software

The K2 theme which is used on my weblog powered by WordPress is unmaintained for quite some time now. The last new version was a release candidate for 1.1 which was released a year ago, and there is no final 1.1 release yet. I wrote theme, but the K2 developers describe it as an ‘advanced template’, which is probably more accurate given that it is quite comprehensive and does a lot of things differently compared to the standard WordPress theme. Because this makes it so different from many other WordPress themes which don’t modify so much things, this means that maintenance is required, as in new releases, to make sure that it keeps working nicely with the WordPress internals. The development team of WordPress continues cranking out new versions and with K2 not keeping up with those changes some of it’s features no longer seem to work. For example, after many updates of WordPress the search field of the K2 theme which used to be automatic now requires pressing the ‘Enter’ key, and after doing so you see the input of the field overlaid on the ‘Search’ text placed by default in that field.

So I guess it’s time to look for a new theme then. That’s unfortunate, because I really like the default layout of the K2, I like the simplicity of it. I changed nothing, all I did was upload a custom header image and add a child theme which adds some CSS so that tables get the same layout as tables on Wikipedia. By now, the default theme of WordPress is Twenty Eleven, which I dislike very much. As you can see on the demo page of the theme which I just linked too, at the top is a large text header with a lot of blank white space around it. Then comes a colossal header image, which is 1000 pixels wide versus 780 pixels for the K2 header image. Half of the page is occupied by this combination of headers while the K2 header occupies little more than a quarter. Also notice that the font size in the Twenty Eleven theme is a lot larger, not only compared to K2 but also compared to the average font size of most other websites. The large font size makes it stand out in a negative way and it means it needs more space for less text. We’re told that the large font size was chosen to make it ‘really readable’ and that anyone who thinks otherwise can make their own child theme. Yes, of course we can edit it to our liking, but not everyone possesses good knowledge of CSS or wants to invest the time in customizing it. It’s all about sane defaults, K2’s defaults are excellent while Twenty Eleven’s are ill-chosen. It should be the other way around, that minority (my assumption) which wants such a ‘readable’ theme should make child themes so that the average user shouldn’t be looking for a different theme. Even better, the developers could make some changes to the WordPress Default 1.6 theme (the Default 1.5 theme is so unappealing it should be dumped outright) which is still shipped with WordPress to freshen them up and make them viable alternatives for dissatisfied users.

I’ve been looking for alternatives to Twenty Eleven in the free themes directory of the WordPress website, but to no avail. I simply can’t find any theme which looks similar too, or as attractive as K2’s theme. Many simple themes do not feature a header image, and if they do they don’t feature text ‘floating’ above it like with K2. So maybe I should start making my own child theme for Twenty Eleven after all? At least I would learn more about CSS then, even if it would be very time-consuming and annoying. Secretly I’m hoping the dear Lazyweb, a.k.a. you, the reader of this blogpost, might have some good advice for me.

Another issue is that WordPress still doesn’t include features which I, and I assume many others, consider useful. Support for OpenID for example. Another issue is that WordPress doesn’t have a nice way to show photos, for example when you click images on the Twenty Eleven demo website, they are loaded in a new page to display them full screen. To fix that problem I’ve been using the NextGEN Gallery plugin, but I’m not totally satisfied with it. Not only does it get a lot of updates (making me update more often than I’d like), it offers many features which I don’t need and most importantly it reinvents the wheel. It doesn’t use the standard functionality for managing uploaded images in WordPress, the Media Library. Instead, it uses it’s own facilities through which you upload images. Even though this plugin works nicely, I’m looking for something simpler which works with the WordPress Media Library. Besides that, all the functionality I really need is that it displays photos using LightBox or similar scripts such as Fancybox, just like NextGEN Gallery does but without all the bloat. It looks like plugins such as Simple Lightbox, Lightbox Gallery or Fancybox for WordPress would be more suitable for my use case. However, just like hacking up my own child theme for Twenty Eleven, migrating all my photos uploaded with NextGEN Gallery to the WordPress Media Library would be very time consuming. I’m lazy, so I’ll probably procrastinate this to eternity, certainly while my current setup of K2 and NextGEN Gallery work okay. I should probably ask on the WordPress forums to decide on the best course of action.

Oh, and I have one more gripe, with the WordPress.com Stats plugin. it requires that you use the evil, proprietary Flash plugin to see the chart of visitor numbers drawn by this plugin. Fortunately, a search I just performed revealed that this plugin already uses JavaScript for blogs hosted on the WordPress.com weblog service. An update implementing this for self-hosted blogs using the plugin should arrive later, said the post announcing this on 30 September 2010.

I used to think that LaTeX was overkill for simple things like letters, but I’ve changed my mind. I few months ago I had to write a sollicitation letter, and I decided to figure out how it could be done with LaTeX instead of using OpenOffice.org for writing it. I’m glad I did, because during my search for information I found the blog of another Dutch LaTeX fan, which contains a series of excellent tutorials for writing a letter and a resume with the KOMA-Script document class. I love KOMA-Script because by default it places those folding marks and it positions the destination address so that it will be visible if you have an envelope with a window. Of course things like that could be done with Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer too, but that would probably a bit more complicated. And of course you get the superior typesetting of LaTeX for free. I’m not sure if I’m going to rework my resume with KOMA-Script, but as you can see the letters displayed in the tutorial look awesome.

On a different note, I noticed a bug which was exposed by the ‘\date’ command in the letter, LaTeX gave me a wrong month instead of the current one, and the wrong month was also spelled incorrectly. After some searching I figured out that a more recent version of the Polyglossia package would fix the problem. Meanwhile TeX Live 2010 was already released, but not in time for the Ubuntu 10.10 release, which still used 2009 with the outdated version of Polyglossia. There were no personal package archives (PPA’s) containing the 2010 version either. So I had to install the latest Polyglossia package manually, but this introduced a dependency hell, because the latest Polyglossia required another package which in turn required other packages of a more recent version. Half an hour or so later the problem was fixed, but of course fixing it wasn’t easy. I’d wish Ubuntu or someone with a PPA would provide updates to TeX Live sooner.

Take a look at the following screenshots:

This demonstrates one of the problems I have with KDE, there’s no consistency in the implementation of tabs in the user interface, unlike in GNOME where the comparable applications all use the same widget for implementing tabs. More precisely, KDE’s web browser and it’s file manager, respectively rekonq and Dolphin, implement them correctly. The text editor Kate uses a different widget and Konsole places them on the bottom of the window. That is very uncommon, besides Konsole I’ve only seen some IRC clients do that, so it breaks with the user’s expectations. In Kate tabs aren’t even enabled by default, but they’re an optional plugin shipped with it. Kate uses the annoying ‘Documents’ sidebar as a replacement for tabs.

One wonders if this design of Konsole and Kate is intentional. After taking the screenshot for KDE I figured out that there is a second plugin for Kate for tabs which is also included by default. For the screenshot the ‘Tab Bar’ plugin was used, but the ‘Tabify’ plugin implements a tab bar widget identical to the one in rekonq and Dolphin. I filed bug #254596 to request that the old ‘Tab Bar’ plugin be removed and is replaced by ‘Tabify’ and I filed bug #254599 to request that the Tabify plugin is enabled by default. The Kate developers don’t agree with both of my requests, but if I consider the use cases they are targeting I can understand. While I still think it’s not ideal because the default settings should be sane – the minority (I assume) of users which need the document list instead of the tab bar because they have a lot of document opened should change the default settings, not the other way around – at least it’s possible to configure Kate the way I want. At that point you’ll stumble on bug #156330 which is about Kate forgetting settings unless you save the session. That should be solved in the future according to the developers.

My last gripe is the split view feature of Kate, which allows you to split the view so you can display more than one document in one Kate window. Ideal for the common wide screen monitors of today , and it allows you to read multiple documents at the same time without switching windows or opening multiple instances of Kate. However, to change the document displayed in the different views, you have to place the cursor inside the view (document) first, then switch to another document with the document list or tab bar to make that view display that document. This is also different from split views in Dolphin for example. In Dolphin, the split view is a property of the tab, I can have one tab open with a split view and the next tab can display just one view. So that’s the other way around compared to Kate, where the split view is not connected to the tab but is independent of it. See the screenshots to understand. I don’t necessarily want Dolphin and Kate to behave identically, but what would work best for Kate would be that each split view would have it’s own tab bar. I noticed that Konsole does exactly what I described, as you can see in the screenshots. I have filed a feature request as bug #255096.

So Konsole does use the default tab bar widget  but places the tabs on the bottom. Here a three year old discussion can be found on the merits of placing tabs on the bottom or the top for a terminal emulator application. While at first I thought it would be better for the sake of consistency to have tabs on top of Konsole’s window, tabs on the bottom do make more sense if you consider that text scrolls downwards on terminals. I’ve come to the conclusion that the latter argument is the better. Consistency after all is only a means to work more efficiently, not a goal in itself. While I don’t use Konsole intensively, I’d probably experience that tabs on the bottom are more efficient if I’d work more with it. Also note that it’s possible configure Konsole to display tabs on the top of the window.

Besides that, I was affected by an annoying bug on Ubuntu, so I started searching on Launchpad if it had already been reported. I found bug #631664, but I also found three other bug reports about the same problem. So I, as a good citizen and aspiring bug triager, I marked those as duplicates of the aforementioned bug. Can you imagine the shortage of human resources if those duplicates don’t get noticed? I’m not dissing Ubuntu or Canonical here, but even though this is relatively common bug, there must be a lot more potential duplicates to be found. Some people don’t search for existing bug reports before they file their own (duplicate) bug report, sometimes they do but they use the wrong search terms so they don’t find the existing bug report (the latter happens most often to me). With all those potential duplicates, you can see the bug reports database getting clogged up. This made me remember that some people proposed all bugs to be closed in KDE’s Bugzilla around KDE 4’s first release. This didn’t happen, yet in general the number of bug reports is still growing, stable, but certainly not decreasing fast according to the statistics of KDE’s Bugzilla. I wonder for how long it can continue?

As a user of the proprietary (closed source) Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) the ugly boot splash screen had been bothering me for some time. For sure, I don’t look at it for a long time, two seconds at most, before GDM is loaded. But I do see it often when I start up my computer, every day on average, so even though it isn’t a serious problem, it’s quite annoying. As far as I can recall there was some limitation in the proprietary drivers which prevented the boot splash screen from appearing with all it’s eye candy in high resolution, and you were given an ugly low resolution version. Since I upgraded to Lucid to Maverick (10.10) I noticed this had not changed. I decided to fire up Google to figure out why this was still not fixed, and I encountered a blog post which I can recommend to anyone using the proprietary Nvidia or AMD graphics drivers. The blog post provides a script which fixes it automatically, all you have to is choose the right display resolution. I haven’t been able to figure out why this hasn’t been fixed out of the box yet in Ubuntu as it should be, but I like this fix. Noteworthy is that it also applies the resolution (I could choose 1680×1050, the native resolution of my monitor) to Grub2, so it’s font size is no longer so huge.

Another serious annoyance are the window buttons which were no longer located on the right but on the left in Lucid. That was decided by the Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life, Ubuntu’s boss Mark Shuttleworth himself, for the benefit of innovation in the future concerning the contents of the window title bar. Whatever they intend to do, it’s easy to change it back, as described in this blog post.

Last Wednesday I visited the GUADEC (GNOME Users and Developers European Conference), a yearly conference for developers and users of the GNOME desktop environment. The GNOME organisation is very international and usually they communicate over the Internet, but once a year they can meet each other in person at the GUADEC. I had never visited the conference before, because it is held all over the place in Europe, most of the time at places too expensive for me to travel to. This year it was held in the Netherlands, in The Hague. Even though I’m more interested in KDE (the alternative to GNOME) nowadays, I certainly wanted to use the opportunity to visit a free software conference which was close by.

Entrance was free, but I made a small donation. I decided to visit for only one day, because I deemed train tickets (€ 14,20 for a return ticket for one day, with 40% student discount) to be too expensive, and because I had other work to do. In fact I’m still tying a few loose ends together for work on a course I followed during the last block of the academic year, because of procrastination. As is customary for these kind of conferences, you download video recordings of the talks later, so no worries if you miss it. GUADEC 2010 was held from July 26th to July 30th, with the talks scheduled on 28th (Wednesday) until the 30th. Kudos to the team organizing GUADEC 2010, because I have the impression it must have taken a ridiculous amount of effort.

I followed the following talks on Wednesday (program can be found here):

1. Keynote
2. GNOME, the web, and Freedom
3. Evolution – Got the wheels to race, the wings to fly, what next?
4. State of the GNOME 3 Shell
5. GPLv3: Better Copyleft for Developers and Users
6. GNOME: State of the Union
7. Building a strong post-3.0 GNOME story

In the second talk Luis Villa made a case for incorporating the web more in GNOME. I agree with his observation that not the Linux desktop but the web has ‘won’ or become mainstream. A few general examples of features already present were given of how this could be achieved, such as uploading photos to online services via photo management applications and allowing languages used for web design to be used for developing applications in GNOME (such as Seed). Louis argued this can be taken further. I don’t know however what more can be done, and neither did Louis, his talk served to inspire brainstorming on this subject.

The next talk on Evolution was far more technical, aimed more at developers, but very interesting nonetheless for me because I could understand most of it. Evolution is an application which I almost use daily for my e-mail, and it was interesting to hear what the plans for the future are.

Then the talk on GNOME Shell. I haven’t tried it yet, and I’m not fully convinced this will improve my productivity. To be honest this might be because the talk couldn’t capture my attention very well, so I still do not understand exactly what GNOME Shell is and why it will be an improvement, it was not as interesting as the other talks. I’m certainly curious to see how it will work though when it’s ready for end users next March.

The following talk on the changes between version two and three of the GPL was the best talk I attended. Bradley M. Kuhn is an excellent presenter, who managed to keep me interested at every moment of his talk. His analogy of licenses and software was good; licenses have bugs just like software, and version three of the GPL was necessary to fix some errors and loopholes in version two. Licenses are something very technical and are possibly difficult to understand, but Kuhn managed to explain it perfectly to those who never studied law.

The GNOME: State of the Union talk is possibly one of the funniest presentations I’ve ever witnessed. Fernando Herrera and Xan Lopez parodied issues concerning codes of conduct in an excellent way. I had the impression that GNOME was lacking progress compared to KDE, and this talk changed my mind. Quite a few things have been achieved already on the road to GNOME 3.0, but I still have a preference for KDE though.

I wasn’t paying attention at the last talk on the future after GNOME 3.0, because I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I had to leave home early to catch my train and hadn’t had much sleep the night before, I guess I was too excited for GUADEC. So after this talk I decided to head home. I received an invitation to join the Canonical party in the evening, but decided against this because I don’t know the people in the GNOME and Ubuntu community well, and had to use a train to get home.

I went to the conference alone, because I didn’t know any friends who where interested and going as well. When I arrived, I did recognise some of the names of the Dutch GNOME community and the persons giving the talks, but I only know them superficially through reading about their work via Planet GNOME. I was pleasantly surprised though to see two people from the Dutch KDE community attending as well, whom I had met at a KDE 4.4 release party a few months ago. It was nice talking to them again. One of them, Tom Albers, has also blogged about GUADEC.

I know it’s a conference for geeks, but you can overdo it. I noticed quite a few people who were more interested in staring at their notebooks than they were in listening to the speakers. Do you really need to inform everyone through a microblogging service like Twitter and Identi.ca that talk X is going to start now and other trivialities? And like a good free software citizen, if you must then please use Identi.ca instead of Twitter. Anyway, I enjoyed visiting GUADEC 2010, and hope Akademy will also be held in the Netherlands in the future.