7 Jun 2002 kai   » (Journeyer)

KaiView

I'm not likely to work much on KaiView in the near future. It just has too many loose ends: the drawing model is not well-supported, yet, the TOM community is very small (very unfortunate), the model-view seperation needs a lot of design work which rather bores me at this point, and there are many issues I haven't even touched yet. In the meantime I'm writing some C code - today I wrote some basic image manipulation code which is supposed to become my learning ground for assembler programming (maybe). I'm also very happy with the select loop I wrote lately. Together with an idea from the TOM library select loop it's going to be pretty good, I think.

Fashion and the 90s

In the late eighties/early ninetees (when Al Gore was just about to discover/invent the information super highway) we saw a short period with exceptionally many examples of good design (industrial design, magazine typography, fashion, user interfaces, ...), of taste, of style! Why is it that the era impressed me so much, while I think the time that followed was a big dissapointment? I can't quite grasp what it was that I feel was so superior. Is it a personal thing, closer related to my own life then to the world at large ? Or could it be the rate of change increasing, technical advancements, NeXT, Bill Clinton replacing Bush, the web starting to become commonplace ? It almost felt like a renaissance, as if design could reach a new plateau, combining the knowledge of classic artists and architects with contemporary advancements in materials and production technologies. And then it stopped. Before the hill top was reached, so we could see what's beyond, it just stopped. Style went away. SGI produced the O2 case (and other companies featured other egg-shaped unnecessities), magazines where drunk by possibilities, color, craze of geometric shapes! Fashion without style reigned...

What comes next ?

To me, it's not quite clear what we're up to. Retro, then OS X, a Chrysler that looks like my great grandpa could have owned one - is there any direction I don't see, yet? Sure, diversity is a good thing, but just as the 90s where driven by joking about the 80s, there is a lot of 90s-bashing going on, too. "Old fashioned", "out of style" they're saying ... so what's next ?

Doing nothing

It's been a long time since doing nothing has felt so good! Watching the birds against the summer sky, smelling the scents of barbecue, distant noises from the streets. It's so beautiful!

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!