GNOME 2.16

Quote of the Day - Josh Billings - "Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there."

Well, you really need to stick on this one till the end to get some good results. Garnome is a user customizable build of GNOME packages. So, you need to download the gnome sources, compile them, install them and then execute them to run your own version of GNOME. This way you can customise the products that you want to be built [ though there is really very less scope of doing this, just because of any dependency failures. ]. But this is definately the best way to get a hands-on on the latest, stable GNOME release. I did this last month for GNOME 2.16

I have SuSE Linux 10.1 running on my desktop, with all the developer packages installed from the CD. Garnome sources are available for download at http://www.gnome.org/projects/garnome/ . After downloading the sources, read through the README quite well and follow the steps at this link http://www.gnome.org/projects/garnome/docs.html very diligently.

The steps are just too simple. After untarring your sources, modify gar.conf.mk file with your build area and install area path. Though, going by the defaults is less painful. Then go to the desktop directory and execute, "make paranoid-install".

During this process, I found that i had to install the following packages on my desktop.

aspell-devel-0.60.3-20
openldap2-devel-2.3.19-18
cyrus-sasl-devel-2.1.21-18
ImageMagick-devel-6.2.5-16.5
libwmf-devel-0.2.8.2-110.5
python-gdbm-2.4-14
Pyrex-0.9.3.1-1
pyrex-0.9.3-5
python-devel-2.4.2-18

Thankfully, these were easily available from rpmbone and google.com :)

I did face another very strange problem though. My proxy server had blocked some of the gnome servers and so i had to make garnome look into some other servers, and most of the time ended up downloading the sources myself. Garnome actually automatically downloads the dependency sources for you and compiles it. This is where my proxy caused me problems. So, i had to download the tar.gz for the sources, and copy them to the "<dependency-package-name>/download/". This way, the makefile would be fooled that it downloaded the tar.gz and directly go ahead untarring it.

This took me around 2 weeks of time to complete, with all the other official work taking away most of my time :p. Then, came the day when garnome finished compiling all the 150+ modules, and I was ready to execute my own GNOME 2.16 binaries. Please make sure that you read all the instructions very carefully for this. You can very easily screw up your existing desktop, if you dont take proper backups of your configuration files. I had to kill avahi, dbus and sometimes even go to single user mode and then run startx to see garnome running for me. Ofcourse, a reboot should take care of all such problems.

But, the worst part is that, after taking so many pains, I did not see any new UI changes between the GNOME 2.12 that i had by default from SuSE to the new GNOME 2.16 that i built now. Hopefully, I should be able to see new changes for GNOME 2.18 :)

Zero Inbox

43folders.com is something i came across to figure out how one could improve his productivity at work. It isnt the one stop shop for all your problems but definately is a good place to start off trying to figure out how other people are solving the same problems you are facing.

One such solution i found was labelled "Zero Inbox". It didnt ring a bell when i read the title, but once I read through the article I figured out that I really was wasting a lot of time in checking and answering mails. Just by going through all the mails as the first thing in the morning, I was spending a lot of time in sorting out the mails that needed my immediate attention.

The approach given in "Zero Inbox" does sound a bit too scary at first, but once you try it out, you will realise that you hardly spend any more time than is needed with your mail client.

The idea proposed is very simple. Always make sure that you have "Zero" mails in your Inbox. Yeah, I know, "that's scary" :). And where do you move the ones you already have in the Inbox ? Well, for that you create 3 simple folders and move the mails accordingly into those folders. These 3 folders are "Archive", "Action" and "On Hold".

Archive : This would contain all the mails just for keep a track record of things going on now, and you dont necessarily have to read these mails more than once. Usually the FYI type mails and the current project status mails fall into this category. As days passed on I realised that i do get some mails which are more personal to me, like the salary reciept mails. I decided to move these under another archive folder called "Personal". Doing this is fine, as long as you dont create so many subfodlers that you end up wasting time in deciding which folder a mail should go. Just having 2 folders, archive for work related stuff, and another archive for personal stuff should do.

Action : This would contain all the mails to which you "have" to reply today. Something like a list of "to do" items for you for today. Ofcourse, another good thing that you should follow while deciding on the mails that go into this folder is to reply them "right now" or "later" ? One good practise that people follow is to immediately reply back to the mails that take less than 2 minutes to type. Some people use the approach of batch processing. First thing you do is sort out the mails into these 3 magic folders, and get back to the work in hand. Then, in another batch, after sometime, come back to your mailbox and reply to as many mails as you can from this folder. There is yet another school of thought that says that "dont check your mails first thing in the morning" :) .. I'll leave this as food for thought :p

On Hold : This would contain all the mails that you will need for quick access in the coming days, may be for one week from now. Things like, a mail to fill up some feedback form in the next 2 days.

Ofcourse, one more important thing that you should do while moving the messages into "Action" and "On Hold" folder is to mark these mails as "unread". That way you know the number of mails that need your attention. And once you are done with the work for a given mail, you should move it to "Trash" or "Archive" as the case may be.

Sounds quite simple and easy ? Well, the toughest part is to keep yourself disciplined to follow this religiously and actually take action on the mail items in these folders .. If you are game for it, then give it a shot for a week, and you might actually find yourself left with lots of free time :)

Code Search

Found this article and tried a search for libevolution-exchange .. It actually found the result from inside a tar.bz file !!!

Truly awesome :-)

Wonder how people get such innovative ideas !!!