I don't have any particular theme to rant about today. Shit happens, I guess.

News point: I've graduated.

Dreams involving my school, my landlord, my major, etc, haven't stopped. Actually, they've pretty much just started. I never gave a shit enough about any of it to have such dreams in college; now they won't relent. It's probably to do with the fact that now is the time I would be heading back for another semester of torment; it's impossible to believe it's over. But it is. It's also odd, because normally I have lucid dreams, and seldom do I not have some kind of super power. Most of my dreams of late have been in a classroom or in an email correspondence. But the point is, that's all behind me, now. I'm a free man. Soon to be a corporate slave.

News point: I'm an XFCE user, now.

For the longest time I've been clinging to the remains of GNOME 2. I know it's necrophilia, but you have to understand how beautiful this desktop environment was. The issue is, I'm not so far gone that I'm not put off by the smell as I carry on with it… MATE has obviously not even been embalmed. It's just a smelly, rotting GNOME 2 corpse. I think that the original idea was "if we keep the heart beating, everything should be fine," but they forgot that a body also requires oxygen and food. Or maybe it was the other way around… although I didn't notice any bloating.

I've tried a dozen desktop environments. All of them rhymed with "Unity." For example, "KDE" (I don't want to talk about this one), "GNOME 3," and "Cinnamon." Okay, I'll be fair. Cinnamon didn't try to be a monolithic suckhole, it just happened.

The issue with most new desktop environments is that there's almost zero room for customization. I'm not kidding; you can't even opt to move Unity's dock from the left side of the screen to the right, much fucking less the bottom. I prefer Windows' layout: single panel on the bottom. Nothing on top but the window title bar, which makes it easy to grab quickly. You just can't have that with these DEs. Most offer zero customization. GNOME's fallback mode is a rancid piece of shit, but it at least allows you to place panels. Cinnamon is meant to be a GNOME 3 implementation of GNOME 2, but it is completely broken on Ubuntu; it causes X server freezes and steals the mouse when the super key is pressed, only to lose it forever, breaking all applications until TTY switchout. XFCE is also badly broken on Ubuntu. As for KDE, well, it's for people who want to have sex with a bottle of glitter, then dump the result on their hard drive and smear it around a bit. When KDE users fart, sparkles come out. It's just not for me.

I'll admit it: I like my desktop a certain way. This is because I have become used to it and am most productive with it a certain way. I had to customize XFCE for about four hours to get it how I like it, but the good news was that all the problems I had with it in the past were completely Ubuntu's fault, which is completely Shuttleworth's fault. I don't like Shuttleworth. I'll refrain from talking about him further to avoid my own incarceration, but the bottom line is that I genuinely don't like him very much, at all. He has ruined Ubuntu, the Linux distribution which I, at this point, cannot escape.

You see, Ubuntu came with my PC and is its only supported operating system, so I do not want to switch distributions. The NVidia driver installation tool meant to work on my hardware is distributed as a Debian, which is incompatible with even Mint packages. I therefore fixed the majority of my problems by installing Xubuntu—an official Ubuntu release—instead. The rest of the problems, I fixed by replacing XFCE's components with non-shitty equivalent components. For instance, Thunar is underpowered beans; I replaced it with Nemo. XFWM is a pretty good window manager; replaced it with Metacity because its window snapping blows.

The only remaining "wow, this sucks" factors are the fact that I don't have access to a battery charge history, and for some reason, I can't customize what my theme looks like at all.

Back in the day, there was a divide between people who like dark themes and people who like light themes. This divide never went away, but the ability to switch between the two themes did. It doesn't matter what GTK3 style (that's GNOME3speak for "theme") I pick; if I choose a dark theme, random shit is light. If I choose a light theme, random shit is dark. Fortunately, the random dark shit looks deliberate, so I have a dark panel, and every fucking thing else on my system is light. I will probably never fix this until GTK3 is finally murdered and fucking buried. What a horrible piece of shit.

News point: I'm working on my own projects, again

Pidgin Plus! is a plugin I wrote for Pidgin that allows JavaScript plugin scripting. So it's a plugin that manages plugins. A new Pidgin API is around the corner, so I've been working on it, again. The goal is to allow creating plugins quickly in a builtin JavaScript UI.

JustDefineIt (JDI) is a C++ parser and code query library. Depending on who you ask, it's either CTags++ or Clang–. Identifying types of expressions is easy with JDI; so easy, I set up a CLI that lets you query expression types when parsing finishes. It's useful for IDEs, and for ENIGMA, because it removes the mystery from what's inside a pair of parentheses. One of the biggest flaws in most IDEs is that, as soon as a template enters the picture, all bets are off for what something[whatever] is, and it can't help you code complete something[whatever]-> at all. Doing so would involve knowing what type you have on the left of ->, or at least having a good guess. Most IDEs have neither. JDI knows exactly.

Disclaimer: JDI is not thoroughly tested on incomplete or invalid code. I have no idea how it would perform when people don't close their fucking braces, which is always the first thing I do after opening them.

Other projects include a 3D graphics editor that is in the conceptual stage and may never leave. I'm also considering bringing the V8 love to InkScape for JavaScript-based animation code and extensions, but InkScape already supports Python scripting, so there's not much point. Oh, Python…

I also just wrote a new BBCode parser which may or may not augment or replace the fifty-year-old one on this site.

Other points of interest: None.

I guess I'm kind of a boring person. I don't do drugs; I don't even sell drugs. Hell, I don't even use Python. All my friends tell me it's good shit, though, and a lot of companies not only allow it, but encourage it on-site. That said, I might pick some up, at some point. Even though it's a little out of character.

At least I'd be able to script for InkScape.

That reminds me, I also maintain some vector icons licensed as GPL. But they're for use in bigger projects and are not to be regarded as a project. Just thought I'd point them out. In fact, this is a good opportunity for some SEO. *Ahem* Free (GPL) small resolution vector icons.