I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.
A colleague sent me this link to a collection of parallax scrolling website designs. Some of them are really awesome, especially considering the fact that they are implemented in HTML5 – no flash or other proprietary plugin required. I particularly liked how the car assembles and disassembles on the Smart USA website and how the glass of beer empties and refills on the Smokey Bones website. Unbelievable, creative, and inspirational!
When I came across The Click Test this morning I had one of those “why oh why didn’t I think of this myself?” moments. Both the idea and implementation are very simple, but extremely useful for anyone involved with interface design, usability studies or web development. When you want to try out a design or user interface concept or element, when you don’t know which version works better, or if you want to find out which element stands out for most people, you need a usability study, and The Click Test gives you everything you need to do one quickly. All you need to do is upload your design and ask the question. It will then be shown to a bunch of people who will answer your question by clicking somewhere in the design. You’ll see the results of your study as a heat map of user interaction. That’s it.
There are applications, even in a form of WordPress plugin, that would allow you to do a similar study directly on your website. That’s not news. But heaving a crowd of people to use for your test – now that’s brilliant. Now you can actually test something before putting it on the live website.
Fedora 16 finalized the migration of the system start-up from SysVinit to Systemd. Â The old commands still work, but as with any other new system, it is recommended that you get used to the new way of doing things. Â I suspect, eventually, the old commands will get dropped.
If you want to prepare yourself to that day, or if you are just curious about the new way of doing things, Fedora people created a wiki page for you, with a very handy table that shows the old service or chkconfig command, thew new systemctl alternative and a brief description.
I am all for new ways and better software, but on a personal level, I really like “service httpd stop” better than “systemctl stop httpd.service“.
It appears that not all Open Source Software developers are pathetic losers coding from their grandmother’s basement. Â Here is a paragraph from Dan William’s blog post announcing the new release of NetworkManager application:
There’s no better way to celebrate the release of NetworkManager 0.9.2 than a sip of ice-cold cocktail.  It’s something pink-colored — I don’t know what — and it’s phenomenal.  And if I ever run out, I just ring a bell and somebody fills it up!  It’s basically like Paradise, except Paradise doesn’t have the latest version of NetworkManager.  Here’s a hot tip: make your first half billion and buy yourself a private island.  Then move there and write open-source software for fun.  It’s a pretty great life.  After a hard day on the beach bending networks to my will, I wind down by building buried hatches solely to confuse the island’s next owner (I’m trading up to a private archipelago in a few years).
He also shares a beautiful view in front of him at the time of his tagging the release. Â Whether it’s true or not, it’s a wonderful picture.
P.S.: I don’t really know who Dan Williams is and if he is in fact a multimillionaire sitting on his own island with a pink-colored cocktail in one hand and a refill bell in another. Â Even if he isn’t, there are enough examples of other people who’ve made a fortune and are now enjoying work on the Open Source Software. Â I’m not kidding. Â Ask Ubuntu people if you don’t believe me.
If you follow my Twitter stream, by now you’d know that I’ve upgraded my laptop to the brand new and shining Fedora 16. Â In case you were wondering how it went, I’m happy to report that everything went smoothly. Â Even more smoothly than I’ve expected. Â Given my laptop’s weird wireless card, I always have this problem with kernel-kmod-something package not being available at the time of the distribution upgrade. Â That usually means that I lose wireless connectivity for a day or two after I upgrade. Â But not this time. Â Either the package was ready by the release date or the driver that I’m using is incorporated into the distribution itself. Â I don’t know, and, honestly, I don’t care. I’m just happy that it works right out of the box without any tweaks on my part.
I’ve upgraded from the DVD, since the torrent was the first downloadable option, before Fedora 16 was available via preupgrade. Â The process looks very familiar – boot from DVD, choose language, choose whether to install or upgrade and existing installation (that was my choice), and let it run for an hour or so, depending on how many packages you have installed and on how fast your DVD drive is.
On first boot, the biggest difference was the graphical login screen, which looks way better now. Â Logging into Gnome 3, I haven’t noticed much changes. Â Yes, there is an option to add your Google Account to online accounts now, which I did, but so far I don’t know what it does and why would you want to do that. Â I noticed that when I move to Activities and start typing, Gnome 3 searches not only through my installed applications, but also through my contacts. Â But that functionality is not of much use to me. Â After using Gnome 3 for about 30-40 minutes, I caught myself thinking that is is a bit faster, snappier if you will, than the previous version. Â Maybe that’s just me and the feeling of new, maybe it’s the forced reboot after the installation – again, I don’t know and I don’t really care.
Distribution upgrade is always a good time to change habits, so I decided to give KDE 4 another try.  In the last 6 month or so I got somewhat used to Gnome 3, but it is still far away from being a productive system for me.  I’ve just learned how to do things I need with it, but it still doesn’t feel right or gives me any pleasure.  Hence, KDE.  My last few tries, which were ranted about at length in this blog, gave me no pleasure either.  This time, however, it looks different.  Things just work the way I expect them to.  All fonts – both for Qt and GTK applications – look good and uniform, icons are on the desktop, panel has shortcuts, the start menu is in place, and, oh boy how much I’ve missed you, the taskbar is there.  I’ve almost forgot how awesome it is to see Skype icon with notifications of incoming chats without having to move your mouse to bottom right corner every time.
The performance of the KDE 4 is also much improved these days. Â It’s fast and responsive. Â And it can still remember my keyboard shortcuts configured ages ago. Â That’s mighty useful.
If you are still waiting for me to describe a problem or two that I experienced, then the only thing I can give you is this. Â Both Apache and MySQL service were down for some reason after upgrade. Â Restarting MySQL helped straight away, but Apache didn’t want to start. Â I had a much customized configuration that I have been dragging from place to place, so I decided to clean it up a bit. Â I disabled configurations for mod_perl, mod_python and a bunch of other features, leaving just the ones I actually need. Â Restarting the service helped this time, bringing everything back to normal.
So, there you go. Â In short, Fedora 16 is the next, improved and solid release for which we should thank all the Fedora community and everyone involved. Â Thanks guys, you are doing a heck of a job. Â Even with occasional hiccups here and there, I’m still much amazed as to how far you took this distribution in all these years. Â Kudos!