USB, Virtualbox and Ubuntu Lucid
Ubuntu Lucid has removed hal support which is required for (proprietary) Oracle VirtualBox to use local USB devices inside your VM. Until VirtualBox is eventually ported to the hal-less world you can start hal daemon before running VirtualBox as a workaround.
The solution is to get closed source free for evaluation and personal usage version of Oracle VirtualBox (you can use the package from the karmic repository), add yourself to the vboxusers group (if not already) and start hald in no daemon mode: sudo hald --daemon=no.
Use lsusb -v to get vendor/product ids if you would like to setup a filter inside VM USB controller properties so your local device can be auto connected when the VM starts.
Close gedit window when last tab is closed
I am using gedit quite a lot. It's reasonably fast and it provides some nice functionality via plugins.
But I don't like that gedit window stays open even when there are no tabs. I know that it's a feature, and that there is a CTRL+Q for closing gedit, it's just that I would like to use CTRL+W all the time.
Some time ago I patched gedit, but today I realized it's better to write this as a plugin so I can use standard package from Ubuntu and not have to rebuilt it by myself.
So, here it is — gedit tabclose plugin, version 1.0. README and INSTALL files are in the archive.
Things I would like to see in F-Spot
I read "Interactive Digital Photomontage" paper today, and I think that it is freaking amazing:
We describe an interactive, computer-assisted framework for combining parts of a set of photographs into a single composite picture, a process we call "digital photomontage."
As I can see, there exists an implementation in C++, released under GNU GPL, I don't have any clues how much effort it would take to have this feature enabled in F-spot but I believe it can be major reason for one to switch to it.
Also, I do like how Aperture can group stack frames, and unfold them only on request. Support for linked RAW files (stored on external removable media) is also very nice, but as I am not professional photographer, that's not important to me.
On the other hand, it would be nice to have some support for importing photos from iPhoto (and Aperture). I read once about some Perl script that can do that, but I can't find it right now.
News about library.gnome.org
SoC code is imported into GNOME CVS (library-web module), I got my CVS account and have some free time, so nothing stops me from doing more coding.
Now, I am asking for peer review of some changes to how things works before I get my hands dirty and start coding. If you don't like my abuse of English language, it would be fine to read just a last section :)
Changes I am planing to do allows me to fix some design bugs, implement support for updating single module (when new tarball is pushed to GNOME FTP server) or single source (CVS) and more and it's more fun to do that then to play with CSS/XSL...
Once more thanks to Google for this great program! I am making plans what to do with money I got.
