Archives for November, 2010
Statler development
Nov 27, 2010 (about 1 year ago)
I am currently working towards putting together another CrunchBang Statler release. The last release was on June 25th, which was over 5 months ago. I guess 5 months might seem like a long time between development releases, but to be honest, not much has changed since June.
Naturally, there have been many package updates coming from the Debian Squeeze repositories, but there has not been anything that has broken the last CrunchBang Alpha release. In fact, I have been running the same “Alpha” release for the past six months and in my opinion, it has been more stable than any of the Ubuntu releases I used to run. This is more a testament to the great work of the Debian developers, rather than anything I have done.
Anyhow, I have decided that for the next release it would be a good idea to drop the “Alpha/Beta/RC” tags and opt to use a build date instead. I think this is a good idea because many people have commented that the last release was not really an alpha release, as it was too stable. For the most part, I agree with this. Obviously, the release still proved problematic for some people, but no more than any other release by any other distro.
So, what can people expect to see in the new release? More of the same. The new release will not feature any newfangled shells or anything like that. It will feature the same tried and trusted Openbox window manager and a selection of applications which Just Work(TM).
Expect the new release when it is ready. :)
The idea of “Dark”
Nov 22, 2010 (about 1 year ago)
Yesterday, I performed a rollout of some design changes to the CrunchBang Linux website. I basically changed the design from dark on light, to light on dark. The idea for the change came from reading this:
The new style in Ubuntu is inspired by the idea of “Light”.
Poppycock? Who knows, but as inspiration for the idea of “Dark”, it worked wonders for me. To be honest, the idea of dark is nothing more than having an idea to invert the colour scheme on the website. I would attempt to dress it up as something more, but I struggle with creative writing.
At this point I should probably state that when I started making the changes, it did occur to me that some CrunchBangers, especially the regular forum users, might not be overly enthralled with the new design, but by that time the idea of dark had truly taken hold, and so I cracked on with the redesign.
I did not consult the CrunchBang community about the new design. This was a conscious decision as I really did not want the idea of dark turning into an exercise in painting the bike shed.
Anyhow, the new design went live yesterday and as expected, the initial feedback was mixed. Some people seem to really like it, others, not so much. Again, this was totally expected, especially since the change in style was not very subtle.
At the moment, I am not sure if any of those who have expressed a dislike are genuinely appalled by the new design, or whether some of their negativity can be attributed to change itself?! Either way, these are early days for the new look and I think some time should be given before any changes are made, if they are to be made.
Personally, I really like the dark background and I would like to see it stay. A few people have suggested that an alternative theme could be offered, especially for the forums. I like this idea and I will probably implement it at some point.
Decruftification Services
Nov 13, 2010 (about 1 year ago)
This will not be news to anyone that knows of him, or his work, but Richard Querin is a very talented artist. I have long been a fan of his creations and my desktops have often sported his wallpaper designs. So, I was thrilled when I came across his Decruftification Services T-shirt design, it absolutely rocks!
With Richard’s permission, I have added his design to the CrunchBang Linux shop. $5 is contributed to the project with every T-Shirt sold.
Parsing Bazaar logs with PHP
Nov 13, 2010 (about 1 year ago)
I have recently been playing around with parsing Bazaar logs in PHP. I have been doing this because I thought that it might be fun to provide a rudimentary way of browsing my project Bazaar logs from my site.
Before starting this exercise, I thought that providing this feature might be somewhat difficult, but as it turned out, it was actually quite simple. Basically, I started by capturing the output of the command: bzr log --line -rN..N /path/to/bzr/repo. I then exploded the captured data into an array using \n as the delimiter. Once I had populated the array, it was then simply a case of manipulating the array values to obtain the revision numbers, before using the captured revision numbers to run more bzr commands.
A working example can be seen for my Whird project. Did I mention it was rudimentary?
“I just love…”
Nov 10, 2010 (about 1 year ago)
This afternoon, whilst I was listening to episode 173 of Linux Outlaws, I heard something which made my ears prick up. Fab said:
*chuckles*
P.S. Apart from the cheap laugh, this post exists as a test for feed enclosures.
Hello World!
Nov 9, 2010 (about 1 year ago)
I have decided to start using this domain for my own personal website. I first registered “corenominal.org” many years ago when I decided to start using corenominal as my system username. I have never really used this domain for anything other than email, although I did set-up a website using WordPress earlier this year. The site never really got off the ground and I think this was probably due to my aversion to using WordPress, but I digress.
Previous to using this domain, I had been using crunchbang.org, but I would really like to give that domain up and donate it to the CrunchBang Linux project. I will make an effort to move anything of note from my old site, not much I feel, to this new site and then set-up a redirect.
For anyone interested, the software I am using to create this new site is called Whird, and yes, it is the same clunky software I used to create my previous site, so beware of the dragons! Having said that, I have spent a little time rewriting Whird and I have cleaned it up in an effort to make it slightly more usable, at least for myself. Anyhow, I will write more about Whird in the future, but for now, I just wanted to say, “Hello World!”