digitalself

Read the title. Test posts are always welcome. Nothing else to see, move along.

After reading this entry on planet gnome, I thought to myself: “Another try at fail”. I like dark themes. Dark themes are soothing on the eyes, and at least for me, tend to make a much better work environment because they annoy less. Hey, my blog theme is dark, I like it.

After using apt-get to install the ubuntustudio-theme package, I was amazed at the first theme that bring dark windows with light background not compromising usability for a dark theme. Don’t take my word for it, here’s a screenshot:

So far, every dark theme I encounter before is a try at fail mostly because they are not usable. Attention is brought to lines, row or text, like Gtk TreeViews in evolution by using a bold font on a dark background, or a little icon that glows just a little bit more than the rest. This is hardly usable, since you fail to get the visual hints needed to quickly parse through an inbox for example. The same goes for the desktop calendar. Try a dark theme and find your events on it and let me know.

This one doesn’t fail like the rest. I’m not saying it’s a perfect theme, I’m not sure about the window borders (too thick), or about the icons, or even the bright blue highlight colors (but it’s customizable). I’m gonna stick with it, play with it some more, and be happy for a while.

You know your life has taken a wrong turn when you spend more than 15 minutes listening to white noise.

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu hardy, I’ve been trying to give Firefox 3 a fighting chance, mostly because of all the hype around it, along with a couple of bumps with Epiphany.

With Epiphany using the gecko backend, it was hard adding exceptions for every website using self-signed certificates, or broken certificates, including my own, due to the interaction which was covered in Firefox but no in Epiphany. I even started my own Certificate Authority (it’s just a bash script). All of this made me give Firefox a try for a while..

But, after a while, I have come to dislike all the things that made switch to Epiphany in the first place. It’s slugish, it eats all my memory, and makes me squirm in pain…

On the other hand, Epiphany feels lightning fast, snappy and doesn’t eat all my RAM. Meanwhile, with the updates in Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 adding SSL exceptions is not a broken process that equals fail. It shouldn’t be easy though, but it should be doable.

Does anyone have any hard facts if the page rendering is faster on Epiphany than on Firefox ? Or is that just a “feeling” people get ?

I can only wait to check out Epiphany with webkit! In the meantime, I’ll take it as it is, and make it my default once again.

The move is nearing completeness. My blog has been up and running for the last couple of days, and I’ve been taking the time to test a couple of features on my provider. The move was a seamless handover, because I was able to setup all of my services before the move, up to a point which was only necessary to change nameservers. The largest chunk of time was actually setting up a couple of ssl configurations, which wasn’t in the original moving plan.

I’ve also managed to use my provider’s one click install for wordpress, but I had to manually update to 2.6, which works great over SSL in the admin interface (always nice to have).

On the down side, I had forgotten the nightmare that is operating a website through ftp and web interfaces. FTP takes forever to actually transfer files, how ironic.

Overall, the transfer was a breeze, and I didn’t see any relevant downtime. Did you ?

I’m updating my hosting solution, so down time shouldn’t be a surprise while records, services and blog tools get moved. Also, if sending email results in no response, please retry, since the moving may impact mail and availability (mine that is).