J5’s Blog

This really gives a kick in the pants to those who take short cuts and lose sight of software freedom.  Kudos to Mozilla who actually has the critical mass to effect real change by endorsing Vorbis and Theora on all of their OS platforms.  Soon it will be up to the content producers to make open formats ubiquitous.  Having a delivery channel which people use on a regular basis means we can finally work from start to finish without touching a closed format if we so choose.  That to me is freedom - not forcing everyone to encode in open codecs, but to allow for those who prefer open formats the ability to deliver their content without any barriers between them and their end users. There are those who don’t want to see this happen but I have to believe that momentum is starting to swing our way.

I’ve been using Eclipse for over a month now and in my last post about it I was none too kind.  After using it for a month I can say I am slightly more productive than my previous gvim setup.  This is mainly due to the excellent editor and layout manager.  As a development shell Eclipse works well though as a complete IDE it still has a long way to go to top other IDE’s I have used in the past (namely Borland’s professional and hobby suites).  Perhaps complete isn’t the right word because there is sure a lot of functionality here so I guess integrated might be a better word.  I also do miss my vi commands (it would be nice is esc-: would put me into extended command mode) but since 90% of my time is typing in code, having to move my mouse or retrain to use ctrl-s is not a big deal.

 Some other great things

• Refactoring file names is awesome
• Loading up a workspace where I left off is priceless for minimizing context switches
• Visual references to what has changed, what is up to date in the git repo and what is untracked allows me to see where I am
• Spell checking has caught a few mistakes in my variable names already though spell correction doesn’t seem to work or exist
• Find in files is a great feature (think grep -r) but the UI almost ruins it
• The python object browser is pretty sweet

Some not so great things

• UI is still as cluttered as ever - I’ve only ever used the saved button in the toolbar and modules merge menus in peculiar places
• Git repo tools are hard to find and do not always notice changes I make outside the tool, this feature could be useful beyond just informational views but right now it just scares me that it has the potential to really screw things up.  Point in case, moving files in the package explorer is way to easy via drag and drop.  There has been a number of times my hand slipped and moved a file by mistake.  I didn’t let the mistake hang around long enough to find out what would happen if I did a commit but I feel it may not get the move right in the repo making it really hard to undo later.  Whether this is a real or perceived issue is irrelevant.  The fact that the tool feels fragile is at issue.
•  Tab control should be more like Firefox. Right now I get confused when I open too many tabs because it is not clear which ones get hidden.  I also have not figured out the hotkey for toggling between tabs (ctrl-tab would be nice working like alt-tab does with windows lists) and have to use my mouse for this.
• The find dialog is just horrendous.  Most of the time I just want to do a quick find in the file I am looking at.  ctrl-f (and esc-/) should just pop up a panel on the bottom of the editor with a focused search box which does a live search of the document as you type in letters (try typing / in a firefox window when not focused on an input field to get the idea).  This makes sure there isn’t a dialog to obscure the items you are searching for.  A more advanced dialog could be another key combo or button click away.
• When clicking on an HTML file most of the time I want to edit it.  Having it open in a viewer while perhaps a nice feature some of the times, gets annoying most of the time.  There isn’t even a way to click on the open document and tell it to switch to an edit view.  What is worse is if the file isn’t in my project, such as a file I am using as reference, there is no way from the menus to tell it not to open up in the viewer.  This make me have to open it in another external editor to view the source.

All in all it is not that bad and I will be sticking with it for the most part.  Vim and gVim are still my editors of choice for smaller projects and quick edits due to the amount of setup I had to go through but Eclipse is nice and hopefully will only get better.

It seems that Moblin will be switching from Ubuntu to Fedora Linux as their base operating system.  I’m interested in finding out the underlying reasoning for such a move.  The stated reason is because they wanted to use RPM instead of DEB.  I can’t quite buy that but perhaps that is because having come from both camps I think that packaging is an implementation detail that too many people put way too much stock in.  This has the effect of causing unnecessary emotional splits within the community resulting in animosity which often overshadows real threats.

The second reason given, which has to do with building a community is pretty broad but more believable.  Fedora has made huge strides while also sticking to its guns in the freedom department and being valuable upstream contributors. It may be that we sacrificed short term gains which can be gotten via a bit more differentiation, or out of the box “just works” on closed hardware but as companies are being convinced to open up their specs and open drivers are being written, a large portion of which is being done by Fedora developers working upstream, little of the short term gains matter much.

I suspect the real reason is somewhere in the community vein, staring with the Kernel and X team developers who work tirelessly making sure their work is fit for upstream consumption and can be supported in the long term. Following their lead the rest falls naturally out of that single notion of moving Linux forward as a whole. Kudo’s to all my Fedora friends - keep moving forward.

All in all pretty good for a last minute event.  It ended up being a night at the good life bar as it was too much fun to leave.  People ended up rotating in and out all night and we all had a blast.  My dinner was pretty good.  The spinage was amazing but the steak was a little overdone.  The vodka martinis were also good but I would stay away from the mixed drinks as they didn’t seem to be of the same quality.  I still prefer Om for martinis and cocktails but overall Good Life was pretty good.  Dancing was fun on such an intimate dance floor and we even had a show of the local hip hop dance crew showing off their moves. Well it is 4 o’clock here - a bit late for this old man. I need to pack for my trip to Aruba on Sunday and am meeting someone for dinner tomorrow night. I will be mostly absent for the next week as I try to relax and soak in some sun and beach but I will be checking e-main every once in awhile and my phone will still work for emergencies.

I thought I was going to be on vacation for my birthday this year but it turns out I’m leaving the day after so I decided to do something this Friday to celebrate with people in Boston.  I’m going to have a small dinner with close friends at Good Life Bar around 8:00 and then perhaps some drinks at Jacob Wirth.  In any case I’ll be microblogging my whereabouts on identi.ca so use it as an excuse to come down, drink a few beers and have a good time.

We’ll I’m going to dive into the deep end (flames welcome) because I have been talking to people about the Qt “possibility” since Nokia bought Trolltech and GNOME was considering what to do for the future of its toolkit.  I can see the headlines of yet another GNOME developer advocating using Qt4 as the basis of future releases but this simply is not the case.  It is, in its basic form, an exercise in “what ifs?” and an iterative process of looking inward at our ecosystem and seeing the pros and cons of certain directions we could take.

Is this going to happen?

First off this is a highly unlikely scenario. The planets would have to align, Qt would have to go LGPL, Nokia would have to loosen controls on contributions to avoid a fork, the Qt team would have to accept a community which has slightly different goals and the GTK+ team would have to signal their willingness to move. We are not going to turn our back on the great work the GTK+ teams are doing and most certainly the base libraries we use such as GStreamer wouldn’t change.

What are the possible advantages?

• Less confusion for the non-insiders on what to learn and program for
• We can get rid of the whole Freedesktop common widgets talk (e.g. Print and File dialogs) which is nonsense and a distraction anyway
• Hopefully less bickering in the community meaning a more unified and focused front against larger threats
• Focus can move from the lower toolkit layers to the higher level desktop layer which really define the value differences between GNOME and KDE
• Easier technology sharing

Note that these are all only possible advantages and may not even happen even if there was a move.

 What are the possible disadvantages?

• More bickering on how to write applications (who’s approach to usability wins out?)
• Less focus and a return to writing applications without a shared guideline (just look at old XLib interfaces - almost like snowflakes)
• A loss of identity
• Loss of amazing GTK+ developers who may feel abandoned
• Splintering of the community so we have parallel GTK+ GNOME and Qt4 GNOME development
• Screwing ISV’s who bank on GTK+’s stable interface
• GTK+ isn’t just a license - we would be losing a lot by switching away from the codebase
• Falling into the growing pains GTK+ 2.0 brought GNOME and Qt4 is still bringing KDE
• A loss of activity at Freedesktop.org which is actually sometimes useful in producing dialogue and shared practices
• A loss of control over the direction of the toolkit effecting the quality and feel of the GNOME desktop
• Really a lot of development is moving to the web - will toolkits be important enough to warrant the pain of the move

What this wouldn’t be

This wouldn’t be a merging of GNOME and KDE.  Each community has a different idea of what constitutes a usable desktop and Qt would simply be an implementation detail bellow GNOME.

Conclusion

This is pretty much a pipe dream.  It solves some issues while creating a whole host of different ones.  I’m not going to advocate it other than seeing what peoples reactions are.  On the flip side if the work was put behind it, the planets aligned, and both communities came to an agreement I wouldn’t object to the arrangement.  Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath nor would I be elated or saddened if it did or did not happen. To me it is all what is best for Linux, GNOME, Free Software and the wider market. It is unclear what direction would be best (any claims to that knowledge would be suspect) but honestly and actively looking at the possibilities is a useful activity, however remote. People reading should not put their “hopes and dreams” on this or believe it to be more than it is.

Before leaving for GUADEC I had purchased a pound of frozen shrimp because they were on sale.  Last night I needed to figure out what to eat so I decided to make some shrimp scampi over pasta.  I pulled out some of the shrimp and proceeded to defrost them by putting them in a bag and running cold water over them.  When I went to reach for the garlic I noticed they were all rotten.  I quickly rummaged around my kitchen and found a frozen ginger root and some green onions (also known as scallions).  The resulting mix was amazing as the ginger had carmalized on the surface leaving little bits of crunchy flavour explosions.  Here is the recipe for one serving.

Ingredients:

Pasta
5 large shrimp, shelled
1 sliver of ginger root, brunoise
1 Tbls. of fresh sliced scallions
1 Tbls. Sweet Cream/unsalted butter
1 leaf of fresh sage
salt and pepper to taste

Cook the pasta in boiling water. When the pasta is almost done start the sauce. Melt the butter in a sauté pan and add the ginger, scallions and fresh sage. Add a pinch or two of salt and sauté until the butter just starts to turn brown. Add shrimp with some more salt and pepper and cook on both sides until orange to the eye and firm to the touch. You need to manage your heat here as you don’t want to burn the butter and you don’t want to move the shrimp except to turn them once. This will also allow the ginger to start to caramelize. Toss the finished pasta in the pan and get it coated with the butter sauce. Take off the heat, let it sit for a minute and then plate and serve. Sprinkle some fresh scallion on for colour.

I would have taken pictures but it was so good it was gone before I remembered I had a camera.

Paul Frields probably has one of the best posts I have seen about ediquet on planets.  It is quite telling what people post to their blogs or any public identity.  I remeber many a news article about the phenomenon of college grads posting pictures and things that they would otherwise not have shown in public only to find out that a potential employer had googled them resulting in them not getting the job.  So while a blog may be considered the private domain of the owner where they can post whatever they want, it is a reflection on that person and may come back to haunt them.

Istanbul was a great place to have GUADEC this year though I wasn’t really able to be a part of the regular conference schedule due to my Foundation duties.  These days I am mostly around for the community aspects and to get a feel for where said community is headed.  To that effect for me GUADEC is mostly about friends, food, beer and moving GNOME forward in a stampede of boisterous hackers with common interests.  Along those lines here is a summary of GUADEC though my eyes (more…)

some people can sense injustice or doom - Matthew senses impending fail