J5’s Blog

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.

Piling on to Colin’s post:

If you knew what I needed to do already why didn’t you just do it?  Just popping up the dialog that I now have to go searching for would have been somewhat passable.  Besides Jython is not even usable right now so just assume I want my system python.  That is just plain laziness and the reason why I keep trying eclipse and then thinking better of it a couple of minutes later.

To be fair I hear it is a great app but I can’t get past the UI.  It gets in my way.  The run dialog alone has forever traumatized me.  Let’s see if the bugzilla plugin will allow me to file this bug or I will be back with another ranty update. I’m going to try to give eclipse a longer benefit of the doubt but if I run into much more of this it’s going to take a lot of people telling me it has since gotten better, before I try again.

I feel I owe this blog post to Chris being that I’ve been cited as one of the catalysts for some in the GNOME community aligning themselves with WebKit.  Not that I think that is bad that there is competition in the browser market (competition is one thing but a line in the sand is just counterproductive here) but my original intent was merely to ask what are our priorities and what projects would align closer to those priorities.

In any case it was reported on Slashdot that according to an article at Dot Net Perls, Firefox is now one of the most efficient browsers when it comes to memory usage.  This meshes with the internal tests Mozilla was doing and Chris blogged about.  It was one of my main gripes with Firefox when using the XULRunner and Gecko engine as the basis for an embedded browser.  At the time I was a bit nonplussed as the work that was being done to make Firefox better revolved around blaming and removing important libraries instead of fixing the root causes.

If the data is to be believed (and be transferable to Linux as the tests were run on Windows) then it does point to significant improvements in Firefox and I thank the Mozilla community for listening and dealing with the issues head on.  Software is hard and we shouldn’t turn our backs on a friend of the Linux community even when they might not be walking lock step with us.  The flip side is Mozilla does need to be concious of the needs of downstream developers and not use its market position as bludgeon to get its way. To that end there are still the issues of a stable embedded API and better platform integration. I hear those are being worked on so hopefully it won’t be an issue going forward.

Again I would like to thank the Mozilla community for putting out a great browser that is a serious competitor with Internet Explorer. I would also like to thank the Mozilla Foundation for helping fund accessibility work in GNOME. By working with each other instead of butting heads, as happens every once in awhile, the ecosystem grows and benefits both communities.

…and say hello to Cappuccino in a Cloud.

The Red Hat “Boston” office just moved into new diggs down the street from our old office space.  This is the second move we have made since I got here four years ago and a needed one as the company continues to grow at a steady pace. Inevitably the discussion of coffee makers comes up every time we make a move (and quite frequently in the interim too) with a new coffee gadget showing up shortly after. We opted for the Flavia drink station this time around. This brings up the issue that any new gadget presented to a large audience will inevitably see high traffic for the first few days before the novelty wears off and the traffic reduces to a steady level of consumers.

There are many questions that need to be considered here. Will the machine stand up to the first few weeks of abuse? If it was engineered for a high peak capacity is it still economical to run when that traffic has fallen off? Do we just accept that the first few weeks will see some breakdowns, pissed customers who will not come back because of the failed experience and keep on chugging with the knowledge that our initial costs were low? If coffee making could be parallelized could it scale up and down economically and efficiently?

This is the Cappuccino in a Cloud problem. How do you make processes efficient and scalable for both high load peak and the inevitable lower day to day traffic? The travelling salesman problem dealt with efficiencies of one single entity (the salesman) finding the most efficient (read cheapest) single threaded route through a number of destinations. In today’s word the consumer comes to the buisness or service, sometimes all at once, and it is important to figure out the most efficient way (measured in the consumer’s satisfaction and producer’s bottom line) to handle that load.

I have been blessed in the past to be surrounded by really good artists who could take my vision and turn them into reality. Back when I thought I was going to make web consulting a career I started up a single single proprietorship company called Martian Rock Interactive, a name came to by brainstorming with a particularly brilliant artist who I happen to be best friends with and am going to be his best man come March. My first attempt at a logo looked something like this:

I personally think it wasn’t bad but I wanted a more stylish take on the basic design so I asked Charlie to come up with something. It took a couple of iterations but we finally hit on this logo:

Now I have forgone the Martian Rock brand for my own more personal J5 moniker and need a logo to use for my video and text blog. My only criteria is it should be simple, memorable, eye catching and reflect the artist as much as myself. I put high stock in personality and if an artist can show their personality through their work I know it is going to be good.

I just noticed PiTiVi was upgraded to 0.11.1 at some point in Fedora 8 so I gave it a run. While there are show stopper bugs (which I will file in due time) and it doesn’t do much yet, it is almost to the point of what I need in a video editor. The important part is the UI is intuitive and easy to use. Here are a list of features I would need for the bare minimum of using PiTiVi as an editor:

• Cross fades
  • Even if it is a simple, non-configurable cross fade, cross fades really add polish between harsh cuts.
  • Fading and unfading audio is also important
• Support for image files as frames
  • This is the quick a dirty way to do intros and credits (eventually I would want direct text overlays)
• decoupling the audio from the video
• quick timeline resize of audio and video in the advanced view
  • The clip editor in the simple view is fine for precise editting but having the ability to drag either end of a clip to resize it in the timeline makes it easy to sync up with other elements in the timeline

That’s it. While I would like more functionality such as voice overs, unlimited tracks, multiple effects and overlays, the above list is all I need to support the simple editing that I do.

It is good to see other distributions are picking up the eggcups printer autoconfiguration interfaces which I had started and Tim Waugh had perfected. It was more than three years ago that GNOME had a dream of making USB hardware ‘Just Work’ when plugging them in. Today one can’t imagine a desktop distribution which doesn’t have this. A key agenda at the next GUADEC should be getting a lot of this work accepted upstream and figuring out how last mile items like PolicyKit will add polish to great stack we have built up.

For the past week I have been leaving work with a killer head and stomach ache. At first I attributed it to just being hungry combined with not getting enough sleep and leaving work around 8pm. As it built up more and more and happened sooner in the day I realized it was the same feeling I got when playing 3d games for an extended period of time. I also realized that at the beginning of the week I had upgraded to Rawhide and turned on compiz desktop bling. Turning off Compiz instantly reduced my eye strain and my headache subsided.

This sucks for me because besides Compiz being very visually appealing, 3d effects and composition is the future of the Linux desktop not to mention a myriad of other consumer devices with displays. The biggest problem is, it is not just the 3d effects which cause an issue but a static screen where no animations are happening seems to trigger vertigo. However the worst offender was scrolling in Firefox. I wonder if anyone is doing research in this area because I hope it is fixable.

I know you don’t want to comment on specifics of recent US law news but what might be useful to the community is a discussion on what patent law really says. There is a disconnect (often emotional) between the true nature of such laws and the laypersons understanding. I for one would like to know why patent law isn’t more like trademark law where one has to actively defend a trademark or risk losing it. Obviousness of a method is hard to prove over the lifespan of a patent. As time goes on and more people start accepting a certain method as being commonplace (and hence obvious to those concerned) does that factor at all into the law? What is the metric for obviousness?

The reason I have to ask here is there really are few resources a person has access to to research these issues without going to law school - something I personally have considered and then rejected at this point in life. This is not a desire to create some sort of grass roots campaign against cases in the court system. I’ll leave the lawyering to the lawyers. This is more of a hacker’s desire to understand the rules that govern the world around him. So far, where the law is concerned, it seems an unobtainable goal for your average Joe citizen.

Taking a look at Rob Bradford’s Open Moko post I noticed something really nice. The notification area icons weren’t some multi-colored blurry blobs and they looked great. They are crisp and clean. With the exception of one of the more busy icons I can readily tell what each one of them does.

Why do we waste our artist’s time adjusting icons for smaller resolutions instead of having them concentrate on the bigger beautiful full color icons? For every icon an artist produces they unusually need to produce two smaller icons at lesser detail since scaling inevitably just makes the lower resolution icons look horrible. This creates extra work and the results are far from perfect. The advantage of black and white icons are that they are simple to create, for the most part can match any theme and produce much sharper icons at lower resolutions. Since we agree mostly on metaphors one set could be produced to work with the majority of themes out there. Elegance through simplicity.

This has been running around in my mind for awhile now, especially after working with the OLPC two tone icon set . Apple does this too.