Advogato blog for dobey

Senility in Tabs

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:06:07 GMT

Calum, I must agree with you.

Some of these hacks from GUADEC are a perfect shining example of why tabs can be a bad thing. Rotated text will almost always be a bad thing in a user interface. Especially in one that is translated to so many languages.

Please stop the madness of forcing such nonsense upon your users, people! It will only make things worse and harder to manage, and in the long run (or perhaps even in the short run), you will want to switch back to your pre-tabs behavior by default anyway.

Hopefully, none of the Pidgin hackers were at GUADEC and taking part in the tab histeria. I was going to try and switch to Empathy soon, but given the recent news, I think I might have to stay away from it for now. At least until Pidgin ends up in the same boat with lots of crazy tabs in the buddy list that shouldn't exist. Or maybe I should just revisit an old plan again.

Istanbul

Mon, 7 Jul 2008 16:07:54 GMT

Not Constantinople.

iPun

Sat, 5 Jul 2008 18:08:12 GMT

It's been a while since my last post, so I figured it was about time I put up another. My 60GB iPod photo is hanging on by the last thread of existence. And I've only got about 13GB of music on it. To have Apple fix it, would cost at least $250, and I can get a brand new 80GB Classic for that. So instead, I decided to get a hard disk and fix it myself for much less. Found a 20GB drive on Amazon for about $35 with shipping and everything. Still waiting for it to arrive, but should be here soon, and then I should be able to listen to all my music reliably. Currently with the bad disk, the iPod just locks hard at random, doesn't support sync, lost all my playlists, and fails to be generally useful. It runs the battery down quite fast in its current state as well.

I see Apple did release a 3G iPhone finally though. Too bad it's a year late on the scene. All the noise over the iPhone died out last summer, and I don't see everyone talking about lines down the street to get the 3G model. Maybe the overly expensive EDGE access on AT&T is fast enough. I switched to Sprint several months ago, as they came out with an unlimited everything plan, and the Mogul (built by HTC) does everything the iPhone can do, and more, got an update to enable EVDO rev. A. Plus I get a nice little discount, for being a referring travel agent.

Now if I could just get a private jabber server set up with all the transports I need to IM with everyone on my contact list, and get SSH working on my phone. Better UI would also be nice. Having to actually use a scrollbar, or the wheel, on a touchscreen phone is a bit annoying when i'm used to flicking the screen on the N800/N810.

Emblems, Tags, and Change

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:13:06 GMT

Decade of Decadent Desktops

With all this talk about change, I wonder if anyone is really getting the bigger picture. On particular thing in Andy's post about the decadence of GNOME stood out among the rest to me. His comments on input methods and the types of hardware we're using. It's not GNOME that is falling away due to some missing lack of innovation. It's the Desktop PC concept in general. Over the last 10 years, there have been leaps and bounds in terms of technology growth. The wireless internet. Camera phones. PDA and phone integration. Tablet PCs. The world is moving away from the desktop. It's really only a fitting metaphor for programmers, and data entry roles in an office, any more. And GNOME, being a desktop, doesn't fit the new methodologies. Nor do Windows Vista or Mac OS X. They might have pretty shiny panels, or 3d zoom effects, but in the end, they are still desktops. Windows Mobile is still even very similar to the desktop version of the OS. It's got a panel, start menu, and feels like you're stuck in it's convoluted world. We need to do more than just make a shiny panel, and pretty effects, to "break free from the decadence." We need to work on ways to empower the user, rather than trap them into our metaphors.

Back to Reality

One very common issue that has come up in my eyes more, as I go back into cleaning up gnome-icon-theme to remove old icons, and prepare it to be relicensed to LGPLv2.1+, is that we have a lot of useless emblems. The original idea of using emblems for metadata searching in the Eazel Nautilus was indeed a noble one, but I think they went ahead on the implementation a little too headstrong. Emblems have two distinct uses in the current implementation. You can set some as custom tags on a file or folder, and some are hidden from the user choices, and only presented to display certain properties of files or folders to the user. The former, I think, should be considered to be tags and not emblems. As tags are more specifically the same as categories, it would probably be best to pull category icons and let the user choose from them, and allow the user to set custom tag/category icons as well. As for emblems, these would be the latter type of usage, and the icon theme could provide all the necessary emblems to represent properties of files and folders. This would give us the clear separation we need, and allow the themes to be metter maintained and handled.

Currently, I am working on removing a number of these emblems as we speak. A large number of them either duplicate other emblems or categories, or they just make no sense to have, such as the "distinguished" emblem. What exactly is it distinguishing? I thought all the emblems were to be used for that.

Hi Hater

Tue, 3 Jun 2008 13:13:15 GMT

This blog is awesome. I think Alex missed the point, though.

GUADEC Travel

Thu, 22 May 2008 16:16:10 GMT

If you still haven't booked your flights and hotels for GUADEC, then now's a great time to do so, at skyhoppertravel.com.

Or if you want to just get away to the Bahamas or somewhere for the weekend, check out the Last Minute Deals. There are plenty of great deals for 3-day trips to the Bahamas, Canada, and lots of other places. Or, just sign up for the weekly deals e-mail on skyhoppertravel.com, if none of the current deals are for where you want to go.

Olympics and China Tours

Thu, 8 May 2008 19:12:16 GMT

If you were planning on going to the Summer Olympics in Beijing this year, but have not yet purchased your tickets, then be glad you waited. Turn your trip to see the Olympics into a tour of China, and save money with the whole package. Go to http://skyhoppertravel.com/china2008/ to book your tickets for a 9 day or more tore of china, including the Beijing Olympics, starting at $1499.00 departing from LAX.

Lost Ones

Sun, 4 May 2008 13:11:01 GMT

You might win some, but you really lost one
You just lost one. It's so silly how come
When it's all done, did you really gain from
What you done done. It's so silly how come
You just lost one..
You just Lost One

2 May 2008

Fri, 2 May 2008 16:12:14 GMT

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Planet Revisited

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:10:48 GMT

It looks like my previous post was picked up by ITWire, extending on the issue with several references to the Foundation list archives, about the same issue being brought up by others there. Of course, Jeff still refuses to confront the issue, this time citing the smooth operation and maintenance of Planet GNOME over the past six months. Of course, that's only his point of view. But just like Federico, I too would like to know who the "potential maintainership team" is, and just where the hell they've been for the last six months. The perpetual lack of response on actual issues is just getting ridiculous.

As an attempt to help improve the situation, I've gone ahead and created the Planet Requests page on the wiki, so that we can catalogue requests and track them more easily, rather than relying on Jeff's personal mail, which he obviously has problems replying to.

Hopefully the wiki page will gain use quickly, and we can moderate the Planet better through tracking things on the wiki. Jeff's responses kind of remind me of this:

Update: Since the planet software intentionally violates my copyright and freedom of speech by filtering content, I've had to go for the workaround to make the YouTube clip I found, show up on Planet GNOME.

Update update: Planet also strips iframe tags, as well as object. I guess hope for a sane web is lost. Good luck W3C/Firefox Evangelists. You will need it.