MindlessCode.net

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a “What’s going on” post here, so I think I’ll fix that right now.

Today I modified the blog theme a little bit (added the “Little Buttons”, “Syndicate”, and “Code is Poetry” sections) as well as made this monster valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (WordPress has a way of screwing with my posts and improperly nesting tags).

I’ve also been hacking out mime-types for Autopackage. Currently, we’re clocking at 3 different standards (KDE, Gnome, and FreeDesktop.org).

KDE implements mime-types with two .desktop files. One that connects a file to a mime-type (e.g., “Files with *.html are of type text/html), and another file that says “Open files that have a mime-type of text/html with Mozilla Firefox).

Gnome implements mime-types with two files as well. These files are in a very strange format (for which I have never been able to find documentation) and have all sorts of weird stuff (e.g., “short_list_application_ids_for_intermediate_user_level”) in them which make no sense.

The third standard is the spec provided by FreeDesktop.org. This one is at least documented. The problem? Nobody uses it. Gnome supports it (in version 2.10, I beleive), but KDE doesn’t (and has no plans to, AFAIK).

So, to be able to get mime-types to work the developer has to write 5 mandatory as well as 1 maybe-not-required file. Autopackage needs to figure out how to install them–it sucks.

Some people think I never do anything but program–they’re almost right. Actually, I’ve found that OpenTTD is a highly addictive game. There’s an autopackage which makes it very easy to install.

Also, we’ve been painting the scenes for our Spanish play (The Taming of the Shrew). The street scene is made out of 3½ refrigerator boxes (1.5 scenes from last years play, The Pied Piper+ 2 more new boxes). Here’s a pic from when it was still under development:

See, I do do something other than program!

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2005 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Linux, Fun, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.