The other day when I logged in on my Ubuntu installation, I received a rude shock: the file manager (Nautlius) would not load, so my desktop remained a bright, response-less green. Not only that, but 80% of my other programs would start and immediately crash with no warning, and no error output. None of my settings would persist. The only perceivable error that I received was one regarding a lack of permissions, which really threw me off.

Since I had just recently installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu, I thought part of the problem might have been due to my old applications settings that I had not removed from my separate home partition. As it turns out, these were not the problem: the mysterious crashings were all due to the fact that my home partition was full, so my applications could not write to them, resulting in a permission error if lucky and silent death otherwise!

After calming down and apologizing to Ubuntu for the names I’d called it, I realized that somewhere I vaguely remember this happening to me before… you’d think I would have learned my lesson the first time. Anyway, the moral of the story is to keep an eye on that disk space. I’m sure savvy users will have already installed Conky to do so for them — as for me, I think it’s high time to do so.

Work on GCast — the soon-to-be open-source screen capture and sharing utility for Linux — is continuing, albeit slowly, in between school, work, and everything else. Today I decided to take a break from working on the region-selector (which now masks the screen with a semi-transparent overlay like every other capture application worth its salt   and focus on completing the graphics editor, which still has some major work to be done. So far text and rectangles (with text) are supported, so I started to work on ellipses. After happily plunking away at a small bit of Cairo code, I was a little surprised at the results, which was anything but the smooth ellipse I was expecting:

I guess that’s what happens when you switch Bezier control points with nodes. Oops!

I have many more features planned than I have time to implement, but soon I hope to add support for undo/redo, Dropbox, Screencast.com (if they would only allow third-party applications to upload with their own api keys!), state-saving of all the graphics canvas and child items, as well as revision history. Watch this blog for updates concerning the development progress.