[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] 17 Feb 2005 (updated 17 Feb 2005 at 14:04 UTC) »
Will people never learn?
Twice in the past two days, people have proposed using the wiki for art competitions (splash and theme) for GNOME 2.10.
Please don't use a wiki for an art competition. It doesn't handle concurrency (at least moinmoin doesn't), and it will die under heavy load. If the art contest gets slashdotted (and art contests, because the LCD can easily participate, tend to get slashdotted), you can kiss goodbye to the wiki for a couple of days, and you risk losing some good submissions lost simply because they got over-written.
The GIMP splash contest started out there, and I think that the GNOME sysadmin team will testify that that was an absolute and unmitigated disaster.
We moved to a CGI based solution on the GIMP web server pretty quickly (which yosh, Helvetix and carol had put in place, but which had been disabled around the time the website changed). This guaranteed that static pages were going to keep getting served, art submissions weren't going to get lost, and when traffic died down, there would be no problems. Sure, some of those CGI requests failed when we were under slashdot load, but the webserver kept on ticking along.
That code is in the gimp-web CVS module, in the programmatic /contest directory, if anyone is interested.
Update Jeff - OK, whatever you think. I suspect that people will attach stuff inline anyway, and possibly that external material will change during the contest. Having data locally has lots of advantages, and having it remotely opens up a couple of cans of worms. But I guess it could work.
I found an inspirational story by someone who migrated their grandmother from her old Mac to a new GNU/Linux based system. This should be required reading for anyone who is hoping to expose newbies to the joys of Linux.
15 Feb 2005 (updated 21 Feb 2005 at 16:03 UTC) »
Beginners are, by necessity, task-oriented. It is very hard for us techies to understand beginners, not because we know the stuff well, but because we're professional learners who have evolved a highly efficient personal learning methodology without even thinking about it. Our tendency is to present facts and examples. We structure information the way we would like it, not the way the user needs it.
In the interests of letting people know as quickly as possible the status of their GUADEC papers, I sent out the first round of mails letting people know that their papers weren't accepted. It's a really hard thing to do, because some of the people in that list had topics I would have loved to see.
By way of explanation, this year we have tried to avoid talks which present latest developments/features in a program. Talks were selected if they had one of two characteristics - either they were intended to show off how cool GNOME is to new or casual GNOME users, or they are intended to be "important" sources of brainstorming on the strategic direction of GNOME.
This is in line with the philosophy I talked about a couple of months ago. We want GUADEC to be jaw-dropping in the coolness of stuff presented, and really inclusive, with lots of hands-on experimenting, tutorials, BOFs. But we also want it to be thought-provoking and productive for hardcore developers, who have different needs. We want to have a conference that is a facilitator on all levels, and it's a hard thing to do. But we're doing our best.
Several people have contacted me and the guadec-papers list over the last week a little worried because the due date for written papers is coming up (1 March), and we still haven't told people whether they have been accepted or not.
Because of an unforeseen delay (which we are working hard to resolve), we will not be able to tell people for sure that they are accepted until the end of next week. So we have decided to extend the deadline for submission of papers to March 15th to give people just under 4 weeks to submit papers after being notified.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
On a side note, the quality of presentations we have received this year is excellent, and due to space constraints, we have had to be hard on a great number of high quality presentations. This year's GUADEC should have the highest quality of talks of any so far. We have reduced the number of parallel streams, to have even more time and space for the stuff people really expect from GUADEC - fun, and in-person brainstorming and team building. But we also have a good mix of presentations and tutorials for GNOME newbies, to get people loving GNOME even more, and even faster. It's going to rock.
I had previously searched for and found such a plug-in, but it had been a couple of years, so I went on a quick web search to see if I could find the one I remembered.
I uncovered this massive community of people interested in stitching tools, with a very active mailing list and several applications (some GIMP plug-ins too) - I must admit I was surprised, since I had never heard of most of these applications before.
Here are the results of that "quick" search, for posterity.
The ptx mailing list has about 100 mails a month, primarily from hugin developers. This is a great model for "themed" software - different packages whose functionality complements each other.
We need more rebel movies. Bring back Dean and Brando!
In other news, Jean Pierre Raffarin is trying a new tack to getting fired. I'm not against allowing people to have longer working weeks, but I'm in the minority.
That's because the way things currently work in France is that you have the same working week as everywhere else (40 to 50 hours), and you get 10 to 20 extra holiday days per year. Last year I had 40 days holidays, this year (because I changed jobs) that'll be down to about 15 (10 days RTT and 5 days holidays).
The French have this weird system where you have to earn your holidays in one year, and take them the year after. Then when you quit you are paid for all of the holidays you earned, but didn't have the right to take yet.
On a thread on marketing-list last week, a point was made that right now there are too many avenues of communication into the GNOME project. Many requests for help appear to fall on deaf ears, simply because they are never seen by the people best able to respond. With the vast number of mailing lists, websites and other resources, it can be hard to know where to turn for help.
That was part of the reason why gnomesupport.org was so successful as a help site - people could turn up to the forum, ask questions, and expect answers. One of the things which gnomesupport.org did was put up a wiki, long before live.gnome.org existed.
So as a small step towards the consolidation of points-of-entry for low-level users, I proposed to stro over at gnomesupport that we work towards migrating all of the information from the gnomesupport pages to live.gnome.org. We haven't worked out all of the details yet, but at least there is agreement that this is a good thing to do. The GNUCash developers, who didn't even know about live.gnome.org, used the gnomesupport wiki exclusively, and a first response suggests they are happy to move too.
So, it's a small step, but soon there will be only one wiki for GNOME, which is a Good Thing. Many thanks to Claus Schwarm for pointing out the gnomesupport site to me, and to stro for helping work out the details of the move.
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