Has anyone else been as annoyed as I am about this dialog?  Every time I close a terminal which has a running child process, rather than the terminal closing and the child process(es) getting killed, gnome-terminal tries to protect:

I’m not unlike any other user: I don’t like unnecessary dialogs.

However as I’ve discovered, there is a fix!  Open up gconf-editor (Configuration Editor, not that you can find it on many menu systems these days) and browse to /apps/gnome-terminal/global and uncheck the confirm_window_close key.

Now you may return to killing your numerous terminals the way you’ve always enjoyed.

I’ve recently made the jump to the latest ‘n greatest desktop, GNOME 2.22. Altogether I’m quite happy with the software. Not so happy with all the Gentoo bugs. But that’s another story.

One of my favorite bugs is the crashes that Xorg keeps causing, which has made my computing experience similarly enjoyable to Windows 95 where the computer is no longer logical, and likes to crash in a multitude of ways with no warning.

However onto the subject: Evolution’s new crash detection feature. I won’t debate the merit of this feature. Just the dialog box that I had to squint at over morning tea for a whole minute before I understood what the hell it’s prompting me for:

I get what this feature exists for. They’re worried that certain types of emails are crashing Evolution upon viewing, so we have a feature to disable the preview pane in the rare case that this is the issue. I suppose. I’ve personally never once had this issue. But what the hell. I’ll play along.

I’m annoyed by this dialog. When my software makes me think, it makes me unhappy. I don’t like to think:

• I don’t use the preview pane. Why am I seeing this dialog? There’s nothing to disable!
• “…appears to have exited unexpectedly…” — how the hell else would Evolution’s data files be in a state indicating crash? Be assertive in your dialog messages, as your users appreciate it! This should read “Evolution exited unexpectedly the last time it was run.”
• The text seems to indicate that “all preview panes will be hidden.” This tells me that the software will do what it says. But what options am I given? An Ignore and a Recover option. At this point in reading the dialog, I wasn’t expecting to be asked a question. I can make some assumptions about what these buttons do…but…what? I had to ponder about what button to push for a whole (admittedly sleepy) minute.

Bug 530345 filed. Hopefully not too grumpy in my bug report, I really do want this to get fixed. But it made me think so early in the morning so I’m allowed to be grumpy, right?

Wowzers, what a great time! Was intending to write about each day individually, but that’s certainly out of the question now. GUADEC was a great experience and I’m hooked on the community! A big thanks to everyone who helped put GUADEC ‘07 together.

My favorite bits:

• Staying at the hostel. It was a helluva long walk and really sucked on the rainy days, but it was a new experience. Forced random strangers to hang out and I met some cool people. Wish I would’ve gotten the names of the two guys running the hostel; they were very laid back.
• There were some killer keynotes; most importantly:
  • Alex’s presentation of PyroDesktop. I don’t take much stock in the comments of folks who don’t like this technology. It’s something we’ve never seen before, and I think the coolest part is the potential to draw a new crowd of developers to the desktop! Alex, Chris & company: keep up the good work!
  • Havoc and Bryan’s presentation of the Gnome Online Desktop. Super sweet guys. Everyone loves integration. Now, lets see it happen!
  • Doc Searls’ closing keynote. Doc is a funny man. “Now bend over and give me some content!”
• And my favorite sessions:
  • Larry’s presentation of F-Spot and the next wave of development. F-Spot rocks!
  • Telepathy and Tubes. You’ve heard the raves of others; I don’t need to spell it out here.
  • Joe’s presentation on Beagle and metadata joyfulness. Joe is a funny man.
  • Kudos to Jimmy K for holding his own during his talk on the new main menu development.
  • The Geodata standards project — creating a totally free database of mapping information.  Cool!
• The Walkabout.  What a great bar.

Many thanks to all the folks who made going out and drinking absolutely hilarious, including Gabriel, Aaron, Michael, Aiden, Rodney, Toms, any anyone else I’ve missed!

Wowzers, what a day!

• Jono’s talk was excellent.
• Video taped the morning sessions in Recital; the F-Spot presentation was great. Larry is working on some sweet ass stuff. Sync’ing our photos online — integration with web services — I think a common theme is emerging!
• Hacked on libgphoto2-sharp and Banshee. Frustrated like no other. gPhoto doesn’t have any magic support for the lame underlying case-sensitive-insensitive FAT32 filesystem. I guess I kinda figured this would Just Work. I’ve been fighting with this for six months and sure enough, I just need to hack 50 lines of code.
• Telepathy: it’s tubular, dude!
• Too many metas: Joe, thank you for taking care of my metadata. You need to publish what you want from us software hackers so we can help take our desktop to the next generation.
• Havoc’s presentation was great. Full integration of Gnome and the web will make our desktop as useful as possible. Web services are all the rage these days and we’re all dying for that One Way To Link Them All…and I think this is the right approach. Bind our online lives with an online desktop and you’ll get my Mom to switch to Linux.
• To compliment Havoc’s talk (not just because Gabriel is awesome) but Gabriel is right: we need a Free Service License. Havoc mentioned it, and Gabriel has already been thinking of it for a week.
• Been meeting a bunch of people; particularly many of the Novell hackers I’ve heard of and met online several times.
• Went and drank the free beer, and the nice cheap doubles of Southern Comfort…on an empty stomach. Ended up back at the hostel relaxing and eating a really nasty fish ‘n chips.  No, that’s not proper british fish ‘n chips…it was deep fried with french fries.  So greasy it made me nearly sick this morning…

Still grumpy about libgphoto2.  Going to see about fixing it in libgphoto2-sharp, and then push the changes down to libgphoto2 proper.

GUADEC continues!

So I arrived in London around 6 AM; everything went quickly.  Plane ride was fun, albeit quite cozy. Took the paddington express train, which is super slick, jumped on the underground to Euston, and wandered around for a while until my train up to Birmingham. The train ride up was so much faster than I had expected — we don’t have quick, cheap trains like that in the US! By the way — if you want a fun bit of adventure when travelling…don’t bring a map of your destination city with you. Half the fun is wandering around (looking quite touristy with my huge bag) and trying to figure out where the heck I am. Then buy a map :)

I’ve been meeting up with a number of GNOME folks that I’ve known over the last year and a half online, and it’s been a great experience. It’s kinda cool to have a team of Banshee hackers and supporters all roaming around. So many ideas! The hacking itch needs to be scratched this week. Big time.

So rather than turn up and go to sessions, what did I do? I walked across town with a bunch of the guys and watched the big football match. It was a blast! I went thru about 3 sets of batteries taking pictures, which I’ll post soon. Lots of funny action shots of people missing the goal. Hilarity.

Then of course, went out and got some beers and the fixings for some good ‘ol homemade pizza. Brought it back to the hostel where we’re staying at and made some pizza! Thanks to Aiden for helping us out and making it a lot of fun. Combine that with some beers, and then meeting up with a few folks later at a bar, and it was a great evening.  Also managed to give away an Ubuntu live cd to one of the guys working at the hostel — he was quite curious about free software and wanted to give it a try.  We didn’t even have to try to “sell it” — he asked for it!