Category: tech

I finished Sports.pl v5.1 main page.
I quite proud of it. It was a lot of work, but the result is a fully XHTML page, not only because validator says so, but also because it follows XHTML idea of web page.
I’m not trying to say that it’s the first site ever made like this, but sports.pl main page is also a quite complex issue.

The first version was even more “clear”, but many browser bugs forced me to add some “stabilizators” like <hr /> tags. In result I applied some dirty hacks for IE6/IE5.5 for Windows, and it works 🙂

About XHTML/CSS. I must say, after working on this site, that CSS lvl 2 is a hell because it lacks columns support and you have to make them via float: property. Float has its issues and on sports.pl site I had to use a lot of floats. I hope that CSS 3 with column-layout support will solve this.
Secondly. The only two browsers which did not have any problems with this layout was Gecko 1.8 and IE 5 for Mac. Both works quite good with very minor issues that were solved without any dirty-hacks.
I had small issues with Presto (Opera 8 ) including bugs in list-style-images positioning and one major, unfixed bug, with upper menu list. I don’t know if it’s Linux only but everytime I open sports.pl in Opera it displays this list vertically and when I mouseover the list it switches to horizontal. Odd bug.
Konqueror has also nasty bug with table’s <caption> tag. I have 2 <span> inside one floated to left, one to right and caption has height 0px even when I hardcoded 1.2em.
IE for Windows has too many bugs to mention them, some of them are documented in CSS files. One is still not fixed – upper menu doesn’t overlaps bottom border.

I also put a nice thing for adblockers. Every adbox has class .adbox – easy to manage. 8)

Damn, sorry for that, but I must show those mokups.
Just a few screenshots. And a few more, more… ahh 🙂

Everaldo just published update to his KDE theme – Crystal Clear.
This guy rox. 🙂

Also, a few cute spoilers from KDE4 – 1, 2.

We’re going to have common address book in KDE4 which is exactly what we have to do. MacOS has it, and it works great!
Overall, I think that it’s time to select, which data sets are “user specific” and which are “app specific” – it’s a huge mistake when I have 3 mail clients, each with it’s own mail database, three addressbooks (KAddressBook, Thunderbird AddressBook and PSI addressbook), three bookmark sets (Firefox, Opera, Konqueror) and so on (music database?). It should be per users, not per app. I think that such datasets should be standarized by FreeDesktop, but it seems that such standarization will need a lot of time, so probably for KDE 4.0 it will be KDE only feature.

Zack Rusin (he’s a Pole! :)) from KDE made Exa – greatly improved XAA. XAA is very slow and quite buggy, so Zack created Exa to replace it. Without Exa, KDE 4.0 would require a monster machine to render all it’s eye-candy. Exa will be released in X.org 6.9 in September.

After yesterday’s talk with Antymon and Gaber (who became Apple gruppie) I contributed to Kolaboration forums with two ideas. I’ll lobby to get it into KDE 4.0. If you have any idea of desktop feature, it’s the best time to write it down on this forum. KDE 4.0 development is about to begin. I’m more than sure that KDE 4.0 will rise the level of quality and usability for open-source GUI desktops very high.

Today I spent half a day at Warsaw University. Don’t ask me why…

The interesting part is when I met dr. Adam Malinowski. First, I spot two nice LCD panels in his room, then I spot KDE installed on those, and on the one that was near to me there was Firefox launched with Gmail website! 🙂

Also while looking at the registration system for candidates I found nice quip on the bottom –

“This system isn’t just going to rock, it’s going to play German heavy metal.”

It’s very nice to know that people out there also have sense of humor 🙂

btw. I’d like to say a big “Thank you” to mr. Malinowski – he saved my poor life 🙂

A few news from the front.

First. Plasma will be an official codename of KDE 4. Plasma – imho it’s a good brand. I’m getting more and more excited about this release. Not only because of features it’ll have, but because guys who’re working on it are doing exactly what I believe should be done. They’re talking and thinking about modern GUI in the same way I do. And they’re not in hurry. They want to make KDE 4.0 released before October 2006. Basing on amunt of work they’re doing in last two months, they’ll be ready with porting everything to QT4 in two, three months having a year of work on new abilities, UI polishing, usability and beauty.

Some links with drafts: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4, Example 5, Example 6, Example 7, Example 8, Example 9, Example 10

Remember, it’s a work in progress… But all of them are flying around what I call beauty, usability and modern. Yeah! :>

Gnome 3: Exactly what I said, the same way KDE and MacOS are going. Great news! Once again – comparing to this, Longhorn seems to be boring…

We have Microsoft Windows. Right? Holding >80% of its market. We have Internet Explorer. Holding >%80 of market. Last version of Windows for end-user market was released on 21 October 2001. Last version of Internet Explorer was released on October 2001.

Damn. If this is a real banner then Microsoft becames pathetic.

They’re loosing the game, and like everyone who looses, they’re showing their real face. Stupiditiy, demagogy, lies.

According to specialists, 80% of Al Qaeda IT proffesionalists are reading books. If you buy books, you support terrorism.

update: Marcoos says it’s a fake. I hope he’s right. (modified Windows logo is a tip)

First, shocking news – Apple is going to move to x86. It’s a great news from my point of view but it’s the bad move for Apple. I don’t think they can fight long on PC market, but they can take a bit from Windows soon. If MacOS for x86 will be in reasonable price, I’ll try to convince my company to switch to PC (they’re using mostly G4) and give our people MacOS + Debian (SuSe?) as a choice.

Second. That’s what I love in KDE development. Vision. Please, don’t read it as a flame. I like Gnome guys. Much more than Gnome desktop 🙂 They’re doing great work, they’re working a lot on standards, they have great HiG, they’re speeding up things in X and so on. But Gnome desktop is still “just good”. Nothing more. It’s not something bad – many people needs good desktop and Gnome is the choice. But they live in “today”, not “tomorrow”. I’m reading Gnome blogs to find any bit of future plans and I don’t see much. They’re working on speeding things, they’re developing some nice bits of dangling boxes for next generation X server… nice, but nothing more.
And I’m reading KDE blogs. Mostly similar work – speeding things up, working on X server, developing some apps and playing with new QT. They’re also working on KDe’s biggest problem – bloat to fix it for KDE 4.0 (or even 3.5?). But there’s something more. A Vision. A plan for the future, creative ideas for new ways of managing your desktop.

Someone wrote a gamers manifesto. Yes. That’s it. I love this guy, he’s so right. Modern games sucks. We’re in the middle of transition from on e world to another, but game producers tries to cheat us that they’re developing great products. They lie.

I dream about Massive Multiplayer Online World. Last year I started thinking about a game. I have a lot of ideas but I don’t have experience so at the moment those are only pure ideas.
At the moment we have a lot of games that simulates adventures in some kind of a world. Let’s take 3 types of game for example.
Danger From The Deep, FlightGear and America’s Army.
They’re quite different, but bases on the same rules (ideally) – current world of science. It would be awesome to create some kind of World Standard Language probably based on XML that would be used to describe the world.