oslonian blog

i've been in oslo for the last several days. it's a beautiful town. i leave tomorrow, and i'm happy for that as i feel rather fatigued from the last month in which i did a lot of traveling, a lot of design related meetings and a healthy amount of community and industry outreach. i look forward to a quieter novemeber and december in calgary where i can code more. i also haven't blogged much in the last week, and i don't really have the time to go on at length now either. but there are a number of thoughts whirring about in my mind, and here they are in short form without supporting argumentation or even fully explaining them:

... in physics, as with many other sciences, we know when we must change our viepoints and theories because the universe tells us so. we observe new things, or old things in new ways, that expose flaws in our understandings and, being unable to change the universe, we instead adjust our theories. in the world of information science, especially when channeled into consumer technology, we rarely have such clear cues. instead we must be sufficiently self aware to realize all on our own when we must adjust our thinking and, more challengingly, we must also discover how to successfully adjust our thinking all on our own. when it comes to information, we are godlike. but being gods and goddesses comes with a harsh price: while are liberated of the of an encompassing and inflexible reality we are also without its guidance.

... incrementalism is not what we need in KDE4. we need to embark on a course that will support our next decade of success and we are no longer competing with windows 2000. we need to move past the technology limitations we are currently up against. in kde2 we did this. apple did this a few years ago. microsoft is about to do this. it is our turn once again.

... file managers are an anachronism.

... the open source desktop is not an enteprise concern, and yet for reasons of business logistics red hat, sun, novell, ibm, etc, etc... all concentrate on the enterprise. it is therefore no wonder that the open source desktop has not been the market success it could and should be when one considers who our largest partners have been. the few large deployments have been in the public sector, but the bulk of deployments outside of individual users have been in small and medium size businesses. this is because this is where our offerings and the needs of others intersect. to achieve greatest growth we must build towards these people. this implies that we put fewer eggs in the baskets of those who target the enterprise and instead work with those who work with those who would work with us.

... animations in svg files is really, truly cool and makes qt-svg probably my favourite feature in the upcoming qt 4.1.

... the panels, desktops, window manager and widgets should (and quite trivially can) draw their look from a single archive of graphics files.

... i miss both my son and lover very much right now and would like little more than to hold them in my arms right now.