UnaX.dk

10Mar/111

Playing around with docks in Ubuntu

After growing a bit tired of the regular Gnome interface I thought that I would spice it all up by trying to ad a dock to hold all my launchers and such. This made me go search for all kinds of different possibilities and as always the Ubuntu Forums is a great place to start looking for something. Never have I met a community which is so friendly and eager to help when you have some trouble with a component or maybe need advise to figure out what you should do.

After hunting around, I came up with three different alternatives I would try Docky, AWN and CairoDock.

So far I've been playing around with Docky and AWN, but am still waiting to try me luck with CairoDock. I'll share how you install AWN (as that is how far I've gotten with my project so far) and also look at how easy (or not) I found it:

At first I had problems with getting more than one dock in AWN, which I really couldn't understand. I had seen several nice screenshots of other peoples user interfaces and they had somehow managed to get it done, but no matter what I did in the settings, I just couldn't figure out what to do. After some searching however, I did manage to find a post that gave me the possibility to do exactly what I wanted.

I did however mean that I had to make sure that I got rid of the old installation of AWN, as it wasn't available in the regular Ubuntu repositories. You need to use the AWN from the AWN-testing PPA.

First you remove the one you might have installed already by opening your terminal and entering the following:

sudo apt-get remove avant-window-navigator avant-window-navigator-data awn-settings awn-applets-c-core libawn1 vala-awn && sudo apt-get autoremove

This removes the core packages that AWN is using and by adding the 'sudo apt-get autoremove' you remove all the unused dependencies too, so you don't have any unused packages that might conflict when you are going to install the AWN trunk.

Now we have to add the AWN-testing repository, so we get the possibility to install it and also update later on:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:awn-testing/ppa

Now do an update to allow you to get the contents of the PPA:

sudo apt-get update

Now we have all the packages we need avalible to play around with AWN, so now we execute the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator-trunk avant-window-navigator-data-trunk python-awn-trunk awn-settings-trunk awn-applets-python-core-trunk python-awn-extras-trunk awn-applets-python-extras-trunk awn-applets-c-core-trunk awn-applets-c-extras-trunk

Now we're almost done installing AWN, but to make the different helpers work, we have to install DockManager which luckily is included in the PPA for AWN:

sudo apt-get install dockmanager-daemon dockmanager

With this last install, we now got everything we can to start playing around with AWN. Simply start up Avant Window Navigator from your menu by clicking 'Applications' -> 'Accessories' -> 'Avant Window Navigator'. This gives you a standard bar, with a few things on it. The standard launchers you'll have is the AWN control panel, a terminal, Firefox and Rythmbox.

I've made a little slideshow you can where you can see the five different settings tabs you have available in the AWN settings, simply start it by clicking the AWN logo below:

It is here you make the action that is setting up AWN to your needs. You can chose all the usual things that are available for such an application, amongst others the size of the icons, the orientation of the bar (do you want the dock in the bottom, the top or maybe even on the side?), the style of how the dock acts and so on. It is also here that you decide what helpers and applets that you want to run on your docks.

Below you see my main dock, which has no unusual applets or anything on it. It's just a standard dock with the currently running applications:

My main AWN dock

As I mentioned it's not very interesting, but the only thing I do from this is launch applications and swap between them and as you can see I'm still in the progress of setting them up. Thus, I've not gotten very far with it, but I'm still working on it and I will show you the progress in a later post when I've made my final decision on what dock to run.

I have added another dock so far, this one is containing some of the different informations I like to have at hand when using my computer. It's nothing special, but still I find it useful so far:

Another dock!

As you can see I have a gMail applet running that shows when I get new mail (the star shows that I actually have unread mails). Next to it I have the notification area, that show when someone message me, Gwibber and the likes. I like knowing how the weather is, even though I'm sat right next to a window looking out and I can tell you right now that I'm having some connectivity issues as it's most definitely not 5 degrees Celsius and sunshine outside. I've also added a network monitor, which underlines my connectivity issues, as there is no traffic what so ever going on at the moment. Finally the date and time, which has become essential for me as I need to know when I have to go to bed...

That is my current set-up after playing with AWN for 30 minutes time (not counting all the time it took me to find out that I needed the AWN-testing PPA) and as you can see it's all very basic and simple so far. It will probably evolve later on when I've gotten more comfortable with it, but I think it's rather simple to find the helpers I've needed for now. I can't yet tell how hard it is to find special applets and helpers yet, but I will chime in when I know.

I hope this could answer a few questions on how to play around with AWN and start your own journey into nice docks in Ubuntu. Feel free to comment, point me towards better alternatives or what not, as I'm always open to some constructive criticism and suggestions.

Filed under: Linux, Ubuntu 1 Comment

9Mar/110

Canonical merges UDE and UNE

Today Canonical announced that they're going to merge the two editions of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Desktop Edition and Ubuntu Netbook Edition into one edition which will be known as Ubuntu.

This means that Ubuntu is changing back from the change they made in 2005, with the release of Ubuntu Server Edition, and making it more simple than it can be for new users of the operating system. According to Gerry Carr at Canonical, this is happening as they've reached the point where it doesn't matter on what form factor you're running Ubuntu on as the user interface will run just as well.

One of the reasons behind this is of course that from Ubuntu 11.04 (Oneric Ocelot), Unity will be the new default shell. Unity was originally developed for Ubuntu Netbook Edition, but apparently they feel that we're at a point where it'll work equally well on a netbook, laptop or a desktop computer.

The question will now stand whether or not this will mean that Gnome will, at some point, be removed entirely from Ubuntu or will continue to live on as an option (without installing it yourself). At least it might seem that with the focus on getting Unity up to scratch, Gnome might suffer on Ubuntu. Only time will tell.

I'm not really sure about this change from Gnome to Unity as the standard shell, as I've had nothing but trouble with Unity myself. No matter if I've been working with it in the Ubuntu Desktop Edition or when I was playing around with the Ubuntu Netbook Edition. For some reason it just didn't seem right for me and it made me frustrated and I ended up switching back to comforts of Gnome. That said, I've never been very good at playing around with user interfaces (which my upcoming post about installing AWN as docks might show), so some people might not agree with me on this.

However, this doesn't mean that Canonical have lost the fight about creating a good operating system for netbooks and according to Gerry Carr, the download figures for the Netbook Edition have been booming, but as mentioned earlier in the post there is no longer a need for several different editions.

Ubuntu Server Edition will live on as a separate edition of Ubuntu, but will also undergo a slight name change to make it all a little more simple, and will from now on be known as Ubuntu Server.

From my point of view it'll be interesting if this change of names and reduction, or merge if you want, of editions will make more people willing to try the jump away from Windows and OSX and plunge into the wonderful world of Linux.

Filed under: Linux, News, Ubuntu No Comments

7Mar/110

I sold my soul…

...to the devil. Or the be more precise, I've decided to add Google AdSense to my blog and forum. I've always been against ads, but at some point I had to realise that generating a little income would be a good idea. It's not like this website have loads and loads of visitors, but I still feel that it's an opportunity I should take as I would love for the site and forum to be self sustainable. I've decided to go with nothing but text ads, as I feel these are the least intrusive when you're reading blog posts or scanning a forum.

This is a short update as nothing new has really happened of late, but I thought the fact that I've decided to have ads was a big enough change for it to merit an update.

As a short teaser, I can tell you that I'm in the process of customising my Ubuntu 10.10 install with AWN docks and I might just decide to make an update about that very soon. Also the fact that I have to reinstall XBMC Live on my Shuttle XS35GT might provide some information on setting up such a thing.

Enjoy!

Filed under: News No Comments

25Feb/110

When a region dies…

When a region in the fantastic game NationStates dies, especially one of the older and most powerful ones, someone will always try to steal the glory of it all. It's a sad fact that Gatesville has run it's course, ending in Gates the God deciding to eject and ban all the members of Gatesville, moving himself to the Pacific lodging a message about coming there to die. Many years of fighting against the World Assembly (the former United Nations) and their attempts to force laws, acts and other evil things over the heads of poor countries, is over.

Or is it? Despite this sad decision by Gates the God, some of the nations from the former Gatesville has decided to make a stance, to keep on the fight against the evil of the World Assembly. My great nation, The Holy Thiefdom of Hrotsijka, have decided to do this from the comforts of the Holy Moosean Empire, where 42 other nations from the former Gatesville have gathered to continue the fight. We're trying and will continue to do so!

A new region called Gatesville has emerged from the ashes, but let me warn you straight away! The new Gatesville (which I won't link to) was created seconds before the old members of the original region could do it, by a puppet nation called The Confederacy of Gate Fences Make Gates, clearly indicated by the measly 26 million inhabitants in the puny country. This shows us that this is a nation merely created to ride the former glory, respect and name of Gatesville. Not cool!

Enough about all that and let's talk a little about some of the new features added to NationStates during this 'Feature February' as Max Berry calls it. Firstly I'll talk about the new trophy icons, which were added on the 5th of February. It looks like this (taken directly from the country profile of the glorious Hrotsijka):

To put it simply, these trophy icons shows how your country fares in the daily world census updates and as you can see Hrotsijka has done neither good nor bad during the first 19 days of this feature. I could sum it up a little by saying that we're amongst the top 10% in the world in the 'Most Cultured' category, in the top 5% in the 'Most Beautiful Environments' and the one that makes fearsome leader Maxim Gromyko most proud: in the top 5% in the 'Highest Police Ratios' category!

It's a fun new feature, which shows the efforts of how your country fares, instead of just being placed on a list. As Max Berry puts it: 'For many years, the World Census has ranked nations. Eight, in fact. Eight years and a bit. But the glory (or shame) has been fleeting. You're ranked, then forgotten. Who was #1 yesterday? Which scale is your best? Nobody knows.'. And I can only say that I agree, it was about time that we saw a change like this, so Max I salute you! It is great that you get to show of exactly how you were placed in a census and I know that you're all jealous...

But this is not all that has changed, because as of the 20th of February we've gotten a nice new feature that adds graphs to our nation profiles. This means that we now get a graphical representation of different statistics, as an example I give you the leading causes of death in Hrotsijka:

This is a neat feature, that gives leaders of nations a better overview of what is going on within the nation, but also gives some nice and quirky information that you can ponder. For instance, I'm wondering how 6% of deaths in Hrotsijka happens when people get lost in the wilderness. I do know that it's a massive nation, with it's 10.314 billion inhabitants, but it seems like many people tend to be morons!

As if these two new and wonderful changes to the game, Max claims that they're not done doing changes this fantastic 'Feature February': 'And Feature February isn't done yet! There's one big new feature still to come! '. I guess all we can do is sit down and wait to see what the big new feature will be, I have my fingers crossed for something so big that it's going to blow my mind! Like maps of countries or something like that, a feature I would love to see.

To sum up this massive post about one of my favourite browser based past times I'm still enjoying playing this great game, even 7 years after signing up. Seven years of playing NationStates and I'm still thrilled about getting a new issue that will change my country, still amazed that my citizens pay a flat 95% income tax without complaining and wondering when I get the two issues that will allow me to enter a custom nation capital and religion. Also, I've added a sidebar widget which shows the latest RSS feed updates from my glorious Hrotsijka, so you all can see what is going on.

Tagged as: features, Gatesville, Holy Moosean Empire, Hrotsijka, nationstates, World Assembly No Comments

10Feb/110

Swoooooooooosh!

The time keeps slipping and suddenly we have no idea of where we are... Or something like that. At least this is another way of saying that an update was needed.

It's been a busy few months after getting a job and thus it makes it rather hard to even think about this website. So another pointless update about the futility of mankind and all that.

I small update can be made however and that is that I've been working on making a new website with a friend, for the new fan section at PARKEN stadium. It can be found at s12.dk and is in Danish, so enjoy

Filed under: Misc No Comments

8Sep/100

Why bother?

So, let's update this bastard! We'll do it short, nice and hard.

To sum up what has been going on lately, could be summarized in one single word: Nothing. It seems that getting a job is a tad harder than first anticipated, so currently I'm walking around thinking about starting studying again. After all it might be better to claim that you're an software architect instead of being a computer science major. It seems that people don't know what they want when searching for new employees...

Ah well, update, update, UPDATE!

Filed under: Misc No Comments

16Jun/100

Wowhead interviews Ghostcrawler

In anticipation to the upcoming Cataclysm expansion to World of Warcraft, Wowhead.com has an exclusive interview with the key system designer at Blizzard, Ghostcrawler.

You can read the interview here. Ghostcrawler is always good fun and we even get the answer to the very important question 'Where's our moose?!'

Filed under: World of Warcraft No Comments

13Jun/101

Back to the future

Cheerio! I guess it's about time I present all of you patient readers with a new update to this blog. It's been quite a while since I last updated, as always, but a few things has happened to the web server, which means the appearance of the blog has changed. The major change has been that we finally managed to go from PHP 4.3 to PHP 5.2.13. This means that we're finally able to update our plugins and themes to the newest versions.

After working for quite some time to get a suitable solution for moving the forum from phpBB3 to vBulletin. The main reason for this has been that I was getting tired of how hard it was for me to install modifications and other things in phpBB. However, I am not made of money and after playing around with vBulletin Publishing Suite 4.0.3 and ImpEx 1.96 I decided that the end result of an import, simply wasn't good enough for me to spend around $300 for this software.

Also I had problems, or in other words: 'no success at all', with importing my blog posts from this WordPress blog into the CMS, I simply decided to give up. This meant that I was a bit unhappy, as I had hoped to be able to have all my sites combined into one, so I didn't have to take care of all the different installations.

However, I'm a persistent fellow, I decided to look around for ways to integrate phpBB into WordPress and fell over the solution called WP-United, which has the exact abilities I were looking for. Getting the same layout on both blog and forum by integrating the phpBB forum into the blog.

This is one of the major reasons for this fantastic new layout on the blog. I've been testing around with an offline copy and found that this theme is the best for integrating the before mentioned features. The only reason it isn't quite done yet, is that I'm currently working on perfecting a SubSilver2 theme, as that is the one my users like.

That was a short update, where I didn't mention the ongoing World Cup at all, before here! Laters!

Filed under: Code, News 1 Comment

9Mar/100

Larman bashing and Fowler appreciation

Now that we, somehow, have managed to revive this, let's have some fun. Last post was one of the updates I've made that generated the most comments, since I called Rihanna a talentless something. Back then people felt the need to tell me that I was just 'jealous'. Actually what this guy said was:

Nahshon aka Young bwoy - 'r u stupid rihanna album and single is the worst u r fucking stupid her new look is sexy and she had a good year ur just mad cause u dont have the fame'

What do you answer to a comment like that? Well I decided to take the high road and simply said 'As to fame? Why on earth would I want more fame than I already got?'. Apparently that kept 'Nahshon aka Young bwoy away' from commenting again... I don't know exactly what scared him away, maybe he realised that I'm so famous (*cough*) that he could not compete with me. Maybe he just thought that my comment was useless, who knows. That said, I did like it and felt like the king of the world with my 'witty' comment.

I felt happy back then, some strange people actually came by and began to comment on my posts? Apparently the entry in question was caught on MSN Music and Google News. It was fun! So let's just take a short break and all thank 't0mmmmmmm' over at onehertz for making a theme for WordPress, which has brilliant SEO. Also the fact that the domain UnaX.dk is nice and easy to remember helps strange people stop by. Anyhow, let's get back to the post.

In a comment I myself made, to my last post, I was threatening with making a pop-quiz with the names of Danish kings. However, I'm not that evil and thought we should do some rambling about something useful instead, so let me introduce you all to a nice fellow called Martin Fowler. He is an expert in design and architecture of enterprise software, which you might think sound a little boring. However, he tends to have some great ideas and since I've decided to have a focus on UML in my dissertation, he is slowly becoming a big inspiration as to how I'm going to do this. I could just decide to follow the teachings of Craig Larman and do the UML the hard and tedious way, but that would lead me into thoughts of hanging myself from my living room window with my mouse cord. Mainly because his book 'Applying UML and Patterns' is, in his own words:

'...a standard university text in many countries as an introduction to analysis and design of software-intensive systems.'

That's what he has to say about his book. Notice the word I decided to highlight in bold, introduction. Because that is the main problem I have with the book by Larman. Everything he writes is just too simple, he doesn't give you any alternatives to what diagrams are actually needed in different situations, nor does he give any sceptic views on whether a model is actually useful at all. If I had to follow Craig Larmans advice, all I would be doing for my dissertation was creating and maintaining models. Again I think this would indeed make me want to hang myself. However, if you know nothing about UML, then Larmans book is a decent place to start. Yes, only 'decent' as I'm sure there is better alternatives out there. According to our school though this book is 'the best of a lot of bad books'.

The thing is that we're doing our dissertation in our own form of 'agile Unified Process', which means we're not entirely within the constraints of the regular form of Unified Process. This means that we've decided to take some elements from XP and add them to UP. So far we haven't found a name for it, but I can name some of the things from XP we've decided to work with: Pair programming and test first.

By doing this I've been reading a little and as some people have the idea in XP that you're not supposed to use UML, Martin Fowler has written this great article about it, Is Design Dead?. Here he touches some of the things that makes me most happy about UML. The idea that you only should do diagrams that adds value to you, is just fantastic. The way I see this is, that you don't have to sit and make tedious sequence diagrams or class diagrams which you have to spend hours to keep up to date, when the code changes. Actually instead of using professional software, you can simply write it on a piece of paper, a napkin or whatever you have within hands. Only do it if it adds value to you!

Combining this article with Martin Fowlers book 'UML Distilled', which in my eyes are a much better, and lighter, book than Larmans 'bible' I've gotten a much better and more useful sight on UML in general. On a side note, Fowlers book is not an introduction, but more a book you can use if you already know UML, hence why I said that Larmans book is a 'decent' way to get introduced to UML. Now I'm more positive when it comes to UML, because it doesn't have to be all that bad.

This brings me to another point with graces the issue of UML as documentation or as a architecture defining tool. After all there are many different uses for UML, mainly the reverse engineering and model-driven architecture approaches has been in my mind. Because how important is UML as documentation? And how important is it when you want to do model-driven architecture?

I guess that is something I should try and explain in my next blog post...

Mentioned books:
Craig Larman - Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development
Third edition
ISBN: 0-13-148906-2
Buy at Amazon.com

Martin Fowler - UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language
Third edition
ISBN: 0-321-19368-7
Buy at Amazon.com

Now that was a very long ramble about something most people might find boring, but however something that is important, at least to me. As I know some of you have had these strange cravings of more updates to the blog, so here you go.

Just to end this post, I've decided to delete the UnaX.dk Beta site and the UnaX.dk Wiki. Mainly because some idiots had completely spammed the Wiki and filled the database. Also I've decided to move the MySQL database that this blog was running on from 4.0 to 5.1. Mainly so I could update it to 2.9.2. All this said, that's it for me and I hope you all have a nice time, doing whatever you're doing...

Klaus over and out!

Filed under: Code, Design, News, School No Comments

4Mar/100

You can’t force me! Even though you are the king…

Why, hello there! So, you're still stopping by every now and then to see what is going on? I guess I'd better write something then...

First of all, let's just summarise what has been going on in my life since my last post (it's been a while you know!). The last post was about the project I had to do in C# and as you all know, if you actually read the post, I was making a client to search for items on Amazon.co.uk. Unfortunately it didn't go as well as I planned, but I did make a client which enables you to search for books. The client however is rather slow and you can't buy directly from it, which was the main goal. I'll give you a few screen shots of it (as always clicking the image will start a slide show):

Currently this is all that the client is capable of doing. One of the major drawbacks with using the free version of the Amazon.co.uk web service is that you can only get 10 results in return. It works as a little mock-up client, but not as something you'd use as a strong alternative to the normal website. That could be helped by paying for use of the web service of course, but I'm just a poor student...

If you should have sick tendencies and a deep desire to try the client itself, you can get it right here! If you decide to do so, you'll need to unpack the program with a program that support the .7z file format. I recommend 7-zip which is nice and free or you could go for WinRAR, which is free for 30 days (however you can keep using it after the 30 days, by just bypassing the warning, so I guess you could call it free too). Simply double-click the .exe file and have fun. If you get an error message saying something about 'exception' and 'JIT-debugging' just chose to continue the program.

To get up to more recent times, as all this was back in late December and early January, let me tell a little about what is happening right now. Currently I'm working on my dissertation, together with 3 other guys from my class. We're working on creating a support system for BluePosition, who you can read a little more about by following the link. I can't really tell much about the details of the application we're creating, but I can tell you that once again we're working in C#... I can also tell that I myself are working on becoming a little better within the horrendous world of UML, no something I would advise people to work hard with. The project will end on the 16th of April and by then we should hopefully have implemented a few use-cases and made some good reports to hand in for the school, so we can defend the dissertation in style...

So now you might think a little. Yes I know it may sound strange, but you might. To be a little more specific I'm talking, once again, about the title of this blog post. Well, I've been looking a little at the Danish royal line, because I was bored. So I thought I'd recite it to you, just because I can and you're already reading this. I'm going to bore you!

These first ones are not 100% proven, so I'll keep the years they were reigning out of this part: