fluid-work IRC Logs-2011-12-01

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Last updated: Dec 01, 2011Version comment

[08:40:41 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> anastasiac: did you withdraw the pull request that's to merge Jonny's theme into wordpress?

[08:40:53 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> don't see it @ https://github.com/fluid-project/studios.fluidproject.org

[08:41:26 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> cindyli, yes: johnny merged his uioptions branch into his master, and michelled suggested I start over with a new copy of his master instead of his branch.

[08:41:45 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> ok

[08:41:53 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> unfortunately, in the meantime I've managed mess up my github, so I'm trying to resolve that asap

[08:42:21 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> lol.

[08:44:18 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> cindyli, in the meantime, I wonder if I should just give you a copy of the new theme, and you can add it to the dev branch. There's no telling when I'll get this straightened out, and there's no reason why you should be held up

[08:45:18 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> sounds good, anastasiac.

[08:45:38 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> anastasiac: what's new in the new theme?

[08:45:44 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> UIO?

[08:45:56 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> cindyli, if you turn on your AirDrop, I can just drop the folder into it, I'd suggest you create a clean branch of the dev branch to add it to, to separate the simple new theme from your mods to it

[08:46:07 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> yes, UIO

[08:46:27 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> anastasiac: Couldn't cindyli just get the new theme from Github?

[08:46:30 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> or have you modified it?

[08:47:29 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> I did modify it: I changed the name, the image, etc

[08:47:33 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> ah, right

[08:47:44 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> anastasiac: do you see me on airdrop?

[08:48:09 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> yes I do. give me a couple of minutes just to double-check that I haven't forgotten anything, and I'll drop it in

[08:48:14 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> sure

[08:50:53 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> ok, cindy, you've got it now

[08:51:03 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> anastasiac: got it. thx

[08:51:32 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> cindy, one thing I forgot is a readme: I'll get that to you in a sec

[08:51:36 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> cindyli: ^

[08:51:40 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> ok, anastasiac

[09:09:00 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> michelled, anastasiac, cindyli: One thing I was thinking, in regards to the Studios...

[09:09:09 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> You'll probably want some content to be able to test and develop with

[09:09:28 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I was thinking that we an showcase the VideoPlayer as part of the Studios

[09:09:38 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> and also ask Johnny if he'd like to show FSSFive there

[09:11:01 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> The other thing I guess we didn't talk about yesterday was our styling techniques

[09:11:38 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I definitely think it would be great if we can keep up the goal Johnny had with FSSFive to ensure it's fully responsive, even with our own theme

[09:11:49 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> A responsive layout seems perfect for a site like this, too

[09:15:53 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> What do you think, jameswy?

[09:17:36 CST(-0600)] <jameswy> colinclark: Absolutely. And if you mean taking advantage of CSS media queries in particular, Joanna has some designs up on the wiki for Studios that's width-adaptive.

[09:17:53 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> Cool

[09:18:06 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I'd guess we can do most width-adaptive designs without media queries

[09:18:12 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> but we'll use 'em if we need 'em

[10:50:42 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> Oh, I forgot my most important standup update

[10:50:47 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I had a really good chat this morning with jhung

[10:50:58 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> he and justin_o are doing well and are in Kano at the moment

[10:51:04 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> doing intensive Decapod training

[10:51:27 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> Today they had the satisfying experience of seeing the first Type 2 PDF generated with Decapod of real content

[10:51:33 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> so I think that's pretty exciting

[10:52:00 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> Apparently the camera rigs are working out really well for the collection in Kano, and they prefer capturing with the cameras to their previous flatbed scanner setup

[10:52:13 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> a lot of their material is loose, so flattening and dwarfing isn't an issue anyway

[10:52:40 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> jhung said he's send along a PDF with some of their stuff when he gets a chance

[10:52:59 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> So it sounds like things are going really well in Nigeria

[10:59:11 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> anastasiac: got the git checkout of fluid-studios working, with the fresh empty database. not with the existing old db tho

[10:59:33 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> cindyli, great! weird that did didn't work

[10:59:43 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> good enough. seems it was because my git config autocrlf

[10:59:53 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> it was set to true by default, anastasiac

[11:00:16 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> !

[11:24:18 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> anastasiac, i've sent a pull request to merge your initial fluid-studios theme - https://github.com/fluid-project/studios.fluidproject.org/pull/2

[13:07:02 CST(-0600)] <michelled> cindyli, anastasiac: I pushed FSSFive to the development branch

[13:07:15 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> yay! thanks, michelled

[13:07:16 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> cool. thx, michelled

[13:17:19 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> hey clown, with a bit of work I managed to get a nicely-working version of GNOME Shell running in VirtualBox

[13:17:29 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I have to say, I really like GS' accessibility menu

[13:17:39 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> So easy and fast and prominent

[13:17:52 CST(-0600)] <clown> colinclark: you'll have to show my how you did it.

[13:18:01 CST(-0600)] <clown> got it to work with virutal box, I mean.

[13:18:07 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I will for sure

[13:18:16 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> But mostly I just followed this: http://www.sysprobs.com/install-fedora-16-virtualbox-guest-additions-get-working-gnome-shell-inside-virtual-machine

[13:19:03 CST(-0600)] <clown> yes, I did something like that (guest additions) with f14, but I got nothing but very jerky mouse movements.

[13:19:19 CST(-0600)] <clown> but it was at least better than "black on black".

[13:19:24 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> yes

[13:19:32 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I get jerkiness in VMWare, despite all my efforts

[13:19:39 CST(-0600)] <clown> re: the a11y menu: I think that was done by one of the gnome design team.

[13:19:47 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> but VirtualBox was quite smooth

[13:20:02 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> It'll be a lot nicer to just run it on one of our new Lenovos, I know

[13:20:20 CST(-0600)] <clown> colinclark: how long did it take? I'm feeling like I should try it right now (it would be a way to do development off site).

[13:20:51 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> not long, really

[13:20:58 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> our MacBooks are so fast

[13:21:00 CST(-0600)] <clown> which version of VB?

[13:21:08 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> The latest, I think

[13:21:10 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> let me check

[13:21:19 CST(-0600)] * clown checks to see what he has.

[13:21:22 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I'm runinng 4.1.6

[13:21:45 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I'm trying it again clean, just to make sure it's reliable

[13:21:53 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> if you wanted, I could just airdrop you the VM tomorrow when i'm in the office

[13:22:50 CST(-0600)] <clown> actually, that might be the safer route — let you do the heavy lifting, and then I'll just take the final solution from you (wink)

[13:23:00 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> lol

[13:23:04 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> my pleasure

[13:23:17 CST(-0600)] <clown> but I will check that I have the latest VB and upgrade if I have to.

[13:23:18 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I had a bit of flakiness, but I think it was just me screwing things up

[13:23:26 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> which is why I wanted to start from scratch, just to be sure

[13:24:58 CST(-0600)] <clown> my VB is 4.0.4. I'ts been a long time since I tried any of this, version-wise.

[13:25:57 CST(-0600)] <clown> colinclark: just in case it matters, you "can" partition your hard drive and have a dual boot machine. another way to have a native running G3.2.

[13:26:07 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> yup

[13:26:15 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> but VMs are so cool

[13:27:47 CST(-0600)] <clown> colinclark: just launched VB and it immediately said "4.1.6 is available, do you want to upgrade". Maybe you want to upgrade too.

[13:28:02 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> that's the one I'm running, yes

[13:29:10 CST(-0600)] <clown> and I can't read… I could have sworn that you wrote 4.1.2 above.

[13:29:12 CST(-0600)] * clown needs new glasses

[13:35:05 CST(-0600)] <clown> colinclark: quick question: did you use the i686 (or i386) or the x86_64 iso?

[13:35:36 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I used the _64 iso

[13:35:43 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I had weird problems installing the 32-bit version

[13:35:50 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> In theory, I guess, it's better to run a 64-bit OS

[13:36:02 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> but at least in other Linux projects we work on, I've had problems with it

[13:36:09 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> what do you typically use?

[13:37:22 CST(-0600)] <clown> interesting. I have always used the _64 on the hardware I have. That is, since the day that Jamon strongly recommended it ("you have 64-bit hardware. it's better to use a bona fide 64 bit OS).

[13:39:14 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> He's right

[13:39:29 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> At least on Decapod, we depend on libraries that seem to be flakier on a 64-bit OS

[13:39:57 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> In fact I think justin_o recently had to move back from 64-bit Ubuntu because our OCR libraries just wouldn't run

[13:42:01 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> colinclark - what is "dwarfing"?

[13:42:08 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> hmm

[13:42:19 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> You're usually the one who explains odd British slang to me

[13:42:30 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> hahaha

[13:42:36 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> Like, "I should co-co"

[13:42:41 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> Like that, yes

[13:43:08 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> Speaking of Cocoa, I had a good chat with Alex Geddie today about our Cloud4all OS configuration plans

[13:43:17 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> He confirmed that we're pretty much totally on our own on Mac OS X

[13:43:22 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> wow

[13:43:27 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> We should be able to fairly easily configure system settings

[13:43:32 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> No centralised, event based settings system?

[13:43:34 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> including the built-in screenreader, etc.

[13:43:36 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> nope

[13:43:41 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> Interesting

[13:43:47 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> Every app for themself

[13:43:50 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> Is there even a MacOS equivalent of the "registry"?

[13:43:53 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> No

[13:44:00 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> That seems odd, given Apple's general approach to such things

[13:44:13 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> Isn't there some form of mandated UX for application settings?

[13:44:31 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> you know, it's interesting...

[13:44:42 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> iOS apps have the ability to central host their preferences

[13:44:45 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> not all do so

[13:45:01 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> but I guess there's more likely something of this kind on iOS than there is on the desktop

[13:45:10 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> Right

[13:45:10 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> There are UX guidelines, but clearly no standard APIs for preferences

[13:45:25 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> GNOME, by far, is turning out to be the best environment for this

[13:45:35 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> assuming applications actually bother to implement gsettings

[13:45:40 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> they need to follow clown's lead

[13:46:49 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> [10:52:13 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> a lot of their material is loose, so flattening and dwarfing isn't an issue anyway

[13:46:58 CST(-0600)] <clown> colinclark: you flatter me. there are a lot of GNOME main line developers who have been advocating the switch to gsettings. GNOME Shell was one of the first big projects to jump on the band wagon.

[13:47:02 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> pretty funny typo, Bosmon

[13:47:14 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> Ah, it's not a typo

[13:47:23 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> It's Mac OS X's automatic spellchecker

[13:47:27 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> ha!

[13:47:28 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> dewarping

[13:47:31 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> ha!!

[13:47:33 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> Great

[13:47:36 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> gets automatically converted to dwarfing

[13:47:41 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> how annoying

[13:48:11 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> clown: I guess non-GNOME-centric apps like Firefox or Thunderbird won't use gsettings, though, right?

[13:48:48 CST(-0600)] <clown> colinclark: I have to check up on FF. It does have an annoying a11y-enabled switch that still uses gconf.

[13:49:02 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> oh, interesting

[13:49:17 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I just figured they'd use their own config file

[13:49:25 CST(-0600)] <clown> but, I recall that FF, in general, uses a whopping big .js file for all their preferences.

[13:49:29 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> right

[13:49:34 CST(-0600)] <clown> no matter what the platform.

[13:49:39 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> that sucks (sad)

[13:49:50 CST(-0600)] <clown> easy to maintain on their end...

[13:49:54 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> for sure

[13:49:57 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> it's understandable

[13:50:20 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> anastasiac, michelled, my latest change on fluid-studios theme: https://github.com/cindyli/studios.fluidproject.org/tree/FLUID-4566

[13:50:24 CST(-0600)] <clown> you just have to do what w4a did — write a configuration layer that translates to the apps native format (smile)

[13:50:35 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> yes, we can certainly do that

[13:50:42 CST(-0600)] <michelled> thx cindyli

[13:50:45 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> np

[13:50:46 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> That doesn't deal with the "liveness" issue though

[13:50:47 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> but then there's also the question of what to do if the app is already running

[13:50:50 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> yep

[13:51:21 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> the real genius of gsettings/gconf is that they're evented

[13:53:26 CST(-0600)] <clown> good point.

[13:53:52 CST(-0600)] <clown> w4a's (dumb) approach was to 1 shut down the app, 2 change its settings, 3 restart it.

[13:56:22 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> In a world where applications (like Firefox) increasingly save their state automatically, that's less a less dramatic option than it used to be

[13:56:41 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> and quite possibly unavoidable for "uncooperative" applications

[13:56:59 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I guess what's nice about gsettings is that if an app conforms to it, they likely won't have to be GPII-aware at all

[13:57:49 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> whereas if an equivalent to gsettings isn't available, we'll have to ask application developers to conform to some event API… in Mac OS X, they'll have to listen to the NSNotificationCenter for some "preferenceDidChange" notification or something to this effect

[13:57:57 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> otherwise, as you say, we'll probably have to just zap them

[14:01:55 CST(-0600)] <clown> just thinking out loud: is there anything in applescript on os x that might do this? that is, there might be a high level application event to tell a Mac app to change some/all settings.

[14:01:55 CST(-0600)] <michelled> cindyli, anastasiac: can we meet in the collab room?

[14:02:40 CST(-0600)] <clown> or is that what NSNotificationCenter is, in essence?

[14:05:53 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> "preferenceDidChange"

[14:05:57 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> So funky : P

[14:06:27 CST(-0600)] <Bosmon> I should Coacoa....

[14:26:43 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> clown: sorry, I missed your comments earlier

[14:26:52 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> There isn't anything that I know of

[14:27:08 CST(-0600)] <clown> well, it was just wild speculation.

[14:27:08 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> NSNotificationCenter is really just a way of posting cross-process events, built into Cocoa

[14:27:19 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> so it could be used to build something just like you suggest

[14:28:23 CST(-0600)] <clown> "posting cross-process events" sounds analogous to classic Mac OS interprocess communication layer. Not really a preferences conduit.

[14:28:44 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> no

[14:28:53 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> just a way to notify an app of something

[14:29:03 CST(-0600)] <clown> although I'm 80% sure that gsettings is built on top of dbus.

[14:29:04 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> including, if we wanted, the fact that a preference did or should change

[14:30:47 CST(-0600)] <clown> right.

[15:12:01 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> michelled, anastasiac, i'm done with the last piece of sidebars. sent a pull request https://github.com/fluid-project/studios.fluidproject.org/pull/3

[15:15:37 CST(-0600)] <michelled> cindyli: where did you get the fluid logo that you've included?

[15:16:15 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> wiki.fluidproject.org michelled

[15:18:06 CST(-0600)] <michelled> thx

[15:23:33 CST(-0600)] <michelled> cindyli: jvass would like us to show more text rather than a fluid logo

[15:23:43 CST(-0600)] <cindyli> ok, michelled

[15:25:07 CST(-0600)] <michelled> cindyli: it looks like she's reconsidered and we're good (smile)

[15:56:36 CST(-0600)] <throckmorton> colinclark: i couldn't resist — I now have f16/G3/GS running in virtual box. Thanks a bunch!

[15:56:50 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> (smile)

[15:56:51 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> nice name

[15:56:54 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> and i'm glad it works

[15:57:00 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I'm still having some flakiness

[15:57:10 CST(-0600)] <clown> weird — that was for an entirely different irc server.

[15:57:12 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> but nothing a few ctrl-alt-deletes can't seem to fix

[15:57:32 CST(-0600)] <clown> a freezing UI?

[15:57:48 CST(-0600)] <clown> I get that on the acer once and a while.

[15:58:28 CST(-0600)] <clown> next step: can I develop on this system? I'll have to do all the system updates next. A project for the morning.

[16:00:20 CST(-0600)] <clown> cya

[16:16:17 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> Hey anastasiac, I thought this article from A List Apart on fluid images might be helpful for us as we're building the Studios gallery: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fluid-images/

[16:16:32 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> It's actually a chapter from Marcotte's Responsive Design book, which is floating around the office

[16:16:59 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> That should allow us to create gallery thumbnails that scale to suit different screen sizes

[16:17:15 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> colinclark, thanks, I'll have a look. We did have a quick look at the chapter. I'll compare how this works to what we're doing now with fl-grid

[16:17:47 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I noticed in your pull request that you're setting fixed pixel sizes for fl-grid, which caused me to remember this article

[16:18:56 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> oh, excellent - I wasn't happy with the fixed width (though jvass did give us a width)

[16:19:30 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> right

[16:19:45 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> The Responsive Design book explains how to take fixed widths from designers

[16:19:46 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> in pixels

[16:20:00 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> and convert them to percentages so that they'll adapt to different widths

[16:20:51 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> "your favorite formula, target ÷ context = result"

[16:20:57 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> do we want the number of columns to remain fixed, and to widen, or do we want a flow, so that the number of columns widens with the window?

[16:21:12 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> Those are things we should determine in conversation with the designers

[16:21:15 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> it's probably a little of both

[16:21:37 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> but my guess is that, on a small screen like a phone, you'd rather see smaller grid cells than have the columns unfold

[16:22:06 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> right, but on a big screen, you don't necessarily want three ginormous images

[16:22:06 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> Sounds like it would be quite helpful if you read the first few chapters of the Responsive Design book.

[16:22:12 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> yes, that's right

[16:22:13 CST(-0600)] <anastasiac> yep, planning to

[16:22:18 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> It's a very funny book

[16:22:48 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I hope, anastasiac, that it should give you some perspective on the techniques for responsiveness

[16:22:52 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> so we can ask the designers the right questions

[16:24:05 CST(-0600)] <colinclark> I definitely don't know the answers to lots of them, which makes it a pretty fun learning opportunity for modern CSS