People look at me funny when I suggest it but I would love to have Compulsory Turnout for elections as they have in Australia as Jeff has mentioned. Ever since the Irish Government reran a Referendum less than a year after failing to get the result they wanted because of low turn out among their supporters I have firmly believed that low turnout should never again be used as an excuse. I believe in the protest vote (or spoiled vote) as form of polical expression, in fact Zig and Zag and Dustin the Turkey Vulture have done very well in past Irish elections. I do not however accept not voting at all as a form of expression, it is described best by the Latin phrase
Qui tacet consentitwhich means "He who is silent, agrees". For a Democratic state to function properly taxes must be paid, and I do not think political awareness is any less important. The price of civilisation is reponsability.
There was a brilliant cartoon ad. campaign on British Television during the past few years, where one character keeps cutting off the other. The characater complains about the weather, the price of alcohol and so on but every time his friend cuts him off. The slogon was
If you dont do politics, theres not much you do do
Inkscape and OpenClipart.org
The Inkscape developers really don't like the new GTK File Chooser and have been working through various ideas, expect their version to have a Thumbnail Preview, a Text Box to enter the location (accessing a hidden box with Ctrl+L is not good enough). There will also probably be a control that allows you to collapse the Preview and or the Shortcuts which I hope is something that will be incorporated back upstream in the GTK File Chooser and having the Preview collapsed by default (but still available) for applications that do not need it.
I skim another review of Inkscape in this months Linux Format Magazine (published in the UK). They reviewed a selection of vector graphics applications, Inkscape got 8/10, as did OpenOffice.org Draw. Sodipodi got 7/10.
Inkscape might be able to improve that increase that result to 9/10 if there were binaries with Gnome-Print (for PDF) support enabled (needs testing) but the article very generously points out that Scribus can be used to generate high quality PDF from Inkscape SVG Documents.
OpenClipart.org aims to be to clipart what Wikipedia is to encyclopedias. A while back I submitted over 100 SVG Gradients and I am now submitting 95 SVG Patterns (30 of which are unique patterns, the others are colour variations but in some cases the colour changes make a big difference bringing out differnt elements of the designs and forming patterns of their own). I am proud that my work is forming a significant part of OpenClipart.org which already has over 700 files after just a few months but I will be even more proud when it becomes a tiny almost insignificant proportion of a much larger collection. I don't expect to have time to indulge these artistic and design interests again anytime soon, so many other things to do.
Not Gnome
I really should make an effort to comment about Gnome more often.
Google bombing is even easier than I thought. I wonder if John Fleck will come to regret being associated with the words sufficiently obscure.
Does anyone else find it worrying when developers are encouraging people to fork their project?
For future reference quotes from developer Sven Neuman:
GIMP is not meant to be Photoshop
...
If however you want to make GIMP a duplicate of Photoshop, then please fork it
Abiword
I've said it before and I'll say it again: The Abiword Developers Rule! Abiword Rocks. Ryan Pavlik just provided another example of how they have earned so much respect.