Newer versions of Pidgin have the text input area resize to fit the text typed in, similar to Google Talk. This made a bunch of people all pissy, and now they want to fork Pidgin. The new project, funpidgin, intends to be just like Pidgin, only with a development team that cares about the users and lives to satisfy their needs.
That didn’t come out as sarcastic as I wanted, so I’ll just say it: the people behind funpidgin and everyone else complaining about the UI change in Pidgin are a bunch of whiners.
First of all, if users are so upset about Pidgin not acting just the way they like it, they can download a plugin that reverts the text box behavior to be just like it was before. In my mind, this pretty much invalidates most of their complaints. Not to mention, most of their complaints are along the lines of: “I don’t like it, change it back,” which is not helpful and is rightly being ignored. For all those with legitimate complaints (some people apparently like to edit large blocks of text inside Pidgin, which IMO seems stupid but at least they gave a valid reason for why they dislike the change), they can just install the plugin and the problem goes away.
It seems now that the bigger problem is about how “insensitive” the devs have been. Frankly, I sympathize with them. The users upset at the change want an option added in the preferences menu to toggle on and off the new functionality, but in terms of maintaining the software, UI options like that makes everything harder to debug, and add unneeded clutter to the interface. One of the devs explained it better than I could. That aside, it’s still the developer’s choice what happens in Pidgin. People seem to forget this. Just because the community wants something doesn’t mean it has to be added — the users aren’t the boss of the developers.
I predict the following will happen: most people won’t notice a thing, the offended users will get used to the change, the fork will dry up, and in a few months everyone will forget about this whole thing. Pidgin is an active project; it’s being updated and improved constantly, and that means some things are going to change. We can either bitch about it, or we can get used to it. Personally, I prefer the new interface, but even if I didn’t I’d still use Pidgin — it’s the best IM program out there, and a little UI tweak isn’t going to change that.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-04-30 | Filed under: Opinion, Tech and games | no responses
I’ve been putting this off for too long, so I finally sat down to write an analysis of Bioshock. I’ll focus on the concept of “free will” and how it is explored in the game. This will definitely contain spoilers, so don’t read on if you haven’t played the game.
Read more…
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-04-27 | Filed under: Tech and games | one response
I was lucky enough to buy a PSP back when they were ridiculously easy to downgrade and hack, though I hear it’s still possible even with newer firmware versions. I’ve helped a few friends downgrade and install after-market firmware, and it’s pretty safe and definitely worth the effort.
I thought I’d compile a list of some of the best things to do with a hacked PSP, in no particular order:
- Play Playstation 1 games. Yup, full PSX games running smoothly on the PSP. Tons of games are supported. Personally, I’ve tried Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Final Fantasy 7.
- Play SNES games. This was the first emulator I put on my PSP, and it runs flawlessly. I played all the way through Super Metroid with no trouble.
- Read books. I read a PDF of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on my PSP (first time I’d ever read it… great book). The text was readable and bright, and the scrolling was mostly painless.
- Play DOOM. I tried this a while ago, and it ran fairly smoothly with no major problems. New versions have been released since then, so I might try again soon.
Feel free to share your own experiences with PSP homebrew.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-04-26 | Filed under: Tech and games | 2 responses
It’s no secret that I’m an Obama supporter. I’ll support Clinton if she’s the candidate, but I dearly hope she isn’t. I’m not a big fan of Hilary Clinton for several reasons:
That isn’t to say I dislike Clinton. She’d certainly do a better job than Bush, and she has lots of good ideas about health care (an issue I care very much about). I just think Obama should be the candidate, and that this long and bitter primary is doing damage to the Democratic party.
Read more…
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-04-25 | Filed under: Current events, Opinion | 6 responses
The new version of Ubuntu came out, but I’m going to wait a while before upgrading. Right now, Ubuntu is really stable for me, and I don’t want to screw things up too much. There are a few things worrying me about the new release, like the beta version of Firefox and the overall awfulness of KDE 4 (I tried it, I just didn’t like it), so I’m staying with good ol’ Gutsy.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-04-24 | Filed under: Tech and games | 2 responses
Earlier I wrote a post discussing whether video games can be art or not. Now, I’m convinced they can.
Just this weekend, I finished playing The Longest Journey and it’s sequel Dreamfall. They’re both essentially point-and-click adventure games (my current favorite genre of video games), but Dreamfall has some lame combat/stealth segments tacked on to appease the console gamers. What stands out in both of them is the story and the writing.
I’m going to write up some of my thoughts on the two games — mainly character analysis. There’ll be a lot of spoilers ahead, so don’t read if you haven’t already played the games.
If you’re interested in my reviews of these games, they’ll be up on Anime Thoughts (my anime and video game review site) soon. Read more…
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-04-20 | Filed under: Tech and games | one response
I’ve been having a lot of fun playing Nexuiz recently. I have played previous versions, but the newest one looks amazing. Full HDR effects, lots of detail everywhere. If you have a good graphics card, I’d highly recommend you try it out.
Anyway, installation is fairly simple. Nexuiz is in the Ubuntu repositories, but I recommend you get it straight from the Nexuiz site. This is how I did it:
This guide assumes you have the correct graphical drivers configured and working for your pc.
Download both the game and the map pack from the official site. Save them to your home folder (/home/[username])
Open up a terminal and enter the following:
mkdir ~/games
unzip nexuiz-24.zip -d ~/games
unzip nexmappack_r2.zip -d ~/games/Nexuiz
Now, open up your home folder and go to games -> Nexuiz. Find the file named “nexuiz-linux-x86_64-glx” and run it to start the game.
You may need to turn off desktop effects before running it. I generally do my gaming in Fluxbox, since KDE/GNOME + Compiz-fusion is too resource-hungry to keep running while playing a game.
Posted by probabilityZero on 2008-04-10 | Filed under: Tech and games | 2 responses
