Postings by Mathias in October 2008
Intrepid Ibex on Berliner Fenster
Berlin's underground waggons are equipped with LCD screens showing news headlines, event tips and local advertisements. This morning those screens catched my attention by suddenly showing a well known wallpaper, making me smile: "Intrepid Ibex - Ubuntu 8.10 - Available now for free - http://www.ubuntuusers.de/" (in German of course).
Well, done guys.
Looking forward to see other Linux related ads on Berliner Fenster.
Static Panel Nonsense
Vuntz, you ask for angry reactions, here is your first one: This static panel stuff is the biggest nonsense I've seen in years! You've presented us an early April's fool joke, didn't you?
Please visit some real people and look at their Windows or OSX desktop, look how they customized the Quick-Launch area respectively their dock and then come again, please.
Important hint: Whenever you try to improve something, you should be as good as the old solution at least. Otherwise you just wasted time.
Come on: You don't really expect users to do several clicks for launching their prefered application, if the current, customizable panel supports this with one single click? Sorry, but the ability to add application launchers to one promiment one-click-location is an essential feature of each desktop shell. And no! I also don't want this list to be generated automatically: I'd feel ashamed if my desktop would tell everyone at a short glimpse, that Solitare is my favorite application.
Well, or if you guys really are convinced of this crap, do it in a side project please, but don't destroy GNOME's desktop shell.
PS: That's how my desktop looks like right now, and I am extremly happy with it.
Notice how I've disabled desktop icons, since they cause just clutter. Notice how I've filled the bottom panel with information more useful than the task list applet. The very first icon of that panel opens a popup with all current windows. This works much better for finding lost windows than this obscure task.
Update: Btw, you might think that my panels contain information you consider not important. Well, good catch, you've found one of my points: Judgement what's essential information largely differs among individuals.
DHL Online Fraud
Dave, the sad side of the story is, that the German DHL site doesn't make it clear, that it just serves as masquerade for some simple postal service. DHL spent quite some money on marketing the brand "DHL" as full parcel service , comparable to UPS, FedEx, TNT, ... Turns out, that the parcel service of "DHL" is called "DHL Express", not just "DHL" as the strong brand might suggest.
I really expected to have ordered a parcel service, just with the difference of having used a sane web interface this time. Turns out their web interface is not sane. Would like to call it some kind of online fraud instead.
You can't imagine how stupid I feel since yesterday. Hope you accept my excuse for the mess I did.
