Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 71)

Your desktop is a mess, please bug the developers to do something useful with it

Your desktop is a ghetto. It is a wasted and unloved space. It looks like the your average inner city, run down with garbage everywhere.

Why am I making this bold prediction? Because I have watched Average People (TM) use the GNOME desktop. Their desktops are either in one of two states: So clean you could eat off of or a random collection of files and folders. Either way, not very useful.

So how do we redevelop this slum of your computer? I think SymphonyOS has some interesting ideas. Rather than using the desktop to store stuff, why not use it display information? It is doing the former very badly anyway.

Anyway, you can go back to making your desktop a mess. I know I will.

Gervase, I will agree with you completely. As far as I can tell from the Ubuntu side, we really only gained one contributor, the excellent Manu Cornet. We also had similar issues with people not being part of the community and thus not really joining it during or after. However, I would add the following suggestions:

1. Code should be developed in a public source repository
2. Projects should post a clear page with who is working on what, and what the status is
3. SoCer's should post status reports regularly (ie, more than just once or twice)

I should note that I was not involved with the planning or execution of any of the Google SoC stuff here at Ubuntu, this is merely an outsiders view. I should also note that Google is not really at fault here. One of the problems that I think Ubuntu ran into was simply that all the development team was too busy to effectively tutor the SoC people. Again, that is just an outsiders view. I could be completely wrong.

However, I don't think there is anything systemic wrong with Google SoC that is not fixable this time around.

Saddened

We in the Free and Open Source software community spend a great deal of time talking about free codecs and supporting those codecs, at least in words. So why on Planet Gnome do I see three different examples of people demoing cool new things with non-free codecs/tools?

Update: Make that four

Apparently my blog post from July, about the consoles and bugs is called "Ubuntu 's Haiku" on a French forum. I feel so wise.

For those who care about not crashing the aircraft they are on

Heed those warnings and don't run your electronics in the plane. Transport Canada has documented cases of pocket calculators screwing up electronics (primarily navigation and communication equipment), or at least so says my brother, the pilot. Also, as he says "I can't cite, but I believe that the bandwidth that GPS operates in is also very, very susceptible to interference. GPS signals are also very low-powered; GPS antenna are correspondingly sensitive..."

Martin, hope that answers your question.

(Sorry, couldn't resist the title)

God Bless Canada?

Please no Mr Harper.

And when you go the polls (Canadian only)

Well, it seems another election is upon us in Canada. As I rarely talk about my political views, I guess I should preface by saying this by saying that this will be the only post about those views this year (unless we have another election).

As a self described small-L liberal, I am tormented by this election. The possibly election of the Conservatives and their leader, Stephen Harper, scares me s**tless. Advances in such things as abortion and same-sex marriage might not be and despite the antics of a certain Liberal candidate, I don't think the Conservatives are going to be any better on copyright. Couple that with a little Liberal arrogance and few scandals and I candidate, Keith Martin of the Liberals, whom I like, I just don't know where to vote. NDP is where I would vote in a perfect world, but should I vote Liberal to keep the Conservatives out?

But hey, at least I am going to vote. Are you?

A great fora of numbers

For sometime I have watching how the numbers of people in our forums stack up against other distros. While no number should ever be taken in isolation, together they can probably yield a pretty good idea of how big the community is around each distro.

First I took the top ten or so distros on Distrowatch. I discarded Suse, Slackware and Debian as they did not have alarge centralized forum. Of those that were left, Mandriva, Mepis, Damn Small, Knoppix and Xandros had smaller forums, by any count. This left Gentoo and Fedora.

Gentoo has by far the largest forum of any distro, but this might be due to a large number of users/developers being of the forum culture (as opposed to the mailing list culture that is Ubuntu and Debian).

Fedora and Ubuntu forums stack up pretty much equally when you look at all numbers except one. Fedora typically has about 6 times the number of currently active users as the Ubuntu forums, with the vast majority of those being guests. Very odd. A better statistician that myself will have to explain that.

More on Flash

Zack says "Not having an open library fully implementing SWF is not a problem." After that rather bizarre statment, he then says some really really smart things about competing and good UIs.

Why is that statement bizarre? Because having a free flash player is not really about competing, which is the gist of the rest of his statement. It is about caring about your users and their freedom. That is why we are here, after all, right?

Gnash != GPLFlash

It seems that FSF released a free flash player today. However, this means we now have three free flash implementations: SWFdec (LGPL), GPLflash and this new Gnash.

Bah.