A Man and his Penguin

I’m now running Compiz Fusion 0.5.3-git20070817 - which means that it’s built from the source code that existed on the Compiz Fusion server on the 17th of August, 2007. It’s code that is 3 days old.

I’m liking it a lot more than the previous version I was running, which I believe was another development snapshot actually. The Airplane effect is now available, and it runs quite well. I don’t see anyone using this in real life, but it’s impressive. The speed of the Expo plugin has been drastically improved to the point that I can now use it and it looks slick! In fact, everything about Compiz seems to have improved in speed a bit.

The default settings have changed. They’re a little less dumb than before, but not much. Now the default animation for tooltips is Explode - it’s a lot of visual noise for such a small interface widget, so this is likely to be the first thing you change. Fading still applies on all windows by default.

Minimise animations appear to be broken at the moment (as in, they don’t work at all). Scale still doesn’t show minimised windows. Shift Switcher may be broken, I’m not sure at the moment. All I know is that it’s not working at the moment; Compiz Settings Manager might not be passing on the change or Compiz might not be applying the change while it’s running.

It’s still heavily in development, so if you’ve still got Beryl or are new to Linux I wouldn’t recommend switching; but things are starting to look up for Compiz Fusion 0.6.0.

—————-

I just made an MPEG-4 DVD of two Amanda movies. K3B with Transcode as the backend made a real mess of it, chopping off the first quarter of the movie. So I tried Acidrip with the lavc (MPEG 4) codec. Worked perfectly… well, not perfectly as one of the movies initially ripped with the wrong aspect ratio, but after manually setting it everything was fine. Audio in sync, quality was excellent. Very impressed. Now I just have to try the disc in my wonderful $53 Palsonic DVD player.

Just got back from the Sony trade show. After seeing what Sony has come up with for the Bravia range, I’m ready to declare plasma as a dead technology. But Sony will have too many TVs; it will confuse consumers completely.

Today we sold two dishwashers from eBay! And the guy who bought the second dishwasher also bought a rangehood and a $550 Electrolux vacuum cleaner. We cleaned up; unfortunately those were pretty much our only sales for the day

After Compiz mysteriously re-enabled the Scale plugin by itself, I took a trip to the Compiz Settings Manager to fix it. While I was there, I discovered the Screensaver plugin. Now, whenever my computer has been sitting for 10 minutes without human interaction or any new windows opening, the cube vanishes and all the windows start flying about and bouncing off eachother. It’s cool!

And it beats the Photos screensaver in Gnome, which only seems to display pictures of the time my family took Sonia out for dinner last year. Well, it does actually display all my other pictures, but whenever I come back to the computer it’s always displaying one of the Sonia ones.

I bought the DVD of "What A Girl Wants" on Wednesday. The movie whose poster made me interested in Amanda Bynes. Oh yes. But I never saw the movie until last night.

What a shocker. Sorry to the movie’s fans, but it was meant to be a comedy, and it simply wasn’t funny. A cross between Girls On Top 2 and The Princess Diaries.

Oh sure, as a family drama film it was quite good. But comedy? Not at all. Such a shame, as Amanda usually has a great sense of humour… this movie didn’t deliver.

Jennifer Peterson-Hind (US Hi-5) has released a single called "Good night tonight". It’s very much a country song, unfortunately; which means it’s really not my bag, baby.

Tonight I’m going to watch Mr Bean’s Holiday again.

Remember when we were having so much trouble getting a replacement TV for a customer, where the TV occasionally wouldn’t switch on?

I had written a letter to APC (Australian Personal Computer) Magazine to ask if they could take up the case for us. They did, but they were too late to be effective. (the ACCC had taken up the case and already forced Panasonic to issue us a credit.)

Yesterday I bought the latest issue, and the case was printed in there!

Remember when we were having so much trouble getting a replacement TV for a customer, where the TV occasionally wouldn’t switch on?

I had written a letter to APC (Australian Personal Computer) Magazine to ask if they could take up the case for us. They did, but they were too late to be effective. (the ACCC had taken up the case and already forced Panasonic to issue us a credit.)

Yesterday I bought the latest issue, and the case was printed in there!

Remember when we were having so much trouble getting a replacement TV for a customer, where the TV occasionally wouldn’t switch on?

I had written a letter to APC (Australian Personal Computer) Magazine to ask if they could take up the case for us. They did, but they were too late to be effective. (the ACCC had taken up the case and already forced Panasonic to issue us a credit.)

Yesterday I bought the latest issue, and the case was printed in there!

I’ve finally managed to make Compiz perform mostly the way I want it to. It has some terrible defaults, it occasionally loses settings, and every so often it crashes; often on startup. But at least I’ve made it workable.

Now I’ve got fish swimming around inside my cube!

I’ve just somehow managed to fix the workspaces problem. I just switched workspaces on the Gnome panel and now the cube is rotating.

I installed the other Compiz-Fusion plugins (the unofficial and unsupported sets) and now I’m using the ShiftFlip plugin to perform the role that Scale used to. ShiftFlip emulates the Flip3D effect in Windows Vista Home Premium and above; or it can emulate the album cover flip effect from iTunes. I have it doing the latter. Unfortunately it requires use of the keyboard as well as the mouse, which is annoying.

The first real release of Compiz-Fusion (0.5.2) is now available as a prepackaged Debian/Ubuntu binary (and I believe there’s a Fedora build too). So naturally, I moseyed on down to take a look.

I’m disappointed.

The first step was to get rid of Beryl. The second step is to add new repositories and install Compiz-Fusion. Unfortunately, I decided to be a smartalec and add the repositories then uninstall Beryl and install Compiz-Fusion as one step. The result was that I got rid of too much; I uninstalled the window decorators rather than upgrading them. Bad idea. Compiz wouldn’t start. Finally I figured out about the decorators, installed them and restarted Compiz in the manner according to the semi-official HOWTO.

Compiz was running fine, but I was getting no borders. Some more reading later, I found that I should disregard the semi-official advice and instead run "compiz –replace -c heliodor" to actually tell it which window decorator to use. I don’t see a way to specify window decorators otherwise, and there’s no panel applet! A severe regression from Beryl - how have the Compiz folks done without it all this time?

The default settings are also pretty terrible compared to Beryl. Window animations are set too fast. Tooltips and menus are set to fade in AND have a focus shiver at the same time, which looks terrible; and the focus shiver is a completely different part of the badly-redesigned Compiz settings manager. Damn, I was just getting used to the Beryl Settings Manager (which I liked) and now this!

To add insult to injury, I cannot tweak the animations to perform at the speed I’m used to. The Burn animation no longer burns down the window; the window disappears shortly after the animation begins, and the burn effect continues even though there’s nothing there. It’s jerkier - uses too much CPU time.

I recently got rid of my task bar ("Window List") in favour of the Beryl Scale plugin. Well, the Scale plugin is still around and with some new features, but they’ve removed a crucial one: Showing minimised windows! Yes, there’s no way to make Compiz-Fusion show minimised windows in the Scale plugin! Useless!

Some of the other new plugins run slowly (Expo runs at about 2 frames per second here). And I found some irritating errors in the settings program, where it continued to use a particular key for a particular plugin even after I told it not to use that key.

On the plus side, memory usage has improved. Menus are semi-transparent by default and look nice. The ADD plugin shows that the project is thinking about accessibility, and I’m sure it would be helpful. And on a fast system you’ll love some of the new plugins. But I really think Compiz-Fusion shouldn’t have released this - it needs another couple of months to cook. I preferred Beryl 0.2.0, and I hope that Ubuntu Gutsy includes Beryl by default rather than Compiz Fusion.

EDIT: I’ve been using Compiz Fusion for over an hour, and I’m STILL finding things about it which are REGRESSIONS from Beryl. For instance, switching desktops using Gnome’s workspace selector causes the current windows to burn down and the new windows to beam in. Beryl did the logical, intuitive action of rotating the cube. Let’s see if I can fix it.

———
In non-Linux news, I finally bought the DVD of What A Girl Wants (the Amanda Bynes movie). I had a dream about her last night, so that’s what prompted me to buy it. Mr Bean’s Holiday has apparently been released, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.

And I realised that I’m owed about $170 by various people. I’ll get into debt-collection mode.

We finally got our long-awaited Avico cables and surge protectors… but my boss only ordered a handful of 1.5m component cables (and no 3 metre ones)! Aye Carumba, we’re going to run out again soon!

And we don’t seem to have any connectors now, or adapter cables (you know, like "S-video to Composite" or anything like that). Curiously enough, we’ve got shiteloads of surge protectors, none of which look very sturdy, and all of which are very very cheap. I’m sure Avico makes good cables, but I definitely have reservations about the effectiveness and quality of the surge protectors; and I suppose we will have to see whether they actually do protect anything!

* For those of you who don’t know, proper surge protectors come with a connected-equipment warranty up to a certain value. If a power surge gets through the protector and damages the appliances plugged into it, the manufacturer of the surge protector will pay to get all the affected equipment fixed or replaced, as long as the total value doesn’t exceed the warranty. The warranty is usually a large number, starting from $25,000 and sometimes going up as high as $100,000. The warranty lasts

A proper surge protector with such a warranty (NOT a Kambrook power board that you bought for $10 from Coles) is an investment that can pay for itself many times over with just a single surge or lightning strike.