I have decided to set up one cool machine. On this machine I am going to run the cutting edge in free software. For a start this machine is based on Debian Unstable and I will be compiling CVS KDE and GNOME. In addition to this I plan on compiling OpenOffice.org, Blender (main and tuhopuu) and some others. I also plan to run Project Utopia, Croquet and Looking Glass (when it is released). The idea is to explore the cutting edge in free software. I have been running the KDE CVS version for years, but I would like to explore some other areas. I would also like to write some patches and submit them.

The fun and games with spam continues as ever. Another fish related sender named Kirk Herring augmented other joyous emails from Derange T. Displacement and BARRISTER CHARLES DUKE. The funniest so far has got to be a spammer who wanted to offer me some quality medication; this was from Spongiest J. Wive. You know, I wish my parents had named me Spongiest Bacon. 🙂
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I have been thinking about advocacy a fair bit recently. I tend to think about it quite a bit and write about it in my Linux Format column Spreading The Word. There is no doubt that advocacy can be done in right and wrong ways. Their is a fine line between an enthusiastic user and pure zealotry. No one likes a zealot – not even the people the zealot is speaking for. I have written about some of these thoughts for the O’Reilly Networkin an article called Advocating honesty. Your comments are always welcome. 🙂

Speaking of my O’Reilly Network blog, I was rather surpised to see that my last article Mozilla and the potential for interaction has made it to Number 4 in the Top 25 Weblogs for the last month. Cool. 🙂
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If you are reading this from my RSS feed or are living under a stone, you may not have noticed that I have changed the design to my site. Those of you who are actually reading this (or can’t read it due to some horrific bug that I have not fixed) will see the new blue-ish design.

All in all I am quite pleased with it. There is still a big list of stuff I want to fix up and change, but I am happy with it to the point that it can go online. The new design, and the changes I have made to the site should also make it a bit easier to navigate and be more expandable. There are bound to be plenty of bugs sticking their oar in and around the place, so please drop me an email with the details. Oh, and before you all hit me with a stick, yes, the site is full of invalid HTML. This is number one on the list of things to fix. 🙂

Today I did some more work on the book and then we went to Karate. We finished off by going to see Skid Row at the civic. Great band and a good night was had. I am really, really, really looking forward to seeing Cannibal Corpse next week. Their new album is great and I am gagging to see them. 🙂

Tomorrow I am giving my first guitar lesson to Fizzy and then I am off for my reflexology. I will then bang on with the book some more. 🙂

Yes folks, there is no new site up here yet. I was planning on doing it last night but I was exhausted and needed sleep. This was partially due to having very little sleep recently and the additional excuse that we had a new mattress delivered and I had been out to the LUG and eaten a bucket of curry and beer. I got in and just zonked out.

I had the pleasure of receiving another useful and interesting email from one of the worlds spammers. Nice people they are, sending me this email, and I was delighted to be offered some low cost medication from a kind soul named Dunks O. Dainties. I was also offered the opportunity to buy some low cost software (because, you know, I need to buy software don’t I?) from Tweed U. Equalizes. This is crazy. You would think that they would at least try to use realistic sounding names. The question I always ponder is if these people are actually spammers. See this as an example. 😉

I have had some interesting feedback on my Mozilla and the potential for interaction article. It is always great to hear peoples thoughts about this and I am interested in learning the different viewpoints on the collaboration of these technologies. In some cases it seems a great idea and in some cases it seems very much the wrong choice. What I find fascinating though is the sheer difference in values and pragmatic opinion. This was something that was discussed at the LUG last night. Some people are more idealistic in their opinions and some are more pragmatic. I have a mutual respect for both of these stances and Aq made a valid point that there are only a few people in the world who can be 100% committed to idealism. It is a balance and I think that so long as you are making an effort conducive with your own context then you are doing your bit. As an example, if I did not have to work for a living and I was minted and wore a gold hat, I would have more time on my hands to dedicate to this idealism, so it would be more reasonable. The other differing side is if I was very poor and I had a number of jobs to pay the bills – this is a more restrictive lifestyle. The question is where we draw the line. Thoughts?
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I have been hacking my new site design again, and last night I got most of it completed. It is looking cool now. It does not really look that much different in terms of visual appeal, but it contains a stack of new little extras that make the site easier to use. I still have a few bits to finish and fix and then I hopefully have it online in the wee hours of the morning tomorrow.

I woke up today to be greeted by yet another email that made me chuckle. I had the pleasure of receiving a (stink) nugget of hilarity from Traitors F. Torrance with the subject Jono, need drugs?

Oh, and while I think of it, I am interested in helping a Nigerian doctor launder some money; I just can’t find anyone to help – any suggestions. 😉

You know, although I hate spam with a kind of hatred that even outdoes my hatred for cats, spam does make me chuckle sometimes. Today I got an email from someone called Brightens T. Haddock. I laughed myself silly for quite some time. What a stupid name. I can’t imagine having the surname Haddock, and this is coming from someone with the surname Bacon. 🙂

I struck a deal with Linux User & Developer magazine to write a couple of features. One of these is going ot be about the Blender project and its aims for the future and another will be about Open Advantage. I am looking forward to writing them.

Today I finished of my presentation and sent it off. I have also written up a document for a possible use of OpenOffice.org and Mozilla at a dole training center. To finish off, I worked on some code for a chapter in a book. This is going to be topped off with a trip to the cinema to see The Passion Of The Christ. We were going to go and see it the other day but we plumped for the Dawn Of The Dead remake. It was OK but not great by any stretch.

Today I also spent some time trying to sort out my business cards. What I thought was a simple task was drawn out and eventually not completed. I had thought that CMYK was a fairly standard thing in paint packages, and I discovered that neither the GIMP, Photoshop 5.0 LT or Paint Shop Pro supported it. I was pretty narked at this. There is a plugin for CMYK for the GIMP, but it is not exactly stable. I don’t want to send the image off and then get a crap print due to some screw up with the CMYK. Fingers crossed this will be sorted soon so GIMP can really be used in this kind of industry. Surely it is not that hard to implement is it?

I wrote an article last night about Mozilla and the potential for interaction for the O’Reilly Network. I have seen some interesting responses to this and thanks go to Gerald Bauer for the link to the XUL Alliance. Let me know your thoughts.

It is great to see some progress being made on the LUGRadio Transcriptions over on Forge. It is always nice to see a community of people coming together to see things get sorted out.
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I have tried to try and avoid this whole mess regarding usability of free software, but I think I need to chuck in my ten penneth. For those who are not aware of this saga you should first go and read Eric Raymond’s rant, then read John Gruber’s rant and then finally read Matthew Thomas’s rant.

The problem here is valid. Raymond throws into our face an unpleasent but true fact. Free software is a pain in the ass to use a lot of the time. This does not only extend to more complex administration tools but also environments such as KDE and GNOME. Take a look at the KDE Control Center for example – it is filled with cruft that should simply not be there. The view here is that if you want to put an option in KDE, make sure it can be turned off. No one in the KDE project seems to be able to say no to options though. It gets to a point where a thousand options are added, each with an off button in the KDE Control Center.

I have a few views about usability. First, I don’t fall for this crap that the mind works in predictable ways. A lot of people praise Mac OS X for its ease of use, but I don’t see how it is dramatically easier to use than Windows (its nearest commercial competitor). I also don’t see the merit in the GNOME spacial Nautilus. I certainly don’t believe that if you make certain visual controls available in a way that people expect to find them without prior experience. Usability is very much dependent on context experience and as such I believe that predictability can only be applied to context; a context that must be learned. Once a Mac OS X user is initially cool with how the system works, it is important that Mac OS X adheres to these guidelines to reinstantiate this predictability in applications. This is not predicting people though – this is just minimising what needs to be learned.

This issue with the usability of free software has been suggested by Raymond, but I think the key point is missed. Raymond seems to specifically attribute the fixing of these issues towards the developers of these tools. This is not sufficient. The attribution of blame should also be at the feet of users too – we are a community after all.

If we want to fix this problem of bad UI in free software, we need to make the effort to tell the developers of these problems. For quite some time I have been writing in various publications urging people to contribute in any way they can. One point I have drilled away at in many a column inch has been the fact that contributions are valid at every level, including the UI bug report level. We need to tell developers when something does not make sense to us. If we send a bug report off to the developer saying what we expected to occur in the application and explaining our level of experience, we have at least done our bit. If the developers choose to ignore you then at least you did your bit. Although you may be ignored in some cases, I think many developers will take note of your points – particularly if lots of people are doing their bit and reporting UI problems.

Remember that we are a community, and it is important to do your bit. In this online community it is difficult to walk an old lady across the road or kick a dog turd off the path, but it is not a lot of effort to send an email and file a bug report when the UI does not work as expected. This is what a bug is – unexpected behaviour.

I really urge you all to do this, and I also urge you to tell others to do this. Feel free to stick this blog entry on other pages on the net to help drive the message through. Not everyone in the community can do their bit, but I believe that you can because you care enough about the community to read these essays read a blog from some British writer with a stupid beard. Come on folks, lets stick together and make our community better.

I worked on the site re-design a lot more last night. I re-worked some of the sections and they seem much more integrated. I wrote a few of the sidebars and I have moved some of the content around to make it easier to access. I also added a blogroll to the new site. This is powered by the ever impressive Bloglines that I read my blogs with.

I worked on my presentation some more today and did a stack of research into various areas of Linux desktop development. While doing this I had a chat with Keith Packard on IRC who has been working on some snazzy X server improvements. You can see some screenshots of his work on this page. Keith filled me in on the current status of the project and it is looking pretty impressive.

While I was looking into X servers Keith pointed me in the direction of Croquet and Sun’s Looking Glass. Both of these projects are aiming to build a 3D user interface. I have seen of this before with Fresco and I wondered if there was any use in it. I would be curious to give these a shot and see how well they work. The Looking Glass interface looks much like a normal 2D interface but in 3D. I don’t dispute that it looks good, but is it really improved in usability? Sun do have a Looking Glass movie up on their site but it did not work just now (I think they are having network trouble), but I will check it later.

In many ways the Croquet project will be the most interesting to see developed. the reason for this is that it is a multi-user system where users interact. This will no doubt bring in some philosphy about MUD and MMORPG worlds and how they can be applied to system interaction. The Looking Glass project seems to be aimed at a single user so is much more linear in how it works, but Croquet will be an interesting project to keep an eyeball firmly positioned at.

I saw that my submission to dot.kde.org made it up. It would be cool to meet some of you guys for this presentation. I have also stuck up the details on the sidebar on this site.

Right, I am gonna finish off this presentation and then get the house ready for my buddy Paul coming over. I used to be in a band with him and I am looking forward to catching up this weekend. 🙂

Oh, and thanks Mike (scopeguy) for the link to Laurence Lessig’s Free Culture book. I will read that. Cheers. 🙂
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