I have been getting some interesting feedback about my Repetitive Software Injury entry on my O’Reilly blog. Thanks for the feedback and email I have been getting. I also had an email from a chap who said that he has implemented some support for RSI prevention in his companies XML editor. I am pleased that at least some good may come of the article. 🙂

Speaking of the article, I actually posted a submission to Slashdot as an Ask Slashdot feature. Whether it gets posted or not I don’t know, but normally when I submit something it gets blasted out of the water within a few hours. This one has been pending for two days now. Who knows. If this site is offline for quite some time, you know what happened. 😛

I have been asked by the AFFS if I would like to sit on their panel at their Annual Conference on May 15th in Birmingham. I have added this event to the spanky new Events Calender that I have added to the site. This will list up and coming and previous events. I still have to add some older events to the roster that I need to dig the dates out for. As ever, if you would like me to come and ramble at an event, give me a shout.

Oh yes, I was watching the third series of Coupling on DVD and in the second episode there is a copy of SuSE Linux on a shelf in a cupboard. The box is quite plainly in sight and was obviously placed by an enthusiastic Linux user who works at the BBC. Crazy stuff. I was quite impressed that my eagle eyed girlfriend Sooz spotted this. Strangely enough, we were watching Friends the other night and they mentioned the band Carcass in the episode. We suspect that there is an attempt to suck us into the TV. Next there will be endless bacon adverts, strangely bearded musicians, and natural history penguin programs. Weird.

We had a LUG meet last night and it was fun. We stayed on topic rather well last night – it was actually like a real LUG. There was still an amicable amount of stupidity and funky pies to keep it real though.

I now have a possibility of four dates for Infopoint booths and I am waiting on a few more and then I will confirm them. When they are ready I will put them on the website and announce them. I can’t wait to see the written up reports about how these booths went. I really hope this proves to be useful in bringing a stack of new users over. We have some very enthusiastic volunteers who I am sure will represent Linux well. 🙂

I posted a new entry to my O’Reilly blog yesterday. This one is called Repetitive software injury. The article discusses the importance of RSI prevention in our software and the potential for incorporating these prevention facilities at the lowest possible level so it applies to all software and users. My view is that this could tie in quite well with the new X.org X servers that are in development. The natural challenge is how this RSI prevention software is incorporated – not everyone suffers from RSI, but they may get it later. Do we make this cunning RSI prevention widget an optional feature or sneakily include it in the users daily routine? There is indeed, lots to discuss. The article also got a mention on OSNews.

I have finally got round to listening to the Metallica Binge and Purge CD’s that are now firmly wedged in my CD player. Considering that Metallica have managed to release an awful album recently we must not forget the many fine tunes they have forged between themselves. They really were a great band and it is great to hear them when they still wrote thrash. 🙂
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Well, I finished the Stephenson book last night and it is pretty cool. Good ending, and it felt like a strage yet logical conclusion. I have now moved onto Free as in freedom; a book about the venerable RMS. It looks like it will be an interesting read too.

Today I got the go-ahead to begin arranging dates for the Infopoint Project and it looks like we also have a fair in Bedford at the end of the month that could host an Infopoint. Matt is also working hard on the Infopoint document – it is good to see things coming together. 🙂
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On sunday we did a gig in Coventry. It was good fun, although it took a lot out of us. We needed to get there for 1pm to soundcheck and the promoter was late. We eventually got in at 3pm and had no sound check. It was a fun gig though, just very exausting.

Yesterday was bank holiday monday and I actually took the day off for once. I normally work on a bank holiday (you sometimes have to when freelancing), but we decided to get our garden sorted out. Lots of mowing of lawns, cutting of bushes and dirtying of fingers. We then went and babysat for Aq’s kid. Sooz and I rented Stuck on you; bad taste but potentially funny, and we were treated to two hours of utter shite. It really is one of the worst films I have ever seen. Not the worst though. Oh no, that crown goes to a film by the name of Gummo. Gummo makes me want to stick a pencil in my eye.

I have been reading Neal Stephenson’s scribe In the beginning…was the command line. I am not sure of what to make of it so far. I am currently just over half way through, and the general feeling I have is that he draws some metaphorically interested conclusions, but some are, well, rubbish. There is certainly some truth to what he says with regard to how we interact with consumer goods and how we perceive OS’s, but he really brings out some wacky comparisons that I find hard to stomache. He is though, a very interesting writer to read. I do sometimes get the feeling he is trying to be overly flowery in his writing, and there is a sense that he has flicked through many a thesaurus to find interesting alternative words to make his writing seem a little flashier. There also seems to be a deep underbelly of humour waiting to burst out. He does makes some comical references, but I get the impression that he chose the thesaurus over the comic wit. Nonetheless, great reading so far…

Good day today. We got up at about 10am and headed over to Birmingham for 11.30am to get ready for the Linux multimedia workshop at OpenAdvantage where I was demonstrating the GIMP and Blender. The response was generally very good, with a particular interest in Blender. There were some impressed faces when I showed off some of the example artwork and movies.

After I had finished my workshop, Steve from A2:RT gave a workshop on Kino and Cinelerra. I have played with Kino before and was impressed, but Cinelerra was new to me. I tried it a while back (I have been trying to get Sooz an alternative to Adobe Premier for a while) but the interface put us both right off. We watched Steve perform the workshop though, and Cinelerra is incredible. It can do most editing requirements that you would need and the real-time effects are impressive. Yes, the interface is clunky, but this can be improved.

I was a little confused about the direction of this project. From what I have heard, the guy who runs the project wrote the entire thing by himself and pretty much rejected patches from most people. He then decided to open up the project and accept contributions from people. It still seems that there is an issue with patches getting accepted and there have been discussions of forks. I really do hope this project heads in the right direction. It seems like a strong developer community is getting behind it, and I am looking forward to seeing it continue.
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To my surprise the Refining for usability blog entry that I wrote has made it to this months Top 25 Entries list. At the moment it is at number 7 and my Mozilla and the potential for interaction entry is at number 9. I am pleased that people are reading these articles, and I would like to thank you all for the email that I have been getting about them. Keep it coming. 🙂

The LUGRadio steam train seems to be running along at a fair lick of knots with the new Episode 6 release. We are currently discussing a UK conference/festival that could be cool. The idea is to create something that is really fun and interesting to attend. The idea is a HAL type event for the UK. We are just fleshing out ideas about the event, but I will keep you posted.

I got my Web Browser Roundup sent off to Linux Format last night. The browser situation is really quite impressive at the moment on Linux. The difficult thing for this roundup was choosing the best of the best. Not only do the browsers seem to match IE and pals, but these browsers are actually innovating in different ways. I suppose the key philosophy is to work around the open standards of the W3C; these open standards are after all the reason why the web was intended as an open platform.

There must be a great temptation from the Mozilla developers to rush ahead and create their own extended functionality, but they don’t. I assume that these developers are well aware of the kind of fragmentation that could be created by doing such a thing. The big question though, is whether they support some of the broken HTML/CSS facilities in IE to ensure integration of IE sites in Mozilla. I suppose this is the same kind of argument that the Mono folks face – supporting a competiting technology is technically assisting the take up of the technology. It is a difficult choice to make and I am pretty sure that Mozilla will never support such things due to ethical reasons. I may be wrong though…
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A few days back I wrote an article called Refining for usability in my O’Reilly Blog. The article mentioned KDE as an example, so I posted it as a submission to dot.kde.org and I had an email saying that the content had basically been discussed before and there would be no posting. A few days later, I seemed to be getting a lot of comments posted on the article. I then noticed that it had actually been mentioned on the dot after all. Not just the dot, but OSNews and Linuxtoday picked up on it too. The effect of this is a lot of discussion.

What seems evident to me is that there is still very much of an issue with this. I had a little flak from some people saying that this has all been discussed before, and I accept this. It has been discussed before, but I think these discussions are from concern that the respective projects are going to suffer problems in the future regarding these issues. In my article I proposed a possible solution and I tried to simply outline the issues that I feel are faced by complete newbies, such as my dad (used as an example). I am concerned that in two or three versions, the configurability situation is going to be crazy. I am all for configurbility, but it needs a new method of layout.

Ease of use is very much a relative concept. It is relative to your experience, intelligence, requirements and of course, equipment. For the kind of people who love fiddling with software and love exploring technical in-depth features, there is no real issue. The software works as you need it to. For new users this is obviously a problem. I do believe though, that the desktop can be suitable for all types of people. I feel the important step is to determine the typical use cases of these different types of user and then build the configurability of the environment around these levels. This has been seen before with applications that hide functionality away behind Advanced tabs.

Although I am suggesting methods to solve the problems I see, none of this can be measurably improved unless we have independent research into the actual scope of the problem. I would love to see some professional, independent UI testing performed on both GNOME and KDE. I know that there are the Sun GNOME Usability Reports that many people seem to sneer at, but the only independent usability testing that I have seen are individual reports, which may or may not be biased.

I may very well be barking up the wrong tree with this concern about configuration overload, but there seems to be a lot of response from this article that indicates similar concern with other people. The last thing we should do is to not discuss the problem. Obviously we live in a free software community and the folks who make the final choice are the hackers. If it is decided that things are fine as they are, fine. That is their choice in a free community – I just hope the choice is based upon research into a potential issue.

In other news, LUGRadio Episode 6, complete with blooper reel, is online. This show was recorded at the Linux User & Developer Expo in London and includes interviews with KDE, GNOME, Linuxchix, Paul Sladen from Debian, Sun, AFFS, AbiWord and others. We also had a chat with the LUGRadio faithful. Remember to visit the LUGRadio Forums. 🙂
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Sun seem to be getting an aweful lot of flak recently from people. Not only did the venerable Eric Raymond stick the boot in about Java but now Pamela Jones from Groklaw has polished the steel toe-caps and sunk them in. PJ’s complaint seems to be based upon the fact that when you use the Sun Java Desktop you don’t really see anywhere in the software the term ‘Linux’.

This whole story is a typical example of a company challenging views on not only the legit use of our software, but the ethical use of it. No, the GPL does not have a clause that states “you must bow down and let the FSF run your life and ensure your first born is named Richard be it girl or boy”; I am assuming that RMS was sensible enough to step back and realise that any forced advocacy and branding upon the part of users of GPLed software would be bad. In any case, I get the impression that the BSD majority are mighty pissed off with the fact that a vocal member of the Linux community is attacking Sun because of this issue yet other vocal members of the community bashed the BSD folks for enforcing branding with licensing. A no win situation it may seem.

The issue here is of the true rights of freedom. The FSF sets itself up as real and pragmatic bastions of freedom and free software. Freedom is something that delves to every level and is present in many forms of society. Freedom to use our software should not involve the forced actions of Linux advocacy and pro-GNU murmur. If you want to be very pro free software (as many of us are), there is a welcoming community for you, but you should also have the ability to take the software for what it is worth and use it without needing to wear a penguin t-shirt and join your local LUG. If you don’t like the fact that Sun can do this, the blame is not fully with Sun, but the GPL itself.

Although I do believe that Sun should have the right to do what they are doing (to a point), I do have deep concerns about this move. When I was at the Linux User & Developer Expo and awards evening, there seemed to be a skepticism about Sun. Even when I was sat at the awards do, there were few cheers when the Sun nominations cropped up. I was curious as to why this was. Yes, the recent Microsoft settlement was probably a contributing factor; if Sun have been shafted by Microsoft there will be certain PR implications, but this apparent hiding of the roots of its software can only inflame further negative PR.

Another issue here is that businesses often don’t care about the politics of free software and Open Source. Sun are jumping into the market by providing a SuSE distribution with a re-branded GNOME and selling it as an enterprise desktop. When we recently interviewed Sun for LUGRadio, it was evident in the response that the Sun Java Desktop is there to push Java further. This has implications as (a) Java is not free software and (b) it seems a rather singular-focused view – we are selling this desktop to really increase adoption of our programming system. This simply does not make any business sense to me.

Another issue is the actual view of Java to punters. Virtually everyone who I have met who has come into contact with Java has hated it. I have occasionally met people who have to use it and don’t mind it, but there is no doubt a majority that think it is an aweful language. I studied it briefly and found it to be a pretty strange and disappointing rip-off of C++. This is of course my personal view, and if you like it then, great. I am just a little concerned for Sun as this anti-Java feeling seems pretty common.
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I am just writing a web browser roundup for Linux Format and Paul (the chap who commissioned the article) informed me about the Firesomething add-on for Firefox. This is great. I am currently browsing the web in Mozilla Seastarfish. Maybe this add-on was the inspiration for the seemingly weekly change of name for the browser.

It seems that the Blender article for Linux User & Developer has all been typed up and is formatted. I am looking forward to seeing what these articles look like. They are more editorial than the normal kind of things that I write. I am looking forward to reading them after my brain has chosen to forget what I scribed in the text. It is always refreshing to read old articles and think “my god, my writing seems to have improved”. I suppose it is like anything you do – if you do it every day you naturally get better at it. I don’t think there has been a huge leap in my writing style, but I am pleased there is at least some development. 🙂

I am off to a computer fair tonight and I might buy some new gear. I am going to be paying particular attention to the stalls and getting some ideas about how the Infopoints can be laid out. I know Matt has been making some good progress with the advocacy materials too. I plan on booking some dates over the next few days if possible.

Those of you with beady eyes will have noticed I have added a few more blogs to my blogroll (yes, blogroll). I suggest you read them. Inspiring people.

Oh, and I got my webcam working, but it is shit. I think I need a new one. The driver seems great, it is just the quality of my camera. Aweful.

I started trying to get Garnome working yesterday. All was going well until it barfed on some kind of Mozilla/GTK/Gecko library that is not packaged for Debian. This is going to involve hunting out some kind of patch and applying it. I will look into it tonight if I have time.

After I had written an article on OpenAdvantage last night I started work on some other stuff. At about 2am I noticed that Aq was online and we decided to get GnomeMeeting going for him. He was impressed to say the least and so was I. I now need to get my webcam working; it does work in Linux, I have just the time to compile my kernel. GnomeMeeting really is wicked. I am also going to add my GnomeMeeting contact details to the contact page for those who want to call me.

I have written an article in my O’Reilly blog called Refining for usability. It is something I have been interested in writing for a while. I think this loss of direction for some projects is slightly concerning. Although I have been a KDE user for years, I have recently been playing with GNOME to see how it compares. The GNOME desktop feels much sleeker which came as a surprise and the clunky GNOME of the past seems to have gone. I still think KDE is a superior desktop at the moment, but the competition between the two is close.

I bought some books of Amazon last night. They include:

• In the beginning was the command line
• Free as in freedom
• Essential english: for journalists
• The universal journalist

I am looking forward to giving them a read. 🙂