GreenFuel Technologies

There is something so incredibly amazing about a power plant that burns carbon based fuels, but reduces emissions by generating bio-diesel, ethanol, and food-grade protein. Check out GreenFuel Technologies or read about their work with the Arizona Public Service Company, then, I don't know, write your representatives in congress. If this technology could be used to produce spirulina... well, great things could happen, that's for sure.

Sanctuary!

The fist episode of Sanctuary (http://www.sanctuaryforall.com/) was released today, a low resolution video to follow. The episodes are a little heavy on the CG, but I think it is well done. It's a little short, at 17 minutes, so I hope that they keep to a fairly quick release cycle. From the Sanctuary Wikipedia entry:

Amanda Tapping stars as 157 year old Dr. Helen Magnus, one of the first female doctors in the Royal College during Victorian England. She was engaged to Jack the Ripper, and also has a daughter by him, Ashley. However, Ashley does not yet know that Jack is her father. Dr. Magnus's father started a sanctuary for supernatural creatures, collected from all over the world. In her work with these creatures, Dr. Magnus has acquired her great longevity.

fun and games. and great reflections.

I usually don't prattle on about games, but a demo video for a new one really caught my eye. I found this on the Ubuntu Gamers Arena; It's called Nosferatu and can be found here: http://www.nosferatuthegame.com/ The video is below.

New Google Reader Firefox Extension

Saw a link to this little beauty on the Mozilla Links site. It is just a simple little unread article counter that resides in the Firefox status bar. The original article can be found here, the extension here.

Well, a post a day

was good while it lasted. Just finished a tremendous meal of country fried cube steak, jasmine rice, green beans cooked with onions and bacon, poached baby carrots with butter and brown sugar, and a hot, crispy loaf of white mountain bread. Dear God that was good. I never can seem to time the gravy so it is ready with everything else though... oh well.

Someone who will not be named had to remind me of the release date for the seventh and final Harry Potter book... you macadamia nut... so it is unfortunately right at the forefront of my thoughts. It's so bad that I have even took a step into the world of fan fiction and read the remarkably satisfying "Harry Potter and the Seventh Horcrux" by Melindaleo, a 34 chapter novel which, while certainly not written to the standards of J.K.Rowling, attempts to maintain a level of consistency with the original works that surprised me. This book is in fact making the rounds on torrent sites, claiming to be a leak of Deathly Hollows.

I've installed the latest official Ubuntu release 7.04, Feisty Fawn, and must say I am quite pleased. The new Restricted Driver Manager made installing the proprietary ATI driver a snap, it seemed to have a problem replacing the original xorg.conf file when i disabled it. Simple enough to fix, however. After making my way past the error messages, I logged in to the text console, sudo'd to root, and replaced the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the backup copy: xorg.conf.original-0

For some unfortunate reason, the ati driver decides to max out my video's contrast settings about 5 minutes after booting up. Have to see about fixing that... At least the power management for this notebook seems to be far better supported in this release, and it's always a pleasure to see all of the extra polish in each new release.

Human Interface Guidelines for Command Line Applications

Human Interface Guidelines for Command Line Applications. I've always wished that Command Line apps were a little more usable. I think that a few guidelines, if followed would make the command far more approachable and intuitive. The GNU habit of using single dashes for abbreviated arguments and double dashes for full text is handy, but can often be confusing when described in man, info and simple descriptions. I am sure that there is documentation on these design standards for GNU tools, but until I find it, I wanted to post these ideas, based on what I have found useful in the command line apps I have used. * All programs, when run with no arguments, should not execute but display a simple description and list of common commands.
Example:

$>foo Description:

foo is a sample application meant to serve as a example of proper command line behavior.

Examples:

To start foo: foo --start
To start foo with a file: foo --start filename.ext

* When running in a non-interactive manner, a command to stop the program should be displayed.
Example:

$>foo --start
To stop foo, press control+x at any time.

* If the program is passed an argument that it does not understand, it should produce a "friendly" error message and display the simple description.
Example 1:

$>foo --bar
foo does not understand your request to "bar"
Description:

foo is a sample application meant to serve as a example of proper command line behavior.

Examples:

To start foo: foo --start
To start foo with a file: foo --start filename.ext

Example 2:

$>foo bar
foo could not find a file named "bar"
Description:

foo is a sample application meant to serve as a example of proper command line behavior.

Examples:

To start foo: foo --start
To start foo with a file: foo --start filename.ext

My Top Five Google Complaints:

Sorry for the missed update yesterday. I was picking my mother up from the hospital. Selfish bastards. You, not mothers. Mothers are wonderful people. Well, most of them. Selfish bastards. So,I actually worked on this stupid list. I have quite a few complaints, as anyone who has met me could tell you. These five, however, are places where I really feel google dropped the ball. things that they absolutely should have implemented, and just didn't. Or haven't yet. With the exception of #2, there is no excuse for these features to be missing. So, without further non-sense, My Top Five Google Complaints:

1. There is no search function in Reader.
2. I still can't collaborate in Pages.
3. Publishing from Docs to blogger does not transfer title or allow you to add blogger tags.
4. I can't export single Note's "nodes" to Docs, only whole Notebooks.
5. Reader doesn't have an option to display _unread_ news from oldest to newest.

So whats up with the name Sunergos anyway?(Pt.2)

I mentioned in part one that Sunergos was supposed to be an operating system. That's not completely true, but we'll stick with that for now. I didn't describe exactly what Sunergos was meant to be, and there is one reason for that: Mission Creep. It is the bane of all project leaders, even when that project is naught but vaporware.

Initially, Sunergos was born on windows, when I worked for a tech support company and nearly every application I used was web based. At this point, I'd had almost five years of web development under my belt. After setting the windows shell to use Internet explorer, I set about creating an interface for all of the resources I used for my day to day work. With that an idea borne of a bit of ambition, normally absent from my psyche, reared it's ugly head: A browser-based desktop. Not a new idea, I know. but in that idealistic turn of the century, it was certainly something I had never seen.

Working on a windows based platform (first 98, and later 2000) posed some serious stumbling blocks, not the least of which was the availability of free information. While I was far from an expert with *nix, my experience with Openbsd and later Mandrake 7.2 led me to the (correct) assumption that the open source community was the ideal outlet for this nearly all consuming idea. With an open source operating system as a base I could customize the entire environment, tuning everything to my purpose, and distribute the whole thing.

This put me at a serious disadvantage, though. As I have previously indicated, I had limited experience with this environment. However, that great electronic oracle-- the Internet-- could provide all that I needed and I set myself to achieving a state of complete saturation with my newly adopted obsession. Unfortunately, during my journey toward enlightenment, to a zen like oneness withTeh Source, the infamous bubble did it's infamous bursting. Instead of using my new-found free time to advance my cause, I took more of a chicken little approach and started stockpiling rice, beans, and 12 gauge ammunition...

Hmm, starting to get flashbacks here. I'm going to go and make some plywood squares to mount over my windows, clean my guns, and check the canned food stocks. But, I promise to be back soon for another exciting installment of "What the Hell is Sunergos." Now that the history is essentially explained, I can cover some of the stolen inovative ideas that, when combined, would have made Sunergos "The Best OS Ever"

Like a Rare Jewel

So, I've been looking at Ruby on Rails for developing a combination blog/wiki/forum/cms solution. Seeing as I am a poorly expereinced programmer, Ruby was an obvious choice. This is seriously a... well, for lack of a better word, Zen programming language. For anyone who interested in an incredibly easy to learn language that still has the power to take over the world, I recommend Ruby. It is well documented and portable enough that I will give you a personal money-back guarantee that it will work on your computer. There are many resources available for free, as I have come to expect from open source projects. I have included a quote from one that I am enjoying far too much for it to actually be programming "manual."

why’s (poignant) guide to ruby :: 2. Kon’nichi wa, Ruby

Pretend that you’ve opened this book (although you probably have opened this book), just to find a huge onion right in the middle crease of the book. (The manufacturer of the book has included the onion at my request.)

So you’re like, “Wow, this book comes with an onion!” (Even if you don’t particularly like onions, I’m sure you can appreciate the logistics of shipping any sort of produce discreetly inside of an alleged programming manual.)

Then you ask yourself, “Wait a minute. I thought this was a book on Ruby, the incredible new programming language from Japan. And although I can appreciate the logistics of shipping any sort of produce discreetly inside of an alleged programming manual: Why an onion? What am I supposed to do with it?”

No. Please don’t puzzle over it. You don’t need to do anything with the onion. Set the onion aside and let it do something with you.

I’ll be straight with you. I want you to cry. To weep. To whimper sweetly. This book is a poignant guide to Ruby. That means code so beautiful that tears are shed. That means gallant tales and somber truths that have you waking up the next morning in the arms of this book. Hugging it tightly to you all the day long. If necessary, fashion a makeshift hip holster for Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, so you can always have this book’s tender companionship.

You really must sob once. Or at least sniffle. And if not, then the onion will make it all happen for you.

For more fun and games, I highly recommend why's blog as well.

So whats up with the name Sunergos anyway?

It was never a nickname for me, although it has become one in some circles. Sunergos is a Greek word that I originally came across when looking for a synonym for the word synergy. Sunergos is the name of a Linux distribution that has been cooking on my back burner for the better part of a decade. I have no illusions as to my abilities as a programmer or *nix guru, so I have done little work on the Sunergos distro outside of theoretics and high-level planning. A few recent articles have put Sunergos back toward the frontal parts of my brain. While I doubt that I will ever see my baby birthed, I would at least like to share my vision with the rest of the world. So, over the next few days, I hope to describe some of the features I wanted Sunergos to have, as well as the articles that inspired my sense of rejuvenation. I have a feeling that logic behind my choice of a name will become self evident.

Enjoying the weather before the next storm (Pt.1)

Or, a quick look at a few of my favorite pages which have sprung up with all of this web 2.0 nonsense. The Google "Suite" were just going to be a part of this article, but there are so many I've decided to split it up into two parts and devote the first half just to the big G:

Gmail - Perhaps the first mainstream appearance of the web too point oh, and frequently referred to as "web mail done right" Gmail features massive storage space (and seems to increase it at a rate of ~1 gigabyte per year) a great search function, handy dandy labels, an excellent filter system (and I don't just mean spam), unobtrusive advertising, free pop and smtp access, and idiot-proof integration with the google chat service, Google Talk, in an easy to use interface. Everyone should have gmail. Seriously. Call your congressman, send a letter to the UN, something. If you have more than one gmail account, I highly recommend the firefox plugin "Gmail Manager" which acts as an account manager and mail notifier, allowing you to monitor both accounts and access them quickly, in addition to allowing sendto: links to work with gmail.

Reader - Google Reader is an aggregator for rss feeds. In addition to plugin-free integration with firefox (2.*) this reader features a sharing function, allowing you to create your own rss or html feed of articles selected from your aggregated feeds. I swear, it's as neat as a snake eating it's own tail, and from what I hear the practically-trademarked super-slick minimalist google interface is up for improvements in the near future. I'm not sure how they intend to improve on perfection, however.

Docs and Spreadsheet - I'll roll these two together, even though they are two separate services. Spreadsheet was google's baby and docs, if I am not mistaken, was birthed after the acquisition of startup http://www.writely.com/. Regardless, this is stone simple office document creation right here, although simple may be a deceptive word. I admit that my needs are generally simple, but I have yet run into a feature here that I needed but couldn't find. I think that the sheer brilliance in this user interface, when compared to MSOffice, OpenOffice, or even my favorite, Gnome Office, comes from its inability to hide features in the menu bar. Everything just has to be there on the page. Again, collaboration and publication is built in so that it feels down right cozy. Have to wonder why Google Docs is missing the discussion tab that Spreadsheets feature.

Pages - I am sad to say that while I like Google Pages, it is the most poorly implemented service I have tried. As far as Google services go, I mean. The interface is smooth and clean and well thought out, everything I would expect, but the layout/editing engine seems buggy as hell. Seriously, it reminds me of Microsoft Word circa 1996. At least with Pages, I can go to the code and fix those little bugs as they arise. Still, I would expect more from a wysiwyg interface, even one as advanced as this. There is also a limited selection of templates, considering the tech powerhouse that is backing this home page service. What I would really like to see are theme generators, a la the proliferous myspace layout generators. The ability to make your Google page your Google Wiki should be there too. Not a full blown world-writable Wiki mind you, but an invite only affair. Google is really pushing collaboration in all of their other services, I'd like to see Google Pages catch up.

Calendar - This is a very functional, clean, standards compliant, and easy to use service-- Although I have to admit that sharing your calendar feed should be easier. This is another service made all-the-more valuable with a Firefox plugin. While there is no official plugin, the aptly named "Google Calendar Notifier" is quite effective and adjusts well to personal preference. Having said all this, Calendar is seriously hurting for some Gtalk notifications, a la Remember the Milk.

Notebook - If you have ever tried Microsoft's OneNote office application, Google Notebook will seem familiar. I'm really not using as often as I should. The Firefox plugin (recently overhauled)for this is the one thing that really makes it worth having in my opinion, although it can act a bit of the insect at times. As someone who constantly saves snippets here and there from various web pages, it should be essential for me. Still a little hooked on notepad though... this essentially makes notes into a scrapbook for the web, and like most of Google's other offerings, you can make your notebook publicly viewable and search-able.

Blogger removes the hassle of remembering yet another - The new non beta blogger is quite nice indeed. Those rat-bastards who designed myspace should really look at how the new template editor works (while taking extensive notes) and then shoot themselves in the head. The fact that I can now use my Google loginusername and password, too. Unfortunately, The interface still seems a little out of place with the rest of the minimalist-yet-hyperfunctional offerings from Google. Integrating the editor into the post management page would go a long way toward fixing that though. BTW: looks like you can now post to blogger directly from Google Docs as well as Reader.

Groups - Oh, man, Newsgroups. Nothing can quite pique fond memories of those early days of the web like newsgroups. Ok, so they were mostly used for porn and posting copyrighted material for public download, but at one point newsgroups were *the* forum for expressing our simian ideas. Google groups manages to capture this wondrous past and breath new life into the service whilst making the whole shooting match indexed and searchable.

That's all for now kiddies. Did you learn anything?

Make working flash with free tools

While this has been in the news a bit, I decided to try my hand at ActionScript recently and felt I would pass on my findings. There is an Eclipse setup (I am told) for flash development, but the massive IDEs aren't really my cup of tea, So I have found a few tools that may be of help to like-minded seekers of curiosities. First stop should probably be the Open Source Flash project at http://www.osflsh.org/ This is the holy grail of OS flash resources and where I found links to swfmill, an xml to swf and swf to xml processor, as well as the Motion-Twin ActionScript 2 Compiler, better known as MTASC. Both of these tools are available in Windows, Linux, and Mac versions. For more information on setting up these tools for flash development, see "How to structure and set up a Flash project without using the Flash IDE" on the OSFlash site.

A rose by any other set of bits

I always wondered what was up with character encoding and I found an excelent article that explains how different encodings work as well as their various origins. While it is geared more towards developers, It shouldn't be hard for anyone to grasp the concepts that are explained within. But, rather than rehash someone else's work, I'll just give you a link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Goodies Two: The Reconing

I love music. I play music in the car, when I work, even when I sleep. So, when my sister offered to buy me a new mp3 player, I got really excited. The video ipods looked so nice, all clean and black and shiny-- they even play videos. But then, so did my old one. So I decided (and strangely enough have yet to regret) passing over the video ipod for a shuffle. For anyone who doesn't know, the shuffle is the smallest of the line-- in size, price, and storage capacity. And when I say small, I mean it. I'm too damn lazy to find my vernier calipers, but the case supposedly measures 1.07 inch tall, 0.98 inch wide, and 0.33 inch deep. It has an integrated clip and is extremely light weight. It uses a single port for audio, power and data transfer. Yeah, weird, takes a little getting used too. On one edge are two tiny sliding switches for power and shuffle/repeat, and the other has the jack and a status led. The face has 5 buttons, a combination play/pause, volume controls, and fore and back track switching. The play/pause button also hides some other features. By holding it in for three seconds locks out the controls from accidental triggering, and pressing it three times in succession will reset the playlist to the first track. In short, it is quite possible that the second gen shuffles are the best balance of technology and simplicity engineered to date, and I really am glad to have it over the full-sized pocket TV. This next (and last) item holds a special place in my heart, as do all devices intended to hurl copper jacketed chunks of lead at super-sonic velocities. A sub-compact .40 caliber Springfield Arms XD. This Pistol is really interesting, but I won't ramble on about all of the little features that make it special. Suffice it to say that the design is inspired by both Glock and John Browning, and when activated it goes BOOM!

Flash Games

For a *very* long time, I never saw any redeeming value in flash. Period, end of story. It did nothing but make web pages difficult to see and navigate. Of course, that is really the designers fault, but that is not my point. I still don't see any point in using flash for web pages, but as content for those pages, the beast has been redeemed in my eyes. I know that flash and shockwave games are nothing new, but the quality (in my opinion at least) tended to be sorely lacking. A few days ago a friend showed me Orisinal Games, a collection of horribly addictive and entertaining games by Ferry Halim. The games manage to be both simple and challenging, and there are more than a few that I could spend hours playing. After that, I started poking the internet with my google stick and asking it to give me games. That brought me to a fairly new site, Kongregate, which is attempting to be the flash game analog to xbox live. My favorite game there has to be The Fancy Pants Adventure, a side scrolling game in the spirit of Super Mario Bros. and the like. The first world is fun, but the demo for the second world has left me salivating. Fancy Pants led me to Armor Games, which has a nice selection of flash games and several playable demos for installable games. The flash games vary in quality, but some are simply amazing. On in particular, Chaos Faction, left me stupefied. I never would have believed that a game so... feature complete could be made with flash. If you have ever played Super Smash Bothers for Nintendo, then you should feel right at home. Chaos Faction even includes a level editor! I was really impressed with this one, I just cant express that enough. All that aside, flash pages suck.(period)

Goodies

Christmas and my birthday were banner events for me this year(what, you don't celebrate new years in the fall?), and I wanted to take a moment to express my thanks. Well, OK, I wanted to brag about my shiny (and matte) new toys. Where to start where to start... I suppose we should start with the biggest first: a shinny new silver and white Dell Inspiron 1501, outfitted with an AMD Turion x2 TL-56 64 bit processor, an even gig of ram and a dual layer DVD-+R/W drive. Thats a mouthful, but amounts to a sweet little PC. It even came with an extra battery and a gps locater. A piece of hardware that fine practically demanded an upgrade in my peripherals. Fortunately I also received a (matching I might add) Logitech headset and an actual laser mouse from the same manufacturer. I am truly surprised at the recording quality of the flexible boom mic. Maybe now I can actually use teamspeak and googletalk as they were intended. I'm not holding my breath though. The mouse is a true work of technophile art, a total of 10 buttons, a scroll wheel and 1000 dpi laser that appears to use a bandidlth that is outside of the visual spectrum, the only down side to this is that my mouse will no longer function as an emergency flashlight... Ok, yes, I realize I am a geek. That's all the blustering I can manage for today anyway. More unabashed pride later.

Dual booting tip

As soon as I opened up my new notebook, I installed ubuntu edgy. It was my intent to remove windows altogether. But, this being the first copy of Windows XP that I have purchased, I decided to leave it on. The Ubuntu installer was able to resize my NTFS windows partition, install the operating system and configure GRUB with minimal interaction on my part. Configuring fstab so that my Windows partition was mounted read/write automatically on boot was slightly more involved, but I have seen that process documented quite extensivly elsewere. What I had never seen, and honestly had never looked for before now, was a way to mount Linux partitions-- ext3 to be more precise-- in Windows. That was when I found Ext2IFS, an installable file system driver for the ext2 and ext3 file systems. You can find the program's home page at http://www.fs-driver.org The install process was simple, just a standard windows executable installer, and the results were immediately visible. The installer allows you to choose what drive letter to asign to you ext partitions, but to change them you just have to look for the new control panel applet "IFS Drives." For those of you that use itunes, it seems to lock down a player to a single drive letter. In my case, the drive letter "E:" was associated with my ipod and was also default assignment for my home partition, if you have applications installed to a USB drive that is not attached to the system at the time of the driver install, this may be an issue as well.

Adultswim

My love for the adultswim fix is now met only with loathing. It now requires active x to view, and with no way (that I have found) to locate the actual play lists, I am doomed to a fixless world until they get their heads out of their asses and lend support to mac and linux users.

Two Themes

Here are two gtk themes that I created for use with xubuntu. The first one depends on the clearlooks engine: # Xedgy-Clearlooks theme for Xubuntu # Based on Clearlooks # Created by Peter Durrill. style "clearlooks-default" { GtkButton ::default_border = { 0, 0, 0, 0 } GtkRange ::trough_border = 0 GtkPaned ::handle_size = 6 GtkRange ::slider_width = 15 GtkRange ::stepper_size = 15 GtkScrollbar ::min_slider_length = 30 GtkCheckButton ::indicator_size = 12 GtkMenuBar ::internal-padding = 0 GtkTreeView ::expander_size = 14 GtkExpander ::expander_size = 16 xthickness = 1 ythickness = 1 fg[NORMAL] = "#101010" # dark grey fg[PRELIGHT] = "#101010" # dark grey fg[ACTIVE] = "#000000" # black fg[SELECTED] = "#ffffff" # white fg[INSENSITIVE] = "#aaaaaa" # dark white / grey bg[NORMAL] = "#f5f5f5" # white / light grey bg[PRELIGHT] = "#ffffff" # white bg[ACTIVE] = "#f0f0f0" # mid white / light grey bg[SELECTED] = "#51739c" # blue bg[INSENSITIVE] = "#f5f5f5" # white / light grey base[NORMAL] = "#f5f5f5" # white / light grey base[PRELIGHT] = "#51739c" # blue base[ACTIVE] = "#aaaaaa" # dark white / light grey base[SELECTED] = "#51739c" # blue base[INSENSITIVE] = "#f5f5f5" # white / light grey text[NORMAL] = "#000000" # black text[PRELIGHT] = "#000000" # black text[ACTIVE] = "#ffffff" # white text[SELECTED] = "#ffffff" # white text[INSENSITIVE] = "#aaaaaa" # dark white / light grey engine "clearlooks" { menubarstyle = 2 # 0 = flat, 1 = sunken, 2 = flat gradient menuitemstyle = 1 # 0 = flat, 1 = 3d-ish (gradient), 2 = 3d-ish (button) listviewitemstyle = 1 # 0 = flat, 1 = 3d-ish (gradient) progressbarstyle = 0 # 0 = candy bar, 1 = flat } } style "clearlooks-wide" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 2 ythickness = 2 } style "clearlooks-button" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 3 ythickness = 3 } style "clearlooks-check" = "clearlooks-button" { text[NORMAL] = "#336699" # blue text[PRELIGHT] = "#6699cc" # blue } style "clearlooks-notebook" = "clearlooks-wide" { bg[NORMAL] = "#f0f0f0" # mid white / light grey bg[INSENSITIVE] = "#ffffff" # white } style "clearlooks-tasklist" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 5 ythickness = 3 } style "clearlooks-menu" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 2 ythickness = 1 bg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff" # white } style "clearlooks-menu-item" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 2 ythickness = 3 fg[PRELIGHT] = "#ffffff" # white text[PRELIGHT] = "#ffffff" # white bg[PRELIGHT] = "#000000" # black } style "clearlooks-menu-itembar" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 3 ythickness = 3 } style "clearlooks-tree" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 2 ythickness = 2 } style "clearlooks-frame-title" = "clearlooks-default" { fg[NORMAL] = "#2a2a2a" # grey } style "clearlooks-tooltips" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 4 ythickness = 4 bg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff" # white } style "clearlooks-progressbar" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 1 ythickness = 1 fg[PRELIGHT] = "#ffffff" # white } style "clearlooks-combo" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 2 ythickness = 3 } # widget styles class "GtkWidget" style "clearlooks-default" class "GtkButton" style "clearlooks-button" class "GtkCombo" style "clearlooks-button" class "GtkRange" style "clearlooks-wide" class "GtkFrame" style "clearlooks-wide" class "GtkMenu" style "clearlooks-menu" class "GtkEntry" style "clearlooks-button" class "GtkMenuItem" style "clearlooks-menu-item" class "GtkStatusbar" style "clearlooks-wide" class "GtkNotebook" style "clearlooks-notebook" class "GtkProgressBar" style "clearlooks-progressbar" class "GtkCheckButton" style "clearlooks-check" class "GtkRadioButton" style "clearlooks-check" widget_class "*MenuItem.*" style "clearlooks-menu-item" # combobox stuff widget_class "*.GtkComboBox.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-combo" widget_class "*.GtkCombo.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-combo" # tooltips stuff widget_class "*.tooltips.*.GtkToggleButton" style "clearlooks-tasklist" widget "gtk-tooltips" style "clearlooks-tooltips" # treeview stuff widget_class "*.GtkTreeView.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree" widget_class "*.GtkCTree.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree" widget_class "*.GtkList.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree" widget_class "*.GtkCList.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree" widget_class "*.GtkFrame.GtkLabel" style "clearlooks-frame-title" # notebook stuff widget_class "*.GtkNotebook.*.GtkEventBox" style "clearlooks-notebook" widget_class "*.GtkNotebook.*.GtkViewport" style "clearlooks-notebook" The second depends on the ubuntu-looks engine: # Xedgy-Human theme for Xubuntu # Based on Ubuntu Human Colorscheme # Created by Peter Durrill. style "clearlooks-default" { GtkButton ::default_border = { 0, 0, 0, 0 } GtkRange ::trough_border = 0 GtkPaned ::handle_size = 6 GtkRange ::slider_width = 15 GtkRange ::stepper_size = 15 GtkScrollbar ::min_slider_length = 35 GtkCheckButton ::indicator_size = 14 GtkMenuBar ::internal-padding = 0 GtkTreeView ::expander_size = 14 GtkExpander ::expander_size = 16 GtkScale ::slider-length = 31 # GtkToolbar ::button-relief = GTK_RELIEF_NORMAL # GtkMenuBar ::shadow-type = GTK_SHADOW_OUT # GtkScrollbar ::has-secondary-forward-stepper = 1 # GtkScrollbar ::has-secondary-backward-stepper = 1 GtkButton ::child-displacement-x = 0 GtkButton ::child-displacement-y = 0 xthickness = 1 ythickness = 1 GtkTreeView::odd_row_color = "#ffffff" GtkTreeView::even_row_color = "#f0f0f0" fg[NORMAL] = "#101010" fg[PRELIGHT] = "#000000" fg[ACTIVE] = "#000000" fg[SELECTED] = "#ffffff" fg[INSENSITIVE] = "#aaaaaa" # B3AFAB disabled widget text bg[NORMAL] = "#f5f5f5" # efebe7 background bg[PRELIGHT] = "#f5f5f5" # f5f3f0 ? bg[ACTIVE] = "#ffffff" # E1D9D1 ? bg[SELECTED] = "#f5f5f5" # D6722D ? bg[INSENSITIVE] = "#f0f0f0" # EBE7E3 disabled widget backgrounds base[NORMAL] = "#ffffff" base[PRELIGHT] = "#ffffff" base[ACTIVE] = "#ffffff" # E1D9D1 base[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # FFD799 highlights base[INSENSITIVE] = "#f0f0f0" # EBE7E3 disabled entry widget background text[NORMAL] = "#000000" text[PRELIGHT] = "#000000" text[ACTIVE] = "#000000" text[SELECTED] = "#ffffff" # highlighted text text[INSENSITIVE] = "#f5f5f5" # B3AFAB engine "ubuntulooks" { menubarstyle = 2 # 0 = flat, 1 = sunken, 2 = flat gradient menuitemstyle = 1 # 0 = flat, 1 = 3d-ish (gradient), 2 = 3d-ish (button) listviewitemstyle = 1 # 0 = flat, 1 = 3d-ish (gradient) progressbarstyle = 1 # 0 = candy bar, 1 = fancy candy bar, 2 = flat animation = FALSE } } # Evolution (and some deprecated widgets) use bg and fg for its listview instead of # base and text like they should, so we override it. style "evolution-hack" = "clearlooks-default" { bg[ACTIVE] = "#f5f5f5" # E1D9D1 bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # FFD799 gtk combo highlight fg[ACTIVE] = "#000000" fg[SELECTED] = "#ffffff" # 000000 gtk combo highlight text } # Bright orange highlights only for selected widgets style "clearlooks-orange" = "clearlooks-default" { bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # FF6D0C } style "clearlooks-wide" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 2 ythickness = 2 } style "clearlooks-wide-orange" = "clearlooks-wide" { bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # FF6D0C } style "clearlooks-wider" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 3 ythickness = 3 } style "clearlooks-wider-orange" = "clearlooks-wider" { bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # FF6D0C } style "clearlooks-button" = "clearlooks-wider-orange" { bg[PRELIGHT] = "#efefef" # button prelight bg[ACTIVE] = "#e5e5e5" # pressed button } style "clearlooks-notebook" = "clearlooks-wide-orange" { bg[NORMAL] = "#f5f5f5" # efebe5 bg[ACTIVE] = "#f5f5f5" # d0c8c1 bg[INSENSITIVE] = "#f5f5f5" # efebe5 } style "clearlooks-tasklist" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 5 ythickness = 3 } style "clearlooks-menu" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 2 ythickness = 1 bg[NORMAL] = "#f5f5f5" # f8f5f2 menu background } style "clearlooks-menubar-item" = "clearlooks-button" { fg[PRELIGHT] = "#000000" } style "clearlooks-menu-item" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 2 ythickness = 3 bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # FFD799 menu highlights fg[PRELIGHT] = "#ffffff" # 000000 highlited menu text text[PRELIGHT] = "#000000" } style "clearlooks-tree" = "clearlooks-wide" { } style "clearlooks-frame-title" = "clearlooks-default" { fg[NORMAL] = "#404040" } style "clearlooks-tooltips" = "clearlooks-default" { xthickness = 4 ythickness = 4 bg[NORMAL] = { 1.0,1.0,1.0 } } style "clearlooks-progressbar" = "clearlooks-wide-orange" { xthickness = 2 ythickness = 2 fg[PRELIGHT] = "#ffffff" } style "clearlooks-combo" = "clearlooks-button" { } style "clearlooks-check" = "clearlooks-button" { } style "clearlooks-range" = "clearlooks-wide-orange" { } style "metacity-frame" = "clearlooks-default" { bg[SELECTED] = "#52759f" # CC863E } style "extra-view-widgets" = "clearlooks-default" { bg[NORMAL] = "#f5f5f5" # F5C07F } # widget styles class "GtkWidget" style "clearlooks-default" class "GtkButton" style "clearlooks-button" class "GtkCombo" style "clearlooks-button" class "GtkRange" style "clearlooks-range" class "GtkFrame" style "clearlooks-wide" class "GtkMenu" style "clearlooks-menu" class "GtkEntry" style "clearlooks-wider-orange" class "GtkMenuItem" style "clearlooks-menu-item" class "GtkNotebook" style "clearlooks-notebook" class "GtkProgressBar" style "clearlooks-progressbar" class "MetaFrames" style "metacity-frame" class "GtkWindow" style "metacity-frame" class "GtkCheckButton" style "clearlooks-check" class "GtkRadioButton" style "clearlooks-check" widget_class "*MenuItem.*" style "clearlooks-menu-item" widget_class "*MenuItem.*ProgressBar*" style "clearlooks-default" # combobox stuff widget_class "*.GtkComboBox.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-combo" widget_class "*.GtkCombo.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-combo" # tooltips stuff widget_class "*.tooltips.*.GtkToggleButton" style "clearlooks-tasklist" widget "gtk-tooltips" style "clearlooks-tooltips" # treeview stuff widget_class "*.GtkTreeView.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree" widget_class "*.GtkCTree.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree" widget_class "*.GtkList.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree" widget_class "*.GtkCList.GtkButton" style "clearlooks-tree" widget_class "*.GtkFrame.GtkLabel" style "clearlooks-frame-title" # notebook stuff widget_class "*.GtkNotebook.*.GtkEventBox" style "clearlooks-notebook" widget_class "*.GtkNotebook.*.GtkViewport" style "clearlooks-notebook" # these should really use base and text colors instead widget_class "*GtkCTree*" style "evolution-hack" widget_class "*GtkList*" style "evolution-hack" widget_class "*GtkCList*" style "evolution-hack" widget_class "*.ETree.*" style "evolution-hack" widget "*.nautilus-extra-view-widget" style:highest "extra-view-widgets" unfortunatly, either I got them on the wiki too late, or they just weren't liked. But here they are for the rest of us.

Firefox Extensions 2006-09-13

A quick list of firefox extensions I'm using right now:

adblock - blocks elements in pages, can be selective or general.

adblock updater - updates blacklist from several third-party lists of adservers.

all-in-one sidebar - Gives you a few goodies in addition to opening common popup firefox windows (like downloads, extensions, themes) in the sidebar. Comes with url tools toolbar button, which lets you look up the current url on archive.org, whois, or the google cache. also suplies you with a vertically oriented toolbar that can collapse to a thin "grippy".

autohide - gives you a little more control over the fullscreen appearence of firefox, including, as the name suggests, autohiding toolbars.

chatzilla - Ah, this one brings back some warm memories of the internet around... 1998? I forget now. IRC client, useful, lite, small. unfortunatly, i can no longer open in a tab or the sidebar... damn.

crash recovery - in the event of a crash in firefox, crash recovery will open up all of the old tabs when you restart.

deepest sender - a blog composer for several different blog formats including blogger, wordpress, and livejournal.

downthemall - a download manager, one click access to emmbeded or linked objects.

flashblock - blocks flash and shockwave, replaced by a play button.

foxytunes - control your audio player from the status bar. pretty complete controls, as well as the currently playing song. Compatible with winamp, foobar2000, windows media player and more.

gmail manager - check the mail on multiple gmail accounts. supports https.

google browser sync - this is rather cool if you use more than one computer. It stores your currently open tabs and windows, as well as syncing your stored passwords, history, bookmarks and cookies on a server so you can stop working on one computer and pick right up on another. supports encryption for storage and transfer.

google calendar notifier - lets you subscribe to google calendar feeds, gives you one click access to your calendar and posts reminders.

image zoom - lets you zoom a single image or all images on a page.

pagestyle2tab - coppies the body css information to the page's tab. can also copy it to the whole browser.

pdfdownload - gives you options instead of just loading the acrobat plugin.

search plugin hacks lets you remove installed mycroft search engines.

spellbound - a spellchecker for firefox. needs a version bump to work with the current firefox, but works none the less.

translate - translate the current page into english. supports 12 languages including korean, japanese, chinese, and russian.

ubuntu forums - a toolbar menu for ubuntu forums. links to forum categories, searches, and adds context menu search for the forum, compiz forum, the wiki and other pages. Needs some customizing though, no options are available.

undoclosetab - another extension that needs a version bump, but otherwise works fine in the current firefox 1.5.*. right click on a tab and get "undo close tab" works like undo usually does, with a chronological history.

unplug - download embeded movies, including flash. Unlike video downloader, it doesn't connect to a third web page to do this.