J5’s Blog

January 19, 2009

Adopt a Hacker – Become a Friend of GNOME

Filed under: Gnome, community, friends, humor — J5 @ 12:38 am

For only cents a day, less than a cup of coffee, or Brondo(it’s got what plants crave) , you can make sure a GNOME hacker has all the resources they need to hack late into the night and into the early morning.  So become a friend of GNOME and donate $10 a month.  Doing so will make you elegeable to receive a signed  postcard from your favourite hacker (only valid for participating hackers) .  You can even watch their progress through their personal blog and see what a difference you have made.  Remember, as of today I am not just the GNOME Board’s Treasurer, I’m also a Friend because everyone needs friends.

Disclaimer: Donations do not go to individual hackers you specify (though feel free to thank them directly via a gift or even better, a thank you and pat on the back – just not when they are sleeping, that is kind of creepy).  The money you donate to the Foundation goes into the general Foundation budget and helps ensure that GNOME continues to be a free (as in libre) and open source desktop by providing resources to developers, software and education for end users and promotion for GNOME worldwide.

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December 14, 2008

A thought or two about design or why do engineers often skip over cost

Filed under: Gnome, humor, usability — J5 @ 4:38 pm

We see bad design around us all the time.  Often adequate design wins over great design .  In a ecosystem based on limited resources (time, money, component parts, etc.) at what point does a better design start giving diminishing returns?  Is this a good thing? – That problem has been solved we should move on to the next – or is it a bad thing?  – The solution to that problem causes adverse side effects but the cost of fixing it is too high.  In a world of limited resources it often takes a large catalyst or new markets to disrupt entrenched adequate design. I suspect there are good and bad sides to every decision here with some situations leaning further one way or the other.

That is a good leeway into my next thought about design in that decision making is a huge part of good design.  Decisions are hard.  Avoiding them has its cost.  My favourite is that collectively avoiding a decision makes it harder for other decisions to be made down the road.  You need to decide if it is worth the cost.

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July 14, 2008

Somewhere in the world someone is experiencing a massive fail moment

Filed under: humor — J5 @ 12:06 pm

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some people can sense injustice or doom – Matthew senses impending fail ;)

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July 12, 2008

D-Bus now supports tabs

Filed under: D-Bus, Gnome, humor — J5 @ 9:06 pm

That’s right, in order to support the upcomming release of GNOME 3.0 which is introducing a new tabbed interface, we’ve totally made D-Bus HIG compliant by adding tabs to the API.  No longer do you have to select a system or session bus while connecting.  Now all you have to do is select the correct tab and you are connected.  Now you might be saying, I can’t see these tabs.  Because of constraints of the D-Bus system, namely not having a GUI, we had to add virtual tabs.  Don’t worry, they are there, you just have to randomly click and eventually you will select the right bus.  Or you can simply use the new D-Bus Gtk+ bindings which exist to provide a GUI in which to display the tabs.  A word of warning though, because of Qt4’s abstraction layers when using the D-Bus Qt4 library they will show up as plasmoids.  We here at Freedesktop.org hopes this makes your D-Bus hacking a much more enjoyable experience.

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