Gnome Shell: Second Look
I recently, very recently, replaced my Ubuntu install with a fresh Fedora 12 installation. I must say that I really like Fedora overall. It just doesn't come with the luxuries that Ubuntu does so it takes a little more patience and fine tuning. To stay on topic I'm not going to go into a distro battle here. I want to give Gnome Shell a second opinion.
When I first tested Gnome Shell it was in Ubuntu and really unstable thanks to the unstable OS. After installing Fedora I decided to take my chances again. It runs 90% better on Fedora so the majority of what I hated was gone. I find it fascinating that they put everything in one location. It works and looks great while working. The developers of Gnome really had transparency in mind while working on Gnome Shell. That same transparency seems to have one major issue. When I want to go to another application or workspace I have to go back to the Activities menu and selected. Only a minor problem but it seems really counter intuitive. I guess you can always alt-tab for the apps but I want to use my mouse with as little effort as possible.
This was just a short update to really show that I did give it another chance on a more stable OS. I can only imagine what the future has in store Gnome and I feel that Gnome Shell is a step in the right direction.
Posted At 2010-01-26 01:43:42 by DeadWolf in Geekdom :: ( No comments )
Polishing the Site
Polishing makes me think integration of Polish people.
It's been about a month since a real update and I know that I said I'll be posting more (I lied). Of course my attention to the site has remained. I fixed a few CSS bugs so that I can now have pages smaller than the nav. I also converted my login from sessions to cookies. The new host has a time out on sessions and it was causing me to loose content by it logging me out before posting. I have the cookie login set up similar to the way sessions work. I just have to take the risk of the cookie being on the computer. I fixed a few other minor bugs so the site looks a little more clean and polished.
Aside from site work I've also been spending what little free time I have learning more about Linux. I've gotten pretty comfortable with it and with the Compiz tweaks that I put in place it's a bit more homely (and leet). I tried out Gnome-Shell to find that it was a horrible mess. I honestly like how they are changing how the operation system is run but it has its problems. I also understand that it is still in development and things are likely to change. When the time comes to update to Ubuntu 10 I hope that I won't be forced to install Gnome-Shell.
If you want to try Gnome-Shell yourself just run these commands (be sure to disable compiz before hand)...
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
gnome-shell --replace
I must warn you that it's still a little unstable. If you want to get the latest build then you must compile from source with jhbuild. I couldn't get it to build so I won't provide a how to. I feel if you're gutsy enough to build from source then you won't need my help.
Posted At 2010-01-19 00:08:00 by DeadWolf in Development :: ( No comments )
True Origin of Christmas
Surfing the internet around the Holiday season will no doubt bring you to a bunch of kids in a heated discussion of how Christmas came to be. Each person slants it their own way based on religious views. Some even bring up facts out of their rear. Of course none of these arguments are valid as these are just internet people who have nothing better to do than to argue. I don't want to say everyone is wrong as there are the rare exceptions that get the facts straight. For my subscribers, I am going to tell how Christmas came to be the market hungry holiday it is today.
The biggest argument is whether Christmas is Christian or Pagen. Believe it or not it is actually both. The Romen Pagens has a holiday around the day we celebrate Christmas today.
This holiday was call Saturnalia and was a week long celebration starting December 17th and ending December 25th. The Roman courts were closed to and no law official could arrest people for vandalism or injuring people. During the week the Romans picked an enemy of the Roman people to represent "Lord of Misrule" who would be forced to indulge in food and physical pleasures. The Romans believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering the innocent person.
Estimated around 4th Century CE Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it. They did this by placing Jesus's birth day on the last day of Saturnalia, December 25th. Many Pagens were converted to Christianity because they were promised to be able to celebrate the traditions of Saturnalia. This is how Christmas come to be on the 25th of December.
The symbols used in Christmas today come from Pagen traditions to help the Christians merge the holidays together. For example the Christmas tree was brought about because Pagans worshiped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes and decorated them.
The Catholic church still kept some of the Saturnalia traditions when Pope Paul II in in 1466, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. Many years later after much violence and rioting this was stopped.
Santa Clause is a Jew hating Turkish Bishop that manage to start a cult spreading across Europe. The Catholic Church adopted the cult and made it out that Santa flew around giving gifts on the 25th of December.
This is how Christmas came to be the Holiday we Celebrate today.
Posted At 2009-12-23 14:19:25 by DeadWolf in Holiday :: ( No comments )
Change of scenery
I've been working on this style all day so it better be amazing to you. I came up with the genius idea of adding the arch to the banner to cover up for the misspell... I mean to express my philosophy behind the name.
I decided to go with a simplistic look. No I did not forget to design around the mana day thingamabober. I decided to leave it open. You know what? If you don't like it then you can leave!
I ran across a few markup mistakes while working on this. Mistakes that still validate. W3 needs to work on their stuff. These mistakes were big enough to throw off the whole design but small enough to drive me insane. I took the p tags off of my footer because it was conflicting and I also hate blind people. They don't need to see my copyright... THEY'RE BLIND!!! That whole accessibility test thing I did a few years back is nonexistent now so that's one less freaking standard I have to deal with.
I just have a little rage from the countless hours I spent tinkering with CSS... I HATE CSS!!!
As I said in my previous post. Things are changing and the style is just one step in my master plan.
Posted At 2009-12-16 18:41:39 by DeadWolf in Development :: ( No comments )
Migration
As some of you may know I am poor and can't afford web hosting. I was paying $15/month for hosting. Now I'm paying much less through a different provider. As good as Thinkhost was to me I can no longer afford the service. I had to look elsewhere. I've found that new hosting provider and I have already migrated. Notice the difference 
. The more I fiddle with this new service the more I fall in love with it. I feel bad for leaving Thinkhost but this is business... Right? Right!
With the new host there are some changes that may or may not affect you.
Due to the massive amount of bandwidth consumed from the videos, walkthroughs and future videos will be hosted on Viddler or Blip.tv. They don't charge me for bandwidth.
No off site linking of my images (You can try but it will not work). If you like it download it and host it yourself using bandwidth that you pay for.
Things are going to be changing around here so get use to it.
Posted At 2009-12-13 14:08:18 by DeadWolf in Development :: ( No comments )