Older blog entries for AlanHorkan (starting at number 141)

Ants and Bees
Normally I loathe acronyms because so often they are completely unnecessary and merely allow the author to be a little bit lazier and make things more difficult for their audience to understand. Scientists and Engineers have a habit of using complicated techinical words to make themselves seem smarter and to exclude otherwise intelligent people when in fact their inability to explain the more complex words in simpler ways shows their lack of intelligence. Computer Science is something that is "easy when you know how" but has a very steep learning curve until you eventually do figure things out, so it is particularly annoying when people needlessly complicate subjects with pointless acronyms and horde some piece of knownledge because they got there first. Sometimes I have cringed with embarassment at the tragic comedy of lecturers going on at great length to do little more than expand acronyms and explain moderately complicated English words.
Despite all that there are times when acronyms can be used effectively. Terms like Laser, Radar and Scuba are all fairly easily pronouncable and have come to stand on their own so much so that people are hard pressed to explain what they stand for (and even in the case of Scuba, Aqua Lung is a far more expressive term).
The reason I mention this is that in the Sunday newspapers I read about a survey by Novell about managing business security. They describe two signficant categories of people who are the cause of many security problems and they manage to do so using memorable acronyms that both describe the behaviours of these groups and serve as a memorable metaphor at the same time. One group was described as Apathetic Non-Techinical Staff (ANTS), the other group (with a slightly more contrived acronym) was described as Busy Empolyees Endangering Security (BEES). Having seen those attitudes before I was well impressed that someone was able to sum up the problem in so clear and succint a way. Whoever at Novell that wrote the report did an excellent job and that is a very significant amount of writing skill and serious thought to be putting into that kind of work.

This Slashdot discussion about literacy in coporate America furthers the point that time saved by sloppy writing is far outweighed by the how it wastes other peoples time.

Odds are I've made many grammar, spelling and punctuation errors in this message. That's Moens Law of Corrections for you.

Budget Day
Wednesday was Budget day (in Ireland, and Britian had theirs this week too) and it seems the Budget is available in OpenOffice.org Write format.
Almost makes me want to read it.

Christmas Songs
As Christmas time approaches my heart goes out to all those involved in the retail trade who have endless loops of Christmas music inflicted on them by thoughtless employers. Although there are some excellent Christmas songs they are outweighed by the many truly terrible Christmas songs and even the best songs very quickly become annoying. The following are a short list of Five of the best and Five of the worst Christmas songs, listed roughly in order of excellence and crapulence respectively.

Five of the Best Christmas Songs

• Fairytale of New York by The Pogues, Shane McGowan and Kirsty MacColl
• Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade
• I wish it could be Christmas everyday by Roy Wood with Wizzard
  I'm sure some people would list this one among the worst Christmas songs but despite being overplayed sometimes it is a good song and I like it.
• Stop the Cavalry by Jona Lewie
  (Irish musician Mundy recently did a nice cover version I quite like for a local radio station).
• Santa Claus song by Kevin Bloody Wilson

Five of the Worst Christmas Songs

Jingle Bell Rock by Destinys Child
Tragically the made a whole album of horriffic hip-hop interpretations of Christmas Songs

Fairytale of New York by Ronan Keating
The bland and irritatting Ronan Keating spews out a bland and irratatting homogenised version of this classic. The most tragic thing about it that this version often gets played instead of the original by some whom prefer its inoffensive blandness.

Last Chrismas by Wham
Once should be enough.

(Okay, so the list doesn't currently include Five of each but as the Christmas season is only just started I am sure I'll hear a few more soon and finish the list. Feel free to send suggestions of the worst Christmas songs to horkana at tcd dot ie).

Not Hot
Some joker put a picture of Bertie Ahern (our Taoiseach, the Irish equivalent to Prime Minister) on Hot or Not. For a change he is not wearing an anorak and doesn't look all that bad but bizarrely he managed to get rated 7.2 out 10. Please help give him the really low score he richly deserves.

Gnome Games
Made a massive and highly technical 6 letter patch to Gnome Games! Wow, I'm so l33t!!!
The game Five or More, (glines, a colour lines game) has a preview widget labelled "Next Balls" which traditionaly made sense but not anymore since a set of various shapes was added to make the game usable for users with colour vision problems. I changed the label to "Next". It is trivial but gotta start somewhere. Gnome Games 2.9.2.1 includes the change.

Dia is for drawing Diagrams
It is a bad sign if you ever feel the need to read the user manual of a program but I decided I really should take a look at it and try to bring it more up to date. When I noticed the incorrectly spelled pnumatic (sic) I decided it had to be done and I got stuck in, making the changes I that had been at the back of my mind for a long time. During the last fortnight I put several sessions of a few hours work each time into reading and rereading the documentation and went about gradually rephrasing, refining and adding to various sections. As I went along it became increasing apparent to me that there was potentailly a massive amount of room for improvement but suprisingly this didn't bother me and I was very satisfied by the improvements I was able to make the problems I was able to fix.
Writing documentation helped me see more things in Dia that need improving. It forced me to learn how to use functionality I had never properly looked into and it helped me discover new functionality I never even realised existed. Having used Dia for more than a few years, I was surprised how much functionality was buried in the context menu of the Diagram Tree, there are all sorts of functions for sorting the object list and hiding (and showing) objects of specific types. I will have to give more thought as to how Dia can be improved and how more of this functionality can be brought forward and made more easily discoverable.
Here's hoping I can get Dia to build and learn more about GTK so I can start making some of the changes I really want, there are so many ideas that it should be relatively easy to borrow from applictions like the Gimp and Inkscape, and more than a few long standing bug reports that could do with some attention.
The important point is the sense of satisfaction I got from working on Dia that I have not felt in a long time.
Dia Hompage at Gnome.org
Advogato Project Page for Dia

No to Software Patents
'nuff said.

Jury Service
Today, for the first time I found myself in the Central Criminal Court, located at the historical Four Courts building by the Liffey. Despite or perhaps because of being a beautiful historical building it was small and unpleasantly cramped and the 100 or so potential jurors all with our green letters in hand were very likely breaking several fire safety regulations. The trials being dealt with were murder trials which didn't fill me with enthusiasm. There were five trials on the court docket, two of which required juries and one of which required the judge to issue a bench warrant for the arrest of the absent defendant. I was interested how much emphasis the judge placed on making it clear that the accussed was to answer the alleged crimes.
Before the first jury was selected the Judge remarked that it was an unusual case in that it would be extremely short, only one day, tomorrow Tuesday (and he made it absolutely clear that he had a flight on Wednesday morning so there was absolutely no way the trial would run over). The Judge also stressed the importance of jurors informing the court if there was anything that might prevent them from serving before they were sworn in. I was among the twenty picked out of the hat for this jury and found myself sitting in jury box. It was kind of unnerving but as the jury only required 14 people and only one or two jurors were declined I was soon back in the crowd waiting for the second jury to be chosen.
The second case consisted of several counts of attempted murder and violence and was expected to take as much as three weeks, starting the following Thursday. Many people were quick to make their excuses, some of them particularly vauge but given the large crowd to choose from the Judge kept his life simple and let off anyone who asked. About 50 people later they eventually had their fourteen jurors and much to our surprise we thanked for our service and told we would not be required to return every morning for the rest of the week, as had been expected.

The Incredibles
The Incredibles, is a film that lives up to its name. If you have not seen it yet (it is due out in Europe next week but there have been advanced screenings everywhere this weekend) I encourage you to go, but the rest of this journal may contain more information than you want to know before seeing it for yourself.
When I first went to see Toy Story I was sceptical a feature length Computer Animated film would be any good but not only was I impressed by the animation, I was even more impressed by the story. Like many others I have been unsuccessfully predicting the downfall of Pixar, waiting for it to eventually make a turkey, to churn out the kind of mediocre rubbish that Disney tries to get away with (and more recently Dreamworks with Sharks Tale).
Last time I predicted their failure I pleasantly surprised by Finding Nemo. Despite being first and foremost aimed squarely at children it was simple story about family and it was clever enough to keep an adult viewer content and mildly amused. The Incredibles is another tale of family life, and is essentially about Mr. Incredible trying to balance his career and his family.
Unlike other studios where you have probably seen most of the best bits in the trailer (I'm thinking Taxi) not only do Pixar not give too much away in the trailer they even have an fun scene in the trailer that doesn't appear in the film itself.
The Incredibles owes a lot of inspiration to the Fantastic Four and many other characters from the pages of Marvel comics. The choice of super powers is not arbitrary and the powers of the children in particular speak to their character. What power is more appropriate for a hyperactive boy than speed or the power of invisibility for struggling insecure teenage girl? The film provides a few other subtle references here and there that comic book fans should appreciate but without being heavy handed about it. The look of Metroville has been described as a future based on ideas of what the future would look like as predicted in the 1960's. Similarly the design of the secret base has a very strong James Bond quality to it and there were also echoes of Star Wars in places. All these familiar references added to the Incredibles but it is nonetheless original and has a very fresh feeling to it.
In most computer animated or special effects driven films I am rarely impressed by the technology for more than a few minutes and after that I hope the story will be good. However while watching the Incredibles I was at times mesmerised by the flow of fabrics and the swaying of Violets long black hair. One of behind the scenes clips I watched explained the huge effort that went into the costumes and the designers said that Violets hair took so much work that it was almost a character of it's own.
I highly recommend the Incredibles, particularly to anyone who has enjoyed the previous Pixar films, or likes superheroes and I would tentatively give it full marks 5/5. If you are in any doubt as to how much I enjoyed the Incredibles I hope to see it again next week when it goes on general release.

Sodipodi animosity towards Inkscape
Roy Mathieu wrote about Inkscape and Sodipodi and I feel I should respond. I really don't think you are seeing both sides of this and are taking everything Lauris Kaplinski has said at face value. You also seem to believe the comment

the ones with more advertizing power always screw independent developers

For one thing the Inkscape developers are no less independant than the Sodipodi developers. It is unfair to claim the Inkscape developers have screwed Sodipodi. They have forked Sodipodi exactly as GNU General Public License (GPL) entitles them to do. Inkscape is not in competition with Sodipodi, despite the divergence of the two codebases some patches and fixes are still ported from Sopidpodi to Inkscape. It is wrong to blame Inkscape for giving people what they want and becoming more popular than Sodipodi.
It is not surprising that any project bemoans the existance of a fork because if your project has been forked it makes you look really bad. The developers of the GNU Image Manipulation Program certainly didn't react well to the Cinepaint fork (aka FilmGimp). Look back at the history of software development and learn from the XEmacs fork the success of which Jaime Zawinski puts down to a greater focus on usability and a more inclusive development group. Look at the case of EGCS which surpassed GCC and wen on to become GCC. Although Inkscape has different priorities it is possible that Inkscape might eventually meet all the needs of Sodipodi users by a different route and be able to please almost everyone. Mozilla Firefox is branch with a significant shared codebase so it is a bit much to call it a fork as Wikipedia claims but I mention it anyway because as dedicated user of Mozilla Seamonkey I can understand how some users feel alienated and neglected by a new project and resent the praise being showered on the newcomer, almost like the resentment the older brother had of the Prodigal Son.
A fork means that your project in some way lacked enough flexibility and good management to at least accomodate the possibilities and ideas of others as friendly branch. As with most projects good management that allows developers to get on with thing is more important than one or two really good programmers. On the face of it Sodipodi didn't do anything wrong, but people wanted it to do more.
The Inkscape project is clearly very good at self promotion, and that does jar with the traditional low opinion many developers have of marketing and advertising but irrespective of the hype I think Inkscape really does stand up on it's technical merits. Keep in mind that at the time the comments hostile to Inkscape were made Inkscape had not made as much visible progress as it has now.
I think Inkscape has learned many important lessons from the likes of the Mozilla project. The Inkscape project tries to be inclusive. The Inkscape project properly understand the the maxim release early and release often and puts it into practice by providing nightly builds for various platforms. This makes it much easeir for casual users and developers to get involved in smaller ways and help with testing and provide feedback and help get bugs fixed. I feel that the Inkscape developers have made a hugely significant effort to engage with their users and make it clear that they appreciate all kinds of feedback. The good attitudes of the Inkscape developers has knock on effects and encourages contributors and is reflected back at them when they encourage users to get involved by contributing to projects like OpenClipart.org or by helping to publicise and promote Inkscape. I am promoting Inkscape right now because I like the program and because I like the developers, and if like so many other projects the developers had been dismissive and taken the condescending RTFM attitude I would not be trying to help them any way I can.
The Inkscape developers are very much aware that they would not be where they are today without having the solid base of Sodipodi to build on. I can understand Lauris Kaplinski's disappointment at Sodipodi being forked but you shouldn't hold that against Inkscape.

Luis you weirdo! :P
From what the automatic translation tools tell me arschegeiger, Luis' favourite new word is a very unusual type of violin player. Never underestimate the Germans, it is great how they make up new words for all kinds of things which I suppose is a result of how they build compound words for everything. (The noun should be arschegeige.)

Update
Roy Mathieu responed to my comments (thanks) and I think I read more into his comments that was really there but I am glad I stopped and thought about what he had written.
He suggests the connections Bryce Harrington has to the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) give him an unfair advantage and greater ability to publicise Inkscape. Maybe it has an effect but I'm not convinced Bryce has any more advantage by employed by OSDL than being any other gainfully employed programmer with enough flexibility to work on projects on his own time. Bryce is clearly the project leader, he has a great attitude and does a good job of managing and encouring others which I think has far more effect on the success of Inkscape. Bryce understands the importance of marketing and he has made the effort to write content and made himself avialable to be interviewed but I do not believe that is not something that other smart developers couldn't do.
I would reiterate the points Jaime Zawinski made that usability and inclusiveness make the difference. As a counter example I would point to Cinepaint. Robin Rowe does an excellent job of publicising Cinepaint but although provides a much needed tool to a niche audience it does not seem likely to displace the Gimp in the way Inkscape seems to have displaced Sodipodi. Perhaps they a greater focus on usability is what makes the difference but it might be an unfair comparision as it is harder to change the direction of a long running project with as much momentum as the gimp.
Although Lauris felt that Inkscape has hurt his chances of doing commercial developement on Sodipodi I seriously hope they can develop a plug-in interface and encourage third party commercial development and give that opportunity back to him.

Small town Dublin
Yesterday I bumped into Beibhinn O'Connor who I hadn't seen in a long time since she finished University. I was relieved that I was able to immediately remember her name, something I am not usually so lucky about. She is studying for Blackhall place (to become a Solicitor) and coincidentally she will also be doing jury duty next week, same as I am. The strangest part of the conversation though had to be that a normal person like her had read this journal. While I am glad that some people occassionally read this it left me without much to say and the conversation didn't last but with any luck I will bump into her sometime next week during jury duty.

Tomorrow I have a phone interview for Technical Support work at Dell and I am hoping the hardware questions will not be too detailed as my interests have always been more on the side of software, design, and usability. It would be nice to be gainfully employed and to start reducing the debt from my student loans, especially with the Christmas season only weeks away.

Red Hat: Fedora Core 3
After a few false starts I properly upgraded my home machine to Fedora Core 3. Years ago when I first partitioned the machine 4GB seemed like a lot of space, more than enough to install a very full version of Red Hat. This time round I was informed that I didn't have enough space to upgrade which forced me to instead clear everything out do a clean install but still I was told I didn't have enough space. This was particularly annoying because of how long the system took to tell this and because I didn't have the option to go back and change my settings and was forced to start again from scratch.
Typically right after upgrading I read about a great big improvement that I will have wait for until the next the next version of Fedora.
Ooh, pretty diagrams charting the start-up process of Fedora Core 3, before optimisation and after optimisation.