We came, we saw, we moved on.

It is sad to see the demise of Metacity, but its legacy will not be forgotten. Obviously there is Mutter, and of course Compiz, but i think most modern window managers owe a tip of the hat to Metacity; it brought a love of standards, simplicity and of course integration.

It was not without the doubters though, and it certainly felt unloved toward the end (despite the ongoing work of Thomas Thurman and whoever wrote the compositor? Ian…?). The problem with Metacity, for me, was that it was just never that predictable, I’m not really fussy with focus issues but Metacity still seemed to grate on me, it always felt very incomplete, it always felt just not right - probably because people (I blame Ubuntu, but I blame them for everything) jumped on the Compiz bling wagon far too early when what was needed was boring bug fixes to Metacity for a better window manager experience. The problem with Compiz was that it became very apparent that those who shouted loudest were more interested in how their menus exploded rather than how their windows were managed.

The Metacity blog was always an interesting read as well which I guess will go out the window now, people just aren’t interested in window managers unless a) they tile (which is foolish) or b) they have stupid effects. I hope Mutter is a solid window manager with tasteful warranted effects that aid usability and maybe even accessibility. Gnome-shell right now look wholly underwhelming but that might be a good thing?

Metacity still has the best simple composite manager for my money and I’d love to see something like it in Openbox ;)

All good things must come to an end, but all bad things can continue forever

It has come to my attention that I have generally knocked out a blag every month, it seems a shame to break this amazing run.

I have nothing much to reckon really, but I have started to learn how to use GIT, which is sort of interesting. I’m using github as it seems the easiest way to get started and i don’t know enough to overly criticism it in anyway. I am more or less incapable of coding to an acceptable standard, so my repos are all theme related. I hope to add a couple of little hacks when I move on to learning how to fork or whatever, and possibly some php frame work stuff - which isn’t real code ;) But right now I just need *something* to learn with.

It is mostly older stuff that I update a bit but never really publically make any ‘releases’

They are all here. There are a couple of icon themes (Eggshell should really be a branch of Ecru) and a meta-theme (metacity, openbox, gtk) and other themes maybe.

Anyway that is all.

Faking Gnome

I was trying to get the adobe air iplayer thingy working in openbox, it turns out it is crap anyway.

But to find out that it is was a waste of time I had to figure out how to pretend I had a gnome session going on; so it would even bother to load in the first place.

Normally you will get the:
Unknown desktop manager, only Gnome and KDE are supported

It turns out gnome session doesn’t really do much in this area and the checks performed are poor and depreciated.

Anyway, you can just dump these in your openbox session or .xinitrc or somewhere?

export DESKTOP_SESSION="gnome"
export GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID="openbox"


The first line might not even be needed, but it is nice anyway.

Another side effect of this is that it will work for other apps (which may suck less than the iplayer app), notably tweetdeck which the kids love, apparently.

I guess you could make a new openbox session like this which would be very fake gnome-y.


#!/bin/sh
if test -n "$1"; then
echo "Syntax: openbox-session"
echo
echo "See the openbox-session(1) manpage for help."
exit
fi


export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP="gnome"
export WINDOW_MANAGER="/usr/bin/openbox"
export DESKTOP_SESSION="gnome"
export GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID="openbox"


if test -e $AUTOSTART; then
. $AUTOSTART
else
if test -e $GLOBALAUTOSTART; then
. $GLOBALAUTOSTART
fi
fi



AUTOSTART="$HOME/.config/openbox/autostart.sh"
GLOBALAUTOSTART="/etc/xdg/openbox/autostart.sh"


exec /usr/bin/openbox "$@"

Getting on the bus

I have been working on a little aggregator for my ‘homepage‘ which is a glorified index page to many directories of files and crap, but over time I have become fond of it and decided it might need some love. The best idea I could come up with was to aggregate all the feeds of sites I use, such as twitter, my blag and flickr (for now) as a sort of centralised hub.

I am going to have to re-assess all my hosting and whatnot at some point (for money reasons) and centralise everything in one place, I have a few domains but I will probably keep chalkskeletons, even though the comic/original idea is very dead, I have had it a while and i am fond of it.

I am currently auditioning a centralised bookmark things, obviously delicious is an option as is google bookmarks, but i am not sure what is out there these days?