J5’s Blog

About dialogs with credits are important.  In the past when developers were developing for developers it was a way of getting acknowledgement for hard work put into an application.  Getting your name and e-mail in an about dialog was a badge of honor.  It also notified would be developers on who to talk to to get info on contribution or sending a patch.  This was when people were mostly in ‘the know’  about e-mail net etiquette.

As more and more people start using Linux on the desktop, many of who have different cultural norms shaping their net etiquette behaviour, we run into the issue of having to kindly tell people that it is immensely annoying to get spam from people seeking support.  Sometimes we are in a bad mood or our own style of writing can be interpreted as hostile when trying to point people to the proper support channels.  This could leave a first time user feeling like Linux isn’t worth the hassle of getting seemingly abusive replies when all they want is to get their computer working.  If we want Linux to be easy we need to be able to easily point users to resources where they can get help on using their system.  Asking them to innately understand cultural norms that we take for granted (I go to bugzilla for bugs, forums for distro help and mailinglists for development ideas) is asking for our userbase to consist of just Linux enthusiasts.

My simple suggestion.  Add a big old I need support button to the about dialog which pulls a URL or text blurb which is set by the distro vendor.  I like the idea of a URL where it can send users to some sort of wizard on the distros website (heck I would like a standard wizard module which sends upstream issues upstream and distro issues downstream but that is just wishful thinking).  Paid customers of a commercial distro would get their support site (heck an IT department could even set all their desktops to filter to an internal support request form) and the community distros can get casual users to their resources.

Note that Ximian back in the day used to do something similar where each app had a way to get to an irc support channel.  The idea was good but in reality I think the one time I tried it out there was only a bot in the channel. Taking that similar idea and instead pointing users to appropriate support sites would be the bee’s knees and save me from having an aneurysm when someone e-mails me asking for a network driver for such and such a device because they found my e-mail in the NetworkManager about box.

I was driving up to work today and thinking about productivity and how I utterly fail when having to switch contexts between say, web programming to desktop programming to filling out status reports (which I avoid for this same reason) to working on finances for the board.  The problem isn’t that I can’t switch contexts fast and effectively.  When there are tools around, say a fairly nice IDE, I can easily jump from hacking on Python TurboGears controllers, to ToscaWidgets to plain old HTML, CSS and JavaScript.  If items are organized properly jumping from task to task, even in the middle of an ongoing task, is pretty much a non-issue.

 The Promise of the Desktop

Computers in general were created to simplify our lives but the Desktop was created to simplify the lives of office workers by taking the papers on a desk metaphor and adapting it to a digital world.  What we ended up with was the same (metaphoric) clutter that happens on any physical desktop, requiring us to manually reorganize our Desktop every once in awhile.  In this scenario we start out very productive but then that productivity starts to decline as the clutter builds up from every day use.

Good applications however have a way of focusing us on the task at hand.  To clean up in an application one can simply start from scratch.  After one task is done a fresh new slate awaits the next task.  Applications for the most part are fairly targeted at doing a specific task well, and if well designed presents the tools you will use for that task in a well organized fashion.  Mind you there are a lot of bad applications out there and the good ones could get much better but we can agree that they are in much better shape in terms of organization and focus then the Desktop.

Traditionally Desktops are places for launchers, various bits of information and a place to stick your most used data for easy access.  This is all well and good, and a tool for organizing oneself but the problem is the Desktop is global so that each task has to deal with the cruft from the last task.  There is no clean slate aside from clearing all of your tasks and with the more tasks a user has to deal with, productivity starts to decelerate at an exponential rate.

If the desktop wants to be smarter it will have to think and present itself as an application which organizes a user based on tasks.  Pagers take a first stab at this by allowing the user to organize open applications per workspace.  Whenever I have a different task - say communications (e-mail, irc, blogging) - I open the applications up on one workspace and then switch to another workspace for say development.  I still however get the same launcher and same files on the desktop, 99% of which I don’t use for this particular task.

I was pretty excited about the GNOME 3.0 mockup for workspaces in which the user had to specifically add a workspace by clicking a button.  By making workspace creation explicit instead of implicit it meant people who don’t need this feature don’t get confused when all of their windows disappeared, but also that the user has a chance at discovering why multiple workspaces are convenient.  The problem is the scope of the workspace changes were targeted at fixing the issue of confusion and not at making the user more organized.  It is a step in the right direction but in my opinion does not go far enough.

If the Desktop was an application to organize the tasks I needed to complete, a created workspace would allow me to first name it for easy reference, un-stick itself from modifying the global Desktop state and let me customize it for the task at hand.  I could then switch between tasks and have only the data I care about and the launcher for applications which would be used for the task at hand, present.  The Desktop would then allow me to delete a workspace when I will no longer be performing the task it was setup for and even save the workspace so it is no longer in my rotation of tasks but still available for recall in the future when I have a similar task come up (e.g. taxes require organization to do effectively but only consume at most a month of my thought each year).

But, but, but, you can do this with fast user switching today.  Well, yes and no.  Completely separate sessions would archive what I am looking for if it were fast and actually worked.  There is a laundry list of other features needed which fast user switching can’t provide:

• Users would have to be able to be setup and removed on the fly with little fanfare (e.g. the add workspace button in the GNOME 3.0 mockups)
• I still would want the ability to share a home directory and copy and paste data from one task to another
• Switching to a “subuser” would need to be as easy and fast as ctrl-alt-arrowkeys are which means a spacial layout and no password dialog every time I switch

With the ability to setup a desktop focused on a task and tear it down or start from a clean slate without effecting other tasks, switching between the many hats one needs to wear in a typical day becomes much less cumbersome.  It also slows down the effects of productivity sapping cruft which will always build up over time.  True there is some overhead in setting up and managing each desktop but I tend to see this happen constantly.  As people switch their task priorities their desktop changes with it.

We use so many external and non-integrated tools to organize ourselves already, wouldn’t it be nice if task organization was built into the desktop and applications such as a todo list could key off the current task without any extra configuration?  Perhaps there is no good UI for this sessions in a session idea and it would in fact make life a lot harder for people.  Think about it anyway - if a Desktop is supposed to make the user more productive by giving them tools to organize their work, why not have that built in?  Why not make the Desktop and applications one big integrated application (not one big process mind you) for getting work done?

They have the details up on their web site.  Apparently it is a way of creating local applications using either Gecko or WebKit.  The remote part of the equation isn’t there and it isn’t clear if they will be perusing this angle. Right now the code only supports clients but by the look of their documentation, they are planning on creating the ability for JavaScript services which would be cool.

Congrats goes to Barack Obama for making history and becoming the next president of the United States.  By all accounts the House and the Senate will also see major Democratic wins.  We now wait and see what the Democratic party will do with this mandate.  If they are smart they will act wisely and swing further centre than most majority parties have in the past.  As we have seen from the Republican mandates for the past eight years no matter how powerful a party, the stronger you are the harder you fall.  The question  has become will the Democratic party build a long term legacy or squander it, damaging their party as Bush had done in a mere eight short years? From what I have seen and read of Obama, I think I have made the correct choice when checking that box this morning. Now it is time for the US to come together, repair our image around the world and continue to be a beacon of Freedom to all.

Stormy, our very own Executive Director, talking about the two new additions to our advisory board and the future of GNOME.  Rock on!

It was quick, easy and dare I say fun.  I was a little disconcerted that the paper ballot used involves a scanner in which a poll worker stands behind and watches you put your ballot in.  I was trained on and am used to the old mechanical voting booths where I grew up in New York.  It is the one where you walk into a booth, pull a lever which closes a curtain, flip a few switches on a matrix and then pull the lever again to open the curtains and register your vote. No method is perfect which is why there is a continual search for better voting methods. There is always some sort of trust that is involved when going to the polls.

Many French Onion dips are made out of powdered French Onion soup mix.  The thing is, real French Onion dip is just as easy to make with onions, olive oil, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce and beef broth.  Basically you make a pan French Onion soup and let most of the liquids evaporate and then incorporate the results into some sour cream.  I came up with this recipe after having some sour cream left from the icing I was making for my pumpkin cheese cake.

1 cup sour cream

2 small yellow onions

1 tablespoon of olive oil

1 tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce

1/2 cup beef broth

salt and pepper to taste

Chop onion into half moons.  Add olive oil to pan and put over medium low heat.  Add onions and a pinch of salt.  Sauté for a bit and then cover with lid to sweat.  Once onions are translucent add beef broth and Worcestershire sauce.  Add salt and pepper to taste and boil down the liquids until there is very little left.  Let mixture cool down a bit and then add to sour cream, mixing thoroughly.  Add more salt as needed. Refrigerate for at least an hour and then serve with potato chips.  So much better than the mix stuff and just a tiny bit more work.