As you can see, the sound indicator is still in alpha stages (print screen taken just before Ubuntu 10.10 alpha 2).
The sound indicator is obviously in the midst of progress, but this is why they call it an Alpha stage. I’m super excited seeing the progress happen before my eyes with every update! Hopefully album art is soon!
Safety notice: I’ve had several emails asking me if its safe to upgrade and this is my response… Living on the cutting edge brings a few perks such as this (seeing the progress of it all), but if you’re serious about your system and need stability then you should hold off until Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick is stable before upgrading. You can always find the cool stuff here and elsewhere around the net. 
If you’re anxiously awaiting the release of Ubuntu 10.10, then you may know that the volume indicator applet is set to receive some nice improvements.
While it is not yet completed, I’ve taken some screenshots to point out some flaws and the way I think it should look and feel below.
Songs with long filenames cause for wide menus.
Shorter song titles fit a bit better.
This is how I think it should end up looking.
It’s certainly coming along nicely and I think this will be a well received update in Ubuntu! There are plenty of other improvements coming to Ubuntu 10.10, but improvements like these are the ones that are making me quickly become an Ubuntu only user!
I’ve given up on cleaning spam comments and spam registrations on my site. If anyone has good advice then I’d be more than happy to hear what you have to say.
Lately, spam has been reaching ~400-500 comments and ~40-80 registrations per day. Managing a blog is starting to become a job. I blame WordPress for not implementing a decent registration blocker and a better spam net to catch this waste of my time. The plugins I’ve tried do nothing for registration spam.
I’d love to hear from you all about what works and what doesn’t! It’s a shame that people stoop low enough to spam blogs hundrends of times per night just to make a buck. When can we all live in peace and say what we want without people trying to trump us?
I just made a change to the header image that’s been here for a year and a half and I hope its for the better.
The previous image was getting dated and the new image rocks my glasses…so its much more accurate. 
If you have a preference, let me know in the comments. I’d also love to hear suggestions for the site layout and header image!
For reference, here are the header images I’ve used in the past thus far:
Old
New
I recently stumbled upon this neat little application that lets you track your mouse movements in a visual way and save the image that is created!
My IOGraph in a Dual Screen (2.5 hours).
As you can see, most of my activity is in my second monitor (right) where my web browser rests, between the tabs and content towards the top. My coding habits and text editor occupy the first monitor (left) and show noticeably less mouse movement and more periods of pausing to work with the keyboard or read.
This application is Java based and runs in Windows, Mac and Linux! I’ll give you a quick run down on how to use this application in Ubuntu..
- Make sure that you have Java 6 Runtime installed on your computer. If you don’t, open the Ubuntu Software Center and search for Java. You should find “OpenJDK Java 6 Runtime” near the top of the results. Install that before continuing.
- Download IOGraph for Linux and save it where ever you like (I saved mine to the desktop).
- Before you can open the Java application (a .Jar file), you will need to set proper executable permissions for it. To do this, simply right click on the file and select Properties. In the Permissions tab, check to enable the option labeled “Allow executing file as program” and click close.
Allow executing file as program
- Now to run the application, right click on the file again and select “Opera with OpenJDK Java 6 Runtime”.
Open with OpenJDK Java 6 Runtime
Now that you’ve got the application running, you can minimize it and let it track your every move! If you’re having trouble, you may be able to find more help with .Jar files here.
The circles represent points where the mouse was left motionless for a period of time. The larger the circle, the longer it was left motionless.
Enjoy making art while you work and please share your results!
As a follow up to Hallvord R. M. Steen‘s outdated post (Wednesday, 28. November 2007), I’d like to point your attention to a gigantic performance increase in Opera!
I haven’t done in-depth research to find out when this improvement occurred, but I suspect it was with Opera 10.50-10.60 and the many JavaScript improvements that came along with these updates.
In my tests, I found that Opera went from a previous “top score” of 4998 to 16382! Doing the math that proves to be an increase of approximately ~3.28 times the performance in Opera 10.20 (my last posted result on his blog post). Here is what my testing line-up looks like:
- Opera 10.60
- died when trying to call function 16382, error was “Maximum recursion depth exceeded”
- Google Chromium 6.0.423.0 (48614) Ubuntu
- died when trying to call function 13059, error was “undefined”
- Firefox 3.6.3
- died when trying to call function 3000, error was “too much recursion”
As you can see, Opera is leading the pack (is it really a surprise? 
).
What does this all mean?
Well, your guess is as good as mine, but to (reword and) repeat the topic question as an answer…I guess it means that Opera can out-depth other browsers in the level of function calls that they can handle.
If you look at the code then you might find it easier to understand, but basically..its like: a function calling another function…calling another function…calling another function…calling another function…(multiply that a few times)…calling another function to get to the final function. Recursion.
Is this something I will see while browsing the web?
I highly doubt you will see any depth calls to this extreme for a long time (if ever). My interpretation of this feat is that Opera has a unique ability to handle and process extreme recursion, which is a stressing task in itself.
If you’d like to test this for yourself, you can test Hallvord’s func5000.htm or you can test my func20000.htm.
If you’re testing func20000, download the zip, extract and simply open the extracted html file in your browser of choice! Share your results for other browsers if you wish! I’m curious to see the results from other browsers!
Recent Comments