i read celeste's application menu study today and implemented a couple of changes to help address some of the "noise" issues she noted. other items i'm not sure i agree with (or understand?) ... will have to talk more about it with her and the other usability interested folk at akademy.
i also stopped in on the konqi bug day happening on irc ... lots of great activity happening there, but i'll let phil blog about it in detail.
otherwise, i've spent the day so far much like yesterday: dealing with administrative details in kde, working with some of our industry partners, writing some proposals and generally finding myself with a frustratingly squozen coding schedule.
apparent "squozen" isn't a word (yet), but seeing as "squoosh" is i say "that's silly! bring on the squozenness!"
i also stopped by the mall a couple evenings ago to see the supposed public kde terminals and indeed they were there: two well locked down kubuntu systems that the mall has rolled out as public web browsing systems in addition to their new free (as in beer) wifi hotspot. when i arrived there were people at each terminal busily using them without any trouble or issues. seeing as i had nothing to do with this in the least, it tickles me to see kde popping up more and more often.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Friday, August 25, 2006
planetkde is mine, i tell you.
ok, couldn't help but post one more quickie blog ... yeah, yeah, i'm flooding the planet. bite me (after the people who want this entry to be the plasma entry but who are going to be disappointed; i told them they could bite me in my last entry so they get to go first)
so, i'd like to talk briefly about "software that looks professional" and then talk about the power of public (near-)nekidness. and by "i'd like" i mean "i will". only the cats can stop me now. (and one of them is trying pretty hard, i might add, by laying on the keyboard)
i just read this blog entry by albert astals cid detailing how mauricio piacentini updated the artwork in kmahjongg. and in the comments some people were noting that the new artwork (which looks awesome, btw) is not as easy for play since the tiles aren't as differentiated as in the current kde3 art. some people in the comments, however, noted that the graphics were polished (they are), easy to read (they are) and serious (ok, perhaps) ... which, they purported made the application professional in nature as if that's something to shoot for.
now, nobody wants to have their software called "poorly done". and these days "professional" has been twisted to mean the opposite of "poorly done". unfortunately, there are many ways for something to be "well done" that don't fit the criterion the posters noted as making the new graphics "professional". you know, like actually works better for the user. in this case, which nice screenshotware, the new grahpics may actually be worse for players as noted by several mahjongg players in the comments (many of whom also noted the new artwork is gorgeous looking)
and this leads me to my rant: sometimes people pursue an idealized version of a "professional look and feel" and end up with crap. by "crap" i mean "doesn't actually do what the user wants or needs". it's no win to short change the user in an attempt to slickify your software.
good news is that one can do both, but it requires holding in your head both goals at once. in kde we've often paid so much attention to empowering the user that we forget the other goals at hand as well. we've been working very hard to change that, but let's not swing the pendulum all the way to the other side of the arc here ...
for those advocating a "more professional" look without noting the balancing issues of user first design, i'd really encourage you to consider that it is more than just clean lines and a low colour count featuring low saturation colours ... it's part of it, but not all of it. because, let's be honest, the current "that's professional look" stands a good chance of looking like bell bottoms and leg warmers in 5 years time but the user never goes out of style.
but enough of the ranting. =) i picked up a plush bathrobe (which t. had been talking about needing/wanting over the last month or three) and a little something to go on underneath it. i went over to her place before she got home from work and laid a path of roses from the door to the gift box in her living room (yeah, yeah, i'm a romantic schmuck). some four hours later (it's now dark outside) i hear a tapping on my living room window. outside is t. wearing the something for underneath the robe and a wonderfully sleek and shiny full length coat with a pair of strappy little platform shoes ... when i open the door for her there's some random person on the street trying to get her attention. when he sees me he makes eye contact and then mutters something about "did i see that girl with .. uh .. a guy? go past .. near here.. a bit ago..... uuuh .." haha.. nice try. caught with his eyes in the cookie jar and really not prepared. boo
hmm.. one of my icecream build cluster nodes just disappeared off the network (i only have 3, but that's better than 1 =) ... turns out the cat was playing with the switch. again. grrr...
so, i'd like to talk briefly about "software that looks professional" and then talk about the power of public (near-)nekidness. and by "i'd like" i mean "i will". only the cats can stop me now. (and one of them is trying pretty hard, i might add, by laying on the keyboard)
i just read this blog entry by albert astals cid detailing how mauricio piacentini updated the artwork in kmahjongg. and in the comments some people were noting that the new artwork (which looks awesome, btw) is not as easy for play since the tiles aren't as differentiated as in the current kde3 art. some people in the comments, however, noted that the graphics were polished (they are), easy to read (they are) and serious (ok, perhaps) ... which, they purported made the application professional in nature as if that's something to shoot for.
now, nobody wants to have their software called "poorly done". and these days "professional" has been twisted to mean the opposite of "poorly done". unfortunately, there are many ways for something to be "well done" that don't fit the criterion the posters noted as making the new graphics "professional". you know, like actually works better for the user. in this case, which nice screenshotware, the new grahpics may actually be worse for players as noted by several mahjongg players in the comments (many of whom also noted the new artwork is gorgeous looking)
and this leads me to my rant: sometimes people pursue an idealized version of a "professional look and feel" and end up with crap. by "crap" i mean "doesn't actually do what the user wants or needs". it's no win to short change the user in an attempt to slickify your software.
good news is that one can do both, but it requires holding in your head both goals at once. in kde we've often paid so much attention to empowering the user that we forget the other goals at hand as well. we've been working very hard to change that, but let's not swing the pendulum all the way to the other side of the arc here ...
for those advocating a "more professional" look without noting the balancing issues of user first design, i'd really encourage you to consider that it is more than just clean lines and a low colour count featuring low saturation colours ... it's part of it, but not all of it. because, let's be honest, the current "that's professional look" stands a good chance of looking like bell bottoms and leg warmers in 5 years time but the user never goes out of style.
but enough of the ranting. =) i picked up a plush bathrobe (which t. had been talking about needing/wanting over the last month or three) and a little something to go on underneath it. i went over to her place before she got home from work and laid a path of roses from the door to the gift box in her living room (yeah, yeah, i'm a romantic schmuck). some four hours later (it's now dark outside) i hear a tapping on my living room window. outside is t. wearing the something for underneath the robe and a wonderfully sleek and shiny full length coat with a pair of strappy little platform shoes ... when i open the door for her there's some random person on the street trying to get her attention. when he sees me he makes eye contact and then mutters something about "did i see that girl with .. uh .. a guy? go past .. near here.. a bit ago..... uuuh .." haha.. nice try. caught with his eyes in the cookie jar and really not prepared. boo
hmm.. one of my icecream build cluster nodes just disappeared off the network (i only have 3, but that's better than 1 =) ... turns out the cat was playing with the switch. again. grrr...
kde ... where? everywhere!
kde everywhere is a cool little meme where people put the kde logo in various places around the world and snap a photo (or just gimp/'shop it in to an existing photo). but sometimes kde springs up in the wierdest places making "kde everywhere" take on whole new meanings.
today on the calgary linux user's group mailing list a member noted:
eau claire is a shopping mall in downtown calgary (which recently topped one million people; only the third city in canada to do so; yes, we're underpopulated and we like it that way; yes, i'm abusing semicolons)
now, i might have suspected that the reporter, one mike bougie, was smoking something fine that day (i've seen the man in action ... ;) except that he provided photo evidence. so unless he was feeling particularly devious today ....
the plasma blog will be coming later today .. perhaps early morning hours even, which would technically be saturday. bite me.
hugs and kisses, aseigo.
today on the calgary linux user's group mailing list a member noted:
I went to Eau Claire
today and saw that they have 2 PCs set up near the cash machines. Low
and behold, they are running Linux with KDE!
eau claire is a shopping mall in downtown calgary (which recently topped one million people; only the third city in canada to do so; yes, we're underpopulated and we like it that way; yes, i'm abusing semicolons)
now, i might have suspected that the reporter, one mike bougie, was smoking something fine that day (i've seen the man in action ... ;) except that he provided photo evidence. so unless he was feeling particularly devious today ....
the plasma blog will be coming later today .. perhaps early morning hours even, which would technically be saturday. bite me.
hugs and kisses, aseigo.
the kay, the dee, the ee on the tee vee
i got pointed to an interesting t.v. technology show called 'call for help' today. it's a very nicely produced daily show that airs in canada, australia and until recently the us on cable. what's interesting is that they have regular desktop linux spots on it featuring marcel gagne who's a happy long time kde user and desktop linux promoter.
over the last 2 years he's been on 23 times according my count of this list of appearances or roughly once a month on average. i caught the latest episode that marcel was on and it's really cool to see kde on the small screen in all its glory.
update: neat... episode 106 shows off linux media players including xmms, noatun, juk and amarok (marcel's fave) whilst they gushed about opera singing mba's and how awesome linux and kde is. not only did they demo the apps live (marcel is awesome at this kind of thing) but they showed the urls on screen so people could go straight to amarok.kde.org ... i wonder what sort of visitor bump, if any, they saw on march 15, 2005?
over the last 2 years he's been on 23 times according my count of this list of appearances or roughly once a month on average. i caught the latest episode that marcel was on and it's really cool to see kde on the small screen in all its glory.
update: neat... episode 106 shows off linux media players including xmms, noatun, juk and amarok (marcel's fave) whilst they gushed about opera singing mba's and how awesome linux and kde is. not only did they demo the apps live (marcel is awesome at this kind of thing) but they showed the urls on screen so people could go straight to amarok.kde.org ... i wonder what sort of visitor bump, if any, they saw on march 15, 2005?
Thursday, August 24, 2006
k(de)-12
if one searches for "k-12 open source" on google this resource site comes up 3rd on the list. it's a relatively new (this year) effort that came out of necc 2006 which was held in july.
i came across it when touching base with the fellow in this article who specializes in bringing open source into the classroom.
if you go to www.k12opensource.com and click on programs you will notice that there are a number of categories but very, very few entries.
seeing as the site is pretty easy to stumble across via google it would be nice to see it populated with the appropriate open source software, especially the wonderful educational software that comes out of the kde project.
a nice mini-project for some one(s) with a few hours here or there. =)
i came across it when touching base with the fellow in this article who specializes in bringing open source into the classroom.
if you go to www.k12opensource.com and click on programs you will notice that there are a number of categories but very, very few entries.
seeing as the site is pretty easy to stumble across via google it would be nice to see it populated with the appropriate open source software, especially the wonderful educational software that comes out of the kde project.
a nice mini-project for some one(s) with a few hours here or there. =)
plasma wednesday: data engines
so here's our first little plasma update, it being wednesday. just to warn you all, it's going to start out a bit boring. ok, probably a lot boring. since for the next couple weeks i'll be working on greasy guts rather than luscious lips. so to speak.
one of the lessons learned with kicker was that some things are not so trivial under the hood (think: taskbars, pagers, weather reporters) and so if you marry them too tightly with the display ..... you end up with very few alternatives. in fact, virtually every taskbar replacement written for kicker was a fork of the original taskbar. what makes that doubly interesting is that the task manager (aka "windows bean counter") was abstracted out for use in other user interfaces. the pager, kasbar and the taskbar all used it. but still, people would generally start by forking the taskbar.
this was rather annoying since most of these forks were to provide new cosmetics. bug fixes in business logic didn't get shared or passed around and i truly think a lot of possible innovation was stunted by the bar one had to clear and the lack of headroom left once cleared.
looking around, this pattern repeated a lot. unless one looks at superkaramba and system monitors. holy crap are there a lot of them! so why so many monitors and why so few taskbars? is it that monitors are simply sexier? probably that's part of it .. but certainly not all of it.
something superkaramba did was provide simple access to hardware data. and then it provided simple access to display widgets you could plug that data into. or you could write your own. i think this is the true reason for the explosion of such widgets; for even though there are other categories of superkaramba widgets, this was the class that really took off.
so in plasma we're going to deliver all business logic sets wrapped in a neat little bundle. and we're going to call them "data engines". why? because that was the name that occurred to me at the time and now i'm stuck with it. ;)
we're also going to provide sinks for these engines called "data visualizations" which are display widgets that accept data in various formats (QVariants, actually). and you can mix and match these data engines and data visualizations to your liking. you can also write new engines and visualizations and share them with others.
there's a basic introduction. using the data engines from a plugin (or "plasmoid" as they seem to have been christened) is pretty simple. in both javascript and c++ it would be:
doing it manually would look like:
but then you'd have to handle unloading it yourself. the data engines are reference counted and shared between plasmoids which fits the pattern: the engines are the models, the visualizations are the views.
enough for tonight ... on friday we'll look at writing a simple data engine, and on wendesday we'll look at writing a simple data visualization and hooking them up. from there .. who knows =)
when i started writing this entry, the p-man was in the bathtub and i heard an excited squeal, "this is gonna be crazy!" it's moments like that which make a parent cringe and smile simultaneously.
i went for a run with the soccer ball at a neighbourhood park this afternoon and a clean cut young kid on a skate board, 10 years old, came up and asked if he could play with me. we spent about 45 minutes kicking the ball around, the last 15 or so with him taking shots on goal. i'm a lousy goalie so it was fun for him ;) he kept asking questions; all sorts of questions ... asked if i was from canada (apparently i don't look like it); if i was on t.v.; if i played on a soccer team; if i had been to other countries; if i was married, had a kid ... sometime during the game of inquisition soccer i noticed his shoes were worn through at the toes. either he loves those shoes (and his mother chokes every time he insists on wearing them) or he's got it hard at home. he asked if i'd come to the park again sometime, and i said yeah ...
i hope he's sleeping as well as the p-man is right now...
one of the lessons learned with kicker was that some things are not so trivial under the hood (think: taskbars, pagers, weather reporters) and so if you marry them too tightly with the display ..... you end up with very few alternatives. in fact, virtually every taskbar replacement written for kicker was a fork of the original taskbar. what makes that doubly interesting is that the task manager (aka "windows bean counter") was abstracted out for use in other user interfaces. the pager, kasbar and the taskbar all used it. but still, people would generally start by forking the taskbar.
this was rather annoying since most of these forks were to provide new cosmetics. bug fixes in business logic didn't get shared or passed around and i truly think a lot of possible innovation was stunted by the bar one had to clear and the lack of headroom left once cleared.
looking around, this pattern repeated a lot. unless one looks at superkaramba and system monitors. holy crap are there a lot of them! so why so many monitors and why so few taskbars? is it that monitors are simply sexier? probably that's part of it .. but certainly not all of it.
something superkaramba did was provide simple access to hardware data. and then it provided simple access to display widgets you could plug that data into. or you could write your own. i think this is the true reason for the explosion of such widgets; for even though there are other categories of superkaramba widgets, this was the class that really took off.
so in plasma we're going to deliver all business logic sets wrapped in a neat little bundle. and we're going to call them "data engines". why? because that was the name that occurred to me at the time and now i'm stuck with it. ;)
we're also going to provide sinks for these engines called "data visualizations" which are display widgets that accept data in various formats (QVariants, actually). and you can mix and match these data engines and data visualizations to your liking. you can also write new engines and visualizations and share them with others.
there's a basic introduction. using the data engines from a plugin (or "plasmoid" as they seem to have been christened) is pretty simple. in both javascript and c++ it would be:
loadDataEngine("windows")doing it manually would look like:
Plasma::Interface::self()->loadDataEngine("windows")but then you'd have to handle unloading it yourself. the data engines are reference counted and shared between plasmoids which fits the pattern: the engines are the models, the visualizations are the views.
enough for tonight ... on friday we'll look at writing a simple data engine, and on wendesday we'll look at writing a simple data visualization and hooking them up. from there .. who knows =)
when i started writing this entry, the p-man was in the bathtub and i heard an excited squeal, "this is gonna be crazy!" it's moments like that which make a parent cringe and smile simultaneously.
i went for a run with the soccer ball at a neighbourhood park this afternoon and a clean cut young kid on a skate board, 10 years old, came up and asked if he could play with me. we spent about 45 minutes kicking the ball around, the last 15 or so with him taking shots on goal. i'm a lousy goalie so it was fun for him ;) he kept asking questions; all sorts of questions ... asked if i was from canada (apparently i don't look like it); if i was on t.v.; if i played on a soccer team; if i had been to other countries; if i was married, had a kid ... sometime during the game of inquisition soccer i noticed his shoes were worn through at the toes. either he loves those shoes (and his mother chokes every time he insists on wearing them) or he's got it hard at home. he asked if i'd come to the park again sometime, and i said yeah ...
i hope he's sleeping as well as the p-man is right now...
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
sweep, sweep, sweep the ui floor
we all have our pet peeves in user interfaces. one of mine is that damn clear button. you know, the one next to location and search bars in kde:
i really do like the solution seen in safari's location bar, where the clear button is inside the edit. it looks cleaner, it tightly associates the clear button with the edit it's associated with, it doesn't muck with layouts (see the composer in kmail for an example). so i wanted to do something similar for kde.
problem? well, i tend to be a pixel stickler. and something that really annoyed me was that while putting an icon or button in the lineedit is simple, the text would flow underneath the button as you typed. several people didn't even notice it until i pointed it out, but there you have it: i'm a bit anal about these things.
it simply was not doable in qt since there wasn't enough flexibility in qlineedit without resorting to really fugly hacks (like including and using private api from qlineedit). well, qt's new css styled widgets to the rescue! now i can just do:
where
this css styling stuff in qt 4.2 is really useful and rather powerful. these are the kinds of things i have been looking forward to being able to do with qt4 that just weren't in the cards for kde as long as we used qt3.
side note: i'm not a fan of that "x in a black arrow/block" icon, but it's what we have in svn right now. hopefully oxygen will give us something a bit more elegant.
these kinds of changes are really sweet in my opinion, but our apps are already pretty good. i mentioned kmail earlier; well, so did an old high school friend via instant messenger today:
oooooooh yeah. ;)
i really do like the solution seen in safari's location bar, where the clear button is inside the edit. it looks cleaner, it tightly associates the clear button with the edit it's associated with, it doesn't muck with layouts (see the composer in kmail for an example). so i wanted to do something similar for kde.
problem? well, i tend to be a pixel stickler. and something that really annoyed me was that while putting an icon or button in the lineedit is simple, the text would flow underneath the button as you typed. several people didn't even notice it until i pointed it out, but there you have it: i'm a bit anal about these things.
it simply was not doable in qt since there wasn't enough flexibility in qlineedit without resorting to really fugly hacks (like including and using private api from qlineedit). well, qt's new css styled widgets to the rescue! now i can just do:
setStyleSheet(QString(":enabled { padding-right: %1; }").arg(buttonWidth));where
buttonWidth is the width of the clear button and voila ... no more text under the button. this gives us:this css styling stuff in qt 4.2 is really useful and rather powerful. these are the kinds of things i have been looking forward to being able to do with qt4 that just weren't in the cards for kde as long as we used qt3.
side note: i'm not a fan of that "x in a black arrow/block" icon, but it's what we have in svn right now. hopefully oxygen will give us something a bit more elegant.
these kinds of changes are really sweet in my opinion, but our apps are already pretty good. i mentioned kmail earlier; well, so did an old high school friend via instant messenger today:
oooooooh yeah. ;)
Sunday, August 20, 2006
cooking; belaying; delaying
tonight t., the p. man and i went up to a friends' place (hi bob & maura! hope i spelled your names right. eek. =) for dinner tonight. i cooked a baked vegan stuffed manicotti dish and had some plating fun with the salads (placed the salad in a ring of orange bell pepper with a tomato flower on the side). nothing "five star chef", but a lot of fun and everyone enjoyed it. some were impressed that it wasn't meat in the filling. =)
of course tech came up in conversation since 80% of the adults there work in the industry. one of the non-techie people at the dinner asked about ms paint for mac. they showed some of the pictures they'd done with ms paint and said they loved it but didn't really like the higher end stuff (they mentioned photoshop and paintshop pro in specific). i whipped out the laptop and showed them kolourpaint and they were quite happy after playing with it for a while. then they explored the rest of kde and decided they were going to try it out on a computer of their own. they live with a techie so it should go well =)
yesterday t. and i took our belaying test at the rock wall at a local fitness centre. we'd taken the initial course about 5 months back and finally got around to taking the test so we can belay on our own. so now we can yard people up and down walls with ropes. neat.
as most of those reading this probably have heard, there was a developer release of the kde4 platform today. this is a pretty important milestone for the project as it marks a rather arduous period of effort for us. it has not been an easy climb to this point as we deal with a number of issues that come from having as much code as we do, taking on a large number of core changes to code that has been relatively stable since kde2 times and increasing time pressures on us from the outside world. i personally feel we need to more responsibly deal with by sometimes telling the sources of those pressures to back off. but that's another topic =)
the release itself is for developers to start porting applications with, to start stressing the newer APIs and seeing what kde4 development will start to look like. there's still a lot more to come though, even in the libs, with changes coming to kwizard, kconfig, khtml (the rather exciting unity stuff) and certainly more. but a lot of the big rocking the boat stuff is there, from here we can build Cool Visible Stuff (CVS?)
which brings me to the topic of plasma and specifically: where is it? it's been caught between a kdelibs that wasn't quite ready for serious app devel, a qt4 that lacked certain key features and me simply not having enough time to breath. sadly, my only tasks are not coding related in kde. they also involve being on the board of the e.V. (which takes an unexpected amount of time and energy at times), dealing with organizations partnering with KDE and playing "public face" when needed. this has all conspired to delay plasma's emergence. this isn't unusual or particularly concerning for me.
right now deadlines are looming (which i tend to work rather well under). and i've been finding my coding mojo really hammering at me to write more. i have a month until aKademy, more or less, and i have committed to showing some demo stuff there in a presentation. four months after that plasma needs to be in a shippable place. which is ample time (though not lots) seeing as a lot of it will be building on the very nice work already done elsewhere in qt4 and kde4 and the design of things has been worked out in my little noggin for quite some time.
so as to keep me honest and all the plasma hungerers out there happy, my blog will be working thusly for the next several months: each wednesday and friday i'll be posting a plasma-only blog entry detailing the progress in svn over the last few days. you can ride along as we put the building blocks in order.
and yes, i'll be doing a kde://radio recording soon again. and about plasma this time.
of course tech came up in conversation since 80% of the adults there work in the industry. one of the non-techie people at the dinner asked about ms paint for mac. they showed some of the pictures they'd done with ms paint and said they loved it but didn't really like the higher end stuff (they mentioned photoshop and paintshop pro in specific). i whipped out the laptop and showed them kolourpaint and they were quite happy after playing with it for a while. then they explored the rest of kde and decided they were going to try it out on a computer of their own. they live with a techie so it should go well =)
yesterday t. and i took our belaying test at the rock wall at a local fitness centre. we'd taken the initial course about 5 months back and finally got around to taking the test so we can belay on our own. so now we can yard people up and down walls with ropes. neat.
as most of those reading this probably have heard, there was a developer release of the kde4 platform today. this is a pretty important milestone for the project as it marks a rather arduous period of effort for us. it has not been an easy climb to this point as we deal with a number of issues that come from having as much code as we do, taking on a large number of core changes to code that has been relatively stable since kde2 times and increasing time pressures on us from the outside world. i personally feel we need to more responsibly deal with by sometimes telling the sources of those pressures to back off. but that's another topic =)
the release itself is for developers to start porting applications with, to start stressing the newer APIs and seeing what kde4 development will start to look like. there's still a lot more to come though, even in the libs, with changes coming to kwizard, kconfig, khtml (the rather exciting unity stuff) and certainly more. but a lot of the big rocking the boat stuff is there, from here we can build Cool Visible Stuff (CVS?)
which brings me to the topic of plasma and specifically: where is it? it's been caught between a kdelibs that wasn't quite ready for serious app devel, a qt4 that lacked certain key features and me simply not having enough time to breath. sadly, my only tasks are not coding related in kde. they also involve being on the board of the e.V. (which takes an unexpected amount of time and energy at times), dealing with organizations partnering with KDE and playing "public face" when needed. this has all conspired to delay plasma's emergence. this isn't unusual or particularly concerning for me.
right now deadlines are looming (which i tend to work rather well under). and i've been finding my coding mojo really hammering at me to write more. i have a month until aKademy, more or less, and i have committed to showing some demo stuff there in a presentation. four months after that plasma needs to be in a shippable place. which is ample time (though not lots) seeing as a lot of it will be building on the very nice work already done elsewhere in qt4 and kde4 and the design of things has been worked out in my little noggin for quite some time.
so as to keep me honest and all the plasma hungerers out there happy, my blog will be working thusly for the next several months: each wednesday and friday i'll be posting a plasma-only blog entry detailing the progress in svn over the last few days. you can ride along as we put the building blocks in order.
and yes, i'll be doing a kde://radio recording soon again. and about plasma this time.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
0.36%?
i read an article today proclaiming that linux only has 0.36% of the desktop market based on a sample set of two million web users. in one online discussion about it some people posted links to stats on other websites that showed similarly dismal number hovering around the 1% mark. then i looked at some general interest (e.g. non-technical, non-geeky, non-specialist content) sites that i have the stats to and they are reporting 3-4% for linux. then there was the private study i saw recently that put it over the 5% mark and of course my own personal experiences of constantly running into linux desktop users ... except in airports where i never see them. what's going on here?
i recently read freakonomics at the recommendation of adriaan de groot, and reflecting on that book i decided to consider: well, what if all those numbers are accurate? how could that be and what would that say about linux desktops?
interestingly, those websites with ~1% linux visitors were web site developer sites. perhaps people who run linux aren't the same people who make web sites. or perhaps those that do make web sites on linux don't learn how to do so by reading those kinds of tutorial sites. perhaps they read books or they learned somewhere else, such as from friends, colleagues, school, etc...
but what about the two million users? i think the same thing may be at play here. the websites profiled are general interest sites. not the sort the average geek might look through perhaps. or perhaps ....
... perhaps what everyone says about linux deployment is true. no, not that it isn't happening ;) but that it isn't happening amongst home users, road warriors, etc. but that it is happening in schools, companies (and particularly single purpose systems) and government offices. that would explain the absence in the airports and the recreational web. it would also match what we're good at and what we're not.
so i wonder if what's happening is that measuring usage by web traffic tends to measure the home market where we are dismal. this would make all the numbers jive quite well.
as a side note .. i was over at t.'s tonight and we installed a web app on her suse 10.0 OSS system. she likes the suse, but it turns out that version doesn't package php pear (suse9 did) nor the gettext support in php. wtf? where is the suse of yore, the suse i loved, the suse i adored with every package? i guess the answer is that suse is not for me, or i'm not for it. one or the other, we have grown apart.
*a moment of silence*
update: so suse10oss does have php-pear packages, but t.'s yast (despite having the correct sources listed) isn't showing them. arg! will have to look into it and see why yast is breaking. note: perhaps instead of writing a gtk+ front end to yast (gotta love that NIH) perhaps those developer hours could be spent improving it? no, that'd make sense.
also, a comment on the blog brought up another good point regarding linux usage stat differential on website: it varies wildly by geography, so depending on the country/region that the website caters to the usage stats can also vary wildly. good point.
the same comment noted that in their region it's primarily due to cost being seen as the primary benefit to open source and using software against the authors will (aka "piracy") isn't seen as a bad thing.
i recently read freakonomics at the recommendation of adriaan de groot, and reflecting on that book i decided to consider: well, what if all those numbers are accurate? how could that be and what would that say about linux desktops?
interestingly, those websites with ~1% linux visitors were web site developer sites. perhaps people who run linux aren't the same people who make web sites. or perhaps those that do make web sites on linux don't learn how to do so by reading those kinds of tutorial sites. perhaps they read books or they learned somewhere else, such as from friends, colleagues, school, etc...
but what about the two million users? i think the same thing may be at play here. the websites profiled are general interest sites. not the sort the average geek might look through perhaps. or perhaps ....
... perhaps what everyone says about linux deployment is true. no, not that it isn't happening ;) but that it isn't happening amongst home users, road warriors, etc. but that it is happening in schools, companies (and particularly single purpose systems) and government offices. that would explain the absence in the airports and the recreational web. it would also match what we're good at and what we're not.
so i wonder if what's happening is that measuring usage by web traffic tends to measure the home market where we are dismal. this would make all the numbers jive quite well.
as a side note .. i was over at t.'s tonight and we installed a web app on her suse 10.0 OSS system. she likes the suse, but it turns out that version doesn't package php pear (suse9 did) nor the gettext support in php. wtf? where is the suse of yore, the suse i loved, the suse i adored with every package? i guess the answer is that suse is not for me, or i'm not for it. one or the other, we have grown apart.
*a moment of silence*
update: so suse10oss does have php-pear packages, but t.'s yast (despite having the correct sources listed) isn't showing them. arg! will have to look into it and see why yast is breaking. note: perhaps instead of writing a gtk+ front end to yast (gotta love that NIH) perhaps those developer hours could be spent improving it? no, that'd make sense.
also, a comment on the blog brought up another good point regarding linux usage stat differential on website: it varies wildly by geography, so depending on the country/region that the website caters to the usage stats can also vary wildly. good point.
the same comment noted that in their region it's primarily due to cost being seen as the primary benefit to open source and using software against the authors will (aka "piracy") isn't seen as a bad thing.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
the heart of kde3 is still beatin' ... in cleveland! detroit!
no, i'm not going to write about cleveland and detroit. the title of this entry is simply a riff on one of my favourite songs from the 80s. i am writing about touching kde3 code, though. kicker in specific.
andreas kling committed a number of fixes for crashes in the taskbar arising from the insanity of nested event loops with menus and the taskbar's incontinence when it comes to controlling when widgets and other objects get deleted thanks to trying to keep up with the random input of the window manager telling it whenever anything window related happens.
tonight someone came into #kde-devel on irc.freenode.net bitching about the performance of the pager. this caused maksim (sadeagle) to bitch at me. now, it was all good natured bitching but i hate it when people bitch at me ... and are right. (if you're wrong (or i believe you're wrong) i can be rather impervious) turns out the problem is mostly repaints on window movements.
so a few patches later and 100% of unnecessary repaints in the taskbar and pager along with many calls to the window manager for window info are eliminated when windows are moving and the pager isn't showing desktop previews (aka "drawing little windows"). when the taskbar is showing desktop previews, the number of redraws is cut by approximately 85%. this is significant because drawing these things isn't particularly cheap (the original complainer, er, bug reporter claimed to be able to actually see the flickering in the taskbar) and moving a window from one side of my screen to the other used to cause the pager to redraw over 100 times. now it only redraws around 15 times. huzzah.
so yes, kde3 continues to improve whilst kde4 takes shape. be sure to upgrade when the next 3.5.x release happens. after all, love is in the air.
andreas kling committed a number of fixes for crashes in the taskbar arising from the insanity of nested event loops with menus and the taskbar's incontinence when it comes to controlling when widgets and other objects get deleted thanks to trying to keep up with the random input of the window manager telling it whenever anything window related happens.
tonight someone came into #kde-devel on irc.freenode.net bitching about the performance of the pager. this caused maksim (sadeagle) to bitch at me. now, it was all good natured bitching but i hate it when people bitch at me ... and are right. (if you're wrong (or i believe you're wrong) i can be rather impervious) turns out the problem is mostly repaints on window movements.
so a few patches later and 100% of unnecessary repaints in the taskbar and pager along with many calls to the window manager for window info are eliminated when windows are moving and the pager isn't showing desktop previews (aka "drawing little windows"). when the taskbar is showing desktop previews, the number of redraws is cut by approximately 85%. this is significant because drawing these things isn't particularly cheap (the original complainer, er, bug reporter claimed to be able to actually see the flickering in the taskbar) and moving a window from one side of my screen to the other used to cause the pager to redraw over 100 times. now it only redraws around 15 times. huzzah.
so yes, kde3 continues to improve whilst kde4 takes shape. be sure to upgrade when the next 3.5.x release happens. after all, love is in the air.
dear ati
ati says, "we like our proprietary drivers". this is in response to the intel announcement about open source drivers. well, ati, i hope you like lower sales too. because that's what you're going to get.
i read a comment online by someone saying that ati can't open their drivers because they are encumbered. the person then went on to confuse copyright and patent law, but even ignoring that it's a cop out. first off, intel is doing it so it is possible by at least some companies. the question is, could ati?
now, i take it as a given that open sourcing retroactively is a no-go for all sorts of reasons including simple financial ones, so let's talk about future chipset releases only.
ati has expressed the need to keep drm under the wraps of proprietary software. that's another huge discussion so i'll leap over it for now and just say that i feel drm is a broken concept in general and not particularly relevant to the conversation about video card drivers anyways. so, on to the potential reasons ati might feel they shouldn't open up their drivers:
what if ati using software written by someone else which they license? the solution is to write code that does that themselves for the next chipset they make. if they can't do that, they need better developers. seriously.
what if ati is legally using a patented technology? fine, release it under an open source license that allows for patents. there are more licenses out there than the gpl if they feel that it's too restrictive when it comes to patents. i have all sorts of patented devices in my house and none of them try and keep from looking at those patented parts. i'm simply prevented from recreating those patented parts for the market. i'm not sure where the idea of "patents are protected by not being able to be seen" meme came from that seems to float around.
what if ati is infringing on someone else's patents? well, then they are in trouble already. it's just a matter if they get caught or not. and really, no insignificant piece of software doesn't violate a patent somewhere because patents are completely out of control.
what if ati believes that their driver software is sooooooo special that if others could see the source code then ati would lose a competitive advantage as others go and use the same ideas? in that case i'd suggest the ati people give themselves a reality check: their drivers aren't the best things out there and few people are so amazingly brilliant that their ideas are so amazingly revolutionary that nobody else has also thought of them. we could probably find instances of it (i think some of einstein's thoughts were pretty unique in his time) but even calculus was discovered by two people at the same time. so really .. reality check time.
the above can be said for probably all the graphics cards manufacturers out there. and makers of most other types of hardware as well, most likely. and yes, there are also exceptions.
in general, i think what it comes down to is the hardware industry lagging behind in their thinking when it comes to software issues. it's not easy to challenge one's own conceptions or change the cultural viewpoint one holds due to their industry roots. but as some hardware vendors move more aggressively into the open source world, it may make such a reevaluation a requirement for companies to keep a competitive edge.
when hardware vendors are taught through market movement that you sell more when you open source, that your drivers get improved by others and that people in the development community are more likely to write software for your hardware when open drivers are available ..... then maybe the conventional wisdom in the industry will become "if you want to make it, you want to go open. it's value provided to the customer that outweighs any value provided through closed source software."
i read a comment online by someone saying that ati can't open their drivers because they are encumbered. the person then went on to confuse copyright and patent law, but even ignoring that it's a cop out. first off, intel is doing it so it is possible by at least some companies. the question is, could ati?
now, i take it as a given that open sourcing retroactively is a no-go for all sorts of reasons including simple financial ones, so let's talk about future chipset releases only.
ati has expressed the need to keep drm under the wraps of proprietary software. that's another huge discussion so i'll leap over it for now and just say that i feel drm is a broken concept in general and not particularly relevant to the conversation about video card drivers anyways. so, on to the potential reasons ati might feel they shouldn't open up their drivers:
what if ati using software written by someone else which they license? the solution is to write code that does that themselves for the next chipset they make. if they can't do that, they need better developers. seriously.
what if ati is legally using a patented technology? fine, release it under an open source license that allows for patents. there are more licenses out there than the gpl if they feel that it's too restrictive when it comes to patents. i have all sorts of patented devices in my house and none of them try and keep from looking at those patented parts. i'm simply prevented from recreating those patented parts for the market. i'm not sure where the idea of "patents are protected by not being able to be seen" meme came from that seems to float around.
what if ati is infringing on someone else's patents? well, then they are in trouble already. it's just a matter if they get caught or not. and really, no insignificant piece of software doesn't violate a patent somewhere because patents are completely out of control.
what if ati believes that their driver software is sooooooo special that if others could see the source code then ati would lose a competitive advantage as others go and use the same ideas? in that case i'd suggest the ati people give themselves a reality check: their drivers aren't the best things out there and few people are so amazingly brilliant that their ideas are so amazingly revolutionary that nobody else has also thought of them. we could probably find instances of it (i think some of einstein's thoughts were pretty unique in his time) but even calculus was discovered by two people at the same time. so really .. reality check time.
the above can be said for probably all the graphics cards manufacturers out there. and makers of most other types of hardware as well, most likely. and yes, there are also exceptions.
in general, i think what it comes down to is the hardware industry lagging behind in their thinking when it comes to software issues. it's not easy to challenge one's own conceptions or change the cultural viewpoint one holds due to their industry roots. but as some hardware vendors move more aggressively into the open source world, it may make such a reevaluation a requirement for companies to keep a competitive edge.
when hardware vendors are taught through market movement that you sell more when you open source, that your drivers get improved by others and that people in the development community are more likely to write software for your hardware when open drivers are available ..... then maybe the conventional wisdom in the industry will become "if you want to make it, you want to go open. it's value provided to the customer that outweighs any value provided through closed source software."
Friday, August 11, 2006
i have been defeated, but victory shall be mine!
every so often i get requested to use the shift key once in a while. i have remain resistant to the notion of such a shift in my typing behaviour. and so it came to pass that jaroslaw staniek rose to the occasion and has used software to vanquish my typographical atrocities. you can see the results, in all it's proper capitalization wonders, here. he even lovingly called it the "deaaronify service". and now you can all just stop bugging me about it ;)
the kde database app, kexi, is still my favourite bit of staniek creativity though =)
and speaking of creativity, kurt asks if our marketing sucks so bad that people don't stand a chance of discovering our wonderous tools such as kbardcode, the label maker extraordinaire. i think the hard answer is: yes, yes it does suck that much.
we've done an amazing job of improving how we communicate about and promote kde over the last few years. additional improvements such as intentional branding and coordinating web presences are on the way.
unfortunately this a is a labour intensive process that really draws on one's creativity and patience, which is why it takes so long to notice improvements as they get made and why our promo people need to take breaks so often. (hats off to those folks, btw..) and because it's such a journey to deal with just the central kde concept alone, it's doubtful we can realistically do much for the individual applications. but perhaps we can optimize the algorithm. (to speak like a software developer.)
one approach would be parallelize things. if we could bundle up in a HOWTO with some reusable components a "marketing your application" then each project could replicate and improve upon our own successes. this would likely create a network effect where each addition would raise the tide for all kde applications.
what might such a thing include? templates for websites, release announcements and articles; a small app or script that would submit the app to various online directories; a listing of news feeds such as kde://radio where they could spread the word; a list of best practices and things to consider (e.g. getting a good logo that fits in with others; picking name that fits in with our arising new schemes) etc.. this bundle of information could be maintained by one person or a small groups of persons and used by hundreds.
then we wouldn't have to try and market every app (giving them fish), we could enable each application to market itself effectively (teaching them to fish and even giving them fishing rods)
we also ought to think about exposing application postings on kde-apps.org better so when someone says, "i'd like to print some labels" they type "print label" into the applications menu and it would show that while they don't have any such apps installed there is such an app (kbarcode) available because that's exactly what appsy says right now if you do that search.
i just talked with asiraj of kbfx about this on irc and we both agree this only makes sense for the application search in the menu in kde4, and easily done if the search supports plugins. yay. =)
the kde database app, kexi, is still my favourite bit of staniek creativity though =)
and speaking of creativity, kurt asks if our marketing sucks so bad that people don't stand a chance of discovering our wonderous tools such as kbardcode, the label maker extraordinaire. i think the hard answer is: yes, yes it does suck that much.
we've done an amazing job of improving how we communicate about and promote kde over the last few years. additional improvements such as intentional branding and coordinating web presences are on the way.
unfortunately this a is a labour intensive process that really draws on one's creativity and patience, which is why it takes so long to notice improvements as they get made and why our promo people need to take breaks so often. (hats off to those folks, btw..) and because it's such a journey to deal with just the central kde concept alone, it's doubtful we can realistically do much for the individual applications. but perhaps we can optimize the algorithm. (to speak like a software developer.)
one approach would be parallelize things. if we could bundle up in a HOWTO with some reusable components a "marketing your application" then each project could replicate and improve upon our own successes. this would likely create a network effect where each addition would raise the tide for all kde applications.
what might such a thing include? templates for websites, release announcements and articles; a small app or script that would submit the app to various online directories; a listing of news feeds such as kde://radio where they could spread the word; a list of best practices and things to consider (e.g. getting a good logo that fits in with others; picking name that fits in with our arising new schemes) etc.. this bundle of information could be maintained by one person or a small groups of persons and used by hundreds.
then we wouldn't have to try and market every app (giving them fish), we could enable each application to market itself effectively (teaching them to fish and even giving them fishing rods)
we also ought to think about exposing application postings on kde-apps.org better so when someone says, "i'd like to print some labels" they type "print label" into the applications menu and it would show that while they don't have any such apps installed there is such an app (kbarcode) available because that's exactly what appsy says right now if you do that search.
i just talked with asiraj of kbfx about this on irc and we both agree this only makes sense for the application search in the menu in kde4, and easily done if the search supports plugins. yay. =)
james ots is... where?!
from the time i started contributing to the project ....
it was over 3 years until i met my first kde developer in person.
it was nearly another year before a kde developer visited calgary. but we didn't meet up due to them being here for a funeral.
i've met exactly one other kde developer in calgary since.
and today i find out that james ots has moved to calgary. in fact, he's not only moved to calgary he's moved .... get this ... next door!
he's here right now with his recently new wife. wow. and yay!
it was over 3 years until i met my first kde developer in person.
it was nearly another year before a kde developer visited calgary. but we didn't meet up due to them being here for a funeral.
i've met exactly one other kde developer in calgary since.
and today i find out that james ots has moved to calgary. in fact, he's not only moved to calgary he's moved .... get this ... next door!
he's here right now with his recently new wife. wow. and yay!
Thursday, August 10, 2006
are you ready, boots? get walking! (or, cracking the free software desktop hardware nut)
so it's finally official, intel is actually pushing out open source graphics drivers for their latest and greatest chipset. the project site is here and you can read keith's announcement here.
fo
after hearing about this initiative at a conference during conversations with zack rusin and keith i got very excited and could hardly contain myself from talking about it all over the place. i did try to exercise some restraint, though, until it was actually official. and now it is.
why is this so important? intel is providing free and open source software drivers for their new chipsets as they become available. none of the usual "linux lag". and unlike some other vendors, this isn't a "minimal support to get the hardware moving" type driver. this is everything the chipset supports, including 3d gizmos. and since this is happening from within intel, the drivers have man power behind them and they are working off of actual, honest-to-god specs.
beyond the obvious goodness this means for people who will pick up a system with a 965 in it and beyond delivering a set of open drivers that exposes the power of the hardware for us to use fully on the free software desktop, it may also be the tipping point for desktop hardware in general.
if by these actions, intel demonstrates to the industry at large that it's economical to develop this way, that it translates into healthy sales and that it doesn't result in the mythical "hardware intellectual property missapropriation through access to code" doomsday scenario ...... maybe other hardware vendors will start to think similarly.
if the industry gets the sense that intel figures the free software desktop is worth investing in like this, maybe those other companies will start wondering if they aren't missing out too and start writing drivers. and that will only help bring more users over to open source desktops.
if intel's graphics chipset competitors who aren't doing this start to lose market share because of this move, then perhaps they'll play ball too.
in short, we all ought to reward intel (and everyone else who follows suit) for this move by opting for such open source supporting hardware on our desktops and laptops whenever possible. this will help create the positive feedback loop needed to keep things like this going.
i purchased my current laptop specifically because it had an intel grahpics chipset after first hearing about this move. it's may only have been one small purchase in the bigger scheme of things, but a million sets of feet moving to the same rhythm creates a drumbeat that is hard to ignore.
fo
after hearing about this initiative at a conference during conversations with zack rusin and keith i got very excited and could hardly contain myself from talking about it all over the place. i did try to exercise some restraint, though, until it was actually official. and now it is.
why is this so important? intel is providing free and open source software drivers for their new chipsets as they become available. none of the usual "linux lag". and unlike some other vendors, this isn't a "minimal support to get the hardware moving" type driver. this is everything the chipset supports, including 3d gizmos. and since this is happening from within intel, the drivers have man power behind them and they are working off of actual, honest-to-god specs.
beyond the obvious goodness this means for people who will pick up a system with a 965 in it and beyond delivering a set of open drivers that exposes the power of the hardware for us to use fully on the free software desktop, it may also be the tipping point for desktop hardware in general.
if by these actions, intel demonstrates to the industry at large that it's economical to develop this way, that it translates into healthy sales and that it doesn't result in the mythical "hardware intellectual property missapropriation through access to code" doomsday scenario ...... maybe other hardware vendors will start to think similarly.
if the industry gets the sense that intel figures the free software desktop is worth investing in like this, maybe those other companies will start wondering if they aren't missing out too and start writing drivers. and that will only help bring more users over to open source desktops.
if intel's graphics chipset competitors who aren't doing this start to lose market share because of this move, then perhaps they'll play ball too.
in short, we all ought to reward intel (and everyone else who follows suit) for this move by opting for such open source supporting hardware on our desktops and laptops whenever possible. this will help create the positive feedback loop needed to keep things like this going.
i purchased my current laptop specifically because it had an intel grahpics chipset after first hearing about this move. it's may only have been one small purchase in the bigger scheme of things, but a million sets of feet moving to the same rhythm creates a drumbeat that is hard to ignore.
this porridge is juuuuust right
ah, goldilocks. that little woodlands b&e mistress, cutely going around and sampling the food, chairs, beds and tequila in the forest creatures' households while they are out. (little known fact: goldilocks was huge on the tequila; years later she'd even end up in rehbab. true story).
sometimes i empathize with her. not the boozing (i'm more of a scotch guy myself anyways) or unlawful entry fetish so much as an appreciation of how hard it can be to find the porridge that is juuuust warm enough. or the chair that's juuuust big enough. or the bed that's comfy just the way i like it.
though for me it's often software that doesn't quite fit. case in point: personal finance software. the commercial packages available out there are pretty amazing in their all-dancing, all-singing, let's play financial advisor way. but that's not what i need or want. the open source packages often try to play equals with these closed source accounting packages. none of them work the way i do. so i use a spreadsheet. i know, it's a bit old school, but at least i use a computer and got away from the pen 'n paper scribblings.
but yesterday while catching up on the latest kde apps in the kde news reader i saw eqonomize, a tool for personal finances. no, kmymoney is quite a piece of work. and gnucash is alright (though i've always felt that gnucash should be further along than it is by now?). but both are just ... too big. so i figured eqonomize would leave me similarly feeling like the proverbial hotdog thrown down a hallway.
but no! i fired it up, didn't have to read a single lick of documentation and everything that i expected and needed was right there in a nice compact interface: accounts, expenses, income, recurring payments (both ways) .... it even has basic reporting (on screen and print), only four toolbar icons and a really compact interface that does a good job of staying away from pop-up hell.
so far it's proven stable, took me minutes to migrate from my spreadsheet and kindly stayed the hell out of my way once it was all done. as it should be. kudos to niklas knutsson for understanding what some of us really need: a tool, not a life partner.
web based content managers are another genre i've run into the same sort of issues with. drupal, joomla, et al are really rather amazing bits of work. but they all take too long to set up, too long to learn to be really proficient with, too clumsy for me to use. they all seem to be built for (and by) people who "do websites" as a central part of their day time existence. that does not describe me, or most of the people i know who have a website somewhere.
i find wikis just as annoying, though for slightly different reasons. if the cms beds are too hard, wikis are the beds that are too soft (though they take just as long to make in the morning).
so where are the content management systems for the rest of us? i think blogs are very telling: they take almost no time to set up and anyone can figure it out. they are content managers of a sort and stupidly popular. why? because a monkey can set one up on a bad day.
i never did find a "real cms" that fits my hand like the glove i want it to be. but a number of years ago a friend of mine and i landed a contract to write some software for a group of people. they had some pretty interesting requirements and demands (they run a north american stock market) and had been quoted a 6 figure sum for just software licensing. (oh microsoft, when will you learn?) we rode in, snapped up the gig and ended up writing a cms in the process.
i still use it's grandchild today, as does the original client. installing a new website is a matter of running script that asks you a few questions then sets up the database, apache, your webroot, the document storage area and the admin site. takes less than a minute after which time one is left with a sporty little interface that is easily exensible, has features like optional edit/approve workflows, internationalization and dynamic content objects (including the ability write new snippets of code if the provided stuff isn't what you want and upload those objects via the admin interface live into the website) and wysiwyg editting. the user interface is pretty straightforward and sites running it have weathered many a slashdotting.
recently it got some attention with a new wysiwyg editor (the old one was getting annoying =) and a bevy of improvements around the house. but it still fits the hand that wears it, which is to say someone who doesn't "do websites" as a central preoccupation.
the reason i bring it up in this context is that my friend and i decided recently that we were going to open source it under the gpl. there are a few things that need to be done before we do that, but we've decided to release before the end of september. hopefully others will find it as useful as we have over the years.
and speaking of goldilocksilicious stuff, if you haven't been watching what the rusin has been delivering laterly, you should go take a look. he's helping make sure that svg as a desktop cornerstone becomes a reality. amazing stuff, really.
in fact, i find the whole "modifying widgets with css" to be a neat thing too and not just because it's "weblike" and therefore theoretically within more people's capabilities but because it provides a more powerful way of dealing with things. e.g. due to it we'll actually have a text box with a clear button inside it for kde4 instead of that horrific clear button with the black death plague flag icon that floats menacingly near your favourite search and location bars.
as this blog entry grows and the clock tick 09:00, i'm debating whether to go for a nap or another cup of coffee. i was up until 04:30 hacking on some stuff and was up at 07:15 to get the p-man off to school for a field trip they are going on. nothing quite says "hey, you're a parent!" like making a lunch at half past seven on 3 hours sleep.
hmm... coffee ... sleep ... coffee ... sleep .......... heh, who am i kidding, coffee it is.
sometimes i empathize with her. not the boozing (i'm more of a scotch guy myself anyways) or unlawful entry fetish so much as an appreciation of how hard it can be to find the porridge that is juuuust warm enough. or the chair that's juuuust big enough. or the bed that's comfy just the way i like it.
though for me it's often software that doesn't quite fit. case in point: personal finance software. the commercial packages available out there are pretty amazing in their all-dancing, all-singing, let's play financial advisor way. but that's not what i need or want. the open source packages often try to play equals with these closed source accounting packages. none of them work the way i do. so i use a spreadsheet. i know, it's a bit old school, but at least i use a computer and got away from the pen 'n paper scribblings.
but yesterday while catching up on the latest kde apps in the kde news reader i saw eqonomize, a tool for personal finances. no, kmymoney is quite a piece of work. and gnucash is alright (though i've always felt that gnucash should be further along than it is by now?). but both are just ... too big. so i figured eqonomize would leave me similarly feeling like the proverbial hotdog thrown down a hallway.
but no! i fired it up, didn't have to read a single lick of documentation and everything that i expected and needed was right there in a nice compact interface: accounts, expenses, income, recurring payments (both ways) .... it even has basic reporting (on screen and print), only four toolbar icons and a really compact interface that does a good job of staying away from pop-up hell.
so far it's proven stable, took me minutes to migrate from my spreadsheet and kindly stayed the hell out of my way once it was all done. as it should be. kudos to niklas knutsson for understanding what some of us really need: a tool, not a life partner.
web based content managers are another genre i've run into the same sort of issues with. drupal, joomla, et al are really rather amazing bits of work. but they all take too long to set up, too long to learn to be really proficient with, too clumsy for me to use. they all seem to be built for (and by) people who "do websites" as a central part of their day time existence. that does not describe me, or most of the people i know who have a website somewhere.
i find wikis just as annoying, though for slightly different reasons. if the cms beds are too hard, wikis are the beds that are too soft (though they take just as long to make in the morning).
so where are the content management systems for the rest of us? i think blogs are very telling: they take almost no time to set up and anyone can figure it out. they are content managers of a sort and stupidly popular. why? because a monkey can set one up on a bad day.
i never did find a "real cms" that fits my hand like the glove i want it to be. but a number of years ago a friend of mine and i landed a contract to write some software for a group of people. they had some pretty interesting requirements and demands (they run a north american stock market) and had been quoted a 6 figure sum for just software licensing. (oh microsoft, when will you learn?) we rode in, snapped up the gig and ended up writing a cms in the process.
i still use it's grandchild today, as does the original client. installing a new website is a matter of running script that asks you a few questions then sets up the database, apache, your webroot, the document storage area and the admin site. takes less than a minute after which time one is left with a sporty little interface that is easily exensible, has features like optional edit/approve workflows, internationalization and dynamic content objects (including the ability write new snippets of code if the provided stuff isn't what you want and upload those objects via the admin interface live into the website) and wysiwyg editting. the user interface is pretty straightforward and sites running it have weathered many a slashdotting.
recently it got some attention with a new wysiwyg editor (the old one was getting annoying =) and a bevy of improvements around the house. but it still fits the hand that wears it, which is to say someone who doesn't "do websites" as a central preoccupation.
the reason i bring it up in this context is that my friend and i decided recently that we were going to open source it under the gpl. there are a few things that need to be done before we do that, but we've decided to release before the end of september. hopefully others will find it as useful as we have over the years.
and speaking of goldilocksilicious stuff, if you haven't been watching what the rusin has been delivering laterly, you should go take a look. he's helping make sure that svg as a desktop cornerstone becomes a reality. amazing stuff, really.
in fact, i find the whole "modifying widgets with css" to be a neat thing too and not just because it's "weblike" and therefore theoretically within more people's capabilities but because it provides a more powerful way of dealing with things. e.g. due to it we'll actually have a text box with a clear button inside it for kde4 instead of that horrific clear button with the black death plague flag icon that floats menacingly near your favourite search and location bars.
as this blog entry grows and the clock tick 09:00, i'm debating whether to go for a nap or another cup of coffee. i was up until 04:30 hacking on some stuff and was up at 07:15 to get the p-man off to school for a field trip they are going on. nothing quite says "hey, you're a parent!" like making a lunch at half past seven on 3 hours sleep.
hmm... coffee ... sleep ... coffee ... sleep .......... heh, who am i kidding, coffee it is.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
like a zombie returning from a michael jackson video
after essentially running out of energy during which i got to spending entire weeks doing administration tasks (not system admin, real admin; as in "papers" and crud) and otherwise dealing with life i decided to cocoon for a bit: spin a little web of quiet isolation around myself. it would've been great to have gone off somewhere amongst the trees (my favourite place to chill out are ragingly vibrant forests) but i had work to do. so instead i just backed off of my blog, irc, etc ...
but, with my theme song blaring in the background, i leap back to the keyboard. or something like that.
the last few days i played hooky and ignored most of my outstanding admin chores and just hacked. hoo boy did that feel good. nothing feels quite as good as going to bed at 5 am after pounding out some code. and nope, it wasn't on plasma though it was kde related.
in the meantime i've booked my flight to akademy. i've also been working on a presentation about our identity as a project. and putting together a montage set to music. i promise to horrify the akademy attendees for at least 3 minutes with jaw droppingly bad music with visuals that might best be described as "fast". how is this different than previous years, the seasoned kde veterans might ask? well, this time i will employ my laptop and a projector (a "beamer" for you euro types). be afraid.
i also somehow landed the 'job' of inviting kernel developers to akademy. something to do with meeting some of them in ottawa a few weeks back. so we should hopefully have a small handful of kernel devs there if the stars align. if that happens we'll do a kernel day on thursday the 28th. spread the word to your kernel hacker buddies.
i also came across this blog entry where the author, a windows user, says: "I think the default KDE desktop looks better then any of the windows desktops that i have seen ... One thing I do notice is the hard drive comes on way less under Kubuntu then it does in XP and thats a good thing .. In conclusion I don't think a windows user or any user can go wrong looking into Kubuntu."
kudos to the kubuntu team, though i think the same can be said of most kde distros these days. speaking of which, i see that the ark linux people made another release recently. as did both kde and the koffice team with amarok, digikam, kphotoalbum and many others also lining up to do the release thing.
there's even talk of a developer's preview release of the kde4 basics coming around the corner.
reflecting briefly again on the whole "low energy" thing ... it's really difficult for me to see the good in things when i'm drained. this is a very human reaction. but when i was younger i would take that perception as a trustworthy reflection of reality rather than a reflection of my own self. as i've gotten older i now, when entering such a space, note to myself that, yes, that's how it feels right now. but that it probably isn't quite that way and that it's really me asking me to not ride myself quite so hard for a bit so i can catch my breath. and so backing off a bit (which i never actually enjoy) i slowly regain the eyes with which to see both the strength as well as the weaknesses of my existence.
and so like a zombie returning from a day on the set of a michael jackson video, i shake off the heebie jeebies and plunge back into the reality of making cool things happen with other great people. (how's that for an odd visual?)
but, with my theme song blaring in the background, i leap back to the keyboard. or something like that.
the last few days i played hooky and ignored most of my outstanding admin chores and just hacked. hoo boy did that feel good. nothing feels quite as good as going to bed at 5 am after pounding out some code. and nope, it wasn't on plasma though it was kde related.
in the meantime i've booked my flight to akademy. i've also been working on a presentation about our identity as a project. and putting together a montage set to music. i promise to horrify the akademy attendees for at least 3 minutes with jaw droppingly bad music with visuals that might best be described as "fast". how is this different than previous years, the seasoned kde veterans might ask? well, this time i will employ my laptop and a projector (a "beamer" for you euro types). be afraid.
i also somehow landed the 'job' of inviting kernel developers to akademy. something to do with meeting some of them in ottawa a few weeks back. so we should hopefully have a small handful of kernel devs there if the stars align. if that happens we'll do a kernel day on thursday the 28th. spread the word to your kernel hacker buddies.
i also came across this blog entry where the author, a windows user, says: "I think the default KDE desktop looks better then any of the windows desktops that i have seen ... One thing I do notice is the hard drive comes on way less under Kubuntu then it does in XP and thats a good thing .. In conclusion I don't think a windows user or any user can go wrong looking into Kubuntu."
kudos to the kubuntu team, though i think the same can be said of most kde distros these days. speaking of which, i see that the ark linux people made another release recently. as did both kde and the koffice team with amarok, digikam, kphotoalbum and many others also lining up to do the release thing.
there's even talk of a developer's preview release of the kde4 basics coming around the corner.
reflecting briefly again on the whole "low energy" thing ... it's really difficult for me to see the good in things when i'm drained. this is a very human reaction. but when i was younger i would take that perception as a trustworthy reflection of reality rather than a reflection of my own self. as i've gotten older i now, when entering such a space, note to myself that, yes, that's how it feels right now. but that it probably isn't quite that way and that it's really me asking me to not ride myself quite so hard for a bit so i can catch my breath. and so backing off a bit (which i never actually enjoy) i slowly regain the eyes with which to see both the strength as well as the weaknesses of my existence.
and so like a zombie returning from a day on the set of a michael jackson video, i shake off the heebie jeebies and plunge back into the reality of making cool things happen with other great people. (how's that for an odd visual?)
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