And Then He Walked Navicular

I know all dogs are different, and Navicular is pretty smart, but god damn it's difficult to teach him to walk on the leash. It's probably exaccerbated by the fact that he's 7 months old and is excited by absolutely everything, and to his credit he's been easy to teach to shake, sit, roll over and OFF!, but he doesn't get the leash walking at all. I've tried changing directions as soon as he pulls, yanking him back when he pulls, refusing to move if he pulls, more kinds of treats than you can poke a stick at, and even jogging with him. He doesn't get it at all -_-

In other news, I'm still settling into my new place. It's the first time I've lived with another person for over two years and It's going fine. I guess I gotta remember the last people I've lived with were fucking crazy. I'm still in "Extended Guest Mode" though, so it might be a few months before I actually feel like I live here. Extended Guest Mode for all those who dont know;

- You still ask to touch/do anything in the house

- You try to be super quiet at all times

- You ask where your housemate has been if he leaves the house and comes back without telling you

- You clean anything within 30 minutes of making a mess. This is in stark contrast to when I lived alone, trust me

- You're scared to spend more than 7 minutes in the shower

- You resist the urge to eat housemate's food, even if he says it's fine

- You freak out if you spill something on the carpet

- You try to ask permission before having anyone over/visit

I've also definitely decided I will get a Thinkpad X1 carbon when I have the money, and I will throw Xubuntu onto it and it will be my Uni software development machine. I like my thinkpad Edge a lot, but it's too heavy, and the paint is starting to flake off the lid. And it literally has the worst display I have ever seen in a notebook, to the point where I would not have bought the computer if I had seen the display before hand. Besides software engineering is a pissing contest ;)

This leaves me with no windows machine anymore, unless I install windows on this machine, assuming I dont give it away. I might. But to be honest windows has never excited me much. When I used the beta 2 of Windows Vista, after being bugged and annoyed by constant moronic dialogues (Allow msconfig to run? Why yes I'd like it to run because I JUST TYPED IT INTO THE RUN DIALOGUE BOX DIDN'T I?) and it crashing on my very ancient P4 2.8 Ghz box because it had driver issues (driver issues pretty much mean a system crash at random unpredictable moments) I bought my Macbook pro in 2006, and my iMac in 2009, my Thinkpad was kinda a stop gap because I didn't own a decent laptop last year which I needed for Uni (The Macbook Pro's hdd was toast by then, and I couldn't be bothered fixing it) so I used windows on it for about 9 months, and windows just has zero appeal to me.

Anyway I'd better go jog now

And Then He Found a GTK3 Version of ClearLooks

Ok after about three months, I now have my Xubuntu desktop set up how I want. I'm surprised that I haven't nuked the install yet - but the fact that most development tools run on it, plus the wonderful terminal means it's sticking around:

I had to find a version of Clearlooks that was ported to GTK 3 though, seeing as the Gnome developers apparently went insane after the release of Gnome 3 and decided to not port any of the existing themes. I think most Linux desktop environment themes are just gross, Clearlooks is the only one I can stomach. Then I adjusted the window borders to something.. I can't remember what.. it's on XFCE look though (I think it's called axe), turned on display compositing, and changed the font to URW Gothic, because the default font is difficult to read which a lot of anti aliasing (and my Thinkpad has a whopping 1366x768 stretched across 14" of goodness. hot hey?)

The result as my mate pointed out, looks like a strange version of OS X. Which is probably true seeing as I've had a mac as my main machine since 2006 ;-]

And Then He Used Thunar

After using XFCE as my main desktop environment for over a month now, I've concluded that while it's mostly good, there is one aspect of it that needs much work.

It's Thunar. And it totally blows. Let me explain why;

For a start, it's unnecessary. XFCE is not, and never will be, as light weight as LXDE (see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_desktop_vitals&num=1 ). Therefore the argument that a new lightweight file manager needed to be written from scratch is ridiculous - What has resulted is a large amount of wasted effort to produce a file manager that is severely limited in its functionality. If a user needs a seriously lightweight system so badly that they are going to care about the file manager, they will use LXDE, not XFCE.

What should happen is the porting of Nautilus from Gnome 2.x, a much more fully featured file manager, and in my experience, not too heavy a footprint to warrant writing a new file manager. Unfortunately I can't, because installing Nautilus makes my Xubuntu system incredibly unstable, not to mention you need to remap every single menu item from the main panel.

So if we overlook the fact that Thunar shouldn't exist in the first place, we are slapped in the face with how fucking terrible it is at odd moments:

- The name is stupid. I understand like how like, totally like lame a name like “File Manager” is and like how awesome and cool like a Nose God Thunar is. But seriously did your twelve year old name is? To add further insult to the injury, the black and white logo from the about screen looks like it was cut and pasted from some geocities website:

Urgh.

- The main window is really ugly too:

Notice how the side pane extends the full height of the window, yet the navigation bar mysteriously starts at the top of the directory view pane? Why? It just looks odd. The navigation bar should be above the side pane and the directory view pane. And the navigation buttons are rounded, rather than arrows pointing into each other. This immediately doesn't make it obvious what you're looking at is a directory, and virtually every other linux file manager on the planet does the arrow layout. It's like the godamn hipster of file managers.

- There are no tabs. Seriously what is that like, 15 lines of code to implement? Come on.

- Wanna see the size of my folders brah?

That's right, you are literally seeing, the size of my folders. Not what's in them. How retarded is that? Why the hell would anyone EVER want to know the size of the actual folder rather than the size of it's contents. I can't even change it to something more useful like “number of items” because Thunar is so impoverished for functionality. Also how is a "/" 4.1 kB? That seems huge.

- Thunar is unable to remember the size and location of windows. Annoying.

- Thunar has virtually no support for removable media. You can mount/unmount and browse them, and that's pretty much all folks. You cannot format them, view or use any special permissions and half the time, you can't eject a mass storage device because something is still using it, despite Thunar giving you no clue what that something actually is. Also, certain removable media stays greyed out in unmounted mode on your desktop for weeks even after it has long been physically removed from your system.

- When you make an alias/link in Thunar, if you move the original file, The link no longer works.

- There's no “undo” option.

- There's no merge option

- Contrary to the “Linux philosophy”, an excuse given by my best friend whenever I moan about annoying I find many aspects of open source software, Thunar is almost Mac like in its inablity to be customised. Go ahead, open up the preferences menu and take a look for yourself.

- Thunar has extensions, of which exactly zero of which are desirable. All I want is drop box. Seriously.

And that's it for now, I have been compiling a list of what I found annoying over the last week, but it's mysteriously gone and Thunar has no menu for recently viewed documents. Urgh.