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I’m currently using the XFCE Desktop Manager because it’s somewhat GNOME-like without being bloated and made for complete noobs. I’m currently using a black colour theme (”XFCE Dusk”), just because I like it. Plus it looks good with my xterm colours (on display in the terminal at the top-right corner of the screenshot).

One thing that is somewhat annoying is that firefox also adopts these theme colours for its interface elements. I guess this can be solved by using a firefox theme, but I like the way it looks. The only annoyance about it is that form elements on websites also get the GTK theme’s look - black background, white text. This does not always (rarely, in fact) work out.

I’m suddenly finding out that a lot of webdesigners are doing a half-assed job at designing websites. Lately I’ve been focussing on usability of websites quite a bit, because two out of four people in RBTS are visually impaired, and thus we will be very good at making websites that are accessible.
Now, back to my rant. It seems that there are too many webdesigners out there that live by a rule of thumb: “If it looks good on my screen, it looks good everywhere“. Apparently the way to make a form element look good is to specify the background colour for it. I’ve come across many form elements where my white text looks hideous on the form element’s background. However, white backgrounds take the cake.

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Let’s look at Owen’s blog (sorry Owen ;)). When I want to comment on his blog, I have to fill in some information.
For some silly reason, the first input box is not themed. I remember that, on a default Windows XP theme, this looks okay. But in my case, it doesn’t fit in with the website’s style at all.
The worst are the other input boxes, however. These were given a white background colour, but the foreground colour was not specified. Why is this a problem? Because the theme’s default colours are used unless the stylesheet specifies a different color. In my case, this default colour is… White.
The screenshot (click the image so you know what I’m talking about) features a completely filled out form. You just can’t see it.
The only way to check what you typed was by selecting the text so it gets highlighted.

Because it’s impossible to get everyone on the planet to fix their stylesheets (although I think I will be sending e-mails to any large and/or well-known site because I think it’s just plain stupid) I guess I’ll try writing a chickenfoot (warning, looooong video (Google TechTalks, great stuff)) script that injects some better CSS for forms.

Probably not the most fascinating blog entry, but I felt like ranting about it. Although I’m not very good at doing so.

Aren’t I just the best LOGO programmer ever?!

I remember LOGO from back when I was a very little boy. We had a program for it under DOS on an old olivetti computer (which predated me!). Back then I never got the hang of it though (I was rather young).

While I was checking out the KDE menu I suddenly noticed KTurtle and decided to give it a go

After getting increasingly annoyed at Ubuntu and Gnome for making way too many assumptions about how I wanted things to work, I decided to go with a new distro (to me, at least). One that was not so focussed on usability that it became the opposite of usable.

After hearing about Arch Linux a few times on chat and on the Dutch news for nerds site I frequently visit (Tweakers) I decided to give it a try. I went ahead and downloaded the base package (which is really just a CD with the bare basics of the Linux OS and some stuff to make installing it easier), because I was up for a challenge. Then I backed up my ubuntu partition (just in case I’d completely fuck up with Arch, which I was expecting) and gave it a whirl.

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I now write to you from Arch linux, running KDE (and XFCE, although I’m actually liking KDE so far). Of course having an OS that does a lot less of it’s configuring for you (like Ubuntu does) also means that more things will not work straight away. But I’ve not had any major issues thus far. It took some time to get used to it all, but I’m starting to get the hang of it now :).

Another way to kill time is working for RBTS™. The website still needs a lot of work and we recently had some new ideas. We’re going for a ’semi-web-2.0′ approach, with AJAX in some places, but not overdoing it (because we want to stay accessible!). But think FAQ search boxes with auto-complete, news messages with comments that are loaded into the page using AJAX, etc.

Furthermore, I’m still rooting for a LANd-party at Rob’s house. Basically, it’s thought of as a LAN party in some tents on the field by his house. But that’ll depend on how much free time Rob’s got :).
LAN parties at Rob’s are great fun (even though we don’t game a lot, we still have fun just doing geeky things with computers) and this time around I might even go home with a free P2 400 MHz server to play around with :).

Or perhaps not.
Firstly, I have to work on my portfolio for school so I can advance to the next ‘block’ which will feature Relational Databases and SQL as a course. I’ve already read through the book (interesting read) so that shouldn’t be too hard.

Furthermore, I’m working on a project for a classmate (or actually his father) where I have to convert a program to a web application, so I’m quite a busy bee.
None the less I think I’ll have some free time.

In another news, I’ve lately been using usenet a lot. Newsgroups are great for… aquiring things. Hmmhmm.
I wonder if my ISP will notice the increase in bandwidth usage.

Oh, and I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu 5.10 “Breezy Badger”, even though I already had the Preview installed for a month or so.

For you perverts out there: no, not THAT experience (unfortunately).

I’ve been having a bit of a dilemma. Even though I have a perfectly legal license to Windows XP Home Edition for my PC, the installation CD somehow claims that the serial number is not valid.
After having tried a few things, I decided to try my father’s serial number, which installed just fine.
However, now I couldn’t activate, because this serial number has been used too much already and the activation window wouldn’t accept my real serial number either =/.

So 2 days ago, the trial period expired and now I’m forced to activate before I can continue to use Windows XP.

Then, the moment finally came. I realized that I had been using Linux non-stop for 5 days in a row and that I had never had a moment where I didn’t know how to do my stuff. (Then again, IRC and MSN aren’t too hard to figure out on any OS) Not only this, but I also managed to get various computer games working, like Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne and World of Warcraft (although I can’t seem to select any object or NPC or mob, so that’s not very playable).

So screw Windows. I’m going to try installing again tomorrow, I’ll call Microsoft and tell them the installer isn’t accepting my serial, and hopefully I’ll manage to get it installed (so I can play WoW), if not, then I’ll just get rid of my windows partitions, repartition my HDs so all partitions are Ext3, and use Linux all the time

Together with some people from TT-Forums, I went to the Dutch Railway museum in Utrecht. It was cool meeting some people from the forums (isn’t the internet great?!) and it was cool looking at old trains
Purno, Mr. X and me had great fun.

After about 2 hours in the museum we had seen about everything, so we headed back to Utrecht Central Station where we would split up again. But not before we just had some fun on the station. We sat on some benches and looked at the one thing that makes Summer great: Scarcely clothed women :p
After that we headed to the shopping mall that’s next to the station. Looked at some electronics, checked some DVDs out, etc.

Then, after another 2 hours on the station, we decided to head on home
We had good fun I made quite a lot of pictures, although some of them are a bit fuzzy. (I probably started moving already while the picture was still being taken by my digital camera)

On another note, TT-Forum’s member Illegal_Alien posted a great desktop which looks great when your terminal is translucent