Gizlog.net

It was really long since I last wrote an entry. I’ve bought a new iPod Touch which I even took photos on so that I could write an entry about it, but I guess I’m to lazy.

Anyhow, back to the subject: Dreamhack Winter 2007. It’s my 3rd time at dreamhack, I’ve been at the last three dreamhack winter events. The first year was the funniest of course and last year my harddrive failed and I had to buy a new one which sucked. I haven’t downloaded that much this year, I don’t want another harddrive to fail. Would suck to break a laptop harddrive.

I was to lazy to try out Wii the last year, but we found Wii with Wii sports today and decided to try it out. Was kinda funny to play some tennis. I have no idea why I never tried it last year.

I might come back with some more info later.

The long await is over, Gutsy Gibbon is finally here. I know I said that I’m not a huge Ubuntu fan in the Feisty Fawn release blog entry. I’m still not a HUGE fan of Ubuntu, mainly because you don’t learn anything about Linux while using it. But I have to say it’s a great dist anyway, and thats the main reason I use it myself. I haven’t tried Gutsy Gibbon yet, but will install it in a minute or so. I’ll come back with a new blog entry (or update this one) once I’ve tried it.

Ok, Gutsy Gibbon installed. I have to say that my first reaction was “Oh god, please give back my old Feisty installation”. As usual everything didn’t work directly. I started off by installing nvidia-glx-new and used nvidia-xconfig to configure my xorg.conf. When I first tried to start compiz, which comes with Ubuntu now for some weird reason, the window borders and titlebar didn’t appear. A common error, had the same thing when I installed Compiz Fusion manually on Feisty. Used nvidia-xconfig again, this time by running “sudo nvidia-xconfig –add-argb-glx-visuals -d 24″. After I restarted x it was working just fine, all borders and title bars were back. Now it was time to get my old desktop look back, that was kinda easy due to backups I had. Sadly I lost my Compiz Fusion config, but I think my new config works just as good.

There are some small stuff I don’t like about Gutsy. For example, why do they have to install Compiz Fusion by default? Sure, it’s not enabled until the drivers are working and you enable it yourself. But still, the program is far from stable and should not be pre-installed on a dist.

GNOME, just like Ubuntu, has a six-months stable release schedule. And today it was time for 2.20 to be released.

The improvements in GNOME 2.20 include: Improved support for right-to-left languages; desktop search integrated into the file chooser dialog; convenient new features in the Evolution email and calendar client; enhanced browsing of image collections; simplified system preferences; efficient power management and incredibly accurate laptop battery monitoring. Developers receive more help with application development thanks to a new version of the GTK+ toolkit, improved tools, and a great new documentation web site.

Source (full change log): http://www.gnome.org/start/2.20/notes/en/index.html

Will we be able to play steam games under Linux without wine or cedega in the future? Valve has posted a job offer at Valvesoftware.com where they’re looking for senior software engineers to port windows-based games to the Linux platform.

Description
Lead engineer and architect on product integration into the highly available digital distribution platform called “Steam”. Utilize business/commerce background and engineering skills to drive next generation features for software developed by Valve.

Responsibilities

• Develop an understanding of Valve’s Internet business and player community and contribute creative web-focused design solutions to improve the experience of using Valve’s products
• Manage the operation of large clusters of machines running both Windows and Linux in a highly available system.
• Utilize knowledge of networking technologies and their appropriate use in large scale digital distribution systems and gaming platforms.
• Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.
• Test, document, and maintain large scale networking installations and their assorted protocols oversee and implement quality assurance of applications in house and third party games distributed on Steam™

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor in Systems Engineering (or equivalent).
• Requires two years of experience in systems engineering designing and developing communications software and hardware solutions including resolving problems surrounding real-time and non real time PC- based systems using C++ and network programming algorithms and their interaction with physical devices.

Experience must include providing research and documentation on solutions implemented.

After a long week of waiting it finally arrived. The reason it got delayed was because they didn’t have the memory card in stock, and the memory card itself got delayed due to holidays. But now it’s finally here, and I’ve tried it out a bit since yesterday. It’s my first DSLR camera. Actually, its my first camera ever. All other cameras I’ve been using has been the families camera.

The package I bought included a Canon EOS 400D, an EF-S 18-55MM lens, an EF 55-200MM lens, a BG-E3 battery grip and some other small stuff like battery and cables. I also bought a Lowepro Nova 2 AW bag and a Sandisk compactflash ultra II 8GB card.

So far I love the camera. The only “bad” thing I’ve noticed so far is that it’s a bit small. But I knew that even before I bought it. As long as you don’t have a huge lens you wont notice it that much. If you’re planning on using a huge lens which weights a lot you might consider using the battery grip to get more camera that you can hold on to.

Sadly I don’t have any picture that I’ve taken with the camera to show yet. But I’ll get there. Now when I got a neat camera, I might add a gallery section to the blog.

I’ve been thinking about switch from windows to linux for quite a while now. But every time I try it I usually mess something up witch I’m not able to fix and goes back to windows again. The dists I’ve tried the most are debian (etch) and ubuntu (6.06, 6.10, 7.04). And I tried ubuntu with both kde, gnome and xfce. But still, there was something which I didn’t like about it and decided to go back to windows again.

Last week I decided to give it another try. I installed ubuntu, which I’m not a big fan of, and everything went fine until I wanted to install adobe flash which doesn’t have x64 support. I booted back to windows and downloaded x86 version of ubuntu and installed that instead and I was back on track.

It was finally installed again. Now I started to play around some with the look of my desktop. I started of by downloading AWN to get a new, nice looking window navigator. I removed the bottom gnome panel to give more room for AWN and added a gradient background to the top panel. The text was still black thoo and hard to read, but that was nothing a 1 min google search didn’t solve. There we go, white text on a dark gradient background. But I’m not done with the desktop yet. Eyecandy are always nice, which made me install beryl. And of course I need some info about my system, and conky does that job just fine. Now I got a nice looking desktop. Well, half-nice looking desktop. Could be better.

Now its time for a music program. Started of with audacious which was nice overall. But I wanted a more “normal GUI” looking music player. I read about exaile and decided to try it out, havn’t changed my mind since. Just was I was looking for.

For the first time ever I’m happy with how my linux install turned out. And it feels like I’ll stay here for a while. Might try out debian etch in the future.

It seams like I have been writing alot about google lately, and that might be because google has been updated alot in the past three months. Heres another blog entry about google.

iGoogle is now themeable. You can chose from seven premade themes. And from what I’ve understood, they change a bit depending on weather (?) and time of the year. This is another step into the right direction from google. It’s not like other sites with multiple themes where you don’t recognize the site when you change theme. There’s some flaws thoo.

1. The theme does only apply for the “iGoogle” page (personal home page).
2. Some of the gadgets doesn’t get “themed”, for example the google calendar gadget.

Besides those two flaws, I love it.

It seams like google has no idea what colors they want. Three weeks ago I wrote about how google got a face lift, witch included changing the old “blue row” into a white gradient. Today it was changed back to the old blue row. However, it’s a bit darker than before.

Why can’t they create a new design and stick with it? How hard can it be to create a new design, let the employers test it and leave comments on it. When it’s done, launch it. I hate when a site change design from day to day just to test it out. It makes no sense. The design/layout should always be done and 100% working before you launch it.

I just read a news post about googles 12 last purchase, and saw that they bought a company which connect photos to geographic locations. Directly after I read that I checked out google maps and noticed that there was a new view option called “street view”. This new function allows you to get down to street view on google maps. An example can be found here. Whats next? Google makes a virtual copy of the whole world?

After quite some time using the same design/layout, google has been given a small face lift. A new “tool bar” has been added at the top of the page. From this tool bar you can access all of the different search pages like google images, google maps, google video but even some of their services like gmail and blogger.com. The old blue row with a darker shade of blue as a bottom border has been replaced with a new white row, nothing extraordinary, but at least it’s something.

The local google pages hasn’t been updated yet, they are still using the old design and most of them hasn’t been updated for a while. My guess is that it will take a while before we notice any changes to the local google pages. To access the new design you can visit http://www.google.com/.