Reinouts’ Nerdy Notes

Dit crowdfunding-initiatief is zeker de moeite waard, en het mooie is dat de code die ze voor deze site gaan ontwikkelen onder een opensource-licentie weer ter beschikking komt!

Gisteravond was ik bij een presentatie van HD Projectrealisatie over ‘De tuin van Noord’ oftewel het park en de woningen die zij in samenwerking met andere partijen willen realiseren op de plek waar nu de PI (gevangenis) aan de Noordsingel staat.

Zoals de naam al aangeeft moet het een groen gebied worden. Het Oude Noorden van Rotterdam kan zoiets heel goed gebruiken. Verrassend is dat er vergevorderde plannen zijn om de cellenblokken om te bouwen tot antroposofische ouderenhuisvesting. Andere delen van het complex worden bestemd tot koopwoningen en kluswoningen in zowel duurdere als goedkopere segmenten. Er komt een restaurant, het gerechtsgebouw krijgt een grotendeels maatschappelijke functie en er wordt een halfverdiepte parkeergarage aangelegd.
Dit klinkt allemaal erg goed maar ik blijf toch nog zitten met de vraag hoe duurzaam de te realiseren woningen zullen zijn. De presentator van de avond had hier geen duidelijk antwoord op. Omdat het een rijksmonument is mag er aan de buitenkant van de bestaande gebouwen niet veel gebeuren, maar ik hoop toch dat voor de overige renovatietaken en de nieuwbouw maximaal zal worden ingezet op isolatie en energie-efficiëntie. Misschien kunnen we als GroenLinks in de deelgemeente Noord hier nog wat bijsturen. Diverse schetsen en sfeerimpressies zijn te vinden op http://tuinvannoord.nl/.

Last week, I followed an NBIC course on Managing Life Science Information. The course included a tutorial on creating an ontology with TopBraid Composer.
A number of course participants, me included, couldn’t run this (Eclipse-based) application because it complained about an incorrect Java VM. Turns out, it only wants to run on the official Sun/Oracle JVM and not on the OpenJDK that’s included with most Linux distributions.
For other people running into this problem: the way to solve it is to:

• Install Sun/Oracle Java from your distribution’s repositories, if available
• Otherwise, download Java SE 7 from Oracle as a tar.gz file

If you had to download the tar archive from Oracle, extract it somewhere on a logical path, such as /usr/java.

When you have done so, you can use the update-alternatives system to switch between Java versions. If you installed the Sun/Oracle JDK through your distribution’s system utilities then chances are, it will be already added to the alternatives database.

Quoting anujjaiswal’s blog:

/usr/sbin/alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" "/usr/java/default/bin/java" 2
/usr/sbin/alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javac" "javac" "/usr/java/default/bin/javac" 2

And to configure systemwide changes use

/usr/sbin/alternatives --configure java
/usr/sbin/alternatives --configure javac

But why, exactly, doesn’t TopBraid run with OpenJDK? According to Jeremy Carroll, it’s because ‘We have places where we have to mess with JVM internals, mainly for clean up.’.
I doubt OpenJDK’s internals are that much different from Sun’s, but even if that were true– if you need to mess with JVM internals, in my humble opinion, you’re doing it Wrong^tm.

And afterwards, spend a few days in Berlin with my cherished girlfriend!

Will anyone from the Mageia community be around??

Last week I visited the Naked Song festival in Eindhoven. The program contained many artists I didn’t know yet, who performed beautiful songs with minimal instrumental backing. I was especially impressed by the Villagers, who later the same day would be playing in Utrecht at the Beschaving festival.

Muziekgebouw Eindhoven is one of the most impressive music theaters I have ever visited.
One singer I did know was Joan as Police Woman. Here’s a small impression (mp4 clip shot with my N900):
Joan as Police Woman @ Naked Song festival

Hopefully, events like this one will remain possible in The Netherlands. The political tide, unfortunately, is against subsidizing arts and culture (except maybe if you think football clubs in financial trouble are culture). Anyway, I know I’ll be in line for a ticket next year, if they do organize it again.

P.S. You’re invited to the Dutch launch party, April 7th in The Hague!

Gnome 3 komt officieel uit op 6 april 2011. Om dat te vieren organiseert Gnome-NL een launch party in Den Haag op donderdag 7 april.

De toegang is gratis, aanmelding is niet verplicht maar wel gewenst. (Dat mag ook in de comments.) Voor meer details zie: http://revspace.nl/RevelationSpace/Gnome3ReleaseParty

English version: GNOME 3 release party in The Hague on April 7th. Free entrance, but we appreciate it when you let us know in the comments if you plan to come.

Location:
Revelation Space
Binckhorstlaan 172
2516 BG Den Haag
Routebeschrijving / directions

Programme:
19u00: Doors open
20u00: Short demo of Gnome 3
all the time: drinks and friendly nerds
late: The End

Last week I spent a little time testing GNOME 3 on the Fedora test day.

In general, things are shaping up nicely. I was pleasantly surprised that I had no 3D driver issues any more on either of my two laptops (using the free intel and radeon drivers). Some things are not ready for prime time, such as dconf-editor that doesn’t provide a search option and doesn’t wrap long description labels, thereby forcing the window width to ridiculous proportions (bug 641292).

However, one issue that’s really spoiling my user experience is the removal of mousewheel tab scrolling from GtkNotebook. Apparently, this feature can give unexpected effects when your mousewheel is over-sensitive. I can even understand that one would want this to be off by default for new users. But to completely remove tab scrolling, something that people have come to rely upon over the years, without an option to turn it back on, is harsh.

To quote from the bug:

If the problem is that the mouse wheel can be too sensitive
leading to unexpected tab switches, IMHO the solution is to have a treshold by
default, much like drag-and-drop.

I would really want the functionality to stay in GTK. If there are really good
reasons fro some not to want this, I'd suggest a GtkSetting (that gnome's UI
configurator would show), controlling mouse wheel support for Notebooks,
ComboBox and other stuff (for consistency).

The end result of this change is that some applications are just implementing the functionality themselves now that it's been removed from Gtk+:
Which unfortunately results in inconsistant user interface... Tab scrolling
works in some programs but not others.

Although this issue certainly won’t cause any melting laptops — please guys. Give me a break and provide a setting to re-enable this.