I originally started this blog post in February, but did not have enough time to finish it. Meanwhile things changed and much of my post went outdated.

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After a year of inactivity I am back to my blog. Last couple of months I was really busy while working on our company product for a digital signage – AMS. It was a great time with Linux,  Erlang/OTP and Adobe Flex/AIR (well not so much fun with AS3 to be honest ). We were presenting our solution on ISEurope at Amsterdam and it was very promising.  So now I will have some more time to my real life, WP and maybe even blogging…

I use remote connection on a daily basis. My home computer is only a terminal to my office workstation so to speak. But I had a problem with it while using Compiz or Gnome Shell for my desktop. After successful login using VNC I received only  static picture of desktop. No interaction was possible. While looking on Google to solve it I found following commands that fixed my problem:

gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/remote_access/disable_xdamage

 

From time to time I was facing strange behaviour of my Ubuntu Gnome desktop. After some action (e.g. drag’n dropping object on desktop while cleaning up mess) all my icons and desktop objects disappeared only background image left. It was not so frequent, but it was definitely not a good experience . Finally I found a simple solution to work around it.

Just restart nautilus and my desktop was restored.

Thats it.

After quite long time I manage to save some time for my WordPress. There was a big gab between versions and there were some new releases of WP. So to be short I updated two public plugins:

• Plugin List
• Custom Logo

There are still two public plugins to update and also I am thinking about releasing some private plugins for free.

Happy using

I am not an UML fan, but I have to use it from time to time. To create models I am using Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems. It is not industry leading software and I think it has good  relation between value and price. It is quite complex tool with a lot of features and some of them are little bit tricky to use. Overall experience is quite good, but what I am missing is UX  strategy or concept. UI is not simple nor intuitive as many complex tools these days are. One IMHO crucial and critical issue that make me angry was toolbar especially Undo/Redo buttons. As you can see from screenshot icon usage is totally confusing. Your right brain hemisphere gained experience that icon with floppy drive represents saving to disk file. Usage of this icon in different context is more than unhappy decision. I have to say that I clicked it number of times before I remembered this “if”.

Yep, I upgraded my workstation to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Linux. Upgrade process was as usually smooth without any troubles.  I again put myself into risk by upgrading over remote connection using VNC. But no problem at all. Just better performance and more polished desktop. Ubuntu just rocks. Thank you guys!

I have to say that I am not surprised by news about London Stock Exchange. It is just an example of enterprise software status these days. It is shame that someone is promoting 100% availability. It is just not possible… 99,8% maybe but definitely not on top of MS SQL 2000. Small quiz: Why companies like Amazon or Google are not using Microsoft technologies? I think it is not a question of money for licenses .

From time to time I have some problems with my WordPress installation. It is usually related to upgrade to a new version and plugins of course. It is expect able for plugins to stop working with new version of host code. Most of plugins works well, but Google XML Sitemaps plugin causes a lot of pain to me. I believe it is every upgrade. I am feeling frustrated, because I can not publish or generally manage my posts without ending on blank page. I am not feeling about debugging these issues (sorry), I am feeling more like to reinvent the wheel and write my own plugin. I know that it is not an open source way (no I do not want to fork it), but I think I can make it more simple and better.