When using drop-down lists it’s not always a good idea to preselect something. Why? Because someone will forget to change the default selection and you will get the preselected item, usually the first one in alphabetical order. Do you want an example? Look at my IELTS certificate:

Click for bigger image

Half a day of downtime is bad, but two major outages in less then ten days are too much! It seems that Unixshell (barisione.org is a virtual XEN server hosted by them) is having some serious connectivity problems and they don’t know what redundancy is, even if on their web page they say:

Built-in redundancy through multiple redundant network connections and redundant router and switch configuration.

By the way, my server is finally back online!

Whoever used g_hash_table_foreach() knows how painful is to use since C doesn’t have closures, so you have to create a struct to pass local variables to the callback.

Jean-Yves Lefort wrote a patch for bug #500507 (now marked as accept-commit_now) that finally adds iterators to hash tables. Using glib 2.16 you will be able to do this:

GHashTableIter it;
gpointer key;
gpointer value;

g_hash_table_iter_init (table, &it);
while (g_hash_table_iter_next (&it, &key, &value))
  {
    /* do something with key and value */
  }

Thank you Jean-Yves!

On Friday, I took my last exam!

Now it’s time to work full time on my thesis (I should graduate in January) and to start to look for a good job. Speakig of which, I already got some interesting proposals but if you are interested here is my résumé (PDF, HTML in Italian and PDF in Italian).

Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar (Burma), Quebec and Italy are excluded from the Android Developer Challenge. Probably Italy and Quebec are now in the axis of evil, American bombs are coming.

Just joking! Quebec and Italy are excluded because of local restrictions and I’m not surprised as we have plenty of stupid laws. For the details read Fabrizio Giudici’s post on the topic.

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It seems that I’m the only one who won’t receive a N810 discount code .

Just applied for the N810 Maemo Device Program, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for the next weeks.

Nokia, give me a discount code if you want to see Telepathy based file transfers on the N810!

The hackergotchis for our server‘s users have been updated for Halloween by Alessandro!

Ahoy!
Gnome 2.20 has a new Clearlooks version, known during development as Gummy. The main new features are blue scrollbars, fading tabs and rounded toolbars.

Clearlooks (gummy)

ClearlooksClassic

If you don’t like the new theme you can use ClearlooksClassic, or just disable the single features you don’t like. To do so, just open (or create if it doesn’t exist) the .gtkrc-2.0 file in your home directory and set the options you prefer:

style "my-clearlooks" = "clearlooks-default"
{
    engine "clearlooks"
    {
        colorize_scrollbar = TRUE  # TRUE = blue scrollbars
        menubarstyle       = 2     # 0 = flat, 1 = sunken, 2 = flat gradient
        toolbarstyle       = 1     # 0 = flat, 1 = enable effects
        animation          = FALSE # TRUE = animated progress bars
        style              = GUMMY
    }
}

class "*" style "my-clearlooks"

Animations work only if --enable-animation was used at configure-time.

If you want the old style for notebook tabs use:

style "my-clearlooks-notebook" = "clearlooks-notebook"
{
    engine "clearlooks" 
    {
        style = CLASSIC
    }
}

class "GtkNotebook" style : highest "my-clearlooks-notebook"

Personally, I like blue scrollbars and toolbars, but I’m unsure about fading tabs. Nevertheless, I’m probably going to disable rounded toolbars as they are ugly when there are more bars (such as in nautilus or in file-roller) and in Evolution (the background of the “New” button is flat).

Two toolbars in file-roller

Evolution and Clearlooks