Older blog entries for clarkbw (starting at number 96)

Big Board and Your Personal Stock

Big Board

The Big Board isn’t a panel replacement, it probably doesn’t do half the things the current GNOME panel does and I wouldn’t imagine it would ever match all of the functionality. There’s lots of areas the panel handles like task switching where Big Board doesn’t want to touch, it’s out of the scope of the project. The intention of Big Board is be an connected companion to the online desktop. Connected meaning not just online but available locally as well.

There are lots of mockups of the board available on our developer wiki, but some are out of date and some are just ideas that haven’t been fully looked at yet. Right now this is what Big Board is and where those pieces are going.

Stocks

The Big Board is made up of different applet like things we call stocks. The stocks are pretty easy to write in python and can access account information through mugshot to grab feeds of the online services you use. The first stock on the board (located on the top) is the Personal (or self) stock.

Personalization

I covered a lot of this in the Big Board Design but most web sites make it immediately apparent when you log in that it knows who you are, while our desktop doesn’t naturally do this. Sitting down at another person’s GNOME Desktop doesn’t give me a hint who’s machine it is unless I start searching for their username in the home directory. (f-u-s-a being a possible exception that isn’t on by default, perhaps until recently)

Display the logged in users photo and name. This not only helps for the person to be sure they are logged into their Desktop correctly but it also helps us to encourage them to set an appropriate name and icon. Further down the road making sure people have set the correct name and icon helps with fast user switching, gdm face browsing, offering a decent default for buddy icons, and some other ideas we have about local network browsing. Currently this personal stock reflects your Mugshot image and name and will keep in sync with the site accordingly.

In the future we’ll be looking into using this personal area for the start point to editing personal preferences and logging out or switching users. You can see in this mockup the idea that clicking on the personal will give options related to either you or the computer you’re using.

Just below your picture and name we’re listing the we accounts you use. Currently these icons will take you directly to your account or profile page for the site it represents. The icon list serves as a decent starting point and begins to show how we’re giving web applications a similar presence to local applications on the desktop.

Search

Next up is the Search stock, where we took advantage of the awesome Deskbar applet to handle the “quick search” input and results display. The interesting twist mugshot gives to deskbar is that we can have the information necessary to search all of your online accounts (assuming they have feeds or web services) like delicious, digg, flickr, and others but we could also be searching your friends delicious, digg, and other accounts as well. Having the collective bookmarks of all your friends and colleagues at your finger tips might be a nice way to quickly find that thing you were looking for. More later…

I was tempted to write a post where I could give my side of a story and mis-quote and mis-characterize a person whose work I admire but I’m going to just talk about our prototype and it’s ideas so we can remain friends and find a way to work together. Plus I personally prefer ad hominem attacks opposed to that baby killing Gravely’s methods.

Syndicated 2007-04-05 05:54:26 from Bryan Clark

The Doctor is In

I broke a rib or two over the weekend playing rugby. Just before passing an assist that scored I bounced off a gentleman who was a bit bigger than me trying to spear my kidneys.

I haven’t gone to the doctors yet since there’s no treatment other than taking pain killers and the pain isn’t getting worse than when it first happened. According to medical student friends and webmd’s fractured rib article I need to breath in deeply every hour to reduce the risk of contracting pneumonia or a partial collapse my lung.

At work I’m using DrWright (now a part of the Control Center and known as “Typing Monitor”) again. Every hour it tells me to stop typing and I use the time to take a very deep and painful breath.

Syndicated 2007-03-01 01:07:00 from Bryan Clark

Gardening Your Library

The LibraryThing article that Luis linked to really stuck with me over the weekend. And luckily I was in the WUNC radio area to hear this story about the book BookMarks: Reading in Black and White. In it Duke University professor Karla Holloway suggests that your reading list is a projection of your own identity, which is perhaps a strongly related reason why people on LibraryThing want to tag and organize their collections (or online projections of themselves).

Now I’m off to Florida for the weekend to play in the Ruggerfest 2007 tournament, the weather down south has been great so far and I hope it continues for the weekend.

Syndicated 2007-02-24 00:14:00 from Bryan Clark

And so it is

I caught an excellent Damien Rice concert last night at the Orpheum. The Swell Season were a funny and great opening act and Damien rocked out to a heavy metal version of The Blower’s Daughter that I thought was amazing. However by the look on the faces of most everyone else in the audience they seemed shocked by it, I think most people came to hear him play The Blower’s Daughter just like it was in Closer.

Last.fm and Tourb.us are doing a pretty good job of letting me know what shows are in town. Plus they don’t spam me with emails I can’t opt out of. Tonight I might catch Cirkestra playing at the Middle East Upstairs, they were also featured on WBUR this morning.

Both last.fm and tourb.us give RSS feeds of your “Events I’m attending” list which I’m hoping Mugshot will hook into soon so friends can swarm around interest in going to a show they might not have know was happening. I clicked that I was a maybe for the Damien Rice show months ago but didn’t know who else would be interested in going to see him.

Syndicated 2006-12-12 16:18:00 from Bryan Clark

Mashing Google Calendar and GNOME

I never used to be much of a calendar person, usually I’m late to everything and never know if I’m free for a weekend or not. But since Google calendar came out I started using it pretty regularly and I think it’s actually improved my ability to be punctual and organized… well probably not, but anyway.

One major benefit I find to using this calendar versus one on my local system is that I can have GNOME import my calendar locally via the iCal and still access and use the calendar via the web interface any other time.

To set it up I went to the manage calendar page for my personal calendar. I had to right click copy the link location since they don’t give the iCal link in webcal: url format. Then open a terminal and type this, replacing $URL with the url you copied for your iCal.

/usr/libexec/evolution-webcal $URL

And that’s about it, the little webcal dialog will ask you silly questions about your web calendar settings and it’s imported into evolution-data-server. I don’t even use evolution anymore, but the calendar portion works just the same. I only ever view my calendar out of the calendar widget, all my updates and additions are done in Google calendar.

Syndicated 2006-12-08 19:37:00 from Bryan Clark

A Premium Night at the Movies

Miguel: There’s possibly an economic solution to avoid your movie watching problem.

Those are students who don’t have money and you’re a working professional who does. You might like to try the Premium Movie Theater out in Framingham. Ticket prices are 13 and 18 for Matinee and regular respectively. You need to be 21+ to get in and they serve food and drinks you can take into the film with you. Plus it’s outside the city where no student would really travel for a movie.

I don’t go there very often because the overall cost is pretty expensive, but if I really want to enjoy a movie quietly (i.e. you’re not watching snakes on a plane) it’s a good place to go. Of course they do only have a limited selection of movies as well as often require reservations. Not worth quitting your spy job over, but it’s still good.

Syndicated 2006-12-07 00:05:00 from Bryan Clark

Upload and Share on the go (without all that hassle)

I’ve been encouraging lots of people lately to get setup using various services from their mobile phones… because it’s fun. If you have a mobile phone with an ok camera and some data access you can do it too.

Here’s how I’m working it.

I added both my YouTube and Flickr accounts to my Mugshot Page and Mugshot does the polling of my accounts notifying people when I upload new things. With Flickr you can upload by email and with YouTube you can setup a mobile profile. Tada, now when I upload a new photo or video I don’t have to worry that they have the right phone or cell plan to see my stuff. And Mugshot just makes it so everyone else doesn’t need a corresponding account at all the places I have, or that they log into them regularly to see what changed.

For a while I was trying to send camera photos around using SMS, but it never seemed to work. If someone was on a different network or phone didn’t allow photos or evil monkeys stole the message it wouldn’t seem to be delivered. However when I upload it to a site I can assume people will see it eventually and I can use the photo or video later in a blog post… like this.

Quietly, Mugshot signup has become open to anyone.

Syndicated 2006-12-05 21:47:00 from Bryan Clark

all your drones are belong to (corporate) us

Recently friends of mine described being worried about their online presence in relation to sites like MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. Their concern is that if an employer sees their public profile on one of these sites they might think badly of them and then not be inclined to hire them.

Kathy Sierra does well explaining part of this problem in her post Knocking the exuberance out of employees. Is it possible to hire bold, creative, smart, passionate, and independent people who live quiet lives of desperation at home?

Seth Godin relates somewhat to this issue with his writing on Change Agent where he describes the problems of hiring competent instead of incompetent people. Competent people are boring, they handle problems in the same way every time; but competent people are reliable and often in many companies this value carries more weight than someones ability to be innovative, adapt, change and essentially rock the boat.

So sure, an incompetent creative person might not have a profile on myspace, facebook, and other sites. But should they worry about the backlash of employers discovering that their lives aren’t as professional and responsible as their work? I don’t think so. And while posting pictures of yourself doing illegal acts is pure idiocy, actually it’s called “evidence”, having pictures of you and your friends having fun and possibly acting stupid probably means you’re a real person.

Some people have said it’s because I work in the software industry that you can get away with this kind of attitude. I think it’s having this kind of attitude that keeps me out of these other crappy companies and industries. I’d rather people were real about their lives and I wouldn’t want to take part in an organization that didn’t feel the same way.

So if you want to see the online profile of me it’s all here in my mugshot, feel free check it out. Behind this chilling professional corporate persona… there is someone who has probably signed up for too many accounts. In a coming release there will be even more of what I do online to look at, but for now you’ll get the idea.

Syndicated 2006-11-02 00:25:00 from Bryan Clark

Bugs with bug mail

I get a lot of bug mail, way too much in my mind and I’m sure there are people out there getting much more bug mail than I do. The issue isn’t so much the amount of bug mail, though that’s often a problem. The real problem I have with bug mail is how often it’s completely useless.

Who are these people?

Lets start off with some better identity. I see a lot of names on bug mail for whom I have no idea who this person is.

I’ve noticed the bugzilla web interface has started to include a points system for people who comment on a bug. I don’t really know what the points mean but that doesn’t matter, I know higher is better. Somehow I’m at 16 points right now so I guess I should pay more attention to people with at least that many points. I actually read all the bug mail I get, but it would be nice to know if I could at least feel less guilty about not responding quickly.

Showing the points of the person making the change (and my points) in the bug mail would help this out a lot. I do also see some of the people who comment have titles like “Evince developer”, this would be another great thing to show in the bug mail.

Last part on identity, it’d also be great if there was a link included in the bug mail to this persons profile. I can’t seem to find the idea of a bugzilla profile though. One page about this person, their points, where they comment, what they are a developer of, if anything.

What just happened?

Removed: NEW - Added: NEEDINFO

Who you need info from would be a great addition which most likely requires lots of changes in bugzilla. However the least that could be done is to include the previous comment and commenter. I think that would help out a lot of other types of changes as well.

Bugzilla comments often work in the form of a conversation that slowly takes place in message board style. It’s like my roommates and I trying to coordinate feeding the cat on the cork board, a slow and painful process that could be easily solved with a minute or two of face to face time.

Below the current comment, prefaced with some text saying: Last Comment on $DATE by $PERSON [$PERSON_PROFILE] and then inline the last comment. Perhaps keeping a limit on the number of characters if you have a desire to keep the emails to a small size.

Anyway, I’m not intending to gripe about GNOME bugzilla as I do think it’s one of the nicest bugzillas I’ve used. Kudos to the developers! And I realize that bugzilla wasn’t really designed for interaction through email, which is too bad because I really think it’s the better way to go. This is just some of the fixes I’d been thinking about to improve my bug email usage, haven’t looked into if they are applicable to everyone.

Syndicated 2006-10-23 22:31:00 from Bryan Clark

bahstan chowhound

All Star Sandwich Bar

The other night I made the quick walk over to Inman Square to check out the somewhat new place All Star Sandwich Bar.

Located at the intersection of Prospect and Cambridge street in Cambridge, MA (the real cambridge) I think it replaced a fairly good Chinese place. But if you haven’t been there I suggest you go, I had one of the best sandwiches I’ve eaten in a long time.

Of course since I eat out in Westford, MA (a place well known for it’s fine foods, diversity, and culture *cough*) almost everyday my judgment may be a bit off from the norm. But I can’t wait to go back there, they serve beer and wine with a cozy area to sit and eat and are open until 9 or 10pm. Do you trust a starving mans food recommendations? Up to you.

Check another one off

All Star is just the start a plan to expand my eatery options in the boston area. My roommate and I recently cut out the Weekly Dig’s Fall Dining Guide and put it up on the wall with a marker close by so we can check off the new places as we go to them. Not that I trust the Dig more than say Phantom Gourmet, but it came in an easy to use free print out that we could write all over.

I think next up is El Oriental De Cuba in J.P. for some Cuban style food.

Syndicated 2006-10-18 20:07:00 from Bryan Clark