About one year ago I tried to create a game that I can summarize as a Commandos but with spaceships. Even though Java is the language I have the most experience with, the game engines I found just didn’t click for me. Getting started was brittle, ideas were overflowing, and I was losing time. So, I picked Phaser, as JavaScript is (was?) the next best thing for me.
I have been contributing to Xfce since about 2013. Over the years, computers have come and gone, from netbooks to desktops to laptops. Since I moved to another country, I’ve been avoiding owning a desktop for practical reasons - the less bulky my belongings, the better. Before the move, I decided to sell my aging desktop (self-built) and even older laptop (a Dell Vostro - ah, fond memories of playing GTA V at 20 FPS) for peanuts and invest in a gaming laptop. At the time, I was working as a freelancer, so a beefy and mobile machine for both work and play made perfect sense.
This is a write-up of my experience with self-hosting services. I hope it’s useful and encouraging to people that wishes to get started in this art. Motivation For some people, I’m a paranoid, I avoid social networks and use Linux. For others, I’m not doing enough, my phone runs Google’s spyware disguised as OS and WhatsApp is my main messaging platform. Honestly, I don’t care, I just try to stay away from extremes, life is too short to pick all fights, at the same time, whenever possible I like to try alternatives.
We are pleased to announce the second pre-release of Xfce 4.16 (a.k.a. xfce4.16pre2), moving us closer to the final release. As you all may have noticed, we are again a bit behind the schedule, but nothing like the 4+ years it took from 4.12 to 4.14, so please hold your excitement a tad longer while we are polishing the rough edges. For now, help yourself with the latest batch of changes:
As scheduled we have just released Xfce 4.16pre1 on August 27th (sorry for the long time to write a post about it) - the first development release leading up to Xfce 4.16. And it comes with a boatload of new features and improvements, so prepare yourselves.
Once in a while someone comes around and ask hey, I love Xfce and would like to contribute, but where do I start? How can I be of use? How can I implement a fancy new feature?, I have no doubt the answer is 42. Unfortunately, we don’t have a supercomputer (and millions of years) to distill a meaning from that one-size-fits-all answer, therefore to offer proper guidance, some questions should be asked first, e.g. What exactly do you want to improve? Do you have any programming skills? Besides programming, how else would you like to help? It’s been a long time since I’ve been planning to write a comprehensive guide, I hope this to be helpful to hitchhikers and new contributors. As any open source project, there are several ways to collaborate, everyone is welcome to help in any or many ways they are able, in this guide I’m going to explain and give hints for all contribution forms I can think of.
Good news fellow Xfce users, we proudly present a new Thunar release, our beloved easy-to-use and fast file manager! The main highlight in this release is that Thunar, as all Xfce components, is saying goodbye to Gtk+ 2 and is now Gtk+ 3 based. Other than that, our team has addressed several critical bugs that compromised Thunar’s stability. Most of those fixes were backported to 1.6.x series and we hope our users do not experience crashes anymore.
When it comes to generate PDFs using Java the de facto solution is Jasper Reports. Even though it provides a bunch of features and a great set of tools, such as iReport and JasperSoft Studio, the developer might want a simpler and flexible alternative. Recently I was involved in a project where I had to craft reports but I felt that using iReport was getting more and more kludgy and messy with lots of subreports. Then I gave Flying Saucer a try and never looked back. For the template engine Handlebars.java was chosen due to its simplicity and my previous experience with Handlebars.js. The combination proved to be awesome!
FLTK is a lightweight GUI toolkit which I use for my music player. It’s great due to its simplicity and it can also be statically linked. Unfortunately the project development is mostly stalled after two failed attempts to rewrite/redesign it (FLTK 2.x and FLTK 3.x). Nevertheless, the library is still useful, somewhat maintained and the community is also active, so I can still rely on it.
Yay, this is my first post. I hope to write many more about my experiments and hacks while playing with technologies such as programming tricks (mostly JavaScript and Java…), Libraries & Frameworks, software design & architecture, Tools, Linux related things and anything else I find meaningful and useful to share. This is it, I’ll be spending some time tweaking, breaking and improving this Jekyll-based blog until some posts come up.