I may be cynical and completely addicted to generic desktop computing metaphorbut I really can’t see glowing flowers surplanting it anytime in the near future. The actual function that this application proposes could be coded up in perl over a weekend and paired with a much less condescending interface. A vase full of flowers that are the litmus for how strong your relationships are? Give me a fucking break.

Ugh. I just looked at the error logs for the first time in way too many moons and realized that I used relative instead of absolute paths for almost all of the images linked to posts which are now archived and yielding a big, fat 404 error. I ain’t so bright about this HTML stuff… that’s more than a little embarrassing since I just had a very long and somewhat painful conversation on the light rail with a very squirrelly older guy about his academic ambition to “learn how to be a web designer.” I wasn’t quite sure what to say to him but now I know. Don’t use relative paths, dude.

I really wanted to like this critical response to the first version of the Lindows comparison chart used to feature compare its new offering with a few like offerings from other places and architectures. There are very few outside the annointed Apple user crowd who actually pay much attention to model names of computers. Get some pets or something. I don’t want to seem like I’m defending Lindows in the slightest because I’m convinced in a childish sense that they are indeed the enemy. What really makes this opinion piece do more harm than good is the writer’s unfamiliarity with (I’m taking a guess here from what he’s written) how Linux distributions work. The comparison of software that comes with the machine is a little ridiculous:

And I haven?t mentioned software yet. If the Lindows Mobile PC comes with any besides the Lindows OS, it isn?t mentioned in the promo literature. Most of the applications that can be downloaded from the Click-N-Run Warehouse are inexpensive or even free, but the iBook comes bundled with a rich suite of applications preloaded, including:

Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, QuickTime, iCal, iChat, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, DVD Player, AppleWorks, Mac OS X Mail, Microsoft Internet Explorer, EarthLink (includes 30 days of free service), AOL, Quicken 2003 Deluxe, World Book 2003 Edition, Mac OS X Chess, Otto Matic, Deimos Rising, FAXstf, PixelNhance, and Acrobat Reader; Apple Hardware Test CD

The value of that software alone more than negates the $200 price difference.

Um, AOL included in a default install is “value added”? If that is indeed the case I have value added to my snail mail box several times a week. I’m not very convinced especially when any number of those applications is freely available for download on other platforms (the internally developed applications excepted of course) or simply aren’t that useful — the chess example kind of speaks for itself. He also has some weird hang up about the lack of modem in a three pound laptop which seems a little absurd. Since the Apple laptops are dependent on Firewire/USB for adding peripherals to their portables I fail to see a real downside here. Anyway, it was kind of funny at least before I gave it much thought.

I’ve been following a good deal of the discussion dealing with usability in the open source/free software world and although I respect many of the opinions voiced I still feel like much of the heated debate borders on pointless marking of territory. The most recent exchange between Mosfet, Havoc Pennington, and a new voice in the fray is centered around the idea of user accessible preferences and where they belong in the process of development.

If you read all three of those linked articles you’ll probably end up with a headache. I feel like all three bring way too much specificity to what should be a very general topic. I’m a little worried that things like preference settings built into GUI applications are going to be stressed too much in development. In my own very humble opinion, preference settings should be nothing more than a frontend for a dotfile. Fragmenting the settings is a bad thing and I’m worried (I am, after all, a worrier by nature) that problematic design like this will start to creep into applications and user preferences stored in files that are not human editable. I guess that’s what bothers me more than anything else — the introduction of yet more “Do Not Edit Anything Below This Line” stanzas in configuration files that leave people stumped for any solution other than the pathetic search through menus methodology. I agree that people shouldn’t need to pick up Lisp just to change a simple setting but obscuring the editability (I made that word up) to make the configuration more singing and dancing seems like a terrible step backwards. Maybe I’m chasing the wild goose here and not understanding the complexity of the issue entirely but it seems like compromise is becoming a precious commodity in the free software world.

Jesus. I’m really impressed by how deeply people are invested in their blogging. I’m equally unimpressed by how worried everyone is getting about Creative Commons licenses being included in Movable Type. Many have complained about the allegedly murky waters of the licensing options which is a hair’s breadth from being complete and utter bullshit because most people don’t really understand how normal copyright and fair use work to begin with. The Creative Commons licensing works great for me because it allows me to state explicitly what you could probably infer from what I post here. I think of the license as the opposite of a ‘No Trespassing” sign with limitations attached. This is part of a connected network after all and as long as my pretty minimal conditions are met I could care less what is done with my words or images. I will grant that I am not plotting some future career as a tech journalist nor do I harbor any delusions about what is written here being important enough for me to protect with unfriendliness.

Interesting discussion going on here with the usual angry crowd of finger pointers pulling their Joe McCarthy in drag spectacles. Hit the thorazine, kids, these licenses are optional within and outside of Movable Type. Save the hysterics for RSS standards or whatever other hobby horse you’re currently rocking. Thanks.

Sigh. Operating systems are not going to be obsolete anytime soon and Roblimo is spreading it real thin on this topic. While I’ve often thought that a chip based (and therefore incredibly limited) operating system that is by nature read only would be a fine idea for huge deployments of limited purpose workstations. I work on a college campus so the idea that reimaging labs could be as easy as sending out an army of robot monkeys to change out some piece of hardware sounds oddly utopian. This works best in the sort of application where you need legions of identical machines outfitted for very simple uses and don’t want crappy applications fux0ring up settings and whatnot all the time. There is some degree of security here at least from the viral sort of intruder since modifying the necessary parts of the operating system would be next to impossible. I’m trying to imagine a script kiddie writing a virus that would flash the bios of the host machine and I’ve gotta say that it’s a pretty amusing picture. However I stop laughing when I think about patching those same machines. Doh.

Unfortunately this is the real world and ape does indeed kill ape. People want applications that aren’t standard to the image and blah blah blah. This means installing libraries, dlls, or whatever and with an inaccessible system partition that ain’t happening especially with the rigid way that most installation scripts are written. You either give the installer access to C: or you’re shit out of luck. I’m thinking of the niche applications that specific academic departments request that aren’t written for flexibility or with anything other than a standard home user configuration in mind. We actually separate the system, applications, and user writable space into different partitions so this is often problematic in the sense that I have to haul my lazy ass down to some office (uphill, both ways, in three feet of snow) to type in an administrator’s password. The upside is that I’m not reimaging machines to get rid of Bonzi Buddy quite so much any more. Unfortunately with a hard image (not the BIOS OS that the NewsForge write up is hallucinating about) altering that partition is not an option meaning that a) you have to create a custom image for that person and flash the hardware (yeah right) or b) this shit ain’t gonna work.

It’s frustrating to see this stuff tossed around by sub-journalists who are differentiated from webloggers by a paycheck and never seem to get the proper degree of shit for not grasping the concepts that they write about. It’s also funny because this unending bemoaning of locally installed applications really makes me want a swift and vicious return of dumb terminals and applications hosted on the server. I’m all for it but I doubt many of the Dilberts would be.

My mouse arm is hurting again which means that I’ve gotta take another break from spending massive amounts of time with hands poised over a keyboard. I probably should just stop right this minute but why actually work towards a solution to a problem when you can gleefully complain about it and make it worse all at the same time? Karma-licious. Sorta exaggerating since the short breaks and stretches really do help.

I’ve been messing around with Epiphany a little bit and I’m pretty impressed with it. It’s kind of taking over the super lightweight yet functional for the basics web browser spot that Dillo used to occupy. I do not like the way that it handles bookmarks though. I do like the modular philosophy behind the way that it’s assembled. The manifesto on the index page of their site is good reading. The only unfortunate part is their marriage to the Gnome DE which I can’t stand. Actually, I hate desktop environments altogether. I’d like my windows managed and little else other than as many virtual desktops as my WM is willing to give me. Luckily it works fine under WindowMaker and the *box managers so I’m not complaining for any lack of function. It will make the browser useless for people who don’t have the Gnome Control Center installed and want to do anything other than browse web sites. Mime types are not determined by the browser and the developers make it very apparent that is a conscious decision. After all the cheerleading for standards in the manifesto this seems pointlessly spiteful. I won’t be using this on my laptop because although I value a lightweight web browser, I’m not willing to install an entire desktop environment just to use it. Seems a little contradictory, no?

Epiphany’s main goal is to be integrated with the gnome desktop. We dont aim to make epiphany usable outside Gnome. If someone will like to use it anyway, it’s just a plus. Ex: Making people happy that don’t have control center installed is not a good reason to have mime configuration in epiphany itself.

So there you go… Interesting also that this application is aimed at non-technical users since the requirements seem to differ from that goal. It’s a nice browser, though, so fuck all the politics especially desktop politics.

Ack. I was just getting ready to go to bed when I saw that Think Secret had screenshots of the Safari browser with tabs. I’m sure this will be huge news to some people.

I’m wondering why they decided to bury it in a debugging menu especially when the public beta was half broken to begin with. I’m glad that Apple finally listened to public response to a public beta for a change. I guess that’s one advantage that Apple has over other platforms with a cult-like following (I am including myself in this roster) — they’re able to do whatever the hell they want to with the operating system and hardware. Mac users get all bummed and ranty about unpopular changes but seldom move away from the platform. Ok. Sleep. Less news and more snooze.

Sorta Noteworthy
The member of Great White that perished in the fire actually had a weblog that ran on MT. Seemed like he was a pretty OK guy for being in some revisionist hair metal band that refused to die. Better to burn out than fade away, right?

Somewhere along my travels tonight I found a site detailing the history of Pong which sounds really great and it is at least in terms of information but the number of times that you have to click a ‘continue’ or ‘enter’ button just to get to some text is grumble inducing. I’m still reading bits and pieces of the site since it isn’t organized in any logical or navigable fashion.

They do catalog a fair number of ancient game consoles and even the full-on arcade version of Pong so at least there are some pretty pictures to look at while trying to figure out how to get to the story of the almighty Pong. My cell phone has more juice than most of these machines and I don’t have a very nice cell phone. That’s the real importance of sites like this — to remind us that technology leaps forward in fast forward like bounds that make things like Pong seem quaint after thirty years (discounting of course the pre-console oscilloscope version) of rapid development. If nothing else go check out the photo and story of the oscilloscope version. I had the Atari version. Very flashback-to-childhood inducing.

Reading this article all the way through without breaking into hysterical laughter and just plain hysterics is way beyond me. So, instead of trying to build a stable economy and limit environmental damage you just destroy the economy and the ecological benefits sorta trickle down? I’m tempted to follow Google’s yellow brick road to find out who else is linking to this story and its variants and in what context but I think the hysterics would win out over the laughter. What findings like these will justify in the future is truly disturbing.

People are still all aflutter about the Blogger buy out and dreaming up all sorts of weird conspiracy theories about it. I can’t figure out why they’d drop the cash on that sort of thing to begin with but Google has pretty solid credibility in my book. I can hardly believe some of the speculation about Blogger fueled weblogs suddenly gaining PageRank. Uh, I really doubt it despite the fact that weblogs are already eating up Google search results as it is. If there’s one thing about search engines that’s been discussed to death it’s the ease of switching if one starts to suck. If Google breaks itself something new will happen. Google is just like Freddy Krueger — it only has power if you give it power.

Now, as far as the overall effect on weblogging I’m not quite sure. Most of us probably played around with Blogger or Pitas or something before setting up our own servers. I did. I realized the limited nature of it sucked in all of two hours and I was happily on my way to setting up a hosted account immediately. Will a ton of people eventually leave the closed environment of Blogger for the freedom that comes with a little money and clue? I don’t know. I imagine that the sudden awareness that there is indeed free space for potential weblogging will cause a surge initially but once the realization sets in that a Blogspot site is akin to voluntarily committing yourself to the bottom 10% I’m not so sure that many toe dippers will bother to continue. I have a snobbish inclination towards not bothering with Blogspot sites in the same way that I purposely avoid GeoCities pages. The quality/quantity ratio is so skewed that avoiding is often a pretty safe assumption. I just quickly scanned my bookmarks and there is not a single Blogspot site among them. Am I an outrageous snob or a good litmus for the general attitude towards free hosted sites?

The bad part about all of this is that the former head cheese of Pyra killed his weblog. Might be a non disclosure thing but now is exactly the time when we’d most like to hear about what’s going on. I’m going to assume that something in the agreement necessitated some kind of radio silence. Actually I really liked his weblog and I’m sorry to see it replaced with a big fat 404 while all of his snotty little kids post continually and at length about high school and whatnot.

Anyone else notice that weblogs.com eats shit consistently when pinged? 500 errors too…

Ah, a solution to most of my robot needs was linked by Mark Pilgrim and can be found here. A good number of the listings also have links to where they’ve come from or at least which Frankenstein launched the monster in question. Marie, have you got your ears on?

This Photoshop treatment of our fearless leader is just so many shades of disturbing that I hardly know where to begin. Go take a look before the shit gets Farked out of existence.

That is all.