Older blog entries for AlanHorkan (starting at number 218)

25 May 2005 (updated 2 Jun 2005 at 16:57 UTC) »
Nokia 770: Can I run Abiword on it?

Nokia have announced a new internet tablet device. Uraues was also pleased to be able to finally announce how Nokia has been working together with Flumotion on the Gstreamer multimedia framework.
What interests me most about this latest device is the platform Nokia have built it on. Nokia have effectively released their own Gtk (not quite Gnome) Debian derived distribution called Maemo although they are more discreetly billing it as a development platform rather than their own distribution. Nokia is probably the biggest computer computer company in the world and they are known for making user friendly devices that are secure, reliable and do not crash. This could be a big boost for Linux and Gnome but Nokia needs to let the right hand know what the left hand is doing before it shoots itself in the foot. (Please forgive the extended metaphor. At least I didn't mix metaphors and mention killing the goose that layed the golden egg.)

Now to answer my own question "Can I run Abiword on it?". When I started writing this I believed the diplomatic answer was not yet but I was pleasantly surprised to learn about the Maemo Word Processor which is a version of Abiword modified to run on the Nokia 770 Maemo platform. From the screenshot of Maemo Word Processor you can see they have dramatically cut down the user interface compared to the standard Abiword. However it shows that getting the full version of Abiword working should be a relatively simple matter of cross compiling Abiword and then giving it some polish to make it really shine. Most of the dialogs in abiword are compact enough to fit on smaller displays although some might benefit from tweaking to fit more comfortably on to displays smaller than 800x600 but these are changes that could be included in the standard GTK version of Abiword. The toolbars already need to be cleaned up and reorganised to make sure they do exceed 800 pixels wide.

Related links:
Maemo at Kernelconcepts, Matchbox, Nokia 770. Reuters: Nokia 770, The Register: Nokia Tablet.
Alan has previously mentioned the idea of Abiword on Handheld devices and Gnome on Matchbox and is glad to see it happening.

I have nothing nice to say about it the new look Planet Gnome. I do not like it. 'Nuff said.

I hate exams. Who doesn't!? Wish I was going to GUADEC instead.

Update: Nokia is at least paying attention to developers concerns about software patents. When it comes to software patents Nokia doesn't get it yet. Nokia need to come to their senses before they find out the hard way and are held to ransom by a patent litigation company.
Uraeus shares his insight on Nokia's attitude to patents

Consolidation doesn't happen all that often in the Open Source world, but it does happen occasionally[1]. Mandrake was fully compatible with RedHat at first but gradually diverged, only as a result of the buy-out of Connectiva are we seeing two RPM distributions converge again. Corporate buy outs are of course nothing unique to open source and the work being done by FreeDesktop.org, the Linux Standards Base (LSB) and others to encourage the use of formal standards is probably the strongest force for convergance and compatibility in the world of Open Source.
The reason I mention consolidation is the interesting comments Anthon Pang (robocoder) made about the diversity of Linux distributions. In particular mentioning the opportunity cost of packaging the same software for so many distributions. Rather than thinking of this particular problem from the top down in terms of the different distributions it makes more sense to think from the bottom up. It is all about the Developers, developers, developers.
It serves the interest of distributors to have custom packages optimised for their distribution, but only adds extra complexity for the project developers. Most developers need to be lazy or to put it another way pragmatic about what they spend their time on and although most do want to appeal to a wide audience, packaging and repackaging their software is not a task most would consider interesting. The developers of Autopackage have provided a system which allows the pragmatic developer to target a wide audience with a single package. There is a lot of inertia to overcome, no one wants to throw out the work they have already done to support a wide variety of packages and many people are attached to having packages tweaked especially for their distribution. I think autopackage will gradually but inevitably become a de facto standard, distributions not waste resources repackaging anything except core software where they can really adds extra value. You never know, we might even see a proof of concept distribution using nothing but Autopackage.

[1] Examples of convergance:
EGCS eventually became GCC which it had forked from.
The developers of Anjuta and Gide agreed to pool their efforts.
Metatheme is a relatively new project but I'm optimistic the potential of QT and GTK becoming more consistent at least superficially.

17 May 2005 (updated 17 May 2005 at 18:38 UTC) »
Star Wars: Living under a rock on Dagobah

Master Yoda says: Living under a rock on Dagobah you would have to be, to fail to notice great disturbance in the force caused by publicity machine for Star Wars colon Episode Roman numeral three dash Revenge of the Sith. Let's call it Sith for short, and avoid the need for nasty acronyms.
The take-over of Manchester United by Malcolm Glazer is the only other thing getting close to as much news coverage as Star Wars. Glazer has been nicknamed the leprechaun but considering the pot of gold he is hording (and if the stories about how he screwed his sisters out of their inheritance are to be believed) I think the comparsion would offend most leperechauns.
Super Size me was on television a few weeks ago (and I have read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser) but nonetheless I was soon tempted by the Dark Side and went to Burger King, there was an upside the kids meals did tempt me to buy a smaller portion using Star Wars toys. I got a neat little Millenium Falcon toy on wheels that lights up at the back when you roll it along. Darth Vader has shown his true evil advertising all kinds of everything including promoting phones from multiple different networks at the same time. The Darth Vader advertisment for Orange is pretty funny though. Maybe the Gnome Foundation or RedHat should strike a deal and produce a Star Wars branded distribution? Computer Operating Systems are becoming a commidity, rebranding and repurposing Open Source software as a form of advertising or merchandising seems like an inevitabile step. I had better stop telling the world and try and negotiate a franchise for myself while I still can!

It has been suggested that George Lucas would have been better off to get into animation but Lucas claims he likes actors. The three most recent Star Wars films have more animation in them than Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Star Wars marketing comes in many forms, and the Clone Wars animated series fits in comfortably with all the other marketing disguised as childrens television. Clone Wars animated series is not bad but not nowhere near as good as Samurai Jack (coincidentally the creator of Samurai Jack was involved in the production of Clone Wars). The foreground and backgrounds in Clone Wars do not blend together which always reminds me of cheap animation. With the expception of C-3P0 the voices are all done by different actors which doesn't help either.
Phil Lilley let us know that he was among the committed fans who sat through the marathon screening of all six Star Wars films. I bet they tried to be funny and asked the crowd to please make sure all droids are turned off during the film. Phil posted a gallery of his Star Wars Day photos including unintentionally (he claims) funny captions like C3P0 naked and a another picture of Anthony Daniels described as the man who was in 3P0, Artoo will be jealous. Don't blame me, I always assumed they were just close friends like Bert and Ernie until the Simpsons called them the gay robots from Star Wars. Samuel Jackson a.k.a. Shaft, must have known what he was doing when he suggested a purple lightsaber. Checkout the funny picture of Phil showing Jenny Falkner his purple lightsaber.

Even with her head shaved Natalie Portman looks beautiful. She shaved her head for an upcoming film called V for Vendetta based on a comic book by Alan Moore. She definately looks better with longer hair but beautiful people will still look beautiful even with bad hair or wearing ugly clothes but it certainly doesn't help. I don't know much about fashion but if you look at beautiful women long enough eventually you might start noticing the clothes. No matter what your size you will look better in clothes that fit properly and despite being being rich and famous Natalie Portman cannot find a dress to properly cut to fit her elfin figure. Am I excited about Revenge of the Sith? The following quote from a mock interview with Seth Cohen from televsion series the OC says it pretty well: "I am, but I am excited for anything involving Natalie Portman, even that movie where she had a baby inside a Wal-Mart."

It will probably be Saturday before I go to see Sith but think I can safely predict it will have awful dialog, silly costumes, and excessive emphasis on effects before characterisation. No change there then. I expect will have some memorable moments, I have heard the opening battle sequence is impressive and it shouldn't be too hard to be less rubbish than the previous two, but still not good enough to attract people who were not already fans of Star Wars. Worst of all Jar-Jar Binks doesn't die so fans are bound to be disappointed. The easiest thing to predict by far is that it will make a shed-load of money.

15 May 2005 (updated 18 May 2005 at 15:14 UTC) »
Cinema: The Jacket
Adrien Brody is losing his mind. He may have won an Oscar for his perfomance in the Pianist but I think of him as the strange man who slobbered all over Halle Berry. The Jacket is the story of Jack Starks, a soldier who fought in the Gulf War. He is severely injured by a shot to the head and is sent home to recover but his mind is not in the best state and he suffers permanent and ongoing memory loss as a result of his injuries. On his travels he encounters a alcoholic mother and her young daughter by the side of the road and helps fix their car. Later he hitches a lift but his bad luck continues and he is involved in a murder case. Unable to adequately explain what happened he is sent to a mental institute. Dr. Becker played by Kris Kristofferson has unconventional ideas about treating his patients, putting them in a straigh jacket, injecting them with a cocktail of drugs and locking them in a morgue drawer for a dose of sensory deprevation therapy. This is where things begin to unravel and Jack thinks he is seeing the future. Is Jack figuring out what is happening or losing his mind?
The film is not particularly frightening, there are momements in the Jacket which might be described as scarey but are probably better described as likely to induce epilepsy as they rely on suprise more than any obvious horror or gore. The Alpine Grove mental hospital (filmed in Scotland, standing in for Vermont) is dank and unpleasant and the harsh treatments the patients receive is disturbing but the story has elements of mystery and is essentially about Jack Starks trying to figure out what is happening to him. Jennifer Jason Leigh (also appearing in Palindromes) features as another doctor in the hospital and tries to convince Jack to expose the harsh treatment he is receiving. There is a lot of smoking in this film for no particular reason.
The Jacket is a film with Keira Knightley in it, which should be enough to explain my motivation to go and see it in the first place. It didn't do any harm that my lecture for that evening had been cancelled and I managed to blag my way into an Irish Times preview screening without a ticket. I think I probably would have gone to see it anyway, as I have already explained it has Keira Knightley in it which should be reason enough for most internet geeks. It has been said many time that Keira Knightely needs a sammich and appropriately enough in this film Adrian Brody does make her a sandwich (but it seems I am among a relatively small group of people who find this in-joke amusing). The director did not orignally want Keira Knightley in the film and bluntly told her so but after an audition and begging that she would be stuck in corsets and period costumes for the rest of her career she managed to get the role. Ms Knightley does a reasonable American accent and comes across as quite a different character from her previous roles. In an interview with John Maybury the director of the Jacket said proudly "I have made a film that as well as having a serious side, will appeal to internet geeks." which on its own was amusing but the next thing he said was more surprising and answers the question I have been asked several times already "I mean, Keira Knightley gets here tits out in it." Yes, there are two scenes with very brief flashes of nudity from the beautiful Keira Knightley and you get to see her boobies again but I assure you the rest of film is worth watching and the story is really about Adrien Brodys character.
I expect people who enjoyed Donnie Darko might also enjoy the Jacket but it is a different kind of film. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I'd give it 4/5.

Other films Alan has reviewed recently:
Palindromes, Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, XXX2: The Next Level, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sin City, Sahara, Garden State.

13 May 2005 (updated 14 May 2005 at 16:52 UTC) »
Abiword News: Anyone can help to develop Abiword
Believe it or not being a developer is not the same thing as being a programmer. The beauty of Open Source development is that with most tasks many hands make light work and any interested person can do a whole lot to help out Open Source developement without ever doing any programming. Motivating and managing people is often really the hard part, something some developers understand implicitly but unfortunately a skill many more need to make an effort to develop or at least realise the importance of it. Programmers are naturally best able to appreciate contributions in the form of code and sometimes fail to be as polite as they could be in response to other forms of feedback, not understanding the effort it takes for an ordinary user to bother providing feedback at all. Of course if you are a user of software like Abiword it is in your own self interest to help improve the program if you can spare the time or resources so it really is worth making an effort. One example of that is creating sample documents and testing, which is something I recently did in response to a request from Marc Maurer for sample OpenOffice documents but more help is definately needed.
As a fan of Abiword I do not use OpenOffice very often, perhaps to view the occasional presentation or see if it can open a troublesome Microsoft Word document. Abiword is fast and light, supports a wide variety of file formats and runs on all kinds of platforms but it is almost powerless against the massive intertia of a full Office Suite. It seems there is no room for Abiword and it is caught between the Text Editors and the Office suites. Abiword has been squeezed out of the default installation by many distributors, even live CD distributions where I one might think the size and speed of Abiword would be better appreciated. (Abiword is significantly faster than Gedit.) In light of dominance of OpenOffice.org I was all the more surprised by the problems I encountered while using OpenOffice.org Writer. I was amazed to learn that OpenOffice.org Writer completely refuses to allow you to create nested tables. Encouraging users to learn to use styles properly is a good idea but refusing to allow nested tables at all is a bit lame really. Creating and modify lists is terribly cumbersome in OpenOffice.org compared to Abiword or even Microsoft word. Again it seems like you are being pushed to learn styles if you want to use OpenOffice.org Writer effectively. Helping Abiword by using OpenOffice, strange isn't it?
Another way you can help Abiword is with advocacy and evangelism, and simply telling people about Abiword helps. I remain optimistic about Abiword and I beleive Abiword will continue to improve, find new niches and help users get the job done.
Download Abiword and try it for yourself.

No more excuses
I want to thank Marc for the excellent work he has done to allow presentations to be viewed in Evince. (Evince is primarily a PDF Viewer, vaguely simliar to Adobe Acrobat.) Thanks to his work one of my biggest excuses for using OpenOffice soon will soon be gone.
Amid the various discussion of what languages and technologies will be used to push forward the Gnome platform (go Python!) it is great to see work continuing to be done on low level libraries whihc allow work to be shared by all, instead of reinventing the wheel.

Jessica Alba in my bedroom
First I had Keira Knightley on my desk, now I have Jessica Alba in my bedroom. ;P
Last Saturday was free comic book day and as I had picked up quite a few of the special free promotional comics, instead I spent my money on a Sin City poster. Jessica Alba as Nancy Callahan, the character she played in Sin City now adorns on my bedroom wall. Comic books are for kids of all ages. What more can I say.

Gfig: Bent out of Shape
Before Inkscape came along I tried making vector graphics using a variety of programs including Gfig. Gfig is a vector graphics program included with the GNU Image Manipulation Program, and can be found in the menus under Filters, Render, Gfig....
While evaluating Gfig I created a small collection of gfig shapes as a way to try out the various different drawing tools. Now I'm clearing out those old files and putting them on the web on the off chance anyone is interested enough to take a look at them (although I wouldn't recommend it, read on and see the problems I had and you'll understand why). For convenience I have provided a zip archive containig all of my gfig shapes (20 kb). The terms of use are described in the Read Me file. At some point in the distant future I might convert these files to SVG, tart them up a bit and submit them to OpenClipart.org (possibly by writing a Gfig importer for Dia using Python, although if Gfig allowed scripting there might be an easier way involving converting the drawings to GIMP Paths which can then be exported as SVG).
If it was not so time consuming I would provide more screenshots of gfig and examples of artwork created using gfig but I have spent too much time on it already. The Linux versions of Gfig all seem to have problems opening files created using the Windows versions, the usual problem of understanding DOS line endings I expect. There is also no scripting support to speed up the process of creating graphics using Gfig. Originally I was hoping to write something more optimistic describing the interesting features of Gfig -- like the Isometric and Polar Grids and the interesting results you can get by applying different combinations of brushes and patterns to the same shapes -- but instead spent too much time trying to sort out the problems I had with gfig and wrote about them instead.
If you are not already using Inkscape I highly recommend you try it. Inkscape is a great addition to the choice of tools available to any digital artist.
10 May 2005 (updated 10 May 2005 at 22:56 UTC) »
Not My Cup of Tea
Pre-teen Sex, Abortion, Child Molestation, Religious Fundamentalists and Paedophilia. Palindromes is definitely not your usual feel-good escapist entertainment and I warn you to have some idea of what you are letting yourself in for before going to see it . I had already seen Hitchhikers Guides to the Galaxy and I was thinking about seeing Downfall (nothing quite like Hitler on a Sunday) but was feeling fairly ambivalent and willing to watch something different for a change so when Stephen suggested Palindromes I wasn't going to argue.
Palindromes is the story of a girl called Aviva, her name is the palindrome referred to in the title. This film brings to the cinema screen the idea of same character, different actor normally only seen on television which is something I do not think has been done before (although at a stretch you could claim Face/Off did it, but that is giving it too much credit). Aviva is played by seven different actresses at various points in the film including Jennifer Jason Leigh an actress in her forties and it is a credit to her acting how surprisingly convincing she was. The character changing gimmick either generalises the story of Aviva making it more universal and easier to relate to or is an annoying distraction that takes you out of the story, I cannot quite decide.
The story is bleak, but it has a disturbingly dark humour I was not expecting. The twelve year old Aviva gets pregnant and wants to keep the baby, but her mother (played by Ellen Barkin you might remember her from the eighties) tries desperately to convinces her to have it taken care of like herself had done. (I dont think the word abortion is actually mentioned in this mother daughter talk.) The characters do not realise how odd and incongruous their behaviour is sometimes, but it is clear the humour was intended by the writer. The mother goes from telling her daughter that she will stick by her no matter what to screaming furiously at her a moment later and it is from the strange contrasts and turns that the humour comes. The laughter of the audience was a nervous uncomfortable laughter, and it was a way to find release from the more disturbing aspects of the story. Thankfully this film does not try to preach or overtly beat you over the head with a moral message, but characters like Momma Sunshine present their side of the moral divide in a sympathetic way. The characters are often flawed but well intentioned and the story speaks for itself and leaves you make up your own mind.
This film was not my cup of tea. I wouldn't say it was a bad film either. I would not recommend it I must admit I didn't hate it. So long as you have some idea of what you are getting yourself in for you might appreciate this film and it certainly did provide a change from some of the rubbish mainstream films I would normally be wiling to sit through (XXX2, and the Wedding Date, both rubbish in very different ways) and it does gives you something to think about.
The Jacket is a film I would recommend, saw a preview screening of it on Monday. (Keira Knightley is in it :) I hope to find time to write a review of the Jacket soon.

Give us a kiss
On a lighter note here is a funny picture of Zooey Deschanel. Zooey Deschanel, played Trillian in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxay.

6 May 2005 (updated 12 May 2005 at 18:16 UTC) »
Gnomes are invading Trinity
Calum Benson "a top usability expert at Sun Microsystems" gave a talk on Open Source usability, as guest of the Trinity Internet Society (Netsoc). Coincidentally the talk was held in the Swift lecture theatre, exactly the same place as Calum gave his usability presentation at GUADEC 4. Even though the place was the same the talk was different, it even featured the recently created South Park incarnation of Calum but more importantly the substance of the talk was about the application of usability methods in commercial and open source environments. The talk was not as Gnome specific as I think people would have expected and with the impending exams the attendance was unfortunately quite low, maybe only twenty people.
Calum gave a formal definition of Usability as "The effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which a specified set of users can achieve a specified set of tasks in a particular environment" which helped to avoid any of the usual confusion and vague about user experience or utility. Some of the ideas were not new to me but it was useful to hear them expressed in a different way. It was good to hear a more formal description and learn the usability jargon to better describe the ideas I had already seen in practice. Competitive Analysis is a much more professional and eloquent way to describe the concept at looking at what existing popular applications are doing and borrowing the best of their ideas (embrace and extend). Contextual Enquiry is a fantastically scientific way of describing watching and learning from your users. The other notable piece of terminology was Heuristic Evaluation which describes the kind of superficial screen-by-screen usability evaluation almost any user or developer can learn to do having read the Gnome Guidelines (or a good checklist) and awareness of a few essential usability principles.
Calum mentioned the concept of Personas, the idea of describing who you think the Archetypal user of your software would be. This concept is something the Sourcegear developers who originally started Abiword made great use of in a simple informal way by identifying a Church Secretary as the archetypal Abiword user which has always helped to keep things in perspective. You could say Abiword has another very significant archetypal user in the form of the University Academic. Not only has Martin Sevior done amazing work improving Abiword to meet his own needs but he has done so with an implicit awareness of the class of user he and his colleagues represent. The idea of personas for Gnome was discussed but I don't recall anything ever being formalised. I imagine it would be a lot harder to come up with a shortlist of clear but relevant archetypes for the whole Gnome Desktop. Scenarios were also mentioned, I won't go into detail about it but I hope to try applying the concept in the future.
There was some laughs when Calum showed some of the mistakes that had been made by Microsoft and Apple. Calum was able to show us a short recording of work done in the Sun Microsystems Usability Labs, and I wish I could have seen more. The user in question was asked to create a Shortcut and struggled to discover she needed to use the item confusingly labelled "Launcher" to create a Shortcut. I couldn't help laughing when the user visibly reeled in horror when confronted by the Advanced Tab of the Launcher dialog, having recently had a similar reaction myself. (There is a longstanding bug report looking at revising the Launcher dialog.)
One notable point Calum made was about the difficulty of getting quality feedback from users and a timely reminder that any user who goes to the trouble of providing feedback is exceptional. He came out with statistic from the Mozilla Foundation claiming less than less than 10% of users ever provide any feedback. The beauty of the Gnome Guidelines has been how they empower users like me to give developers useful feedback in a way more likely to be understood and accepted.
The talk covered a wide range of other ideas and ended with the obligatory Questions and Answers session. The Q&A ended quite quickly but I got a chance to talk to Calum for quite a while later on. In Trinity you have a better chance of having a conversation about the intricacies of Constitutional Law or the History of 19th Century Irish politics than finding people who are interested to talk about Gnome so I hope Calum can understand, my slightly rabid enthusiasm and forgive the barrage of questions.
When in the presence of an expert (or simply an expert speaker) I thoroughly recommend getting them to geek out and talk in detail about their area of expertise for a while. So long as you can find an aspects you can relate to, guide the conversation a little, and know when to stop them, it is very often compelling to hear people talk about a topic they are deeply interested in. Even if it is not necessarily an interest you share you can often marvel at their enthusiasm, but maybe it is just me that enjoys seeing the obsessive aspect of my own personality reflected in others. This journal does allow me to geek out and ramble on to my hearts content about subjects of limited interest to other people like I would never get the chance to do in normal conversation and allow others to quickly read it and filter out anything that might be of interest. At least that is part of the plan.
Update: Calum has posted his usability presentation and quickly mentioned it in Calum's Wee Blog.

Got Style?
For better or worse my website finally uses Stylesheets. It's not much but it's a start. The aspect I am most pleased by is that users of Opera or Mozilla can choose Use Style and change switch to a red and black themed alternate stylesheet, unfortunately the stylesheet doesn't really look all that good yet. (Firefox doesn't even seem to be able to do a decent job of copying Opera but the Page Style feature has been belatedly restored in version 1.0.3.). The picture of Tweek from South Park is not an attempt to jump on the current bandwagon and has in fact been there for years.

Gnomes are invading Trinity: Comments

3 May 2005 (updated 7 May 2005 at 12:50 UTC) »
Paint me blue and call me a baboon!
Paint is the key word you should notice from the title and baboon is just fun to say. This is my effort to occasionally write about computer graphics topics and justify my continued presence on Planet Openclipart. Even if you are interested in Open Source software you might not have noticed the beta release of KOffice 1.4. What makes this release particularly interesting is that after many many years it includes the first public release Krita. If you are as konfused by silly gnaming konventions as I am you might not know that Krita is the application formerly known as Krayon, formerly known as Kimageshop. At least by some small mercy it never known as KIMP but the name is still awful.
Now looks like a good time to try out KDE again and the developers have made it especially easy by providing a KDE Office Live CD. Personally I'd recommend Konstruct -- the KDE answer to Garnome -- if the idea of a Live CD seems too easy for you. Recently I tried it myself but got entangled in problems while building ImageMagick. Kexi has support for importing Adobe Photoshop Documents (.psd) and the Berkeley eXperimental Format (.xcf). (XCF is better known as the default file format of the GNU Image Manipulation Program.) No prizes for guessing which tool gives Kexi that functionality. The integrated nature of KOffice could make things very interesting, especially with their embracing of the OpenOffice.org file formats and the support for SVG in the Karbon 14 vector graphics application. The dream of a Free Desktop Graphics Suite looks closer than ever, although not in the way we might have predicted.

Komments?
;)

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