Most of us outside the borders of the USA know this, but nothing we do or say will probably have any kind of effect on the status quo: The American government is supported by an extremely efficient propaganda machine that ensures that the majority of its citizens will support it in its most barbaric of ventures. The big problem is that this propaganda machine consists primarily, contrarily to tradition, of “independent” media entities.
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. If there’s a Cancel button, it should be to the left of the default button.”. Gnome seems to imply that the default button should be on the bottom right, with other buttons to its left, which is more or less consistent with the Apple guidelines.
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. Cygwin also has to deal with the ugly text file / binary file distinction on Windows, and therein lies the problem. Make sure that any filesystem from whence you will be committing with Cygwin CVS is mounted with the textmode option (and not binmode). Running “mount” will tell you if this is the case or not.
Much happened this weekend. Because many readers have fantastically short attention spans, I’ll break my report up into clearly marked sections.
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. No amount of restarts, reboots, hard drive reseats (yes, I do mean “reseat”) and cursing seems to remedy this. When I returned today (i.e. after almost 4 days of rest and relaxation for both me and the hard drive) it started up without a hitch.
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. So, following this guy’s example, we’d have a different GUI program (each with its own freshmeat entry) for configuring each line in the mutt configuration file.
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. The fact that they are funded and advised by the Americans does not improve this situation.
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. These computer people however, have come to the ridiculous conclusion that they belong to the genus and species Homo Superior and have therefore deserved the right to live in a permanent haze of condescension towards others.
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.
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 2.5.x.