So, here we have the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines (i.e. the MacOS-X user interface guidelines), the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, the KDE User Interface Guidelines and of course the Microsoft Windows Official Guidelines for User Interface Developers and Designers (I came back in January of 2018 to fix this link — also interesting is the section on margins and spacing). Apple says that “The default button for dismissing a dialog should go in the lower-right corner.
Het boek, de pen.
Jeroen sent me links to two interesting web pages dealing with the important question of the relationship between the gender and article of Dutch nouns. Enlighten yourself by going here and here. Thanks Jeroen!
Cygwin CVS EOL problem solution
At this very moment, you might be wondering why, if CVS is such a wonderful piece of version control software that even offers to soothe your cross-platform end of line woes (*ix: eol = lf, macos: eol = cr, windows: eol = crlf), it’s suddenly breaking the end of line checkouts on the *ix side since you’ve been committing your ports on the windows side with CVS from Cygwin. The answer is fortunately far shorter and simpler that the previous sentence.
An eventful weekend
Much happened this weekend. Because many readers have fantastically short attention spans, I’ll break my report up into clearly marked sections. Is my laptop hard drive defective? My laptop has done this once before: after the laptop is switched on, the hard drive refuses to start. It’s usually very quiet, but definitely audible at startup. This weekend before we left for Belgium (more on this later) the laptop decided it was time for the “the hard drive can’t be bothered to start up” trick again.
The most useless software of the year award
As we all are aware of the frighteningly high editorial standards of freshmeat.net (ha ha), I have to wonder how MumabAs was accepted. This MULTI-FUNCTION software is a GUI (graphical user interface) for, wait for it, “configuring which mailboxes mutt should watch for new mail”. Aaaaarrrggggghhhhh!!! For those of you who don’t know, mutt is a MUA (mail user agent) with a text-based UI. Usually, “configuring which mailboxes mutt should watch for new mail” is a question of editing one (1) line in the config file.
Some of my unfavourite things
I was going to write about some of my favourite things, but unfortunately I had to read the news first. This article came to my attention. In short, Tom Hurndall, a member of the International Solidarity Movement, was shot in the head by an Israeli when he tried to rescue a small child from gunfire. He died shortly after in a nearby hospital. I have very little sympathy for the Israeli aggressors.
Scum of the Earth
Computer Professionals. IT Stylists. Computer Engineers. I don’t know what their preferred labels are, but many of these people need a serious attitude adjustment, preferably in the form of a large hammer to be administered regularly to the head and other soft parts of the body. You know what I’m talking about: those people who work with computers yet think they’re somehow better than than the rest of us. Unskilled labourers who have made peace with the fact that they’re unskilled labourers are the most pleasant and genuine people you’ll find.
Fly, little birdy, fly!
My Radeon DRI resume patch has been integrated into XFree86 CVS by Kevin Martin. Yaaaaaay! Now it’s only a question of time before it’ll propagate into all other XFree86 branches and eventually even into operating system distributions.
Another small step on the way to S3 STR
Urgh, radeon frame buffer support in 2.5.66-bk12 (that’s cutting edge with some extra blood on top) seems to be completely broken at least on my laptop. After a little searching, it seems these drivers also seem to be in the process of a complete redesign. That’s a shame, as I wanted to try and adapt Benjamin Herrenschmidt and ATI’s 2.4 kernel PowerMac power management and suspend/resume code to x86 ACPI support in 2.
Back to the present
Andrew Carlssin claims to be a time-traveller from the year 2256. Just another crack-pot, except for the fact that he was able to turn $800 into $350 MILLION in 2 weeks on Wall Street. More detail here.