After years of being a dedicated KDE user it seems like it's finally time for me to go "back" to Gnome. I once tried KDE 4.x from the Debian 'experimental' branch knowing that it's probably unstable and will require a lot of patience. But I was willing to report bugs and dive into new things. It didn't take long though to find out that graphics were extraordinarily slow with the new "desktop effects". The worst was resizing a 'konsole' (KDE terminal window). It took 25 seconds until the window was resized and redrawn!
Before you BBQ me - note the word layout here. I'm not opposed to CSS. Instead don't get me started about crappy web sites that use "font size=+5 face=Arial" in every sentence or are even just saved from Micro$oft W*rd "as HTML". CSS is great for styling your contents. How do I want to make my H1 heading look like? How much space does a P paragraph have above and below? Which font style do I want to use? That's what CSS is good for. I like it. Keeps my (X)HTML clean and readable.
While many other "web designers" create hacky websites (that break in many funny way once the browser developers figure out how to do their jobs right making the hacks fail) I almost always try to use W3C's web standards. Just that sometimes I forget to validate my own pages for proper CSS or (X)HTML. Thanks to the great "Web Developer" Firefox plugin I can press Ctrl+Shift+A and validate my local (X)HTML using their validation service. But I felt that a more automatic way would be nice.
And once again I was bitten by problems on my Debian laptop mounting directories from the file server via NFS. After a Debian dist-upgrade I couldn't login to KDE any more. Shell login worked somehow but I quickly found out I could neither read nor write any files there. Apparently an "ls -al" showed me the right permissions (not just unmappable numeric UIDs or something of that kind) and an "id -a" confirmed that my LDAP PAM configuration still worked. But reading or writing any file just lead to "Permission denied".
Bear with me that I keep you posted with boring news of screenshots.debian.net. But after further optimisation (caching the start page, serving screenshots directly from nginx instead of via Pylons) we decided that it's time to get us on Slashdot. Thanks a lot to zepolen for teaching me about memcached and threading!
I'm still amazed how quickly the word is spreading. Yet another proof that good products need little marketing. ;) Bear with me that I share a few articles I found on the net just a few days after going live:
After just three days of beta operation I could already make screenshots.debian.net go live. Within the first day I fixed a few typos, optimized database queries and added proper HTTP headers for caching. We got a huge load spike after my announcement on debian-devel-announce.
Roberto Sanchez and I proposed to create a service to provide screenshots for Debian packages. And with a little work, a lot of Pylons frameworking power and a tad of jQuery spice I created the 'debexpo' software that provides a nice-looking web site doing exactly that. The service is already up and running at screenshots.debian.net. This is still the phase where I have to sort out a few minor technical, legal and organisational issues.
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