Older blog entries for ted (starting at number 3)

As hurricane Ike is coming closer to my house than I'd like, I've been watching the predicted path maps on the National Weather Service's homepage. What bugs me is that there are straight lines between all the points. How silly is that? Nature never moves in straight lines, so I had to make my own map.

What I did was take the map and then place a path over it using the spiro splines live path effect in Inkscape. Spiro splines are amazingly natural, and so I figured they'd work very well here also. I like the results, and it seems just from looking at it, to make more sense as a path for the hurricane. Perhaps they should use Inkscape at the National Weather Center?

It's said that in real estate the most important thing is the location, and that's also true when thinking of screen real estate. How big something is and where it's located is tied closely to how useful it is.

The point is accentuated when it comes to the corners of the screen. These four precious areas are very easy to mouse to, making them very quick for oft used items. In the current Ubuntu default desktop we've chosen to give the upper right hand corner to bringing up the logout/power dialog. While this is a good use, I think we can do better.

One of the problems with that solution is that we're using a whole corner for basically only one function. While it's an important function (turns out the center of the Earth isn't oil) it would be nice if we could put more functionality into that location.

The functionality that we're looking at putting into that corner is managing your IM status. Almost every user I see today is using some form of messaging client. If we look to optimize the interactions with instant messaging we're likely to see productivity gains for large numbers of users.

The other piece of functionality that we'd like to put on the same menu is fast user switching. This is a very handy function, but it is directly related to logging in and logging out. In many ways it is similar to "Pause session."

All in all, the better use we can make of our corners, the more efficient we make our users. If we have users that are 100 times more productive, even if we only have 5% of users, we can rule the world!

This update may or may not make users 100 times more productive, it hasn't been tested so it might, we just don't know. Remember, numbers never lie.

I gave my talk about Ubuntu Desktop Technologies at OSCON, and the slides are all online. You can get the source here or follow the pretty picture bellow to get to the binaries:

Overall the talk was well received. Many people liked the slides especially, and I loved being able to say that they were both done and Inkscape, and use features that Illustrator doesn't support.

A comment that Miguel made is that I should have called it "GNOME Desktop Technologies" instead of "Ubuntu Desktop Technologies." He followed that with "perhaps I should only talk about Mono on SuSE." While it makes me laugh to think how many people would be happy with him doing that, he does make a good point. There are a few reasons that I titled the talk the way that I did:

• One of the technologies that I highlighted is Telepathy which isn't yet a GNOME technology. I hope that it will be soon, but it currently isn't.
• I also talked about DBus which is more of a GNOME dependency rather than a GNOME technology.
• The number of people that come up to me, want to help with Ubuntu and are surprised when I mention they could work on GNOME. No seriously.
• The talk was originally scheduled for Ubuntu Live, and then migrated to OSCON.

The third point there always befuddles me. But I'm learning to deal with it. Since the talk was targeted to new users and developers, I wanted to draw as many of them as I possibly could. Using the "Ubuntu" name seems to do that better than the "GNOME" name today, for better or worse. A new contributor is a good thing no matter what project name draws them in. As Ubuntu, we need to always ensure that we continue to inform people of our roots even though they seem plainly obvious to us.

When I saw Robert's interesting and fun Bazaar search plug-in I had a few thoughts:

Wow, that's cool!

It would sure be awesome if I could say that I've written as many Bazaar plugins as Robert this month.

That sounds like work.

Perhaps I can do this with, like, 6 lines of Python.

I've now written a plug-in to provide desktop power management support to Bazaar. You can install it like this:

mkdir -p ~/.bazaar/plugins
bzr branch lp:~ted-gould/+junk/bazaar-power-management ~/.bazaar/plugins/power_management

This hack-ish plug-in uses the initialization of the plug-in to call the DBus interface for power management to inhibit the power manager. It then relies on the fact that the power manager will drop an inhibit request from a client that disconnects from the bus which happens when the process exits. Both are relatively unsupported, and mostly undocumented ways to use the systems, but it works.

Why would you need something like this? Well if your trying to create a repository from a really slow SVN server which takes longer than the sleep timeout of your laptop (not that I've done this) you can end up really wishing your laptop hadn't gone to sleep. Yes, things restart, and you don't loose everything, but you'd really rather your laptop was awake the whole time. With this plug-in your laptop won't go to sleep while Bazaar is running.

The only thing left to consider is: What is Robert going to do to retaliate? 7 lines of Python?