I recently discovered a very nice tool for GUI prototyping, called Pencil. It can be installed as a Firefox AddOn or as a standalone software. The Firefox XPI is unfortunately not in the Mozilla repositories which means you have to install it from their site, which also means no package verification and no automated upgrades.

Apart from that, Pencil is a very nice tool. It’s a very easy to use it allows to create interface prototyping in no time. Of course, you should know what wireframes are and what they are used for.

To demonstrate how quick you can create drafts for a website layout, let’s assume we are creating a booking site for events and we want to create a first draft of the home page. Here’s what you could get after 15 minutes sketching with Pencil. (Yes, that is Comic Sans MS. As awkward as it sounds: this font is actually suitable for this sort of work.)

Of course, Pencil doesn’t offer the fancy features of elaborate drawing software like, for example, Inkscape. In fact, it doesn’t offer much more than a collection of common web UI elements which can be easily placed, resized, aligned and colored. The great thing about this is that you don’t need a tutorial or FAQ to get started – Pencil is completely self-explanatory.

It has multi-sheet documents, and you can copy/paste elements from one sheet to another one, which allows to quickly create variations of one screen. A variety of exporters (ODF, PDF, HTML) will help you to discuss your ideas with co-workers or customers.

Although Pencil still misses a number of essential features like guides, more shortcuts or better configurability, it is an ideal tool to put your ideas to paper.

As a Gentoo user, you sometimes emerge packages which you don’t want to be in the world set, you just emerged them because you needed to fix or test something. (Of course, there’s the -1 flag, but you don’t always remember to use it.) With time, these packages become unneccessary, pull in useless dependencies and cause stupid conflicts. Therefore you should remove them from the @world set.

The @world set is stored in a plain text file located at /var/lib/portage/world. You should be aware that manipulating it may cause problems, therefore you’re advised to make a backup before editing. Also, you should do a full update of your system with emerge -uND world. Now you can open the world file in an editor of your choice, as root.

You may delete entries for packages you don’t need anymore, line by line. In order to actually remove those packages and their dependencies from your system, you must run depclean and revdep-rebuild:

emerge -a --depclean
revdep-rebuild -- -q --keep-going

After this, you will have a much leaner system.

Bonus hint: Also check your /etc/make.conf as well as your /etc/portage/package.use for no longer needed USE flags. These also tend to cause conflicts and stuff your system with needless dependencies. (Remember to run emerge -auND world; emerge -a --depclean; revdep-rebuild -- -q --keep-going afterwards.)

Google’s + operator is appearently no longer supported.

For those who didn’t know, Google used to have a + operator which you could place directly in front of a word and which had two features: it would make sure that the word was included in every result, and it would make sure that only results with the exact spelling of that word would be returned. This feature is not the same as using the quote operator, because that one only enforces the exact spelling – but it does not make sure the word is included in each result.

Of course, not always both features were desired at the same time – for example, you may have wanted to make sure the word was included in the results, but you would have accepted alternative spellings. But even then, the + operator was be a nice addition for a search strategy.

I like search engines who provide advanced tools for fine-tuning searches. And this move of Google is one in a direction I don’t like.