Rubénerd!

While Polly is understandably optimised for Ubuntu, it runs well enough on Fedora to still be my favourite multi-column Twitter client! Here's the quickest way to get it running.

Getting the source

Polly doesn't ship with an RPM, but we can install it ourselves without too much trouble. Head to their Launchpad download site and download the latest source tarball. As of writing, the latest is:

Polly-0.93.4 (pre-alpha 3.4).tar.gz

Dependencies

The tarball's README list dependencies for Ubuntu, but it didn't take long to find their Fedora equivilents.

Ubuntu	Fedora
python-gtk2	pygtk2
python-dbus	dbus-python
python-xdg	pyxdg
python-notify	notify-python
python-oauth2	python-oauth2
python-gconf	gnome-python2-gconf
python-socksipy	python-SocksiPy
python-httplib2	python-httplib2
python-pycurl	python-pycurl
python-numpy	numpy
python-keyring	python-keyring
python-gtkspell	gnome-python2-gtkspell

And here they are on a single line to make installing easier. Depending on which spin you're running, you may already have most of these.

# yum install pygtk2 dbus-python pyxdg notify-python python-oauth2 gnome-python2-gconf python-SocksiPy python-httplib2 python-pycurl numpy python-keyring gnome-python2-gtkspell

These also bring in several dependencies, including:

atlas, gnome-python2-extras, gtkspell, libgfortran, python-nose

Installing

Now it's just a matter of extracting the tarball, and running the install script.

% tar xzvf "Polly-0.93.4 (pre-alpha 3.4).tar.gz"
% cd "Polly-0.93.4 (pre-alpha 3.4)"
# ./install

Restarting gconfd-2

If Polly works now, you're done! Add your accounts, and tweet away!

Even with the latest alpha versions, Polly still refuses to load on any of my Fedora machines unless I restart gconfd-2 before I run it the first time. According to the GConf site, the safest way to do this (other than outright killing it) is:

gconftool-2 --shutdown

The friendly Polly developers I've talked to on Twitter expressed surprise that this was still needed. This leads me to believe it's a localised Fedora issue, which means when I research this further I'll be filing a support ticket with them, and not Polly. We'll see.

Unfortunately despite my best efforts at staying at version 9, I had to update iTunes to 10.0.1 this afternoon so I could install the latest iTelephone update. Looking at the interface and how it's still the the most sluggish Apple application on my Mac, I'll still be using Exaile for actually playing music ;).

Cocoa iTunes! Come on, help a brother out!

hwbrowser is a slick little GTK application that probes your Linux machine's hardware and presents the results in a two pane window, in a similar fashion to OS X's Hardware Profiler.

Some things I like about it

• Fast, simple, no nonsense
• Self explanatory, no docs needed (or are provided!)
• Uses GTK but doesn't use any of the Gnome APIs, so you can use it on DEs like Xfce without too many dependencies
• For a FOSS application the icon is surprisingly well detailed and cute -- very important!

It's certainly no replacement for procfs or dmesg piped to less/more, but if you just want a quick and broad overview of the hardware on your system it's spiffy. It's also quite old, but given its not available on FreeBSD I could be forgiven for not knowing of its existance... right?

Almost works great on Fedora

I've settled on Fedora as my Linux distribution of choice; as far as I know hwbrowser isn't installed by default but it's available from the free YUM repos. The only caveat is for some reason the Hard Drive tab remains blank.

Fedora 13 is out but my machines are still on 12 at the time of this post.

Best. Error. Message. Ever!

A painful confession, don't laugh!

I have to come clean and admit I never really got past the dabbling stage in Adobe Photoshop, I grew up using and loving Fireworks (back when it was Macromedia). For my own uses with my crappy old Lumix camera it did everything I needed it to in a fraction of the hard drive space and with a much cleaner interface; people complain about The Gimp's interface but I think much of it comes down to what you're used to, I thought the Photoshop interface was nasty.

Anyway I'm getting sidetracked, with Fireworks I could also use it to make vector graphics. It was like a beautiful Swiss Army knife application to me; sure a proper steak knife and cork opener would work better than the miniaturized versions in an army knife but the army knife was just so gosh darn practical. Did I stretch than analogy too far?

Using The Gimp

When I graduated from high school and was no longer eligible for student pricing (at least I thought so at the time) I balked at the price and decided to force myself to use The Gimp. I had also just got one of the first Intel MacBook Pros (that I'm still using!) and it seemed a Universal version of Fireworks was a long way away. By comparison, third party developers had tirelessly ported the Gimp over to Intel within weeks, and the performance was so much better than Fireworks in Rosetta it wasn't funny.

It took a lot of getting used to, but now I have a photo and graphics editor that I can afford, with dialog boxes that have a sense of humour to boot :).

Personally the feature I found most confusing initially was the way the software dealt with layers. Particularly coming from a Fireworks background which lets you have multiple free floating elements in one space, The Gimp uses a separate layer for everything unless you specifically flatten it. Even if you copy a part of a layer and paste it, it becomes a new layer. Once you get your head around that everything becomes gloriously simple, but that mental roadblock was a tough one to get over!

Inkscape. Policecops!

When used with the really elegant and fun Inkscape software (which is also free and open source) you can do some amazing things. For example all the graphics on this site were made in Inkscape then imported into The Gimp for processing. Hardly a glowing endorsement because my tired old logo I originally designed when I was a kid is really quite terrible, but there you have it!

If you haven't used it in a long time, I encourage you to check it out again. The unified menubar and the inclusion of UFRaw in 2.6 has made it much easier to use.

The next step for me will be to look at it's scripting capabilities which are supposed to be insanely powerful.

I was having trouble compiling Gnumeric from MacPorts and Pan this evening. Turns out gtk2 was failing to build because of a problem with the tiff port.

root# port -v install gtk2
–––> Extracting tiff
On Mac OS X 10.5, tiff 3.8.2 requires Xcode 3.1 or later but you have Xcode 3.0.
Error: Target org.macports.extract returned: incompatible Xcode version
Warning: the following items did not execute (for tiff): org.macports.activate org.macports.extract org.macports.patch org.macports.configure org.macports.build org.macports.destroot org.macports.install
[...]
Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

If you're being given this error message too, as the error suggests you need to grab yourself a newer version of Xcode. Since I only just reinstalled Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro I installed the Xcode that came on the 10.5.6 DVD which as the error above shows is only Xcode 3.0.

What's curious is the Apple Software Update has never told me about a newer Xcode. Is it because you need to login as a ADC member first perhaps?

Anyway, lesson learned: make sure you have the latest Xcode before attempting to compile software or built ports on your Mac! It's not that it's darn obvious you should, but that we need reminding sometimes :).

Screenshot of my Armada M300 as a lean, mean Google Reading machine!

Given this is Sunday (as of two minutes ago), I thought it would be logical to post a Sunday blog post. That was an entirely irrelevant and superfluous sentence; then again so was this one. And this one too.

I've started getting into the habit in Adelaide where I'm studying to catch up on my latest Google Reader and Bloglines feeds first thing in the morning and before I go to bed on my cute 2002-vintage Armada M300 subnotebook in my room because it's interesting but also relaxing. At these times of day there isn't much light out so I have an even lower tolerance for Blazing White® website themes, so I decided to completely re-theme the entire interface of the machine to accommodate my picky eyes.

ASIDE: This bizarre post is mostly geared towards Linux, FreeBSD and whatnot, but the browser specific whatnot could be adapted if you have a Mac user or if you use that obscure operating system a small software company in Redmond makes.

Firstly, if you're a Mozilla Firefox or Opera user with Greasemonkey or an equivalent user style engine, I've found the Google Reader Dark-Blue-Grey user style by hronir to be by far the most readable dark theme. If your machine has limited screen real estate like mine, the Google Reader Maximize Vertical Space script by Chase Seibert makes a huge difference, and plays well with the colour changes — an important consideration!

Next the browser itself: I first downloaded the beautiful MidnightFox Dark Firefox Theme which I've had lots of success with on my MacBook Pro, but then I thought I might as well take advantage of the fact Firefox is a GTK+ application and use a theme that would affect all the applications I use. I really love the dark Xfce-dusk theme, so I downloaded the Xfce theme package and added the following line to my ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file. If you're using a desktop environment you'd probably want to use it's theme selector.

On Linux
include "/usr/share/themes/Xfce-dusk/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

On FreeBSD
include "/usr/local/share/themes/Xfce-dusk/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

On NetBSD or other systems with pkgsrc
include "/usr/pkg/share/themes/Xfce-dusk/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"

Finally I customised the window manager. I use dwm on my Armada M300 because it's ridiculously fast and lightweight even when running on very modest hardware, plus it automatically tiles windows. In the config.h file in the dwm build directory I changed the following lines then recompiled and installed (you could substitute these hex colours into whichever window manager you're using too):

[...]
static const char normbordercolor[] = #404e63;
static const char normbgcolor[]     = #404e63;
static const char normfgcolor[]     = #000000;
static const char selbordercolor[]  = #222a36;
static const char selbgcolor[]      = #222a36;
static const char selfgcolor[]      = #ffffff;
[...]

The results are what you saw at the beginning of the post. I love this colour scheme so much I've even started using it for when I'm writing code and assignments because it's so easy on my eyes when stared at for hours on end. Good times ^_^.

So that I can reference what I use in future posts, I've already written a list of security and privacy extensions I use with Mozilla Firefox and commented that they're the primary reasons I choose to use it over every other browser. Using a browser without those extensions (or equivalents) makes me feel naked and scared now! You can take that however you want.

I've installed far too many extensions over the years that I've later never used, but these are the usability ones that have stuck.

Adblock Plus

Absolutely essential, it reduces irritating distractions on pages and makes them render much faster because you're downloading less stuff. Some people complain about Adblock Plus. I ask how many of them own a DVR which skips ads, or how many of them have a WC break or a snack instead of watching sponsors of a sports event. Enough said.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey ets you modify the appearance and function of individual sites and pages by clicking and automagically installing scripts from sites such as UserScripts and UserStyles. Once you have scripts installed, they work transparently and so fast you can't tell they're even there.

I started using this when I thought Google messed up Reader's interface.

FireFTP

I mostly use the shell to quickly get sftp work done, but for tedious and repetitive tasks FireFTP makes it really simple. If you're one of the few who haven't tried it, it launches itself as a tab within Firefox and uses the split file manager metaphor like Norton Commander with the left pane showing your local drive and the right showing the remote server.

FireFTP is honestly polished enough to be a standalone application.

British English Dictionary

I find it curious that even if you explicitly download the "English (GB)" versions of Firefox, it still comes with the American spelling dictionary which battling with gets pretty old fast.

This extension is fairly old as far as extensions go, but it still works even in the lastest Firefox 3 builds. And besides, you could argue spelling doesn't change as fast as builds of an open source project do. Wait, ignore what I just typed; that's a Pandora's box I would rather leave shut!

If you don't like being scolded for not peppering your words with Zed, grab it!

FoxClocks

Adds a world clock to either your status bar or your bookmarks bar; I choose the latter.Insanely useful to have right in your browser where you're most likely to be viewing things and conversing with people from other parts of the world.

For example, I can check just by looking at it what the time is in Singapore when I'm in Adelaide and vica versa, as well as the eastern Aussie states, the UK, Talkeetna, Toronto, Tokyo... I thought that was some clever alliteration.

LORI

The Life-of-request info extension adds a really useful monitor to your status bar that shows how many seconds, how much data and how many requests a page took to render. Supposed to be used for people who want to monitor the performance of their own websites, but I use it for everything!

For example, did you know a Whole Wheat Radio page heavy with images and other media renders faster than many commercial websites? Wonder if it's faster than the RIAA or ARIA...

More Apple-esque themes

I discussed these late last year. In a nutshell, these themes make Firefox look much more Mac like. Firefox 3 was a huge improvement over version 2, but it still looks a bit kludgy.

Gnome Firefox 3 Theme

I use this theme for Firefox on my FreeBSD and Linux boxes. It replaces the default toolbar icons and styles with ones that match your other GTK+ applications. Fits really well with Xfce and window managers such as dwm or OpenBox where you're using mostly GTK+ apps like RoxFiler and Gnumeric.

This post is going to be part of a series on Xfce, originally posted on my university blog. I'm republishing them here in the hopes that others might find them useful or interesting. Cheers!

You may have noticed a few weeks ago I announced that I was moving my primary machine over to GNOME from KDE, mostly because the applications I use most heavily on FreeBSD and GNU/Linux are all GTK+ based and it seemed silly to run them in a Qt system. I'm a sucker for eye candy and visual consistency.

Well here I am now typing this on my newly reinstalled FreeBSD, Xfce desktop and it's running great.

You can be forgiven if you're new to the world of Linux, BSD and X11 in general if you've never heard of Xfce; it certainty has been given far less publicity than the heavyweights GNOME and KDE despite it actually being born around the same time. Unlike GNOME and KDE which strive to be the ultimate desktops with all the bells and whistles, Xfce is designed to be lightweight and fast while still being a usable and complete desktop environment out of the box (as it were). This means unlike vanilla window managers such as Fluxbox it also includes a file manager, desktop background and icon support, graphical configuration, panels and so forth. A full list of included goodies is maintained on the Xfce projects site.

The real kicker for me is that as with GNOME, Xfce uses GTK+, meaning all my most used applications such as Gnumeric, Abiword, Mozilla Firefox, The Gimp, Inkscape, Thunderbird and the X11 version of VIM all look really slick and match the rest of the system. I'm a sucker for eye candy and visual consistency. Wait, I already said that.

In the coming days I'll be posting many more entries about my experiences with Xfce including how I've customised and used it and some other tidbits I've picked up along the way. Stay tuned :-).

UPDATE: In fact I'm now trialling Xfce once again for my primary desktop because it satisfies all the criteria I outlined below as well as GNOME does, while being much more light weight.

It's funny, I'm really only this fickle when it comes to software!

With a somewhat heavy heart and conscience I moved my primary desktop from KDE to GNOME this week.

Yes, that's CC from Code Geass, the anime series Felix and I are watching!

While I think I still prefer KDE as a desktop environment, I think Gnome is more practical for what I do right now. Aside from Amarok and Ktorrent, virtually all the applications I use on a daily basis are GTK+ based, such as Gnumeric, Abiword, The Gimp, Gnucash, gEdit, Thunar (from Xfce, another nice DE), Firefox, Thunderbird... I could go on.

It is really nice to have a consistent user interface for the first time, where my applications and the desktop work and look the same. Having used GTK+ applications on KDE and Mac OS X for many, many years, it's certainly a refreshing experience.

Too many GTK+ apps running in GNOME

On the whole I also prefer the simple design methodology behind a lot of what the GNOME people are doing. Despite Linus Torvald's vocal opposition to it, I believe working hard to make interfaces simpler is an admiral goal.

I've still got KDE 3.5.9 on my Athlon XP desktop, but I guess I could say I'm a GNOME user now. For what it's worth, this is another reason why I love using free and open source software, if I don't like a particular user interface or environment, or I choose to use a another one, it is completely in my power to just slot in a different one. It's fantastic!