Koda

Four days ago, I wrote about an icon project I was working on for gmpc, the music player. A few hours of work and experimentation later, here’s a second (nearing completion) take on the artwork.

24x24, and labeled.

My main goal with this redo was for the server to look less like a piece of paper and more like a reasonable tower. Not surprisingly, the hardest part of the design was choosing a perspective and composition that looked good at the size. After a bunch of trial and error and Inkscape crashes (probably over 15 at this point for the project), things fit into place.

Version 1. Looks like paper!

At this point, I’m quite happy with the status of these icons - though I’ll probably find a few things to change in the morning.

For a few weeks I’ve been thinking about and working (on and off) on an icon for gmpc. Similar to a previous vectoring of a logo for pympd, the program is an interface to a networked music player system. However, where with pympd the icon was descriptively referencing both the python code and phonetic “pimp’d” pronounciation, I wanted to do something more generic for gmpc, more suitable as a tray icon. I also didn’t want it to be just another music note, like the other popular players; because under the hood it’s fundamentally performing something different: networked media control.

24x24, for an accurate view.

Surprisingly, the hardest part of designing the icon was deciding how I wanted to represent the “networked” aspect of the program. I must have spent a huge chunk of time simply staring at that music note and trying to figure out what else I would put there. Earlier versions of the icon were littered with contorted music notes, and cables and ethernet plugs, which got really blurry and really didn’t do it justice. Putting in the tower made things so much easier! Once I realized the tower made a space for status indicators, everything just clicked into place. You’re looking at what I was finally able to come up with.

It’s still a little rough around the edges, but all in all I’m pretty pleased with the design. Right now, the tower looks a little too much like a piece of paper for my tastes - to be fixed tomorrow. Also, I probably won’t get a good idea of how well the icon fits until I see it up in the GNOME system tray. Though all given, not too shabby for a Wednesday night.

Wait, what? It figures that the one day I’ve got the RSS reader closed is the day something I’ve written hits digg. Over the past few days, I’ve been talking to the friendly Jason of Tectonic about republishing my Compiz Howto there. Well, as of this morning, he let me know it was up. What I didn’t recall him mentioning, though, was that he’d dugg the story. Wow. Front page! I’m really quite amused and entertained. I suppose now I can truly say I’ve tasted the fury of the social web.

…and now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in the corner over there, silently giggling to myself.

On the eve of GNOME 2.14, it would only seem suitable to do a little feature on two of the tray doodads that we’ll likely be seeing a lot more of in the months to come. Emphasizing dbus-powered hardware pluggability, both of these little apps provide useful and pretty information particularly useful to mobile users. Read on for a quick review/preview, and Ubuntu apt-get commands for those who are running Dapper.

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I did a little more exploration of compiz this afternoon, and have a few updates to share.

For starters, I stumbled upon the Gentoo Wiki XGL Howto, with a surprising amount of information regarding it. A few things to be gleaned:

Thing 1:
Mplayer can be run at reasonable speeds when the arguments -zoom -vo x11 are added to it. I’m really not sure why this works; I only know that on my system, it does. Intuitively, I would think that using the x11 driver would work worse, as it is supposed to be without acceleration, but it sure performs better than the broken xv support.

Thing 2:
The wiki mentions a neat little util called transset, which lets you set window transparency on the fly. apt-get install transset, run it with a decimal opacity between 0 and 1, and click on a window. Fun! Be careful though, don’t run it with transset --help like I did, or it will totally dissapear your window. Gee, um, not the greatest software design.

So, the logical conclusion from this, is that to have a really good time, you must make a bunch of semi-transparent mplayer windows and throw them around. Well, it worked for me.

I’ve updated the Howto with most of these goodies.

Finally, for some annoying reason, Google does not seem to be crawling this blog very well. Thus, if you came here looking for a Howto, and found a whole bunch of other silly things instead, it can be found here.

Today was spent mostly tweaking more fun CSS details, and around the house. I went to see Good Night, and Good Luck today - very interesting film. The quality of the acting and production was very good, and the message relevant and interesting. All about the importance (and the dissolution of) our media. A lot to think about.

Unfortunately a lot of the intricacies probably flew over my head, likely due to the CSS-induced lack of sleep from last night’s efforts. Definitely something I’d see again, to be able to catch those important details. The film was done all in black and white and really immersive - pretty arty. At first the lack of color started to annoy me, but I could see so much texture in the grayscale that I liked it after a while (and I knew it would stay that way).

Quick update on Compiz: after a few days of normal desktop use (art, internet, email), I have to say that I am still very satisfied with Compiz’s performance. Only a few minor crashes: every now and then gnome-window-manager dies, and window borders disappear - opening up gnome-terminal and starting it up again solves the problem. I haven’t seen Compiz on a whole do much mischeif. Idle performance is very good; the fans stay on the lowest speed on my desktop-replacement laptop/brick. It doesn’t seem to be eating a lot of memory, either. No surprises, other than the total bling of it all.

Good night, and good luck!

Last Updated: Jun 8, 2006
Want a more up-to-date compiz? Read a follow-up here.

Overview

Goal: Install Compiz and Xgl on top of Gnome or KDE.

Pros:

• No compiling, all packages downloaded from Ubuntu repositories.
• Userspace compiz startup configuration.
• Works with both fglrx/ATI and Nvidia cards.
• Cooler X functionality, more responsive GUI.
• Impress your friends.
• You know you’ve been aching to try it.

Cons:

• Recommended dist-upgrade to Dapper.
• Requires proprietary 3d acceleration drivers, reasonable card.
• Beta and somewhat buggy software.
• Video playback issues (mostly on ATI cards).
• Getting your feet wet.

An Oh-So-Skippable Intro

Compiz.
Maybe you’ve heard the buzz, the pictures and videos, and spent the past few weeks in absolute agony over the coolness of it all. Okay, maybe you haven’t - but I have. I could rant on and on about why this is the absolute coolest thing ever. An OpenGL powered desktop, Composite, OSX-rivalling effects, and works on ATI cards? At first I thought it to be too good to be true. Yet, there are the screenshots, the forum posts, and everywhere people seem to be talking about it. So why not give it a shot?

The problem is, I’m lazy. I don’t want to dirty up /opt/, don’t want to cvs X.org, don’t want to hack anything I’ll have to remove later. So when the first round of make-filled instructions came out, I waited. If you’re a little less excited than I am, perhaps you’re thinking of waiting a while until it’s working in Dapper. Here’s the thing: thanks to a few brave souls, it already is. What?! you say? Okay, it’s quite beta, but that’s part of the fun, right? And you won’t have to compile anything, so it’s like beta without the beta. In just 3 steps, we can do it. (more…)

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