Midterm Time
I have not written here for many moons now. This is mostly because of
the steady flow of midterm examinations I've been bombarded with
recently. I just got one of them back today, and I failed miserably.
It's the first midterm failed this year. It's Quantum Mechanics, and
significant studying went into it. With two out of three tests in that
class complete, both shoddily, I am starting to get quite worried. It
seems I have all of the information I need, but there is some
incompatibility between how my brain works and how the tests are
written. It's very frustrating.
Another thing driving me nuts is my eBay purchase of
MechAssault needed to get Linux onto Xboxes. The purchase was
made exactly four weeks ago today and I still do not have it.
This certainly warrants a negative rating.
My laptop's been doing stupid things with the display as of late. It
seems to be a combination of software and hardware problems, neither of
which I can resolve.
Today marked the first day where the daytime temperature was below
freezing. It was the first day I didn't wear my sandals outside.
All in all, I feel miserable.
[
] | posted @ 04:48 |
link
The DashPC Project
While I'm still waiting to get the Xbox hardware to run Linux, I decided
it would be a good idea to look ahead and see what front-end software I
should be running.
DashPC has always seemed the logical choice. It has an intuitive
interface, what appears to be decent integration, and of course, it runs
on Linux using the GTK toolkit. However, building and running it today,
I was somewhat disappointed:
- The tarball is not conventionally organized, and all of the files
uncompressed into the current directory.
- The UI is incomplete and buggy.
- The integration that was implied is non-existent. It's simply a
shell with pretty graphics that does callouts to other programs.
- It's not configurable, everything appears to be hardcoded.
- It seems disorganized: I downloaded a tarball versioned 0.45, and I
got version 0.5.9 of the program.
With these shortcomings, it would probably be easier to start a new
interface from scratch. There is really very little that could make this
project useful. However, that is not a bad thing, as the project's major
goal is to consider user interfaces, both hardware and software.
Here are some ideas for a new project that would differentiate it
from DashPC:
- Interface elements should not be graphics. Graphics do not allow for
scalability or contrast modification.
- Interface "screens" should be user-configurable, so that a new
section is easy to add.
- The UI could be written in Glade, to allow for easier design of
various panels/screens.
This software would be straightforward, with focus on two areas: user
interface design and plugins/extensibility. Seeing as the back-end work
is simple, the first step of the project should be to do some Glade
mockups of a new user interface.
