Some interesting discussion has been rumbling on inside the walls of some of my pals’ blogs. The whole shebang started when Aq referenced this post from Jorge Castro’s blog. It was then replied to by Matt, then again by Aq, and finally by Matt. The whole discussion is about that favorite of subjects – the GNOME spatial Nautilus.

The issue here is a pragmatic one. For all the great unwashed on Slashdot may bitch and complain about the spatial Nautilus, the developers make the final word on where software develops. Although non-hackers may see this as painfully unjust, this is a fact of life and it happens. The main point to bear in mind here is that the hackers writing this code are not just idiotic techno-geeks with no idea of user interface or interaction, they are often talented developers working for large organisations who have an acute sense of direction. Yeah, it is isn’t fair admittedly – it would be great if every user in the world could confess their dreams and have them appear instantly, but this is not going to happen. Developers prioritise work that is important, interesting and enjoyable. The enjoyable factor is key – none of this software would be here if it was boring to hack. That is why we have a thousand IRC clients and relatively few accountancy packages.

I am pleased with the position GNOME are taking on things. Some of you may have read my article on the problems with KDE usability and feature-bloat, and this is expressly the direction the GNOME team are avoiding. At some point in the timeline you simply have to make a hard decision to go down one path or the other. This is exactly what Jorg is talking about. Few people want to be vilified by such decisions, and when someone has the balls to stand up and make the choice, it should be admired, irrespective of the potential outcome.

The point that seems to be getting missed throughout this whole discussion is how the GNOME technology portfolio is intended. GNOME is not written to be installed by the regular Joe – it is intended as a framework that distributors assemble to target their audience. This may mean tweaking the magic GConf key and turning the spatial Nautilus off, but that is the choice of the distributor. GNOME is not a catch all desktop in the same way that KDE seemed to be designed. Although KDE is platform independent, the platform specific parts of KDE are rarely included with the desktop due to the fact that so many see the main desktop as a stock install for most distributions. This is why platform dependent software for KDE always seems to feel like a crufty add-on.

The GNOME guys took a risk with Nautilus and I applaud them for it. It was a good addition and works well. I do feel they should add an option to turn it off (mainly due to the fact it is such a large feature), but I also want to encourage people to use the spatial Nautilus as a new and more productive way of working, and not just turn it off because the zealots on Slashdot don’t like it. As Jorg rightly says, we need to focus on the important things now. Who gives a shit about how configurable the UI of the desktop is? I certainly don’t – I would much rather see my hardware work flawlessly, my desktop work transparently and my applications work impressively. This is an area where GNOME and KDE are distinctly different – the GNOME guys are pushing for real and different innovative features, whereas the KDE folks are simply taking any feature and providing an off switch in the Control Center. I would love to see KDE become more framework orientated such as GNOME, but I fear that while the KDE distribution software contains KControl modules for an impressive array of pointless clutter, the modules will simply remain in distributions. I liken this situation to that of sound engineering. The greatest sound engineers never add more bass/mid/treble to a sound, they simply take the other frequencies out. This is what separates a quality recording from an over bassy hash of a sound. More is less.

I hope Matt doesn’t get bored of Linux. He is a valuable member of our community and has done some great work. The main thing to remember though is that no-one ever said free software would be perfect. It has its fair share of bumps in the road, but if we step over the losers laying in the road begging for attention, we can head in the right direction.

Went to the LUG last night and it was fun. A bit different as it was over at Dave and Kat’s house, but it was nice to see the usual bunch as well as Woo and Tim. I drunk way to much Dr Pepper though. I was driving, so beer was off the menu, so I decided to polish off a fair few cans of black stuff that tastes nothing like fruit.

Last night I wrote an article entitled The end of imitation. This article is all about how Linux is stepping into a mature innovating stage where is beginning to ride ahead of the competition. I am pleased to see that it appeared on Havoc Pennington’s blog and as such on OSNews. Cheers. As ever, let me know what you think.

I am just working on some new stuff for the site. This is going to explain a bit more about my commercial services. I hope to have them ready soon.
—–

Lack of blog entries for the last few days has been due to my hectic work schedule. All is going well though and I am ploughing through some projects. Fun fun fun.

More great feedback has been coming through on the Infopoints and some more reports have come through about the success of the different Infopoints. I am going to start pre-arranging dates for the August Infopoints when I have cleared a couple of projects out of the way first.

It is looking like I am confirmed to give a talk at the Linuxworld Expo in October. I am going to keep the details of the talk under wraps at the moment, but I will let you know when I have confirmed some things later. It should be fun, and yet another trip down to the capital will be in order. 🙂

We had a nightmare last night. Sooz, my other half, who is a complete and utter magnet when it comes to computers, had possibly the worst computer experience ever – her machine blew up. All she wanted to do was to transfer the computer from one room to another and what resulted was a burnt out motherboard, broken graphics card, broken PSU and possibly damaged hard disks. I was up until 1am trying to make the hard disks work with some new gear. The fight is ongoing…

Right I need to do some more work before the LUG tonight. Oh, and LUGRadio Episode 10 is out!!
—–

Sunday was a busy day. I got up early to go to the Wolverhampton Infopoint and was there from 9am – 3pm. It was a great day and I was joined by Ron, Dave & Kat, Adam and Mo. We shifted all of the CD’s and LUG flyers that we had and it was incredibly busy all day. An overwhelming success without a doubt.

I am pleased to see that the Bradford fair went well again. Thanks must go to Richard Bruce for this. He has posted a number of photos online. Check them out here:

• Photo 1
• Photo 2
• Photo 3
• Photo 4
• Photo 5

As with the previous fair that Matt and I did, we are learning things as we go along. We are also beginning to get an idea of what we need to create to go on the Infopoint. Ron did a great job at the Infopoint on Sunday by creating a stack of Knoppix CD’s and Wolves LUG flyers. The flyers provided quite reassuring for a number of people – they knew where they could get help if they chose to give Linux a go.

I am really pleased how the Infopoint project is going – it really shows how people working together can help. I have recently had an email from South Derby LUG who are going to run the Derby point too. Thanks. It was also great to get a phone call from Brian Teeman (from UKLinux offering a stack of free stock that is just out of date. We can use these to give away at Infopoints. Thanks Brian.

I have also just stuck some snaps online from when I visited my brothers family. These photos were obtained with Project Utopia. 🙂
—–

Last night we had a gig at the Planet in Wolverhampton. All was going reasonably well until the double pedal went on the drums and we had to cut our set short. Bugger.

My god, it has been busy recently. I spent the last few days doing some training, and I am now working on a bespoke website for the student. Progress is going well and it should be completed fairly soon. After this there are few other bits of work and articles to get completed and then I can continue with some of my book.

There is so much stuff I have in the pipeline to get out. I have some updates to the website to get online, some work on HAL device information files to do, I need to set up shared printing on our home network, research some bits off PHP, set mailing lists up on our web server, edit LUGRadio Episode 10 and plenty of other things. All of this is merged in with actually working and earning an honest living. 🙂

I also have some things I want to write in my O’Reilly Blog. I have been meaning to write them up for a while but have been way too busy. I think everyone gets to a point where they just have a million and one things to do. For me, it seems like I am like that all the time. I need a holiday…

Anyway, I need to get on tidy the house up now. This is yet another thing on the list – move the house around. We are currently moving the layout of the rooms around to get some more space. Tonight though, I will do nothing.
—–

Yesterday I spent the day training and the course is going well. I am teaching PHP/MySQL based web development, with a specific web application in mind for the student. I will be there for the next two days, and it should be fun. 🙂

Last night we recorded LUGRadio Episode 10 and it went well. It was good fun and we are pleased with the show. We have decided to add a little more time between recording and release, so I managed to get to bed at a reasonable time last night. The show should be out on Monday.

This weekend is going to have a couple of Infopoints run at both Bradford and Wolverhampton. Ii is great to see that more events are in the calendar. I plan on getting in touch with a northern fair organiser when I have some time next week, and we can then get some more locations on board. Schwuk and co have already asked to one up in Cumbria.

I managed to get /etc/fstab updating working in HAL. After a little help from Rovert Love and some tinkering, I figured it out. The solution is not entirely obvious, and I will add it to my Debian installation instructions when I have some time.

Right, I better get on…
—–

Busy weekend. We went away to go and see my brother and his family. It was really nice to catch up with them. Unfortunately from about Wednesday onwards I had come down with a nasty cold (hence the lack of updates on the site), so visiting my family was slightly tarnished with me coughing and spluttering all over the place. Nevermind, I seem to be on the mend now. 🙂

Good news on the Infopoint front. We have volunteers now for the Nottingham and London fairs, and a few more confirmed dates. I hope to confirm them with NCM and BCM fairly soon (pun intended). We have also had a big donation of bits and pieces from IBM. Thanks!

My experimentation with Project Utopia has paid off, and I now have a complete, working implementation of the system. This involves udev and dbus from Debian Unstable, and a compiled HAL and GNOME Volume Manager. Below is a shot of the GNOME Volume Manager’s properties window. It gives you an idea of what it can do:

It does actually work. I slotted in an audio CD and my player came up automatically. I am going to experiement more with it tomorrow. I wrote some notes about setting this up in Debian and put it on the freedesktop.org site. What is exciting is that Project Utopia is getting close to being considered for GNOME 2.6. See the start of the discussion here.

Speaking of GNOME, I got the new GNOME 2.6 installed (now that it is in Debian). Overall, a very impressive release. The network browsing is a real lifesaver, and so far the spatial Nautilus seems pretty good to me. It feels very lightweight and sleek. I was fairly cynical if I would like it, but overall it gets the thumbs up so far. I really like the fact that the GNOME folks have the balls to step up and try stuff like this. I am looking forward to using things such as the Dashboard in the future. Thanks to Aq for letting me know that 2.6 was in Debian. 🙂

Some new Infopoint news. First, I have added a database driven list of events in the Infopoint section. I have also added a bunch of dates that have been confirmed. I have also written an Infopoint Event RSS Feed – now you can plug in a list of Infopoint events into your website or RSS reader. James Holden has also managed to get his hands on some IBM freebies for use with the Infopoints. Nice one James. 🙂

Another big win today was British Computer Fairs getting involved and donating some tables for Infopoints. This broadens the project out across the south of England. We now have the potential for Infopoints at the following locations:

• London TCR
• Kempton
• Portsmouth
• Croydon
• Crawley
• Fareham
• Tolworth
• Worthing
• Southampton
• Bracknell
• Hove
• Gosport
• Ruislip
• Bognor Regis
• Bournemouth
• Slough
• Chichester

Now the plan is to find volunteers for these fairs. There will also be some Linux related content in the British Computer Fairs magazine PCi. Thanks very much BCM!

I am also pleased to announce that the first LUGRadio Special is out. This special contains some interviews and analysis of British political party views on free software, open source and software patents.

Sorry for the lack of updates over the past few days. So much has been going on, and part of the reason for a lack of updates has been because we were changing over to a new server. As of about four hours ago, jonobacon.com is now on our brand spanking new hosting at Bytemark Hosting. Not only is the server damn fast, but the move over was pretty painless. Aq came over here at about 2pm today and we finished at around 7.30pm. Everything is in good working order. 🙂

This past weekend was busy. On Saturday, Matt and I interviewed Howard Berry. Howard is a political candidate for the Labour party and is part of our LUG. He is a really genuine chap and we had an interesting interview. The interview was for a special election special of LUGRadio. The day after the interview, and after the night before involving a great many beers at Aq’s, I dragged my hungover carcass out of bed at 7.15am on the Sunday morning. Complete with headache and groggy stomach, I made the largest cup of tea in the largest mug I could lay my hands on, and prepared for the Wolverhampton Infopoint. I met Matt at 8am, and the computer fair kicked off at 9am. The Infopoint went amazingly well, and we had an incredible amount of interest. Matt has written up a good report of the day on his blog. He also took some photos, which I have mirrored in the gallery. It was great fun all in all, and we both got the impression that something really good came of it.

I have been playing with Project Utopia and installed the binaries that have been added to Debian Unstable. For all those skeptics about the project, I am pleased to say that it does indeed work. I installed the packages, fiddled with a few things to get a graphics driver to work with udev, and then fired up the HAL Device Manager. I then grabbed my USB webcam and plugged it in. Within a few seconds it appeared in the manager window. I then removed it, and it vanished. I also tested it with my digital camera and my Midisport MIDI box. It all worked. Here is a screenshot of it in action:

(click for the full size image)

This is exciting stuff. When I have figured out some of the automake and autoconf problems I am then going to have a crack at compiling HAL from the CVS, and then trying to get the GNOME Volume Manager to work.

Send some work off today to Linux User. I did an article about Red Hat, one about Project Utopia, one about the Linux culture, and one about recycling PC’s. I plan on writing my book for the rest of the week.

Oh, and nice one Alan. Right, I am off to bed…

—–

I am pleased to announce that jonobacon.com is going to be moving over to a new home. Although the sites on the server have been serviced well with the current ISP (cheers Chris!), the bandwidth requirements have outstripped our current hosting plan. We have decided to move over to the kind chaps at Bytemark Hosting. I bought a years hosting today and we plan on moving the site over next week sometime. This will possibly involve a day or so of downtime as the domains move over, but we are looking into methods to have as little downtime as possible. I will give some notice when the changeover is happening so you are aware of it.

This move over to the new hosting will bring some new services to the site and will also dramatically improve the speed. I know that jonobacon.com can be fairly slow sometimes, and I think the speed improvement will make the site much nicer to use. 🙂

Yesterday I got through my interview answers from Red Hat’s Matthew Szulik and Ximian’s Joe Shaw. I am just waiting on some answers from David Zeuthen who is the main hacker for HAL. I am going to merge this content into the articles today.

We recorded LUGRadio last night and it should be online today. Good fun as always, and I am pleased with how it sounds.
—–