Aisleriot has received love from a variety of quarters mostly from Vincent Povirk, Richard Hoelscher and myself. If we are to rule the desktop then we must have the best solitaire ever. The improvements are: Cats walking on the keyboard no longer start a new game. I make no warranties regarding cats dancing on the…

There has been quite a bit of progress with gnome-games since 2.10 so it is time to write about some of what has changed. First up is Mines. The changes are mostly due to Richard Hoelscher, myself, and Marco Colombo. When you make the first move you are now guaranteed to clear a useful number…

The conversation on DDL has recently turned to GNOME 3.0 and what magic number that means. There are some strong opinions that a complete rewrite will be a mistake. I agree completely, but I had to try an experiment to truly believe. In the GNOME 2.9 development cycle I decided to rewrite Same GNOME. I…

Life in brief: I’m still job hunting. I actually got an interview for one position, but not the job. Unfortunately I’m stuck with living in Dunedin for the next year at least. Not that Dunedin is bad, just job opportunities for my skills are few and far between. I can’t make it to Guadec –…

I was good this year; I only spent $5 and only made one trip. Early afternoon turns out to be a decent time to go. The initial explosion of bibliophilic vultures has dissipated and the after-school bunch hasn’t arrived. Some friends say it was still busy at 1am, I have found 7am not bad and…

This picture of a badly out-of-focus cable was taken in my kitchen. Once upon a time these two wires were connected to a phone, an ADSL modem and an entire wall. The phone and modem are in a box, the wall is in pieces on the back lawn and I am living next door. I…

Yesterday was ANZAC day. For those reading this from outside Australasia, ANZAC day is a half-day holiday commemorating people who were killed during a war. ANZAC itself stands for Australia-New-Zealand Army Corps and refers to the soldiers who fought from Australasia who fought in World War I. Traditionally the commemorations centre around Gallipoli on the…

Those of you who remember xresedit with fondness (yes, both of you) might find g-inspector interesting. You can’t actually edit anything like you could with xresedit, but you can get a very good overview of what GTK thinks it is doing with your app, including drawing you a nice widget-tree. Its UI isn’t great, but…

About a week ago I was trying to organise my desktop at home and was struck by the problem I had keeping my various collections of launchers on the panel organised. In this case there are three distinct groups with quite different function: application quick-launch, specialised commands and commonly used folders. Up until then I…

Did you celebrate Cosmonaut’s Day?