A poetic, epiphany for a geek

10 05 2009

It’s been a curios weekend. I feel extremely anxious and nervous due to the final exams. I know what will happen, but I don’t know yet what to do. It’s a pain in the ass.

Anyway, this post is about a two-stage religious experienice I had this weekend. I was kind of bored, angry, tired and some other things I won’t list here, so I decided that it would be a good choice to practice Java a bit. I launched Eclipse, and took my programming folder. To my surprise, I only had two classes left from the previous course: My actual final project, and the project of the systems engineers from Monterrey’s ITESM campus. As I didn’t know the second, I chose it as it sounded more interesting.

I started coding immediatly the class. Less than half an hour later, I had the basic scheme finished. It was kind of stupid to think that it costed me next to none effort, considering that only the basic scheme of my final project took me more than 5 hours. I felt happy, but at the same time I realized that our campus is the only one that offers a more-or-less complete plan studies, and it features some unique specializations.

Anyway, I really hate the ITESM marketing, so I’ll stop there. I wrote the code of the class, fought a little with an array of objects, and polished the interface. After testing it, I checked all the code, searching for errors. I found a very stupid one, I forgot to close a ‘case’ statement, so the next statements would be executed after finishing the one with the problem.

I opened space within the code to write the last command of the of my class. It was poetical. The last command I wrote was:

break;





Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 Overview.

1 05 2009

I’ve just finished reading and incredibly mediocre post about Ubuntu Jaunty featured in WordPress frontpage. It contained a heavy amount of software, “helping” users to install software via command line in the way “sudo apt-get install (put your software here)”. Now that’s sad, as most people looking for information on installing something within Ubuntu will mostly be newbies, so it’s a quick way to scare them off. As I’m angry again, I decided to write this post to introduce the main new features of Ubuntu 9.04, in both the technical and the “mortal” way. May the force be with me… I hope I won’t end as that poor guy. So, here we go.

Ubuntu first impression.

The same installation since Edgy. Smart, easy and fast. As soon as you pop in the installation disk, the welcome screen guides you through. The installation (including tweaking original values) took me roughly 15 minutes, while an XP clean installation took more than 20. One of the main changes announced in the technical overview posted at Ubuntu Forums, was the increase of boot speed. Definitely, they accomplished it. It takes somewhere around a 25% less to boot, so it’s a noticeable change. Also, the graphic login screen has changed completely, it’s no longer the usual, beige + Ubuntu logo. It was replaced with a heavy coloured, dark screen.

As soon as the login is completed, GNOME 2.26 is loaded. The new stable version features major updates only. No new, shiny, bleeding edge software. Nothing noticeable here, as GNOME works very neatly and bug fixes rarely show up as it almost never fails. One thing I could see though, is that the CPU Scaling widget has been corrected. It no longer is randomly broken after each start.

The system introduces new features also, at system level, the “Computer Janitor” used to clean unorphaned packages, files and else consuming space in the disk. Another feature, is a new display panel (which I couldn’t use as my card is an nVidia, by the way) which helps with the connection of a monitor and/or TV. It was a daunting task to connect anything before, so it’s appreciated. Shame on me, as I won’t be able to use it for now.

Probably the most significant interface change in this version, is the new notification system. In previous Ubuntu version, an icon popped when an action was triggered. A rectangular icon popped up at the lower center of the screen each time the brightness or volume was adjusted, The network status was published as a cloud, Pidgin new messages were marked in Pidgin’s icons, and so on. Cannonical, decided it was way too decentralized, so they were bound to create a common place, were applications would publish their notifications. And again, it happened. They did it.

Notifications.

The new notification system is quite beautiful, yet useful. I only have a few regrets, which I’ll explain further. The new notifications idea model, as stated in Mark Shuttlworth’s blog, is to be a clean way to tell the user that something important is going on, without causing any clutter.

Notification system in action.

Notification system in action.

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