Planet GNOME

Today was a nice day here in the DudesConf 07, full of interesting talks about debian and meeting new (and not so new) people from differents parts of the world who came just because one main reason: talk about the debian distro, its current state and about several related things, in general terms. (more info at http://www.dudesconf.org). At first I thought I couldn’t attend this interesting event, but at last I could and I’m happy to do so, because it was an interesting day in which, even though I wasn’t able to pay as much attention as I wished, I learned several new things and met new people that could be difficult in other way apart from this one. And we even had a GPG signing party in which we shared our fingerprints and get our gpg keys signed by each other. ...

Last sunday, going back home after three days of several interesting speechs at the Guademy, I’ve decided to upgrade my ubuntu distribution in my laptop from the 6.10 version (name-coded “Edgy Eft”) to the new beta released version 7.04 (name-coded “Feisty Fawn”) and I have to say that everything is working pretty well: I had no problems upgrading (not even one), my Ati graphics card works with 3D acceleration, and I can enjoy the new Gnome 2.18 desktop… and the new baobab ringschart developed by Igalia, which is included by default in Gnome in the “Disk usage analyzer” application (formerly known as “baobab”). ...

I don’t like too much people writting posts about other people’s posts, but I think this time it’s mandatory to do it :D… since the idea of Davyd about writting an applet which turns Gnome into an MMORPG game looked so funny to me. Just take a look into this post from Davyd’s blog and judge it by yourself. Everquest World of warcraft (WoW) Lineage

As many of you (“igalians”) already know, some time ago we[*] started working in the development of a new widget for a gnome application called baobab. The main motivation for us to work on this task was being able to get a better graphical view of the disk space usage information retrieved by the original baobab program, in a similar way as done by the KDE’s filelight application. This KDE app shows such that disk usage as a beautiful ringchart (which offers a very good idea about the size of scanned dirs), instead of just using a treeview with one scanned dir by row, which is not so visually impressive as in the filelight’s ringchart. ...

Last afternoon I spent some time in the Lfcia talking to Miriam, and she told me about Gaim storing passwords in plain text. I had no idea of this before she told me, and that’s why, as soon as I was warned about, I took a look into my ~/.gaim directory and I realized how my password was really stored in the accounts.xml text file. The reason for my password to be there was that I’d checked the typical “Remember my password” checkbox when adding my IM accounts to gaim, with the only purpose of not being annoyed each time I login into my accounts. Somebody could say at this point that the only real security would be not storing passwords at all (and this is true, of course), but I think that if a program asks you for doing something like that, you should be able to trust it about how your password is going to be saved at disk (hopefully, in a secure way). ...