/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

I tried to give you a fair chance. I installed you on both my work and home machines and used you for a few days, but sadly I’m afraid this might be the end of the road for us, dear KDE. While we’ve been through a lot together, a lot has changed since the 3.5 days. I really don’t want to get into it, but it’s probably for the best that you know why I’m parting ways with you.

You’ve just become too blingy for your own good. You’re not Windows Vista, nor will you ever be, so why try to keep up? While on my higher end desktop you performed OK, you seemed quite sluggish on my work machine. It’s not the latest and greatest, but it seems to run KDE3.5 just fine. Dolphin, your file manager is terribly slow. When I right click for a context menu, there shouldn’t be a 5 second delay in showing it to me. I’m sure there are options somewhere for me to turn that off, but I never had to deal with that before on this box using Gnome or KDE3.5.

Crashing the main GTK application I rely on for work is not a good way to make inroads with me. Granted, you only did this to me on my work box, but regardless it’s something that I cannot soon forgive. There are some other nagging issues, such as when I run a script or program from your “runner” (Alt-F2), you’ll execute it, but when you’re done you whine that you now can’t find the executable. Neat trick, and I’ll file a bug on it if one hasn’t been filed already.

You’re sluggish, I’m sorry to say. That new bling has come at a price, and that price (at least right now) is performance. Yes, my work desktop has integrated graphics, but should that really matter to you? It just seems like you went for the bling and left performance for another day. Unfortunately, these things combined will leave me with no choice but to find something else until a later release, when hopefully you’ll be back to a level where I can use you daily.

Some of you may have heard about the goings-on surrounding Hans Reiser, creator of ReiserFS, and how he was convicted of killing his wife. Most recently, he lead police to her body in an effort to get his sentence reduced. An interesting idea came up on Ubuntu’s Brainstorm site that sparked a lot of controversy. Exhibit A: Brainstorm Idea #10930. The summary is that the submitter things sending a laptop to Reiser while in jail would give him a chance to contribute to society. Ignoring the fact that the laptop would never see it’s intended recipient, some of the comments got rather interesting. Eldmannen, the originator of the post, sees Hans as a ‘victim’ in all of this and has some rather ludicrous thoughts.

There’s this gem:

mtrausch,
Whatever, it was just one kill. Big deal. Others have killed way more. George W Bush is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
Also if he commit a crime, he should be locked up so he is no harm to society. But he should still be allowed participate and contribute to society so that he can become a good and productive citizen.
Plus, she deserved it. She cheated with Sean Sturgeon, embezzled money from his company, and was an irresponsible mother who abused illegal substances such as ecstasy.
Let this be a lesson to all; avoid post-order mail brides.

chipbennett,
It is much better to let him be a productive citizen of society that contributes to society, than have him locked up and do nothing, just waste tax money.

neon,
It is not like he killed Gandhi, he just killed his wife.
Perhaps other people can work on it too, but Hans is the genius who designed it, he can make bring the best to it.

And this is the comment that spurred me to post this:

Endperform,
She was a irresponsible mother abused illegal substances such as ecstasy, putter her kids at risk and who dated Sean Sturgeon a dangerous serial-killer who have admitted to killing 8 people and leaving a ninth for dead.
* http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/05/reiser

I cant imagine the tremendous stress and abuse that poor Hans must have endured. :(
Driving an kind and peaceful man into such an act. :(

“He took someone else’s life and should have to pay for his crimes.”
The guy is paying for his crime. He is doing time.
But he should be given an laptop so that he can be a productive citizen and contribute to the society.

Poor Hans? The guy KILLED HIS WIFE. Eldmannen seems to think Hans is the victim in this, and that his wife drove him to murder her. If you’re having problems with your significant other, there are ways to fix or defuse the situation. If he was really that ’stressed’, he should have separated from her, or better yet, divorced her completely. The fact remains that he killed his wife. We don’t know the exact surroundings of the murder, but to say in no uncertain terms that she deserved to die is just completely insane.

Jon posted an interesting entry concerning KDE3 vs KDE4, and I was all geared up to post a comment to it, but I figured I would go ahead and share my thoughts here, since I had been pondering writing about this topic to begin with. He mentioned a couple of points that I’d like to weigh in on myself. I’ve summarized the points since I haven’t had a chance to ask if I could repost portions of his blog here.

I disagree with the thought that KDE3 is only for power users. I’ve sat quite a few people in front of a KDE3 setup who were totally used to Windows and they didn’t have any issues getting things done. In one case, one person actually liked the fact that settings were at his fingertips and not buried behind various shields. The fact that KDE4 is trying to simplify things doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to appeal to everyone. In fact, some may view this as going along the lines of the Gnome project. My biggest beef with Gnome is the whole GConf setup, and the fact that I have to dig through a special editor to customize some settings. I shouldn’t need to go into a registry-like setup to tweak things. KDE3 exposes these things in via the system settings and various configuration settings, where they should be.

KDE3 was, and still is, a perfectly good desktop for home users. For most people, they may not get into all of the settings, only accessing what they need to. The settings themselves are organized well enough that most wouldn’t need that much hand-holding (if any) to get around things. For some reason, the thought that KDE3 was for power users only just kinda bugs me a bit, especially after seeing quite a few new users take to it nicely.

With that said, let’s turn to KDE4. I’ve tried it, and wasn’t too keen on it at the time. I may give it another shot when 4.1 final is released, but I’m still not sold on it yet. To me, it seems like they focused on the “ooo, pretty” aspect of the desktop and went from there. I wouldn’t call KDE3 vs. KDE4 over just yet. It’s going to take some time before people completely migrate over, myself included.

As some of you might have noticed from my recent tweets, there’s a gentleman in the office who is whining about the burn ban in the area. Apparently he’s attempting to get a burn permit to burn some things on his land, but is being denied due to the ongoing drought conditions. There’s a part of me from my volunteer firefighting days that wants to go over and tell him the reasoning behind things, but based on what I can’t help but overhear, he’s not going to take no for an answer. As of right now, he’s called three different agencies at last count and isn’t giving up. I wish he’d at least have the courtesy to step outside and talk, but instead we’re treated to hearing him get upset at things. What he needs to realize is that one little spark, one little ember that gets away from his burn could cause a lot of damage due to the dry conditions. It’s not just the immediate area that is the concern here.

It’s amazing the things you overhear in the office. I leave you with this gem:

“Well, they took the thermometer and stuck it up my butt”

Once in a while, the HVAC system in the cube farm takes a dive. Sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for a few hours. On one occasion during an extended downtime, someone walked by my fabric-covered box. While that may not be so bad, the fact that it seemed like said person took a bath in cologne made the air in my general area a little less than good. Ok, a lot less, since once the airflow stops here this place gets stuffy. At any rate, I’m sitting, trying to do some work and doing my very best not to choke on the fumes. Fast forward to two hours later. You would think that by now, the odor would have somewhat wafted out of noseshot. I could only wish that were true this day. Eventually the HVAC system came back online and I could breathe again.

The following week, some people from other offices were onsite. My cube is right near the door, so people tend to congregate around it. Again, not too bad when done in moderation, but on this particular day someone once again decided perfume was a better substitute than water. If the fragrance weren’t so bad it wouldn’t have been too unbearable, but the odor was just so sweet and ungood++ that again, I found myself almost choking. The group of people were standing around talking with no end in sight. Finally, as I was about to begin a round of well-timed coughs, the crowd dispersed and along with it the odor.

I could go on about the lunchtime odors around here, but there’s far too many to mention. I am a culprit as I do eat at my cubicle and work through lunch a lot, but usually anything I eat is not as odorous as some of the other more ethnic offerings around here.