http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/582604098/hotpi

The board draws between 10mA and 120mA when in use, the largest consumers of current being the RGB LED (~60mA max) and the Fan (~20mA max). This is a significant win on using a USB IR Receiver and transmitter like the MCE remote, we also don’t have completely pointless LEDs for telling you it’s on, and when you’re pressing a button, unless you want to create a script for the RGB LED.

A little more about that RGB LED, it uses WiringPi to implement software Pulse Width Modulation so it can fade and transition smoothly.

We’ve only got a week left so time is of the essence! If you’re considering contributing, you’ll have to be quick.

I am well aware of problems caused by using national flags. If you could take the time to look at the UI designs further you’ll see that it is specified that “All layouts and input methods have an icon which is written in the respective native character set. In essence whatever is in the icon, is the same kind of glyph that will be drawn to screen”.

The term “flags” is used because it is the terminology used to describe icons for layouts in both the code and the gconf key. I specified this here to remove confusion over the term flags. ”Flag – An icon representing the current keyboard layout” in the terminology section was intended to remove confusion regarding this.

Even looking at the UI designs should have been informative enough that you wouldn’t assume we were using actual national flags.

People ask, what are you doing for canonical?

?My current work involves improving the keyboard preferences and keyboard indicator, as well as getting involved in many of the other indicator bugs. Effectively, what we’re working on with keyboard is a merging of the current mess of preferences capplets. These include;

• Keyboard preferences
• Input Method Switcher
• Keyboard Input Methods
• Keyboard Shortcuts

Having 4 separate capplets is confusing, and it makes it difficult for users to figure out what they need to do just so they can type in their own language. The current path is based on the idea of having Keyboard Input Profiles, each profile consists of a Keyboard Layout, an optional Keyboard Input Method (using ibus) and the Input Method options. What we’re looking to do here is to provide a single place which is sensibly designed, has improvements to usability and utility, as well as reducing the number of capplets and the removal the separate ibus indicator which happens as a result of the merging of the preferences UI’s and the introduction of the Input Profiles.

There’s information on a wiki page detailing this work here. Including some mockups and a full explanation of what needs to be done. Feedback welcome.

We have a Keyboard Menu session tomorrow at 9am, and I’d like to appeal to any ibus users here to come, discuss, rant and rave so I can get a better understanding of what it is they want. Even if you’re not here, we’ve got IRC in each of the rooms so we can see your questions, and streaming audio so you can hear the discussion.

The elephant in the room

Ok, so unity as the default on the desktop? People have a problem with this? Why? For heavens sake, isn’t it time we stopped fighting amongst ourselves on items which can become religious issues? Really, it’s time this community got a grip and accepted competition rather than denouncing it.

In-fighting never helped any disruptive social group, for instance, ever wonder why animal rights protesters don’t really get much done? It’s simple, it’s because some of them think it’s OK to dig up human corpses, and others that it’s just not cool to wear fur. More extremist people try and force the less extremist people to follow their views (See numerous debates on GNU/Linux or, well, a hell of a lot of other subjects, but I’m sure you get the point).

There’s much much more I could say about the subject of extremism and how it works in society and how it becomes a force for bad rather than a force for good, if you’re religious about free software, you’ve already missed the point about disruptive technology. If you think you can change things by criticising a free software user because e.g. they own a Mac, then you’ve got the wrong idea entirely.

Something that’s really really hard to do

Building a free software desktop is something that is really really hard to do, this is something that lefty pointed out recently. He’s most certainly right in his overall analysis. However, to agree with him in one sense but disagree in another is to say, that what it takes to build a free software desktop is dedication, continuity and direction.

Ubuntu has all three of these things going for them, unity isn’t being created purely so they can compete with the GNOME shell, it’s being created so they can direct themselves without waiting any longer. So they can direct themselves toward a product not a simply linux distribution. So they can put Linux and GNOME in the hands of millions more people than is possible when you’re religious about software freedom, and won’t ship drivers, codecs and other bits and pieces that users actually NEED in order to do their work.

If you think it’s OK to substitute user satisfaction with a moral code then you’ll never be able to penetrate the market of the desktop operating system. If you realise that you have to make compromises on your own moral code in order to improve everyone’s experience with computing, then you’re on the right track.

The sum up

• Extremism = BAD, if you think digging up a dead person to prove a point about guinea pigs is OK, get your head looked at!
• Moral High Ground - Doesn’t convince ANYBODY, everybody lives in a glass house, stop throwing stones!
• Competition = GOOD, if you don’t like unity, make something better, get involved in competing projects and push things forward rather than back.
• If you want to change peoples perception about software, and show them a better way, don’t fight with the people who share the same views, fight with those who oppose you. I know it’s easy to avoid this because enemies are scary things when you only see them from afar, and it’s much easier to create enemies closer to home.

Exchange of money took place after we’d had a very short test drive (the car was almost empty of fuel) when we were both satisfied and then we began to drive home. About 10-20 minutes into the journey, the engine overheated. After a few quick checks we’d determined it was probably a burst radiator. We filled the radiator with some water and drove the rest of the way home, and yes, we added boiling water to the radiator, I’ve since been told this is unnecessary in modern cars. A few further inspections and one good mechanic later our assumptions were confirmed, the radiator is duff and needs replacing.

Now this isn’t the kind of part which breaks within 10 minutes of driving, it is the kind of part that a used car salesman can get away with not mentioning.

Needless to say, we’re not very happy about what has transpired. We’re pursuing this as the sale is in contravention of the Sale of goods act (specifically that the car was not suitable for the purpose specified), we’re perfectly aware of our statutory rights and we’re entitled to a refund, repair or refund of the cost of repair. Letters have been sent, the correct authorities informed, the dealer has failed to respond and in the near future I will be filing a claim in the small claims court to recover the cost of repair and the costs of filing a case against them…

The repair is in progress and soon everything will be in working order but I just wanted to warn all those nice internet people about this company in the hope that it prevents them being stung as we have. Coincidentally the BBC has a story regarding the rise in sales of broken cars on their website today. So at least we know we’re not alone in this.

http://alpha.memetic.org/~adama/observer-tm.txt

http://alpha.memetic.org/~adama/observer-tm.pdf

I’m asking mostly for clarification and advice here, as we see it; as the company didn’t own a registered trademark in the EU and they then decided to pursue that AFTER they’d already threatened Adam. I believe all their complaints to be invalid as they’re pursuing trademarks after threats have already been made. I also believe this makes their trademark invalid as it was pursued purely for the purposes of litigation.

Thoughts, advice and all comments welcome

Enter the Posc, this device, invented by a friend of mine is genius. Using a couple of pins to measure skin resistance and a light dependent resistor the oscillations created by the timer ICs are modified. The device is like something built specifically for the purposes of circuit bending, when playing with it you feel how the slightest movement of your fingers over the light sensor  and how your fingers moving across the pins change the sound. It truly is a human experience, I love it, so simple to build and so easy to play.

I was lucky enough to get one of the kits for the device from Jim and Kat last night and I assembled it in less than half an hour. Rather than showing you my awful soldering skills I’ve included an image of the kit instead.

The Posc Kit

The other great thing about posc is that it’s all Creative Commons and LGPL which means the idea can spread wildly, just like GNOME You can build one of these devices yourself using the circuit diagrams and tutorials the PCB artwork is even available for those of you who like to etch. Alternatively, you can purchase the kit, including all of the parts you need directly from the sonodrome shop or the makers market.

I’ve always interpreted this to mean not only that if you ignore the past you’re doomed to repeat it, but also that the past might give you insights over and above what the present time conciousness realises. I truly believe that an understanding of the forces which shaped the present will help individuals understand and effect the present and future.

Following is a verbatim duplicate of the opening paragraph of (sub) chapter 1.1 in the book “Manufacturing Consent”, I want to reproduce this here to help encourage people not simply to look at the dirt that has floated to the surface of things like the DMCA and the Digital Economy bill but to see the reasoning behind these laws from the perspective of organisations who have lobbied for them to come into being, and the governments which ratified them.

In their analysis of the evolution of the media in Great Britain, James Curran and Jean Seaton describe how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a radical press emerged that reached a national working-class audience. This alternative press was effective in reinforcing class conciousness: it unified the workers because it fostered an alternative value system and framework for looking at the world, and because it “promoted a greater collective confidence by repeatedly emphasizing the potential power of working people to effect social change through the force of ‘combination’ and organized action.” This was deemed a major threat by the ruling elites. One MP asserted that the working class newspapers “inflame passions and awaken their selfishness, contrasting their current condition with what they contend to be their future condition – a condition incompatible with human nature, and those immutable laws in which Providence has established for the regulation of civil society.” The result was an attempt to squelch the working-class media by libel laws and prosecutions, by requiring an expensive security bond as a condition of publication and by imposing various taxes designed to drive out radical media by raising their costs. [my emphasis]

Does this sound at all familiar? Yeah, thought so… These are the tactics used by mainstream media, government and “special interest groups” to manipulate the little guy into following the rules the way that the “ruling elites” have chosen to set out these rules – but remember this isn’t commentary of today’s new copyright laws this is about the laws established in the early nineteenth century. One of these laws was recently used in an attempt to prosecute Simon Sighn, his blog post about it is here. Also take note that the book was written in 1988, long before the DE Bill or DMCA were dreamed up by some corporate fat cats.

I often get criticised as a conspiracy theorist for challenging the way people are told the way the world is. Never delude yourself that the mass media isn’t under fine control by the ruling elite and in most cases actually part of the same system. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is the truth of the media, the corporations that control it, the governments which manipulate it and the overall control that the illusion of freedom-of-the-press has on the common man.

So before you attack someone for wanting socially responsible healthcare, or someone who contradicts the assumed certainty of anthropogenic climate change, or the justifications for the Afghan and Iraq conflicts, or their liberal views on immigration policy or any of the myriad of things I personally have been attacked for commenting on, or any other contradictory-to-mainstream view that anyone expresses. I hope you stop, think, and read the book Manufacturing Consent, because understanding the propaganda model which is currently in use by the power structure of the western world, is more important than maintaining your allegiance to that system.

Finally, this isn’t a call to arms blog post trying to urge people to protest against the bill with silly twitterings and useless black-placard protests that no-one understands. Its merely a commentary on the situation, and highlighting that this isn’t the first time the common people have had their freedom tempered to suit the people with power.


class Foo {
Foo () {
}

public Foo get () {
if (instance == null) {
instance = new Foo ();
}
return instance;
}
}


I’d be interested to hear comments on the c-code this produces, advantages and disadvantages as well as suggestions for improving singleton support in vala or improving the vala code here in some way.

Here’s some more information on the Singleton design pattern from wikipedia

kthanksbye

VFolders - Links to video

With tracker, and fster we’re edging toward a solution to making everything accessible without the pain of sorting. Using these tools we can build semantic fuse file system. Still in it’s early stages and with lots of features to come, take some time to try it out!

Installing Tracker+Fster VFolders

Install Tracker 0.7.24, for ubuntu users there’s a nice PPA available;
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tracker-team/tracker-unstable

If you’re using another distribution you can follow the build instructions found here.

If you’re using ubuntu you can install the fster deb file straight from their website.

If you’re using another distribution, or are on amd64 like me you’ll need to build fster, in order to do this you’ll need the following packages;

• cmake >= 2.8.0
• fuse >= 2.8.1 (2.7.4 seems OK)
• tracker-client >= 0.7.24
• libxml2 >= 2.7.4
• libattr1-dev

Then follow the build and install instructions as per the fster website; You may need to make /etc/fuse.conf readable by all after install as it seems to be created with 640 permissions.

Using Tracker+Fster VFolders

You need to make sure that tracker has started indexing everything, generally running tracker-control -s will get that off the ground, you can also re-log-in in order to start tracker with the GNOME session.

Start up fster by running fster /path/to/virtual/Virtual/ -d -c /path/to/fster_media_library.xml, ../conf/fster_media_library.xml from your build folder if you built it yourself, not sure where this file is in the deb, please someone let me know if they use it on i386

Now you can browse all of your videos, pictures and music via the semantic data store. Obviously this is just a starting block, and much work needs to be done in the future, for instance figuring out which folders to auto-generate within each folder based on the common relationships of the items, creating folders resulting in sub-queries and features of that nature to be added.

Even now I see a lot of potential in taking this route forward to improving the usability of the file system and nautilus.

GNOME3 and the future of the file system

Nautilus is, as has been previously mentioned due an overhaul. In order to allow Tracker+Fster to exist on GNOME nicely, and be used in Nautilus I propose we focus on improving how devices appear in nautilus, and allowing devices to specify their position, and function in the sidebar, as well as using configurable icons, emblems, backgrounds and other existing features to improve their functionality.

We should consider making the default bookmarks and the appearance of devices and bookmarks more configurable for folders and devices. For instance certain fuse devices might want to appear as default bookmarks as in replacing the home folder with vfolders, these devices or folders could also specify whether or not they wish to display the mount/unmount button. The separators, the positioning, grouping and spacing of the places are all artificially imposed at present. If concentrate on improving these things we can introduce fuse filesystems as first class citizens in nautilus.

By concentrating on the fuse/device integration with nautilus rather than a specific filesystem add-on inside the nautilus UI we keep nautilus small and unbundled from the data store and allow for other fuse filesystems like GNOME Activity Journal with Fuse to benefit from the same improvements.

I also think we need to do more in order to detect types of devices and include more device icons, e.g. iPods, Phones, Cameras, Memory cards, and other attached storage devices can have device icons and it would be great if we could try and utilise any and all available icons appropriately, like the icons available in places like Quantum Bits. Using icons and branding, watermarked backgrounds and emblems in nautilus along side the device, bookmark or folder improves the connection between what the words represent and the function of the item. Dropbox is very good at integrating into Nautilus using emblems, and there’s no reason that other folders and fuse file systems can’t achieve the same level of usability with features already present in Nautilus.

Image by artcodes

Details, often overlooked, are very important, the many details on the corners and edges of the old buildings we all see are just as important as the structure of the building.

I often feel that many new constructions lack these finishing touches, the detail that someone spent a lot of time to ensure looked just perfect. In some ways this illustrates the difference between an architect and a master craftsman of old.

If the intention of the structure is convey a particular essence of grandeur then it is important to build that into the fabric, communicating the impression through design.

If we take a look back it’s the same with the desktop in many ways. If we allow it to become too cold and surgical we will never be loved but may be used. If we make it too active and animated then we may reach a market but may also convey an image of childish interactivity. Somewhere in the middle is a balance, where we use animation, colour and shape in a way which brings together the user interface for the whole desktop into a polished, finished and corner detailed experience which expresses the essence of the GNOME desktop.

I wouldn’t like to classify the essence as a political belief, political beliefs especially those behind free software aren’t important to the end user. Instead I would focus on what GNOME intends to be really good at, the following bullet points were brainstormed during the HIG session at the Usability Hackfest I believe that this is a good starting point for describing the ‘essence of the GNOME desktop’, and that this is something that should be embraced by developers and designers;

• Simple – No useless options presented to the user, no confusing options
• Elegant – clean visual layout, no unecessary clutter, alignment of elements
• Universally accessible – Everyone can use it, 3 – 93 years, no-matter what disability, background, language
• Obvious, discoverable, learnable – common operations should be visible, should be easy to learn advanced operations
• Helpful – requiring as little work from the user as possible, staying out of the user’s way, anticipating the user’s needs, presenting them with what they are most likely to need

Indeed there are some things to be concerned about, for instance as I read recently.

“I’m becoming more and more worried about the rounded-rectangle, grey gradient, tango-esque, big-ass padding and even bigger-ass button style that is predominating our little end of UI design lately.” – rfquerin

This, it must be said, has some truth in it. Although I do love the idea of tango icons, a standardised pixel sharp icon set with a standard colour palette is very sensible. However, the issue that we’re not really innovating in other ways is a concern of mine, we need to rethink themes, rethink window management, rethink desktop furniture and rethink the rules for colouring and styling our widgets.

Things are most certainly becoming more grey, rounded rectangled, hugely padded UIs but some of this is well placed, some of it not-so. I believe that there is a case for pairing the HIG with a set of Style Guidelines which will help build stylish user interfaces. A lot of the required text for a set of style guidelines exists in parts of the HIG, separating this out and making it appropriately usable shouldn’t be too hard.

Some proposed topics for a set of style guidelines could include; colour matching & palettes, shapes, gradients, lighting, borders & spacing. There should also be some standard documentation somewhere for accessing specific colours from the theme allowing developers to use cairo widgets in tune with the themes colour scheme with ease.

Alberto Ruiz posted recently that we should be more open to design ideas and embrace them rather than resist them. We need to make GNOME exciting for developers and end-users, encouraging designers to become a part of the project and dissect and critique without fear of the reaction.

Making GNOME3 isn’t just about libraries, modules and infrastructure it’s also about improving the experience for everyone and learning from mistakes we’ve made in the past.

The preferences window is too tall, redundant functionality with icon view and compact layout

Little nugget of fail I found in nautilus yesterday… Essentially, the icon view preferences has a use of “compact” which is slightly different to the compact layout. The text beside icons in the icon view preferences leads to effectively the same thing as the compact layout except it scrolls vertically rather than horizontally which is a bad way to scroll in a horizontal icon/text layout.

The options are useless and the compact layout is the correct way to  present this feature. Having all of these preferences in this dialog increases the height of the window to 625 pixels on my theme which is far too tall.

Eventually we can also remove the tree options, as they don’t apply to a view they apply to a sidepane therefore they’re in the wrong tab anyway. Also this could be removed as an option completely leaving a gconf key for distributions to configure.

The first day was spent opening up the floor to issues that were of interest to individuals in the group, noting down what could be worked on and what should be worked on, specifically of interest to myself was the state of nautilus, the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and a bunch of minor issues that popped up. I’ll cover each of the topics in some sort of order.

Extra Pain

A great deal of discussion was held on nautilus, between many of the individuals involved, bringing a conclusive solution to the nautilus problem is a difficult one. Firstly, Garrett mentioned a very important point, the word “Manage” is terrible for the user, so maybe we should consider renaming the GenericName of nautilus to Document Organiser. Personally I like this idea, it removes an obvious barrier to the user, that barrier is the fear of the word “manage”, this also makes sense when considering in my /usr/share/applications/ folder I have an entry for File Manager, File Management and File Browser… *sigh* who knows why we tend to overuse the word manage but we should bear in mind the common user fear of words which sound like they lead to complicated or difficult things.

Breadcrumbs were also an important topic, firstly GTK+ has a terrible breadcrumb trail which doesn’t adequately explain where the user is. Sometimes I’ll view a folder, go back to the previous folder then delete the folder I was in. Currently this will leave a button in the forward direction which doesn’t exist. Clicking on this button will then generate an error. We looked upon the nautilus-elementary design for the Nautilus UI with favour, in this UI the breadcrumb bar has been moved into the titlebar, changed to match a canonical developed breadcrumb bar used in the ubuntu software store, some redundant buttons removed, or improved (combined stop/reload button) and the sidepane has been updated to have a greater space between the places.

All together nautilus-elementary is a very good design, although may suffer from some accessibility issues at present those issues will be easy to fix.

We all considered the new “extra pane” feature extra pain, the tabs in conjunction with the extra pane especially bad, the brainstorming session on Nautilus that included myself, Garrett LeSage, Jakub Steiner, Mairin Duffy, Hylke Bons and Allan Day was extremely productive. We came up with the idea of having a button bar at the bottom of the nautilus window, offering contextual options for modifying selected objects also all were agreed that increasing the spacing between places to increase the size of the drop target would be a good thing, and a general redesign and removal of useless features a positive thing. Specific features we considered to be useless are;

• Notes – We’re not sure if these are persistent or how and where they are stored
• Information – What information? The number of items in a folder, some basic stats about a file?
• Tree – Duplicated functionality in the main view, the sidepane is not wide enough for a decent tree browse
• History – Duplicated functionality from the back button
• Tabs – This will cause some flaming I’m sure, but really, we should be looking at better window management for nautilus rather than tacking on a fashionable feature to the UI. I’ve used tabs, and have found them usable, but I’d much rather have my windows organise in a better way without the need for tabs.

Even emblems has failed to become as useful as it could be, so this leaves us with the proposition of should we just remove the sidepane view selector and instead concentrate on improving the general appearance and usability of the places sidepane? I think we should, how much code would be removed from nautilus? Answers on a blog comment

So the emblems feature is useful however it isn’t positioned well and we didn’t come up with any specific solution to this. My personal opinion is that we should find some way of integrating this functionality into our bottom button bar concept at the same time integrating tracker metadata features and functionality in much the same way in the same place. In fact wouldn’t it be nice if there was a Nepomuk ontology for dealing with emblems…

Wireframe by Allan Day, Visual improvements added by myself

GNOME Guidelines for being human

The GNOME HIG has fallen into a state of duplicated information, overly information dense and out of date. Matthew Paul Thomas of Canonical has the opportunity to update the HIG and do the actual work, but we all wanted to make sure our thoughts were included. We produced an adhoc document to voice our gripes in the most up to date version can be found here.

The main focus of the HIG as discussed should be to help developers make the right UI decisions early on, and to help developers adjust their application towards compliance, this is especially evident by the proposed smoke testing pages. The concept of introducing a pattern library was discussed in some ways also, and the eventual outcome of the new HIG will probably be based on this concept with a few common UI layout concepts which are described in detail dealing with alignments and layouts moved over into its own section and consolidating shortcut and accessible keys into a single topic, along with many other elements of the HIG discussed I think we formed at least a starting path toward our ideal HIG.

The GNOME Shell

There was lots and lots of discussion regarding the shell, and I don’t think I can give an overview here of the eventual outcome of these discussions. Seth created a great write up about the shell, and I’ll be following up soonish with a path to implementing some of his specific ideas using tracker and zeitgeist.
Things I’d like to mention regarding the shell;

• Supporting NVidia and binary drivers *must* be a priority for the development of Mutter, currently the performance is apparently unbearable. Ignoring binary driver support and a lack of cooperation with device manufacturers makes the GNOME desktop worse not better*.
• Changing the whole screen in order to launch an application makes me a bit queesy.
• Having a top panel rather than a bottom panel inhibits direct access to my Chrome tabs, and in the future may get in the way of other UI design experiments like this. Seth tried to emphasise this and suggest the use of a global menu, which I think should happen in place of the titlebar for maximised windows and therefore sit at the top of the screen. However I’m not convinced it’s an ideal solution for unmaximised windows as you then have to click at the window you want to access the menu, then click on the menu when it appears.

Grandma we love you, grandma we do?

Seth put great empasis on the fact we’re designing our desktop for our grandmas, and while my grandmother would love to use a computer this is unfortunately impossible as she’s been dead for some years, and the unfortunate fact is that if we keep designing for an aged population eventually we may get more users with the rate of medical breakthroughs prolonging our grandma’s lives but this isn’t really the market we should be trying to get into, more a market we meander into as a result of good use of paisly and chintz in the themes**.

It was mentioned by Seth that we should design our desktops for ourselves as we have the same goals as most of our users, but I disagree, I think designing for ourselves makes things far too short sighted and far too narrow. We as engineers have specific needs we may focus on (see Extra Pain), and by doing this we may introduce new confusing UI features for our userbase. In my opinion we should do a Nintendo, instead of designing for a certain age group as Nintendo did for so many years, targetting each platform at very young children, we should look at their approach for the Wii, as one Wii designer put it “Design for the ages 3 to 93″ creating the everyman desktop – where we don’t confuse users with dramatic language, clustered user interfaces with a billion options but at the same time we want to make it beautiful and usable by everyone.

Personal Gripes

• Our GTK+ popup menus should have a little arrow pointing to where the click occurred, with compositing enabled this should be the default of the design.
• Relying on contextual popup menus for major operations is also a bad thing, and part of the reasoning behind our bottom button bar idea for nautilus.
• Near screen edges, combo boxes leave a block of empty space in order to try and ensure that the previous item is selected when a user clicks and clicks again immediately after. However leaving a scrolling space which is empty is not an ideal solution, in fact it’s a horrific flaw in usability. Recently I’ve noticed that Pidgin fixes this issue by moving the combobox directly out of the way of both the button and the encroaching screen edge. This is a better way of dealing with this issue, and should be adopted into the toolkit.

Terrible way of dealing with combobox items near screen edges

• Our combobox and combo entry is inconsistent, if we’re going to use a specific design for combo box that design should be *identical* in the combo entry. There’s no specific need for them to be different as far as I can tell, and therefore these widgets should be brought into a single consistent design.

* The better/worse distinction here isn’t any overblown ideological distinction, it’s a matter of user experience the user wants fast graphics, so they can play games like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars without being turned off to our desktop by bad general support for binary drivers. The user doesn’t care about a free software philosophy they care about free software to help them get their work or play done.

** Yes, this is a joke.

This post was brought to you by Codethink Ltd.

Fear not, an applet exists to allow you do do this! I’ve only just seen this, and I don’t even use a top panel, or a bottom panel after recently converting to docky, but here’s the link to something awesome

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=103732 GNOME-look.org surely is an underutilised resource

Thanks to Antonio Roberts, who joined the hackfest today for pointing this out…

Lets take for example there’s a load of mailing list messages coming in to my inbox, anything that catches my eye I read (I don’t have a problem with this so far), if it’s important I flag it for replying to later (this doesn’t always work as things drop below the inbox horizon), when a mailing list message is flagged I have a virtual folder with mailing list messages which are flagged in it (this can this be done now with evolution, with search folders although I just tried it and the search folder never appeared). Now, when I reply to a message the mailing list thread is flagged by the mail client in such a way as all followups which are in response to my original email are highlighted say in yellow (nice non threatening colour), and messages which are related are in a more washed out, but still noticeable lighter yellow.

This means that I can both keep track of which messages I feel the need to reply to, and also the messages which are in response to my messages. Some people rave about threaded views, but I still find that threaded views are difficult to navigate, also conversation views like googlemail don’t really work for me.

In order to make this work there’s one last feature  I don’t think evolution has (correct me if I’m wrong) which would be “Highlight messages with this header, or that header as this colour” – bears some thinking about I feel.

Along side this, having some default search folders configured in evolution could probably help usability, e.g. in apple mail there’s a combined inbox for your accounts which is essentially a search folder. Also, I’d like to be able to have search folders at the top, and switch off the “On this computer” menu, neither of which seem to be possible

“Why is this on planet gnome? Who gives a shit about you and your proprietary OS?”

Now, I’m not adverse to taking acerbic comments, I write some pretty provocative posts from time to time, expressing my opinions, ranting about this or that and to posts like that I expect a certain amount of debate and argument. I even come to expect threatening and purely insulting comments which are redirected to dev null.

However this comment, which flies in the face of;

“Planet GNOME is a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors.”

is more than a bit much. Not only does no one apparently care about OSX, but nobody cares about me either…

To clarify, I use MacOSX and Windows as well as loving Linux and GNOME. Linux doesn’t do everything I need to do so its necessary from time to time to use a proprietary OS… However, as OSX is built on top of mostly open source software, adheres to open standards is generally accepted by GNOME developers as something worth taking a look at I don’t think I’ve crossed any ideological divide here.

I feel like I’ve just had to defend myself for doing nothing wrong *sigh*

Anyway, the point of this post is to call out the hostile readership of planet gnome. Those readers who will personally attack people ‘anonymously’ (henry.tss.usg.edu), need to be made aware how they damage the community, damage developers perception of who we are doing this for and in the end do nothing to make themselves heard, in this case the hostile reader got to be heard, because  I honestly think it’s time we outed them for what they are.

Also, this little bit of wordpress comment info made me chuckle;

“User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.219.4 Safari/532.1″

I guess this hostile reader didn’t realise that chrome is built on apples webkit project, and relies on EVIL PROPRIETARY CODE!!!! Oh, no wait… Erm Apple kept webkit nice and open didn’t they.

To end, here’s a note to pigeons in the wise words of Fletch from Porridge;

“One – bide your time. Two – keep your nose clean. And three – don’t let the bastards grind you down.” – I’ve searched for the video for this to no avail. Hopefully someone can poke a youtube link of it into the comments.

Update: This isn’t going to turn into an ideological debate about apple and their practises either so you people can stop commenting about that.

Apparently it can’t install because the computer can’t start from my hard drive… Well obviously that’s false.

The problem seems to be related to partitioning, I did have a triple boot, leopard, xp and ubuntu. So after reading a few articles about this particular problem I started playing around (tweaking the disk size won’t work because of some bizarre journalling problem apparently, or mediakit something something depends on when you run it), deleted ubuntu and tried to put windows back in its original partitioned space, fail, as apparently you ALSO need 128Mib free between partitions using GPT for OSX to be happy…

One more moving of the NTFS partition to give it that 128Mib space and still nothing… I don’t know whether I should bother the 3+ hours it takes to move the NTFS partition to give it more than 128Mib space see if that helps but I’m at the point of futility :/

I have a feeling that I’m going to require a full re-install of all 3 os’s because apple love their quirky one size fits one approach to installers and the boot process.

The worst thing about it is that it took me days of playing around to get a triple boot working, now I’m probably going to have to do it all over again…

So to finish off this little post of futility and arguing with apples weird disk utility I add;

Dear Steve Jobs,
Please can you fix it for me to be able to install a triple boot with osx, windows and linux without me having to bend over backwards. Essentially get your installer team a clue and some error messages that can help diagnose and repair faults like this without me having to backup all of my data from my windows install and my mac osx install (which I really don’t know if I actually have enough space for).

Thankfully in this instance ubuntu was a fresh, unused install, so that wasn’t so hard to nuke and carry on.

kthanksbye

Update: If anyone else gets this problem you will have to ensure that there is LARGER than 128Mib of space between your Linux/Windows partitions and your OSX one before you can proceed. I’ve now managed to get the upgrade done

Socialism isn’t necessarily a bad thing; capitalism doesn’t work as it just lets the rich get richer and the poor get the picture. It’s time to wise up to REAL WORLD politics rather than still continuing this hatred for socialism and communism caused by MCcArthyist witch hunts and the fear and panic of an empire big enough to slaughter the US.

(and yes, the former Soviet Union could totally have destroyed the US, just take a look at Tsar Bomba if you don’t believe me, the US had nothing close to this weapon that knocked Stalin off his chair from 110km away, a couple of these things would have annihilated the US power within only a few minutes).

Increasingly in the UK we’re seeing complete morons in the US screaming about how free health care is communist and communism is bad. Wise up for crying out loud! Just because these people are afraid of something they don’t understand doesn’t mean anyone should continue feeding this fear. Socialist objectives are very egalitarian, favouring economic equality where the top 1% don’t own 90% of the wealth. From the wikipedia page verbatim;

Socialism refers to various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with an egalitarian method of compensation. Contrary to popular belief, socialism is not a political system; it is an economic system distinct from capitalism.

Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through exploitation, creates an unequal society, does not provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximize their potentialities and does not utilize technology and resources to their maximum potential nor in the interests of the public.

Is that such a bad thing? Seriously, start thinking about other people, and not the size of your bank balance.

P.S. This isn’t directed at your political views Havoc, as I don’t know what your stance on socialism is. Personally I’d prefer a socialist society to a capitalist one any day, especially as I come from a working class background in a country that has over my life become increasingly capitalist.

Update: I forgot to mention something that’s quite important to understanding how implementation of socialism works; the extra money required to run a socialist society does not come out of YOUR pocket. The money comes from increases in capital gains taxes, corporation taxes etc… The whole point of socialism is distribution of wealth, not making individuals poorer by increasing income tax.

Update: Moron, a definition: “Idiot, someone of sub normal intelligence”, I think this adequately  describes the people I’m talking about, uneducated people publicised on the BBC News who see communism as evil without even knowing the difference between communism and totalitarianism… Not that the US isn’t _TOTALLY_ under the control of corporations, I mean that seems to me to be totalitarianism of a different form… Hopefully Obama will change that, as it seems he is willing to take the risk of assassination (by corporations who do not like his new ideas) over protecting the freedom and liberty of the US population.

I won’t republish the comics here as they are surreal, bizarre and at times profane.

A new comic is published every week day which is totally in the style of Spud’s humour. So head on over to impshum.co.uk – WARNING: Offensive and confusing material

As far as I’m concerned, firefox has gotten to a point on Linux where I’m reminded of Internet Explorer 6. That’s right, I just compared firefox to IE6… It’s seems to have been under development in the same direction for so long that the code is rotting. This is only my opinion, and the code is probably really clean but this doesn’t excuse the sluggish nature of the browser the repeated failures and the appearance of “Oh this is embarrassing” in the browser after repeated crashes.

I remember when firefox first launched I jumped on it like a flash saying things like “wow, have you seen how fast it is” and “it just works!”… This was during a time where I was switching from IE6 and old Mozilla.

Well, as it was back then, it is again; the new kid on the block has arrived, developed from scratch with solid engineering principles and a fundamentally better architectural design.

Enter Google Chrome…

I’m now saying the same things about chrome that I once said about firefox. I don’t think I’ll ever switch back full time, only to use those sites which chrome has trouble with while the development continues. I’ve managed to get chrome configured nicely with the –enable-plugins hack and a link to the /opt/google/chrome/plugins/ folder for libflashplayer.so so I’m happy, I have flash, a browser that starts in less than a second, and handles plugin and page crashes independent of the browser, better memory management and general slicker experience, with the tabs right across the top of the screen my browsing experience is delightful.

Google chrome is my new friend

There is no end to the praise that I’ll bestow on chrome now, I just hope that in 5 years time it’s still the same quality, or whether there’ll be yet another new kid for me to switch to.

Thank you google for giving me a browser that works!

Now for all this set of tracks may look overly complex it actually isn’t, the reason it hits such a weirdly dense set of tracks at the station is quite simple, there are two railway bridges going south, originally only one, these bridges were pretty much the only way to connect the north and south for a long time (well until IKB got his act together and finished the great western). From Newcastle the railways would carry coal from Spital Tongues and the Rising Sun coal mines, and from further north in places such as Ellington, to the south of England.

Essentially Newcastle central station became a major crossing point between the north and south. You can see that on the left of the picture Andrew posted there are 4 sets of tracks which don’t even stop at the station. I’ve heard that some trains did stop, on the bridge that they are visible on, toward the back of the station. From there a crane would load up the trains with goods, including coal. When it was built it was one of the most heavily used stations in Britain, and incredibly important to the industrial revolution. These tracks have now been replaced with another platform and it doesn’t quite look the same anymore;

Newcastle central station, C.1990s

Obviously this happened as a result of the closing of both the Spital Tongues mine and the Rising Sun which is now a nature reserve and country park. Now if you go down to the Rising Sun, you can see the original train tracks (there are earlier tracks of course, but these were the first to run locomotives) from the first test railways and you can walk down Middle Engine Lane where the Rocket was tested at 30mph! All just a little bit of awesome in my backyard…

The Rocket, the first one made, with a hack to allow the piston to move from the original 45 degree position.

Yes, I am a bit of a geek about this stuff… Point me at the Clifton Suspension bridge and I’ll probably sing a song from the animation “The Great IKB”

The latest ubuntu firefox release makes this web browser completely unusable, breaking after about 30 mins of continuous use. Mostly on facebook, is this the fsync bug? Strangley though it doesn’t crash X anymore… This is worse, I don’t just need to restart X, the whole computer needs rebooting.

CANONICAL PLEASE PUSH 3.5 TO REPLACE 3.0 ASAP!

This bug is probably fixed in firefox 3.5 but ubuntu are holding back the 3.5 release for some reason and for now I’m stuck with 3.0. I think this bug is related to nvidia proprietary drivers, which doesn’t explain much, either way, firefox causes the crash, and we all know that firefox developers don’t really seem to care too much about Linux these days, so what’s the point in reporting a bug…

So instead of filing a bug report, which is probably a dupe of a dupe that no-one cares enough about to fix, I’d like to introduce international punch a firefox developer day.

If you have one near by, commence punching.

*This is joke btw, I don’t condone unnecessary violence against firefox developers*

In a social perspective, these strong links can be identified mostly as close friends, family and work colleges. There are of course also weak links, these weak links are generally friends of friends, acquaintances, and professional contacts of various forms. The irony of this is that weak links are actually more important than strong links in many ways, social networking being a perfect by the numbers example of how, but we can also see town markets and church congregations as other ways that these weak links can become more powerful.

The importance of weak links is related to the value of strengthening the link, if you strengthen a strong link not much is achieved, a further solidification of the already existing relationship. Strengthening a weak link creates a new strong link, and therefore the value of this is immeasurably higher than a strengthening of a strong link.

At GCDS an example of google shooting themselves in the foot in this regard came up, although I didn’t have much time to explain my dislike for the feature I’ll cover it all here; Robert McQueen brought up that googletalk has a feature that will hide the contacts that you don’t speak to often, these people aren’t important and therefore shouldn’t be shown in the main UI, although you can jump through a hoop to find them if you need them. To me this is a fairly senseless feature as it takes away from the table the impulse action which can lead to the valuable result of strengthening a weak link.

What would be more interesting is if google had a sorting method based on your frequency of communication, but also promoted those weak links that may be relevant, relevancy could be based on the number of shared contacts, suggestions for new contacts could also be made; however, we’re now talking about social networking not just communication, instead of locking it down, expanding instant messaging to incorporate social networking features in the same way that the social networks are incorporating instant messaging features.

Google failing to do this already is unbelievable, Microsoft were talking about a 3 degrees style instant messager a long while back so the idea isn’t new. However developing the client in the completely opposite direction is a bizarre detour from the obvious.

How does this relate to search? and why on earth would I group the two of them together? In many ways search is broken as a concept, the most obvious problem with search, as I’ve heard brought up over the years is;

You need to know something about what you’re looking for to find it.

This doesn’t mean that all kinds of searching are bad, for instance if you do know enough about what you’re looking for, search is great. But in most cases a better solution is filtration, for instance filtering a list of files to produce a specific subset.

This all boils down to the one problem that computers have never really solved which is locating things, and making sure that you can find them again and again without ever really loosing track of them.

Solving this problem of locating things is a very difficult one, and is generally based on one of two methods, browsing or searching. These are polar opposites but are also very similar.

• Browse as neatly defined by googles define command is; feed as in a meadow or pasture; “the herd was grazing”. This implies a systematic method of acquiring an item
  with regard to the “locating things” problem, in essence, I look in one folder, it’s not there, up a level, next folder, it’s not there; ad nausium.
• Search again defined by google is; the activity of looking thoroughly in order to find something or someone. Sounds pretty similar to browsing right, but, in this case, the computer does the systematic locating of the thing, not us.

This isn’t the only solution, there’s also a slightly more powerful solution and that is to make sure that relationships between items are relevant, that strong and weak links describe and inform, and assist in discovery.

By solving the problem of “locating a thing” with a focus to the relationship between items of interest we’re actually offloading the task from our wrists in the case of browsing, and our memory in the case of searching, to our ancient inbuilt ability to forage for things.

A good example of where filtration and grouping assists in foraging rather than browsing is in the gnome-main-menu produced by Novell. Specifically in the control centre and application browser windows. These tiles have a nice large target size which is always a good start, but they’re also clearly grouped, and those groups are jumpable from the side, filtration is provided but as we’re not starting from a blank canvas we don’t necessarily need to know exactly what it is we’re looking for. This probably the earliest example of utilising the skill of foraging over systematic approaches like simple search and browsing.

In this instance foraging can be defined as; Locating an item of interest by following paths of highest probability utilising experience and understanding to locate the item.

This is a fundamentally different way of addressing the problem. Happily this is the direction that GNOME-Zeitgeist and Tracker VStore are headed in, using strongly described content in a space which allows us to use a probabilistic reasoning to locate items.

With foraging, again we’re exploiting the strength of weak links, allowing us to follow interesting paths to arrive at our target, or targets and possibly find new interesting things along the way.

For more information please read;

• Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks
• Wikipedia on information foraging
• Interaction Design on information foraging theory