FOB

I switched my home desktop from KDE to Gnome today. I guess I should have done it many months ago, but it took me this long to reach the necessary pain threshold. I had been a KDE user for many years. (Prior to that I was a twm user, which should give you some idea.) Thus, I had set up a bit of infrastructure around KDE and gotten used to working with it. This switch was a big deal to me, and not in a good way…

So my 8-year-old boy got all excited about PowerPoint, of all things, at school yesterday. He and his friends were using it to make single pages with cool typographic text and images pasted from off the web. He came home and wanted to do the same on our Linux box, so I set him up with Open Office Impress, which worked great for him, except…

The two commonly used X desktop apps that work the most horribly as far as cut-and-paste are concerned are, hands down, Firefox and Open Office. X Firefox refuses to copy images, as near as I can figure out. It will copy image URLs, but that's not too helpful. Meanwhile, even with an image on the clipboard, Open Office grays out the Paste entry in the edit menu, and doesn't have a paste popup.

It turns out, though, that if you use Konqueror instead of Firefox, you can copy an image using the popup fine. And if you hit the paste accelerator (control-V) in Open Office, it pastes the image just fine. Problem "solved".

One of the things I promised when I joined the X.Org Foundation Board was to work on cut-and-paste. I did some stuff, but never really got anywhere. I need to get on that again. #$@! X cut-and-paste.

Nominations for the X.Org Foundation Board election are open through December 1. I've attached the announcement. If you our someone you know are involved in the development of the X Window System, and want to help with its organizational aspect, nominations are welcome…

We are holding a Linux Plumbers Conference [excuse the broken hyphenation] here in Portland a little less than a year from today. It should be a really nice event…

I want to build a personal time planner app that runs on my Linux box. I have some ideas for how I want it to look and work that I think will make it nice, at least for me.

Unfortunately, my choices of development environment and toolset for building this app are not so attractive…