I’ve been working last days with my old K6-2 300 at home. I had some problems with large apps like Evolution or Firefox there, so I decided to look for another email client and another browser. Then I found two really cool ones.
Dillo is a very very light weight browser. It does not render web pages perfectly, but it’s OK if you just want to read.
On the other hand I found Sylpheed email client. It’s also light and has lots of plugins (even integration with dillo).
After three days working with them I think they’re perfect for all this kind of old machines.
Guys, you took the right decision:
Astronomers Relegate Pluto to Dwarf Status
Hi,
I’m here at work again, after 3 weeks at Köln learning German, meeting a lot of people and also having fun. What I can say about the city is “das Wetter ist schlecht aber die Leute sind toll” 
I arrived Galicia on Saturday, and after 20 days without using a computer (very nice experience), I retook my sound problems with mine Intel HDA sound card. The problem was very weird, I had sound once the system is up (the module was loaded also without problems) but every time I tried to modify the volume by software then the sound turned off. As usually I thought that the problem was mine, you know, bad configurations and so on.
But then I found this, basically the sound support for the Intel HDA was broken in the 2.6.16 series of the Linux kernel. So I updated my kernel to the 2.6.17 series and everything worked well
So, do you think that this is telepathy? Come on, check this out. This is the real (mmm, maybe virtual?) telepathy
I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird for two years, and I was (and I still am) very comfortable with it. Especially I like very much how it manages multiple pop accounts, the themes and mainly its speed.
But now, for some reasons, I began (again) using Evolution. I need it because its great integration with the GNOME desktop, and because it has some features that I need, for example, tasks and appointments management.
Despite Evolution has a lot of features, I think that the mail client application has nothing to do with Mozilla Thunderbird. Some examples
- Thurderbird differentiates between unread mails and new mails, with Evo is impossible to know if an unread message is old or new without comparing dates. Thunderbird notifies you with some graphical artifacts
- My pop accounts have their own Inbox,Sent,Trash etc… in the Thunderbird. I can’t do it with Evo (yes I know that I can use the virtual folders but it’s just a workaround, for example the sent or trash folders will be still global)
- When you have new messages in a thread, and the thread is contracted, Thunderbird shows you that you have this new messages by underlining the first message of the thread while Evo just shows you this first message as it was unread
- The thread view of Thunderbird is really nice and very attractive to the eye, it’s not as easy to identify threads in Evo
- The UI of Evo is too complex just for sending emails, maybe some UI work is needed
- And finally Thunderbird is really fast, I know that Evo is more than a mail client but the difference between these two ones is too big
I’m some other points that I don’t currently remember. I don’t want to say that Thunderbird is better than Evo, this comparison is neither an usability report nor a serious study I’m just, talking about some stuff that I miss in Evo. Evo has some other amazing features, for example, I did today a copy&paste from a wiki page with tables to a new blank mail with an unbelievable level of accuracy, I was really very impressed.
The first half is over, the second half must be played, who’ll win?. Ladies and Gentlemen place your bets .
A few weeks ago I have been working with the libgalago library by Christian Hammond. If you don’t know what is libgalago take a look at this article of the Linux Journal. Basically galago is a library that provides presence to applications.
This library had a little performance issue. libgalago uses DBUS for getting/setting presences, and all the calls through the bus were synchronous. Imagine a device with low resources, for example the Nokia 770, that uses libgalago. It could be that if you have a lot of contacts, an application that uses libgalago could get stalled due to it should wait for every call to the bus that requests for presences, contacts, services …etc.
I implemented an asynchronous implementation of three common libgalago calls:
- galago_get_service
- galago_service_get_account
- galago_account_get_presence
These new asynchronous calls created new race conditions, because they could need some data that could be freed before the call to the function was made. So it made sense to implement another function galago_cancel_call that cancels an asynchronous call.
I sent the patch to Christian Hammond and he accepted it. It seems that he thought that it could be very interesting to add more asynchronous calls in the future, so he made some refactoring in the library code instead of applying the patch directly. Now you can use the asynchronous calls of libgalago because these changes are merged in the HEAD of the libgalago repository.
Happy presence
I’ll begin posting some comments that I have in my pocket since past week. I had not much time all these days, so I have many things to say 
.
First of all, I’m a computer engineer, I like numbers, and I found this nice web that shows what’s special about most of numbers from 0 to 684.
My favourite one is the eight. Talking about the eight, have you ever read “The Eight” by Katherine Neville?. This is one of my favourite books, I really encourage you to read it, it’s marvellous. I’ve read “The Magic Circle” that is outstanding also. Katherine you’re a very very good writer, and you have only three books, so what the hell are you waiting for? Please write for us .
Yesterday was another intensive hackfest afternoon. But this time no one came neither with food nor drinks 
. We should review our policy about hackfests.
Anyway, Iago and me were reviewing our past work about DBUS. We were trying to port Gedit to use DBUS instead of its own “bacon-message-connection”. We coded some tests in order to know if we were understanding everything. Creating a client and a server was easy, and the API to perform a remote call to an object is easy too, but like other projects, I think there is a lack of documentation. This time we took some help from the DBUS missing tutorial
For example, we were in trouble because we were not able to connect to the session server. We read in the DBUS tutorial that libdbus automatically discovers the address of the per-session bus daemon by reading an environment variable. But what is its name? We found it, well we found them, because there are two: DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID.
Finally we were able to call our amazing method called foo from our really impressive GObject called Objectlet. What a great victory . Next week, we’ll begin analizing the “bacon-message-connection” code, and then after reviewing the requirements, I hope we’ll begin the port.
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Iago had a talk with Paolo Borelli this afternoon while I was rebuilding some Gnome 2.14 components. This is a little extract of the talk:
<pbor> there are other hacks that can be done though
<iago> I hope so
<iago>
<iago> sergio told me
<iago> something about dbus
<pbor> yeah
<iago> that would be interesting
<pbor> we would like to try to use dbus instead of bacon-message-connection
<pbor> something like evince and epiphany do
<iago> cool
<sergio> eo
<iago> is that a high priority task?
<sergio> I lost connection
<pbor> enforcing just one instance of gedit using dbus and the second time gedit is launched use dbus to pass the list of args to the running
So, while pbor was away (he had to pick somebody I began taking a look at the D-BUS tutorial and the evince source. The D-BUS tutorial can be found here
I finally talked with Paolo for a time, nice guy this Paolo
<pbor> sergio: yup... pretty much what we talked about the last time
<pbor> sergio: I know little about dbus to be honest, but it should be the usual deal
<pbor> sergio: register a connection (or whatever it is called in the dbus jargon) at startup...
<sergio> pbor: I know a little too, but I want to learn
<pbor> other instances check if the connection is there and if it's there they send a message through the bus
<pbor> usual rpc stuff
<sergio> yes
<pbor> the arguments passed to the following instances should be marshalled through the bus
<sergio> so you want dbus to share the gedit parameters of the first instance of the program with the other instances?
<pbor> no
<pbor> I mean
<pbor> first time gedit is launched it starts up the connection
<pbor> if then I run `gedit foo.c` on the command line
<pbor> gedit should connect through dbus to the running instance
<pbor> and pass it the argument 'foo.c'
<pbor> along with the command 'open'
<pbor> or something like that
<sergio> ok I understand
<pbor> it would be really neat if this could be wrapped up in a class/gobject
<pbor> but I am not sure if it is possible
<sergio> neither do I
<sergio> I'll take a look deeply
<pbor> great
<pbor> take the time you need
<pbor> I am not sure it's worth switching for 2.14, bacon-message-connection works well enough for now
<sergio> ok
<pbor> long term it makes sense to use dbus
