XBMC Issues With XFCE/Compositing

I have just come across an issue that I struggled to diagnose, I couldn’t find this anywhere online, so if only for myself in the future I thought I would write this up here, so hopefully when I google the problem in a year’s time, I’ll find myself writing about it

I have recently switched to using Xubuntu 11.04 for my media PC installation. XBMC is my choice for controlling all of this (I may write another post sometime explaining my setup in more detail, but for now this is about a specific problem).

I use the media box for more than just watching/listening to stuff, not much more, but enough that every now and then I need to come out of XBMC (although without quitting). There is a handy keyboard shortcut to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode ‘\’.

However, when I switched into windowed mode, all I would see was a black screen and a mouse-cursor (another major bugbear with me and XBMC, but that can wait for another time). After searching online and finding nothing, I decided it was time to just start hacking around until I found something that at least helped me diagnose the problem.

Turns out it didn’t take me very long at all, once I’d found the Window Manager settings in XFCE, I noticed that compositing was turned on. Turning this off sorted out my problems straight away. Although I love the compositing features in Linux in general, they are not needed for a media pc, so I have no problems leaving this off.

I hope this helps someone, and if it’s me reading this suffering from the same problem again, then you should have remembered this and not wasted so much time looking for the problem again you idiot!

Chrome vs Firefox

I have been using Firefox since version 0.9 alpha… it’s been a long and mostly enjoyable journey. However I have been unable to resist the ever-growing hype surrounding Google Chrome.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I switched. To try to see if I could cope with Chrome as my everyday browser. I thought I’d write a short piece on my experiences:

Chrome 5 dev channel vs Firefox 3.6.4b.

Note that this is not a ‘fair’ test, Firefox had many many more installed extensions, this is only my observations so please don’t complain if I wasn’t fair.

Google Wave

I just finished watching the Google Wave video on YouTube, here.

Google have come along with a new technology called Wave. Watch the video to find out more about it (be warned, its a video from the Google I/O developer conference, so its a little techy). Basically they have stepped back from the way we currently communicate with each other (e-mail, IM, SMS) etc and, reinvented it. Its hard to explain, just watch the video (its long though).

There are times when I think Google are becoming the new Microsoft, the way they’re taking over everything and the way they buy new companies, however… Google keep proving me wrong, time and time again they surprise me.

I’ll try and summarise the features that I can remember (guess they’re the good ones):

• Live – All communication when using Wave is live, even the typing, so no more “Buddy is typing…”. Waves come and go in your inbox, even the search is live.
• Open Source – Woo! This means that other people can create their own Wave servers. Different wave servers can communicate with each other, using something called Foundation
• Collaboration – A wave is basically a smart document, or conversation. A smart docusation if you would. All the people involved with the Wave can edit the Wave at the same time and all the changes are displayed live on all the clients. Impressive
• Playback – When you are added to a Wave after it has already started, you will see all the edits/comments/conversations in the Wave already. Google have come up with a playback feature, which lets you see how the Wave was constructed. Another impressive feature.
• Extensions – Google demonstrated some pretty cool extensions, check them out in the video.
• Rosy – Live Translation! This was probably the most impressive feature of Wave, Google demonstrated two people conversing, one in French and another in English, Wave was translating what was written, in real time!

Overall I was very impressed with Google Wave, obviously as a developer I find this thing interesting anyway, but hopefully this will change the way people communicate world wide. For the better. Open protocols, Open source.

Google have impressed me today.