it was only a matter of hours before a fresh Linux kernel was doing the heavy lifting on that machine.
Before I used the Dell I was using an Acer. I was pretty satisfied but it was already an old machine. One thing I really liked about it was the multi touch scrolling, much like you have with Apple. For those who don’t know. If you are surfing and you have to scroll down. You just put both your fingers on the touchpad and drag them down. The page will scroll. On my Dell this didn’t work however, so I started investigating and after a while I found out that Dell uses a ALPS touchpad. Most other vendors use a synaptic touchpad. It seems the people from ALPS haven’t released any (good) documentation and therefor the Linux hackers can’t enable the multitouch.
This seems to be the first downside of my new Machine. For the rest pretty much everything worked out of the box. Wifi, Compiz, … Even my new usb headset with micro worked out of the box. Only real thing you have to add is the MP3 codecs.
On my windows and mac machines I’m using Thunderbird but on my Linux machines I was using Evolution but after a lot of crashes and latency with my Imap store I switched also to Thunderbird. I have to say I’m glad I did, everything seems to working much better now.
Wonder why evolution is still the preferred mail client for gnome as I have the feeling that Thunderbird is a much better product?
I just upgraded my Fedora 7 to Fedora 8. I didn’t notice to much difference. Okay the login screen looks much better
However I did install Compiz-fusion. This is really amazing, MS and Apple still have a lot of catching up todo if you look at this. I followed the tutorial on the Howto site but I still have to run Compizmanager as a separate process. I really like the new features (flatten your desktop, group applications on a virtual plane,…)
My girlfriend is doing here internship at some schools. She demoed Ubuntu and Beryl. The day after she had to bring Ubuntu cd’s for all the kids in here class. My little saleswoman is doing great, don’t you agree?
This weekend I upgraded my main desktop from Feisty to Gutsy. It went pretty smooth I have to admit. Just click upgrade and it works as it supposed. I had installed the Ubuntu Studio theme and that got upgraded too. When my X came back up I was really amazed, I had to remember to close my jaw.
I really like the gray theme I have now. It’s much more clearer than the former one. (I could have switched to another one, but didn’t want too )
I also noticed they ditched Gaim and switched to Pidgin. I was using it already on my F7 and works perfect with my 2 hotmail,1 google and 1 jabber account 
Another thing I really like is that nautilus now has the Documents,Photos,… folders in the main opendialog-form.
I have to conclude it feels like another successful iteration of the Gnome desktop and Ubuntu distro!
On planet gnome I saw this article. In the feature list it states
• Viewing default calendar
• Creating/modifying/deleting the appointments
Hubba hubba, /me wants this for his desktop. I use Google Calendar all the time. My girlfriend even uses it. I still have to find a better Calendar web application! I even get notified by SMS.
At the moment I just import it as a read only calendar, so getting the other CUD features is … … SWEET
Another thing that got mentioned on the user group was the lack of a Quicksilver copy for Linux. As I find it hard to believe this didn’t exist for Gnome, I searched a bit and it seems Deskbar is doing this kind of stuff. I just put it on my top menu and I think I’m gonna use it a lot. It really looks nice, eve the del.icio.us plugin is nice.
Probably it will add a lot of extra load on your network with all the web calls it does. But hey I don’t have any limit so …
Today I switched my default mail client back from Thunderbird to Evolution.
Why???
I installed Beagle and I want all my mails to be indexed for searching. I lost 10 minutes searching for a stupid mail today (yeah, it’s really stupid heaving 5 large mailboxes that you use frequently)
After installing I started replying some emails and I noticed that my Nautilus mounted SSH folders were included in the add attachments screen. sweet The Thunderbird version didn’t have that option and that was pretty stupid. I had to copy the files locally and then attach them 
I did notice however that the response off Thunderbird is much better than Evolution, but hey at my customer I’m have to use M$ Outlook so I’m glad when I’m back at my office using Evo.
I also stopped using Amsn, I also fully switched to Gaim. Okay the integration with the MSN messenger service isn’t as good as Amsn but Gaim also gets indexed by Beagle. I was already using Gaim for my Jabber and Gmail friends but not yet for my MSN friends. So you guys are now on my Gaim list and are being indexed 
You get the point, my whole entry is about indexing. Lets see how much more efficient I get in the future.
On a side note, I now seem to have my spelling checker enabled in Firefox. So I’ll pay more attention on my writing skills as some of you seem to have problems with my bad English!
Yesterday I put a new graphics card into my desktop machine (a CGA-P1652 RADEON X1650PRO 512MB) . I hooked my 2 big screens on it and rebooted. My ubuntu dapper couldn’t start gdm (ffcourse). So I apt-getted the ATI drivers and did a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-org, still couldn’t boot. So I started searching, after a while I found the aticonfig tool, one word sweet. I ran it witht he option for dual screen setup and he made a template xorg.conf file.
After adding the Xinerama option and setting the resolutions, I now have a nice widescreen view of my desktop and I can drag my windows over both of them. Life is great! I really believe that multiple screens do increase performance. I also liked the fact that my dapper box now has the ability to modify my screen resolutions using the gnome tool. The last time I did the dual screen setup with ubuntu, the app crashed, guess it wasn’t ready for dual screens. Now it works like a charm!
So people out there with radeon setup problems, one tool : aticonfig
This weekend and this evening I did some more TopReader development. I got stuck on the right mouse click popup (context menu) for creating folders,adding feeds, … I asked #gnome and Murray pointed me to the UIManager class. I have to say this is a nifty thing!!
For those out there who (like me) didn’t know about this Factory, it reads an xml file like the following
<ui>
<popup name="channelpopupmenu" action="channelpopup">
<menuitem name="MarkRead" action="MarkRead"/>
</popup>
<popup name="folderpopupmenu" action="folderpopupmenu">
<menuitem name="CreateFolder" action="CreateFolder"/>
<menuitem name="AddFeed" action="AddFeed"/>
</popup>
</ui>
In your code you just do this for initializing it
uim = new UIManager ();
uim.AddUiFromResource("FeedMenu.xml");
And if you want to show a context menu, you intercept the right mouse click event on your widget and do this little piece of code
Menu w = (Menu)uim.GetWidget("ui/channelpopupmenu");
w.Popup();
The widget is retrieved by the tagname or its actual name
As easy as that!!!
Now we take it a step further. During initalisation we do this
uim = new UIManager ();
uim.InsertActionGroup (group, 0);
uim.AddUiFromResource("FeedMenu.xml");
Where the action group represents a group of Action objects (Duh)
ActionEntry[] entries = new ActionEntry[] {
new ActionEntry ("MarkRead", Stock.Cut, "MarkRead", null,
"MarkRead",
new EventHandler (OnMarkRead)),
new ActionEntry ("CreateFolder", Stock.Cut, "CreateFolder", null,
"CreateFolder",
new EventHandler (OnCreateFolder)),
new ActionEntry ("AddFeed", Stock.Cut, "AddFeed", null,
"AddFeed",
new EventHandler (OnAddFeed))
};
I haven’t configured them as you can see, all are the Cut Stock item.
So we linked the selection of the context menu item with the designed EventHandler.
One word: SWEET
What can I do so far with my app, well I can create folders, add feeds, read feeds, mark a whole feed as read. In the backend the feeds get updated automatically. As I mentioned everything is stored in a small sqlite3 database, for 318 items it’s 600 k, not tho much if you ask me. I wonder how much feeds I can archive before I reach the limit of sqlite (thought that was 2 gigs,but not sure)
I’ll keep you posted (offcourse it’s gonna be opensourced, LGPL probably as I like it more than the GPL)
The last couple of days I’ve been doing some hacking in Mono/Gtk#. A year ago I created a small patch for liferea, I wanted to create some more patches but the damn thing wouldn’t build on my ubuntu box. I asked the mailinglist but the reaction was that they hadn’t gotten a clue what could be the issue. Now it is a default installed ubuntu box, no special thingies, just apt-get install gnome-devel, that’s it.
So I had 2 options, find out why the hell the autotools was crashing or start writting my own RSS aggregator. Well stupid me chose the second option.
You might ask Why?
Well actually very simple I wanted to do some heavy dutty development to get back into the gtk libraries. As I want to join in on the tinymail development somewhere in the future …
Secondly it had been more than a month that I did any c# development. So I created a simple project in monodevelop, took the 2 defacto standard rss and atom dotnet libraries and started hacking.
Where am I now?
Well I have a TreeView on the left with my rss feeds, I have a TreeView with all the unread items and I display the unread Items in a WebControl (firefox embedded). The feeds that are in my TreeView get checked for updates every 3000 seconds. If you click an unread item it doesn’t get displayed anymore. So basic viewing capabilities are getting there.
view the screenshot
How?
If I’m not mistakend liferea didn’t use a database, I instead decided to implement it using a sqlite3 database. All the folders,channels and items are stored in it. I have to say I really was amazed by the speed of it.
What’s next?
Well a lot has to be done but what will happen in a few days is the ability to add folders and feeds from the gui.
Long term goal?
Well very simple finally get the rss aggregator I want, all the aggregators I’ve tried all had some nice features but none of them combined the ones I want. The scratch your own itch thingy
The name?
TopReader
What? TopReader?Wtf? Well since a few weeks I’m self employed and the company name is TopCoders so …
