Orkut.com seems to be the talk of the town this weekend. I have to admit that i'm a little bewildered though...Whats the difference between orkut and friendster. Perhaps the whole gnome crowd just missed out on that. Ironically they are both owned by google even.

Democrats are Blowing It

Could the democrats screw this up anymore There's absolutely no way Kerry will beat Bush in the general election. In fact its going to be a complete landslide and this sucks. As much as I like Dean as a person, he also has the usual trappings that prevent him from having a chance. There really is only one person who could win and thats Clark. He has the foreign policy experience, is a rhodes scholar and most of all is from the south. I know in an ideal world this wouldn't matter, but face the facts. Gore won the Democratic states by very small margins in the 2000 election. Bush creamed Gore in the republican won states for the most part. The democrats need to not only hold the states won by Gore, they need to win the south and southwest. They need to win to Ohio, and the other staunchly republican states. The only person who can appeal to these states is Clark. He's tough and has the creditentials. He'll absolutely crush Bush in the debates when it comes to foreign policy. And best of all he's very liberal.

mpesenti we can't please everyone. Unfortunately the people who we hear the most from are those who flame on gnomedesktop. You don't often hear about how great something is because it just works. People just use it and are happy.

Its been along time since i've posted.

Times are weird indeed. I've been somewhat of a lull. Motivation has been somewhat escaping me lately and I feel really bad about it (in particular i feel bad about my lack of help on epiphany).

Well on the bright side of things, i've managed to avoid eating out for a week, and expect that there will be lots of free food around for me on campus this week when the college recruiters invade.

Concern about Bounties

Don't get me wrong, in general i think the gnome bounties idea is great, but i do have some concerns when it comes to ui. Take for instance bug 127522, contact search applet. According to the bounty the goal is to design "A panel applet where you can type in a search term and get matching contact cards." First of all this is a great desktop integration idea. However it is shortsighted. What the desktop really needs is a general "Open Applet". One such example is the applet that comes with the storage project. This applet aims to be a general search applet and this is what the more general goal should be. We should have one applet and only one applet to search your files, your bookmarks, your web history, your recent documents, YOUR CONTACTS, your email, your whatever. By being short sighted we are giving rise to bloat in the applet category. All of these tasks require the same ui, a text entry in which to enter a search query, and an autocompletion drop down of results.

We can even expand this ui to allow users to type in web address, or file system paths making opening web pages and folders faster. Why should you ever need to start a web browser to surf the web.