eplanet!

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a replacement for e17xplanet. This will be a full-blown module for e17 instead of a poxy script, which will be much nicer.

I’ve had to learn C to do this, which has been a painful process for me and all the other people I’ve been badgering for help. (Thanks to the guys and gals on #edevelop and ##c!) However, I’ve now got to the stage where I can successfully draw a planet on the background, so I’m fairly close to getting something that’s usable, if not yet massively functional. There’s a few loose ends to tie up (not leaving loads of files laying around, for instance), and it appears to be leaking memory rather badly (give me garbage collection any day), but once those are slightly more under control I’ll put something up for people to try.

August 25, 2010   Posted in: eplanet  No Comments

Matlab Icon

There’s a new icon for Matlab on the Linux Icons page. This uses an SVG icon created by malte.natlab icon

August 7, 2010   Posted in: Icons  No Comments

Oh, they can be wrong. Very wrong.

The latest Lenor advert starts with the sentence “1,000 voters can’t be wrong”. Given that over 500,000 people voted for the British National Party in the general election, I beg to differ.

June 7, 2010   Posted in: Marketing  No Comments

Wiper Confusion

I recently had cause to spend a few weeks on a ship, sailing the seas in search of scientific data. The crew on board were friendly, kind and generous to a man, and the officers allowed us onto the bridge to watch the waves and wildlife as often as we pleased.

Now, at sea the weather can often get a little rough, so like all good vehicles, this ship had windscreen wipers – six of them.

Very sensible, and controls for the wipers were placed all the way across, so anybody (including us land-lubbers) could clean the windows if we felt the need. At least, that’s the theory: in practice, we just asked the officers to do it for us. Why? One look at the control panel will enlighten you (click to enlarge):

This control is impossible to understand without training. It is possible to control all six wipers from the panel, which is presumably why there’s duplicated symbols on some buttons. Of those symbols, I could hazard a guess as to what some of them might do; the zero probably switches off the wipers, but how about the spot? What does the light bulb do? It doesn’t illuminate the panel at night – I tried. The horizontal lines are meaningless too – if I had to guess, I’d say they were something to do with wiper speed, but these wipers have only one speed. Their function remains a mystery. As for the duplicated buttons, they apparently control different sets of wipers, but there’s no indication of which ones. The officers had learned the mysterious art of controlling the wipers, but all admitted that it would take too long to teach us. If we wanted the windows cleaned, we just asked.

Now, some of the controls on the bridge are incredibly complicated, and need to be – ships aren’t simple things to work with. But if the windscreen wipers can’t be made understandable, or at least easy to explain, then there’s something amiss. Whoever Wynn Marine are, their interface designers leave something to be desired.

June 4, 2010   Posted in: Design  No Comments

Disabling GDM in Ubuntu

There are various reasons for installing a full Ubuntu desktop, but wanting to run the system in text-only mode by default. Perhaps your machine is a server, and you want as much RAM available as possible for its server activities. Maybe it’s an LTSP server, which needs all the nice GUI stuff for its clients, but doesn’t need them itself. Or perhaps you just did a standard install and don’t need a GUI that often. Whatever the reason, your goal is to disable GDM, the graphical login manager. Fortunately, this is simplicity itself.

GDM’s configuration is in the file /etc/init/gdm.conf. At the top of this file are two commands that specify when GDM starts, and when it stops. In Lucid Lynx (10.04), these lines look like this:

start on (filesystem
          and started dbus
          and (graphics-device-added fb0 PRIMARY_DEVICE_FOR_DISPLAY=1
               or drm-device-added card0 PRIMARY_DEVICE_FOR_DISPLAY=1
               or stopped udevtrigger))
stop on runlevel [016]

All we need to do, then, is to alter the start criteria. The easiest way is to replace the multi-line start command with this:

start on runlevel []

The runlevel approach tells GDM to start or stop when a given runlevel is entered. And if we give it an empty list on runlevels, it never starts. Simple!

May 16, 2010   Posted in: Linux/Ubuntu  3 Comments