Older blog entries for funrecords (starting at number 25)

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.

If there was a competiition for maintainer of the year, I'd vote for mpesenti. Thanks for the hard work....

Wrote a fairly lengthy reply to a question about totally abstracted document/task interfaces from luis on the gnome usability list.

Starting School Again

I start school this coming monday at University of Washington. I haven't been in school for a while now, so I guess i'm a little concerned. My first semester is going to be pretty easy though. I only have two classes, a digital vlsi design course and a digital system design course. Pretty light load for a grad student, but thats ok, I just moved to seattle and would like to get to know people and the city instead of just burrying my face in text books.

Music

Saw ted leo yesterday at the graceland. He played solo though not acoustic. Anyway it was pretty fun, and of course he played "Timorous Me" which made me happy :) The kills are playing friday and that should be a good show too.

I spent my precious time today building gnome from cvs. Why I did this i'm not sure... Well at least for the most part it now works. Notable exceptions are evolution (which I can live without), storage (just a toy at this time anyway) and gaim (the lack of gaim does kind suck.). Anyway I think this link summarizes the day well.

For those that are too lazy to click the link: "If we truly understand that the internet is shit then maybe we'll go back to looking elsewhere to check our information instead of just Google...If we remember that the medium isn't the message then maybe we'll stop aimlessly surfing for something amusing when we could actually be doing something fun."

It's Official, Hell has Frozen Over

Yes it's true. This annoucement from Dave Camp, was sent to the nautilus mailing list today proclaming that Nautilus will now become an object oriented file manager (with an optional file browser). Frankly, I'm in a state of shock.

Everything you buy will eventually be thrown away.

Moving and more specifically packing really depresses me. It really makes you realize how much crap you buy that you end up just throwing away. :/ Maybe I'm just a hippie with short hair but I find the act of throwing stuff away really upsetting. Well at least paper can be recycled.

Coolest Free Software Project Goes To...

"Storage is an exciting project to replace the traditional filesystem with a new document store. Storage is part of a larger design for a new desktop environment, more details on that to come. The current implementation offers natural language access, network transparency, and a number of other features..."

Awesome!!!!