Opensource is (most of the time) not about the user, but about a bunch of programmers having fun. Blender with Big Buck Bunny did something good (real usable feedback and improvements), but on the other hand Yafray really pissed me off. Because Yafray had been rewritten; now it’s Yafaray. Blender integration sucks, stability is crap – and while I still say that Blender improved a lot, the internal renderer is “not very good” (yet).
Archive for November, 2008
Yaf(a)ray vs Blender – regression in the workflow
Sunday, November 30th, 2008CdCat: a catalogizer with a really broken data format
Saturday, November 22nd, 2008I’m using an opensource catalogizer to keep track of my CD and DVD collection (in fact I have been using Hyper’s CdCat for years); actually it’s pretty unstable, it seems to be unmaintained and some essential features are missing (read: it’s opensource), but since I don’t know a thing about Qt and I really am not interested, I thought about at least moving my main catalog xml into a db (sqlite for now) to do some testing on processing speed. Apart from finding this task utterly boring and unchallanging, I also have found a tiny little problem: the file sizes are stored in pretty print format! Not bytes, but kb, mb or gb!
So, some math: 1.72kb = 1.72 * 1024 = 1761.8 != 1760
I know that we say XML is human readable, but this is stupid; if one uses XML for massive amounts of data (my main, yet somewhat cleaned catalog file is well over 10mb) then please, please do optimize it for speed! Now we have some junk whitespaces, non-short tags everywhere, lossy file size data (1760 != 1761 – and that was just for kilo, not mega or giga), some really stupid naming conventions, full human readable time instead of a Unix timestamp.
Lazarus 0.9.26ß
Thursday, November 20th, 2008Still am not a great fan of static languages, but (mostly) out of nostalgy I gave the newly released Lazarus a try (another one). I like the new Tangoish icons, the interface is pretty stable now – documentation still sucks big time though (I can remember how I used context sensitive help for everything in Delphi, it was a bliss) or at least getting to it (and the docs website has no search terrible search facilities).
What really annoys me is the dataset controls or the lack of. I just wanted to do a performance test with xml to sqlite db import/export and some lookups, but I just failed to install sqlite! The wiki is terrible and the sqlite4fpc site is major crap (I mean in late 2008 we have a static geocities page? wtf? where the hell is the wiki? Google code, Sourceforge anyone?). I don’t want to get into details, did everything twice (including reinstalling Lazarus with some pain in the back recompilation attempt), it broke badly, let it be enough (Edit: on the other hand, SQLitePass works out of the box).
I also tried installing the IDE onto current Ubuntu, and boy, the installation sucks (for out of the box debs) and is totally a waste with recompilation (which is rather common with Lazarus itself) – and no, I don’t care for GTK1 (yeah it’s butt ugly when stupid distros just forget to package a proper gtk-rc, but it’s okay for me), but rather package/module installs.
I do know about the “shady” CodeTyphoon project: somehow Delphi people doesn’t seem to understand the way how opensource projects and opensource technologies (should) work (you know, version tracking, forum, wikipedia, comments, unified coding style, generated/useful documentation etc. – I don’t say these criteria are never met, but still…)
Xubuntu 8.10 mini review
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008After trying out the new Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) in a Virtual Machine (and seeing all the same bugs I have seen before unfixed) I installed Xubuntu 32bit (for real) – I gave up on 64 bit anyway…
I like Xfce, because it’s pretty small and flexible (one can reuse the panel or the mcs-manager with other desktop manager parts), and at least its’ panels are not as terribly buggy as Gnome’s!
What I liked:
- the Xubu guys did a pretty good job at integrating Xfce into the Ubuntuish system (same layout, managed startup applications, good menu integration etc.) – I prefer to customize xfce’s every aspect, but it was nice.
- Internationalization works, foreign characters appear fine in xterm and assorted terminals, even under more exotic window managers (this is not that trivial).
- Xfce is fast as usual, has a small memory footprint.
What I didn’t like:
- The restricted driver install is still buggy, though if I click brainlessly it works.
- catfish, as the “default” search application; it’s just way too dumb for me (thanks for not saving the preferences and defaulting to the binary location); it would’ve been nice to add a freaking “search here” item in Thunar’s right click menu – at least we have a terminal opener…
- Default fstab setup sucks. No, I mean really. No ntfs drives in Thunar (okay, I can add them manually as usual), pcManFm automounting is broken (probably pmount and hal), and I really find the whole Gnome vfs idea annyoing (yep, have fun with Nautilus –no-desktop).
- Samba discovery is still broken, LinNeighborhood (ahem, pyNeighborhood or what) is buggy as hell and Gnome vfs / KDE kio systems are restricted to specific desktop environments (applications awaro of these systems). Adding samba shares manually and with my pingmount script as usual.
- No sudoers setup; not even wheel. Did I mention how I hate visudo?
- Xubu comes with Alsa (no Pulse-crap), but some applications are preconfigured for Pulseaudio (like Audacious for example).
- Smb shares can be mounted multiple times into the same directory (see mtab), though this is an smbmount bug (feature?) I guess. Still it’s sloppy, especially for it being here for 7 years.
- The shutdown process halts, because my Dlink NAS box did not answer for the CIFS logout/shutdown request. I can do magic sysrq, but since unmounting from the terminal works like a charm, this is crap.
- Compiz fun: after killing compiz it did not reset the wm to xfwvm4, but installed metacity; add the xfce-session behaviour to that and you have five minutes of headache (ten if you’re Joe Average having fun with OpenGl window management). By the way Compiz taskswitcher is a huge regression compared to Beryl, and no, restoring a simpler version is impossible.
- Just one small rant: why on Earth can’t I set the padding / menuitem height for Xfce menu? Even an oldskool bb menu looks nicer!
- Adobe flash (thanks, Adobe) still eats plenty of CPU (ate 50% for me with Youtube, which already triggers upscaling by the ondemand governor), though it’s not really Ubuntu specific.
- Grub uninstall still sucks (like dd-ing 512 bytes to a savefile is so hard).
- Java install in the add/remove items: we have OpenJDK (bad mojo for Tomcat and Eclipse stuff), but not the Sun official JRE; Firefox install plugin on the other hand suggests the Sun version. How come OSX has java preinstalled?
- No dual pane file management: Worker is raw, Emelfm2 is dumb, Krusader is unstable, TotalCommander perl wrapping is silly and so on… It’s good to see how a dumb Dolphin kicks the more advanced Konqueror around, not to mention how users had to whine for years for tabs in Nautilus.