Older blog entries for AlanHorkan (starting at number 205)

Doctor Who
Anyone else who saw Doctor Who on Saturday might be interested to check out the UNIT website. Password? ;)
I'm so looking forward to the return of the Daleks, which was today mentioned on Slashdot.

The Conspiracy Theory website Who is Doctor Who may also be of interest.
Geocomtex the company founded by Mr Henry Van Statten also has a highly informative website. The company is described as follows

We make the best computers in the world and provide the best internet access. Our computers never break down, our internet access is swift. We never crash, lose an important document, or go "bing" 98% through downloading an important file.

The funny thing is it is immediately followed by the disclaimer Obviously we are completely fictional. Microsoft has domintated for so long people can hardly imagine computer that works properly anymore, how could that possibly be realistic.

Gthumb: Infrequently Asked Question
When I read that gThumb was based on GQView I didn't believe it. Aside from it being a pretty poor description of gThumb I had never heard of this alleged connection before. The two programs have always looked distinctly different and had different behaviours. Only when Paolo Bacchilega himself informed me that he had started with GQView as a base for gThumband gradually rewritten it did I start to believe it and I was still a little surprised.
If gThumb was cross platform (including Windows) I think it would make an excellent addition to any Free Desktop or Gnome Graphics Suite

Glade for Windows
Although I did notice the initial announcements of Glade being ported to windows I didn't think to go looking for updates on a seperate site and was pleased to see that there was a windows version of Glade 2. It may not be intentional but the GIMP, Glade, and Dia all give the impression that their windows port is like some sort of unwanted bastard child, relegating them to seperate sites rather than presenting a united front and encouring people to move away from proprietary software. (Dia is already looking for someone to help update and maintain their website which should provides a good opportuntity to improve the situation if I can find the time to help. The TODO file for Glade 3 includes Windows port in their plans so it seems likely that it will be better presented if there is ever a release of Glade3.)
To me cross platform software is a good indication of the vitality of a project. It takes a significant user and developer base for it to be worth porting a program to another platform and maintaining it. Open source is not enough. I know I am never going to have the time and expertise to maintain half of the software I would like to use of the vendor stops supporting it, but the availability of source code does at least increase the chances of someone else continuing the development.
Some might ask, why would I want Glade for windows anyway? Even if I have a limited choice of Operating System I appreciate still being able to choose Open Source software. Cutting and pasting screenshots works up to a point but Glade provides a relatively convenient way to create mockups of graphical user interfaces. In many cases I want to recreate a layout similar to something I have seen in a Windows program and running Glade on windows makes it easy to to create a mockup while at the same time running the application I am trying to recreate.
Now if only Glade provided a way to automatically batch generate sets of screenshots from glade files I'd be sorted!

Films so bad you'd only watch 'em on Telly Vision
Watched some of "American Psycho 2: All American Girl" featuring Mila Kunis from That 70s Show. Frankly it was awful, although I was amused to see William Shatner doing something other than Captain Kirk. Mila Kunis should stick to comedy. I would have been more forgiving if they had gone with a different title instead of trying shamelessly to cash in on far superior American Psycho. This film abjectly fails to recreate the atmosphere and malevolence of American Psycho.

Tool of Globalisation
While researchng for background information on what tools Sun Microsystems use for Globalisation work and looking for scraps of information I read through a few employee online journals and a comment about the mutilation of words reminded me of my previous comments on bad writing. As for the Globalisation tools I was interested to learn about XLIFF when I look at XLIFF I cannot help thinking of the XML Strings format Abiword has been using for years.

Temptation
I almost gave in to temptation and resubscribed myself to various Gnome mailing lists but I resisted the temptation and my incoming mail has slowed to just a trickle. I do not claim to be an expert (although anyone who claims to be is asking for trouble) and I would like to believe I provide some worthwhile insight but I know there are many capable people who will express similar opinions and provide their own insight. Hopefully I can avoid other distractions and motivate myself to study for my exams. I mean what is the worst that could possibly happen to Gnome in just a few months while I'm not watching?!

Helper Monkey
Monkey, Monkey, Monkey. Helper Monkey is a great name for a band and my friend Kevin Moroney is in a band by that name and I'm off to see them play. When they were getting started they didn't have a drummer and only had a drum machine which inspired the name Helper Monkey. The band was pretty good as far as I can tell (and I know I'm more than a little biased) but I'd be surprised if they won the overall competition. The competition consisted of roughly eight bands competing to be the opening act for the Trinity Ball, a hugh private concert held in Trinity College Dublin most years.

Meme: Old Sayings, with twist
Many hands make light work, but too many cooks spoil the broth.
Optimist: Every cloud has a silver lining. Pessimist: Every silver lining has a cloud.
Winners never quit and quitters never win and losers don't know when to quit.
Beauty is only skin deep but ugly is to the bone.
The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

Adobe and Macromedia
As if Adobe didn't already dominate the Graphic Design field now they are going take over Macromedia their biggest competitor. Even though this new Adobe will be a powerhouse the threat from Microsoft remains. I am still wondering what will happen with Microsoft Expression and this merger might prompt the 100lb Gorilla to flex its muscles and make a move.
This will very likely spell the end of Macromedia Freehand and Fireworks as Adobe already has Illustrator for vector graphics and Photoshop for raster graphics respectively. Unless Adobe surprises everyone and finds a sneaky way to maintain both product lines and maintain the illusion of choice and crowd out any other competitors (Where are you Corel and what are you doing with Paint Shop Pro?). From what I've read Fireworks is much more web oriented and probably best compared to Adobe Image Ready. Incidentally the Fireworks file format uses an extended version of PNG if anyone is interested in reverse engineering it and providing compatibility for open source applications. Inkscape would do well to learn from Freehand and be ready to attract new users if Adobe fails to satisfy their needs. This consolidation goes to show the importance of an integrated product line and I hope it will be one more factor to spur on the developement of a Free Desktop Graphics Suite.

The Register on the Adobe Macromedia take over and the implications of the "bad news".
Slashdot on Adobe Buys Macromedia
And finally, a more humourous take on the Macromedia merger

Movies: Sahara
The reviewers weren't just being lazy when they called it a poor mans Indiana Jones. The characters were pretty shallow, adventurer, side-kick and doctor/love interest. Indiana Jones never needed a smart alec side kick and when you have Nazis as villians you can get away without needing to explain too much. Penelope Cruz looks beautiful in her remarkably ordinary way (I know that sounds like a contradiction but I think it makes sense) and if Matthew McConaughey was even half as cool as he thinks he is he might have been able to carry it off and this might have been a much better movie. I mean "Dirk Pitt" are you serious? The title Sahara is seriously over the top and doesn't really suit the film. For an adaptation of a book (of the same name) I had hoped it might have more depth, I suppose the relationship between the McConaughey and his sidekick Steve Zahn was fairly solid and convincing (and isn't Zahn the German word for cream? What's that all about?). Villians are often more interesting than the heros and I quite liked how one of the baddies wanted to believe he wasn't a bad guy and it was not really his fault despite his wilfull neglect and trampling over other in his search of profit. I say one of the baddies because their are quite a few of them, an industrialist, a general and hooded assassin who appears briefly but is never explained.
Now that I've done might best to puncture any expectations you might have you might be able to enjoy this film for what it is. If you are looking for a middle of the road inoffensive action movie this might be for you. It would certainly be worth watching on television but unless you a fan of McCaunaughey or Cruz you might feel a bit cheated if you laid down your hard earned cash to see this.

Abiword: Gnome Office
Talk of OpenOffice.org versus Gnome Office makes me feel queasy. I do not think it is productive to consider the situation in terms of one against the other. It is worthwhile to think where exactly Gnome Office fits in and how can we encourage distributions to include Gnome Office applications. Even without getting into component APIs like Bonobo or UNO the work done with GtkMathView will give people all kinds of ideas when the next major release of Abiword happens.
Competing head to head with OpenOffice.org doesn't make sense. I think most of people will want to install OpenOffice.org for the occassional PowerPoint presentations they receive (the PDF export and the OpenOffice.org Draw program and the masses of features in OpenOffice.org don't hurt either). Rather than competing directly it is more productive to fill a niche and give users a reason to install Abiword as well as OpenOffice.org. I have mentioned before the idea expanding in other directions like using Abiword for quick text editing and using Abiword on Handheld devices making a version of Abiword more suitable for Handheld devices as well as I often do using Gedit. Although the original notions of a full Abi Suite is never going to happen there are a few things that could be done to bring the idea of AbiShow closer to reality. Abiword has been used successfully to put on Presentations, by using the right size of page, full screen mode and Ctrl+Page Down to move a whole page at a time the abiword developers have been able to use about to give presentations about Abiword. The improvements to support for Text Frames will certainly help but there are a more things that could be improved for those who want to use Abiword for presentations. Being able to roundtrip SVG and a good example Template would probably help. A Viewer or Presentation mode that skips to the next page on click or keypress wouldn't hurt either but a specially tweaked version of the XHTML exporter could probably be just as effective.
Oh, and don't forget that Abiword can be embedded in Evolution. I would have thought the ability to preview Microsoft Word Documents inline in the Evolution email cleint would nearly be enough to keep abiword in most distributions but it goes to show the effectiveness of bundling applications together as suite. Microsoft proved this long before OpenOffice.org came to dominate the mindshare of Open Source. The sheer intertia of an Application Suite is so massive that individual applications like Abiword and Gnumeric need to work exteremly hard to carve out a niche for themselves. Developement continues...

Other comments: Nicu Buculei comments on the Office Suite dilemma.

Putting the Action in Satisfaction
File Roller accepted my patch and now it makes better use of GTK_STOCK which should make things a little easier for translators (along with my similar patch to gcalctool) and it feels good. Most work leaves with little more than a sense of relief when it is over. This small but important task was satisfying because I made the extra effort to figure out how to fix the problem (with thanks to Jody Goldberg) and put in the work to produce and test the code and get it accepted. To an experienced developer the act of creating a patch and it being accepted may not seem like much but it has taken a long time to reach the point where I had all the dominos lined up so that I could knock them all down in one smooth almost seemless action.

Truth is stranger than fiction
A Wholpin, part whale, part dolphin, and a Liger, part lion, part tiger (damn, misplaced the link with a good picture that I wanted this one from gawker will have to do). Hope it isn't a hoax, sounds resonably plausible. Wikipedia has an entry about the Liger too.
I also saw a robot walking down Grafton Street today, it was really convincing looking. It looked a lot like the ABC Warrior Robots out of Judge Dredd only shiney and metallic grey. I guess there must be some magician or putting on a big performance in town.

Here's one I made earlier
Doctor Who continues to entertain and amuse, but the latest was a two part episode and left me hanging. The preview at the end of last weeks episode showed an Alien spaceship crash landing in London but they managed not to spoil it by giving too much away. Hopefully the show will continue to get it right and keep it fresh and interesting. So far so good.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who enjoys the new doctor who.

(Whoops, lopped off half this post while making a small update but managed to recover it before it was too late.)

Games, Art, and Standards
Having reading an article on de facto standards (or informal standards) and still thinking about my Lbreakout2 level sets and while looking at a Sokoban game it occured to me that the Tile based levels used by so many games could quite easily be represented in X11 Pixmap Format. Most games prefer to use a text based file format to make it easier to edit things without any specialised tools and the X11 Pixmap format is one of the few text based image formats. Using a popular existing graphics standard game developers could make use of a much wider variety of existing tools and it would have other benefits like allowing the easy generation of thumbnail size previews to show the what the levels look like at a glance. As an example, I drew Minesweeper level in XPM format.
In a similar vein I have long wished I had the time and skill to take the dia.shape format and reorganise it to use SVG with some custom markup (instead of custom XML with embedded SVG) as this would make it easier to reuse SVG tools for generating Dia shapes and it would also mean that librsvg could generate thumbnail previews of Dia shapes for us in Nautilus, the Gnome File Manager program.

Garden State
Finally released here in Ireland about a week ago, a big group of the tramps[1] all went to see Garden State. With any luck the rollout of digital cinema in Ireland will mean in future there will not be any more waiting months and months for for sloppy seconds when films eventually finish their run in the U.K. and the prints can be shipped over. The wait for House of Flying Daggers was so painfully long I was tempted to borrow it from a friend who had bought it while in Asia and not bother seeing it in the cinema at all. Despite this kind of messing hordes Irish people still go the cinema regularly.
The film itself has an interesting timeless quality to it. I don't that in a grandiose way but rather that it doesn't seem very heavily anchored to a particular time or location despite the title being an allusion to New Jersey. The film didn't particularly grab my attention or excite me, the amount of reviews and publicity material I had seen probably didn't help. Dealing with a state of numbness and feeling of emptyness and trying to find ones place in life makes for an interesting but not very uplifting story. Even seeing Natalie Portman in her underwear didn't help. There were some funny moments, although some of them like the petrol pump gag seemed very incongruous[2]. The film was likable enough and I simple interesting story but I my expectations were too high and I was underwhelmed. Zach Braff and Natalie Portman played their parts convincingly and they did keep me moderately entertained for a couple for a couple of hours. All in all a fairly average experience.
I wish I'd written a script where I would get to kiss Natalie Portman. :)

[1] Not real tramps of the hobo variety, but what we call the trampolining club for short.
[2] It feels like bad pretentious writing to use words like incongruous when I could just as easily say out of place. And even using the word protentious probably makes me sound even more full of my self. Hopefully someday I'll look back at this and marvel at my apalling lack of writing style and laugh (or go back and change it before anyone notices).

Doctor Who
I am was never a huge fan of Doctor Who and was fairly ambivalent to the new series, and forgot to watch the first episode of the new series. The prospect of former pop-singer Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston (who I vaguely recall from Shallow Grave and other bits and pieces) and memories of how cheap and tacky looking it used to be didn't fill me with much hope of it being any good. As a fan of all kinds of science fiction I have occasionally watched episodes of Doctor Who but not many that did not feature the Daleks. I distinctly remember watching an episode explaining the creation of the classic sci-fi villians the Dalek by the evil scientist Davros.
On April 2nd while busy finishing off some work at the computer and in hurry to go out to dinner for my birthday, I watched the second episode playing in the background. From the first beat of the distinctive Doctor Who theme tune I was immediately filled with optimism and was more than a little distracted from my work and delayed quite a bit. I was suprised by quite how funny the new Doctor was and enjoyed the clever writing which included humour and pop-culture references. One of the jokes involved a historical artifact the characters mistakenly believed was called an iPod, and they went on to play a well known pop song but it is described as a traditional ballad. Blink and you'd miss it but Rose (Billie Piper) compares Cassandra - a gender confused character with a plastic surgery problem - to Michael Jackson, and in response Cassandra recommends plastic surgery to Rose as she "has a bit of a chin". Okay so maybe trying to explain the jokes isn't such a good idea but watch it yourself and you might find it surpisingly amusing.
It is not often you see Welsh people in Science-Fiction but Doctor Who is made by BBC Wales and the third espisode is set in Cardiff and makes a few jokes about it, but Welsh people are nice so I don't expect they'll mind.
Fourty Five minutes of Science Fiction unintterupted by advertisements, good writing, a bit of humour and Billie Piper is easy on the eyes. Basically I think the new series of Doctor Who is great fun and I will be making more of an effort to watch the rest of the series.
Unlike most other channels the BBC doesn't show a lot of repeats, so only yesterday did I finally get to see the first episode and I was very grateful when a friend generously lent me a copy. I expect the legendary Doctor Who theme tune will be stuck in my head for weeks.

MIDI Technolgy still live and kicking
At the moment I am studying (revising and learing a few new details) MIDI so I have an excuse to play around with the Sound Editor Audacity. The lecturer was at great pains to explain to us and make it distinctly clear that MIDI is not a sound but a set of instructions that can be used to make sounds. What particularly interested me was how MIDI was a cheap and useful technology that became extremely popular and continues to be sucessful and that MIDI was uses for other purposes the designers never unexpected, controlling more than just musical instruments but also devices such as such stage lighting and special effects.

Give some people an inch and they'll think they're a Ruler
My suggestion to turn rulers off by default in the GNU Image Manipulation Program was declined. Many programs with the Rulers and Guides functionality like Inkscape and Adobe Photoshop (and I informally surveyed a few others) have their Rulers off by default which I think gives a better first impression as it makes for a cleaner layout and a better use of space, although the downside is that it makes the Rulers and Guides functionality a little more difficult to discover. It was my opinion that Rulers are not frequently used and that the trade off was worth making but others did not agree. I made the suggestion and they considered the idea which was all I let myself hope for. Oh well, it was worth a try.

If you liked the game Marble Madness (and you like cross platform software) then I encourage you to give Track Balls a try. Track Balls Screenshots

Today I was interested to learn that Trinity offers a degree in Deaf Studies and Sign Language.

The %s link is to test a %s theory I have about Mozilla and Google. If it works I might explain it later.

Gnome in a Matchbox
This week I was commenting on Matchbox, GPE and Abiword on Handhelds this week and now Miguel is copying me! Maybe not but it is cool to see GPE getting more attention and my posts in abiword bugzilla may have generated some interest. Matchbox is great and memorable name, and I'm tempted to ignore the nasty GPE acronym and simply refer to it as Matchbox Gnome instead. I do not have any special hardware so Matchbox Gnome is much more accurate description of what I am running anyway. I took some GPE screenshots of my own, mostly to show off the great work that was done to make Gnome Games scalable and to show how great Gnome Games on Handhelds could be:
Gnome Mine sweeper
Five or more
Blackjack
Aislriot Klondike
Connect Four, red wins
Gnome Klotski
Mahjongg
...

I was also pleased to see how well the Gnome CD Player rescaled to fit the 320x240 display.
I mentioned it before in my comments about using Abiword as a Text Editor and I am still underwhelmed by Abiword Normal View but it is not going to get fixed until I can make time to provide a clear specification of how I believe it should behave.

(I accidentally posted the same comments twice. Rather than remove it completely and leave a blank entry I split out these comments about Handhelds and Gnome Games into a seperate entry and added a few more little bits and pieces.)

Planet Clipart
It is a big compliment to have been added to Planet OpenClipArt.org which I guess means I will need to occasionally write about Clipart, Inkscape and maybe even other like the GNU Image Manipulation program and Scribus. I guess I should also take it as encouragement to contribute more Clipart.
After seeing the work of Juice Drops I have some ideas about SVG Desktop Wallpapers but my first attempt needs more work.

Spring Cleaning
Cleared out lots of bits and pieces. A set of Keyboard accelerators (key shortcuts) for GQView, these GQView shortcuts are very roughly following the style of the Gnome Guidelines (HIG). Alleyway (Arknoid) is the generic name for all those "bat breaks blocks" games one of which is LBreakout2. I created a handful of LBreakout2 levels some with a Space Invaders theme, others with a flag theme including one called Guy Fawkes.

Ubuntu: Hoary Hedgehog Live CD
Great name, even if good writing style recommends writers to always avoid alliteration it can be occasionally amusing. I could tell you all the things I like about Ubuntu and Gnome but I am not going to. This mini-review may seem harsh. Every distribution should offer a Live CD it is a great way to try out the latest software.
It could be my imagination but this time the Ubuntu Live CD seemed slower than the previous Warty Warthog version. Hardware detection has improved and I didn't need to choose fall back mode, which until now was something only Knoppix did properly for me.
Having panels at the top and bottom of the screen doesn't work for me. If Fullscreen was ubiquitous in Gnome and I could put menus right against the top edge of the screen it might help (and satisfy others interested in Fitts Law).
Although I've already known about it for months, when I started the GNU Image Manipulation program I was overjoyed not to see the painfully unnecessary Setup Assisant. I seriously hope other distributions will follow their lead and the developers will eventually get the message. There are more start-up speed improvements that could be achieved without requiring masses of programming work, the most obvious of which is to use --no-data option at something no Live CD distribution should be without. I also think some plugin detection could be shifted to compile time instead of first runtime.
Ubuntu does not include Abiword. I know I am extremely biased but it would be a significant improvement to the Ubuntu Live CD. I was disappointed that Ubuntu failed to play the various video files I threw at it. Even though Ubuntu is serious about free software I still expected more. Unlike Knoppix the Ubuntu Live CD does not mount my Windows Partitions for reading.
The Ubuntu Desktop is remarkably empty, uncluttered by some of the rubbish other distributions see fit to put on the desktop. They leave it up to the user to make use of the Desktop which is fairly good idea, however that doesn't make much sense in the case of the Live CD. Matchbox Gnome uses the desktop if you can call it that, to provide links to all the applications effectively provding an alternative interface to the main menu and I like it so much I think it would be a concept worth exploring for other Live CDs like Ubuntu.
I have moved my response to enduring Ubuntu to Livejournal in case anyone might have any comments.

Quick Comments, Canned Comments, Cliche Responses
Open Source consolidation is good thing. Rose bushes need to be pruned if you want the to grow properly. Some of the Licenses the Open Source Initiative accepted in the past were an insulting joke. The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from. There's nothing new under the sun.
The TV series the OC is the Beverly Hills 90210 of a generation and will age just as badly, probably even worse. That is not to say it isn't entertaining. Mischa Barton, Olivia Wilde, mmmmm :). Point Pleasant might surprise me and last more than two or three seasons. Smallville is an _awful_ lot like Dawsons Creek but with less psychobabble and more super powers. I suppose I should be glad it has raised itself up from the monster of the week schlock they were churning out to begin with and it does reward past viewing by building on old episodes.
Channel 4 has a new cartoon called Quads by John Callahan (who is wheelchair bound himself). It tries hard to be offensive but isn't very funny. South Park continues to surprise me make me laugh hard so I wont be going out of my way to watch Quads.
Honestly, I really am trying to watch less television. (I still haven't even commented about Doctor Who yet.)
Audition makes Fatal Attraction look like a Disney movie. The Japanese sure know how to make horror movies.