Gnome 3 vs. Unity

After upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 I did my first steps with unity. I nice approach but it feels unready in terms of graphic, layout and some other things. So I've installed Gnome 3 to see how this one feels. The result, it look and feel incredible, very clean, very nice, definitely the right direction. Unfortunately it is not yet complete from my point of view, things like global menu should be incorporated to Gnome 3 as well. But when this is done it is the actual coolest and nicest desktop I know of.

Eclipse 3.5 on Ubuntu 9.10

When using Eclipse 3.5 on Ubuntu 9.10 you will discover display problems in some dialog boxes. The problem is the combination of Compiz and Eclipse. To work around this problem simply create a start script in the eclipse folder (/opt/eclipse in my case) with the following content:

#! /bin/sh
#
# Fix display problem on Ubuntu 9.10
#

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true
/opt/eclipse/eclipse

This will fix the display problems.

Beyond the mainstream

I just saw a nice operating system completely coded in assembler. Multitasking, graphical desktop, TCP/IP, USB and many other features on one 1.44MB floppy disk. Very impressive to see what is possible with extreme coding. Feel free to check out the KolibriOS 0.7.7.0 operating system.

Google mobile phone

It looks like it become more and more official, Google plan to release a mobile phone next year in cooperation with HTC. This was reported by the Wall Street Journal today. First spy shot pictures could be found here. This definitely help me with my decision when to buy the next mobile phone.

Using SAP Netweaver in Google wave

I found a nice video on YouTube showing a proof of concept to connect SAP to Google wave. Check out here!

Google calendar week numbers

One thing I really missed in my Google calendar are week numbers. Fortunatelly this is no longer the case if you follow the instructions here.

Xmarks alpha for Chrome available

One of my personal killer extensions for Firefox is now also as an alpha version available for Google Chrome, Xmarks. Check out the Xmarks blog here. Btw., it's also working with the Google Chrome version for Linux, very nice!

Check mails in Gmail from command line

If you want to check new mails on your Gmail account from the command line, here is the how to:

curl -u username --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | perl -ne 'print "\t" if //; print "$2\n" if /<(title|name)>(.*)<\/\1>/;'

You will be prompted for a password before the informations are gathered. Please notice that you need to change username to your Gmail user name before executing.

Fly to the moon

Ever thought it might be cool to fly to the moon once in a lifetime? If so, the first parts of the code used by the Apollo program is released as open source. Check out here and have a good flight :).

Google OS is comming

According to the Google blog, Chrome OS will come in the second half of 2010. So what a lot of people already supposed, Google will now directly attack Microsoft in there core business, the operating system market. Let's see how this develop, competition was never bad in the software business.