lucidfox

(as usual, the use of randomising device in the decision is interpreted as a refusal)

Damn, there goes my obvious intuitive objection to Newcomb’s problem.

Hollywood makes what sells. If it was misguided about what might sell; say, aiming too low; it would quickly be gazumped. It rarely is. This tells us something about the audience, not the industry.

~ Blog comment by Ben_Jones

I get a distinct “trainwreck” vibe from the beta, and I really don’t see it changing. I strongly suspect that just like the kindergarten heroic tale known as Wings of Liberty apparently wasn’t written by the creators of the original Starcraft, so, it seems, the faction leaders of WoW are being written by the same 15-year-old boys who are the game’s primary target audience.

Imagine if, during an anti-terrorist operation in the Caucasus, FSB operatives discover Stalin’s secret grandson, who grew up there in the mountains under the influence of radio and TV programmes asserting that Stalin was a bloody dictator, and thus grew ashamed of his heritage. Then suddenly he is taken to the Kremlin, where Medvedev assures him that Stalin was in fact a national hero who single-handedly earned the Soviet Union a victory over the Germans in WWII. Stalin’s grandson—let’s call him Joseph Jr.—naturally grows proud, and starts participating in Russian political life despite having no qualifications or prior history of leadership.

In the meantime, Sarah Palin, who went missing two years ago on a diplomatic voyage to the UK, suddenly appears on the streets of Moscow, amnesiac and without possessions. Naturally, nobody there recognizes her either. At first she’s kept as a slave by a Moscow crimelord, but when she makes a daring escape with her two newfound friends (a Japanese martial arts master and a Serbian assassin), the crimelord realizes the error of his ways and approaches the Russian government, where he’s promptly appointed the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Palin and her companions hijack the crimelord’s personal plane and fly to England, where seeing Queen Elizabeth II restores her memory.

Palin flies back to America, where Barack Obama immediately proclaims her the rightful ruler of America and shyly steps down. She calls for a NATO summit and promptly drafts a new foreign policy centered around eradicating Russia, and nobody says a word, because, you know, Russians are evil and every honest American is totally cool with eradicating them. Then she goes back to England and, together with the Queen and David Cameron, meets Medvedev (accompanied by the crimelord-turned-minister and Joseph Jr. but strangely not Putin), and they start discussing the Russian-Japanese dispute over the Kuril Islands without any Japanese representatives being present. However, Muslim terrorists bomb the Buckhingam Palace and Palin, naturally, blames it on those pesky Russians. Joseph Jr., in turn, suggests nuking America to smithereens.

For now, however, the differences are put aside. You see, back in 1945, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, one of Hitler’s generals was building up a Nazi state in the Arctic, and just now, having built up an army of brainwashed Wermacht soldiers, he suddenly decides to conquer the world! Russia and NATO both invade New Naziland, with Joseph Jr. commanding the Russian army and Putin patiently dissuading him from attacking American ports. Meanwhile, a rogue general from Ukraine, who was previously funding bioweapon research with Yanukovych’s secret approval, unleashes a deadly virus on the allied army, halting the assault and letting the Nazis capture Obama, who was for some inexplicable reason present on the frontlines.

When they do finally make it to the Nazi general’s citadel, the Secretary-General of the UN, who is overseeing the joint operation, suggests hosting the Winter Olympics right there in the Arctic, and let the winners infiltrate the general’s chambers. They do so and kill him, and find Obama kept prisoner there, so they leave Obama to rule New Naziland to give orders to the Nazi soldiers and prevent them from nuking everything on their own accord. And so it seems that, at last peace is achieved…

But then Medvedev is called to a summit about the world ecological crisis in… let’s say the Philippines, and thus resigns in favor of his new Prime Minister, Joseph Jr.—who is then promptly elected President of Russia because, you know, Stalin’s axe-crazy grandson was the only logical choice. (*) Meanwhile, a secret Nazi nuclear silo that has been lying on the bottom of the Pacific since the early 1940s suddenly surfaces, and the ICBMs fly all over the world, nuking such disjoint places as Yokohama, the Hoover Dam, and a random patch of pine forest in Canada.

Joseph Jr. kicks all non-Russians out of Moscow and then declares war against NATO. He tells the Ukrainians to invade Romania without using the virus (which they then promptly use anyway, because Yanukovych suddenly decides to turn into a cackling evil overlord), and launches an invasion fleet against Japan despite it not even being a member of NATO, taking all the Kurils and Hokkaido but losing southern Sakhalin. Putin watches Joseph Jr., facepalms, but does absolutely nothing.

Meanwhile, one of the nukes falls over the Alps, causing some disturbances in the crust or something like that, and makes a new volcano erupt, flooding Switzerland with lava—but not before one of the bank owners evacuates the entire population on his personal passenger plane. (Apparently it had space compression technology or something.) The plane then flies into a fight between Russian and American jet fighters, and an American pilot shoots it down just for being there. The plane falls onto a no-name island in the Pacific, and it coincidentally turns out that the Americans were holding Medvedev (who was en route to the Philippines) as a prisoner on a ship around there. The Swiss rescue him, then the bank owner arrives and announces that they are his slaves. Naturally, they fight back against the bank owner’s personal little army, culminating in a battle between two giant robots, and when the jerkass bank owner is defeated, Medvedev installs him as the leader of Switzerland-in-exile, conscripts them into an alliance with Russia, and refers them to Joseph Jr., who gives then the newly-claimed Hokkaido to settle on. The Swiss use uber-experimental terraforming technology to reshape the island into a giant two-headed eagle.

If this summary sounds like everyone on Earth suddenly regressed to the mental age of 15 and got high on hallucinogens, I wholly agree. Then why is this essentially the plot of the recent two WoW expansions?

(*) It is rumored outside Russia that his opponents in the election were a convicted mass murderer, the ghost of Hitler, and a basic campfire. The campfire almost had it, too.

My netbook screen cracked :(

Update: Ordered a new one. Whew.

So, what happened to the resident from our Tale of Two Houses? Well, as it happens, after seeing one dispute too many in the first house (including memorable incidents when the orange-shirted designers shifted all flowerpots on windowsills from the right side to the left, and convinced the local post office to glue bright orange stamps to envelopes), while any significant changes just kept getting postponed, she shrugged and moved back to house two—and liked it. For it was newly furbished, and looked much livelier and better decorated than it had been when freshly rebuilt from the ground up. And so she stayed there, and (hopefully) lived happily ever after.

Now, all this allegory-speak aside, Harald Sitter’s recent post really clicked with me. I already switched to Kubuntu a week before it was posted, so I found myself agreeing with many points raised in it. While I switched for social reasons, I stayed for technical ones; I really believe that at this particular point in time, KDE has more to offer to the end user, and I cannot honestly recommend GNOME, torn in corporate feuds and dealing with entropic decay, to my friends whom I introduce to Ubuntu and Linux.

Which is a shame, because I actually like the core underlying platform better in GNOME‘s case. I like GObject, I like GIR, I like Vala, I like the architecture revamp that the GTK developers are doing for 3.0. I like the GNOME HIG and the “less is more” philosophy, and try to apply both to an extent even in non-GNOME software. But Qt (ugh, ancient C++!) has Nokia’s corporate backing, and it really, really shows in everything, including both feature-completeness and the quality of documentation and SDKs. And Qt 4 is a solid, polished foundation on which KDE has built, and built steadily, having evolved surprisingly fast in less than two years since 4.0.

Still, KDE and Kubuntu are not ideal (nothing is), and here is an assorted, broad-strokes wishlist.

• KWin is a resource hog in its default composited configuration. On both machines where I tried KDE 4.5 (one with NVIDIA and the proprietary driver, one with ATI and the default free driver), Compiz worked noticeably faster with about the same quality of effects. I’d like to either see KWin sped up, or see a seamless switch to Compiz in composited mode, like Ubuntu does for Metacity.
• Kubuntu should have more visual identity on its own. The greyish-blue is nice and “techy”, and I’d like it to remain the core of the visual style, but I would also like Kubuntu to have its own, distinct QtCurve configuration. I’d like to see the main menu “K” replaced with something Kubuntu-specific (although since I use a non-default icon theme, I see the Elementary “e” instead); KDE has long passed the time when the developers thought that every appliKation had to Kontain at least one K.
• Plasma, I think, is the most confusing experience for new users. What is a “widget”? What does “block widget changes” mean? (Yes, I know what this means, but, say, my parents would be lost.) The panel editing UI is confusing in comparison to both GNOME and Xfce, with seemingly meaningless whitespace and a horizontal row of widgets that makes it hard to quickly scan them by function; a vertical list where descriptions are displayed all the time, and not just on tooltips, would be better.
• I’m not sure that having widget changes unblocked by default is the best choice. Windows has had its panel changes locked by default since Windows XP, presumably out of the same “Don’t confuse the user” mindset. This mode introduces more right-click menu items that aren’t of interest most of the time, and adds an icon to the right whose sole purpose is to configure widgets. Just keep widgets locked by default and let the users discover the configuration option through right-clicked.
• I find the standard notifications too obtrusive, in the same way as the upstream GNOME notification-daemon. Having a button with a backlog of notifications is nice, but it quickly fills and requires manual clearing; popup window sizes are unpredictable. Often I found myself playing, say, Starcraft II only to have notifications steal focus from its fullscreen window. I have switched to Colibri, which is basically a KDE clone of notify-osd that doesn’t suffer from the Ayatana hardcoding syndrome, and I wouldn’t mind seeing it as the default in Kubuntu.
• Replicate the Ubuntu sound menu.
• Make it more obvious that some widgets (such as the messaging menu, Network Manager and clock) are interactive, for example, by highlighting. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was done for Ayatana application indicators without any specific coding in the application itself.
• Quassel: Best usability of all IRC clients I’ve tried, but it still could use some improvement. My main issues are the unintuitive “Hide Chat(s) Temporarily/Permanently” menu items, and the fact that “temporary” hiding keeps private chats hidden even if you double-click the username in the user list or type /query, and only shows the rows if they write to you.

If some of these issues are considered sound, maybe I’ll take part in working on them for the Natty cycle—who knows!

Eldritch abominations in fiction, their sheer sense of presence that makes you realize how insignificant you feel compared to them, reminds me of the way I think about outer space.

The universe is vast, very empty, and hostile to life. Earth is a tiny kindle of low entropy, enjoying its place under the warming Sun until it, too, burns out.

It’s possible that life is unique to Earth—and our imagination fills the universe with aliens, just like storytellers once filled unexplored corners of Earth itself with dragons, giants and cities of gold. But then every patch of Earth’s surface was mapped and measured, and all the dragons flew away somewhere.

It’s a really unsettling thought, that the entire human history may mean nothing in the long term, because if not now, then eventually there will be nobody out there for it to mean anything to.

I’m not saying anything new here—all this has been said before, countless times. I try not to think of this. I try to convince myself that life is worth living, and history is worth contributing to, because of its current, immediate, rater than eventual value. But some ideas are difficult to expunge from one’s mind entirely.

Now I can honestly say I survived a car crash!

Without a single bruise, at that. Although seriously, what were the odds of one taxi ramming into another?

I’ve been meaning for a while to write this, but this recent discussion about the Evolution default signature has prompted me to actually do so.

The typical argument for not exposing a preference in the UI goes like this: the user can set the wrong setting by accident and make the application unusable. So for power users, there is gconf or manually editing configuration files. Let’s hide it. Unfortunately, this mindset only works in the ideal world of software designers where nobody ever seeks to escape their Vision™.

Real-world users want power over their own systems. They want to personalize their desktops and make them stand out from the default settings. They want to tailor their systems into configurations convenient for them—with their own shortcuts, colors, and button placement. If you take this freedom away from them when there is no technical obstacle for that, you’re provoking them into seeking other, potentially more dangerous ways to get what they want.

Here is a concrete example. In comments to my previous post, I saw these comments:

And yep, in every install of Ubuntu 10.04, the very first thing I have to do is download Ubuntu Tweak and revert the Window button placement. Sure, I could use another theme, but Ambiance is otherwise pretty good.
...
Worth noting that I didn’t even know about Ubuntu-Tweak until the buttons thread raised its existence. As long as Ubuntu-Tweak exists with options like this, I’m sad to say that Ayatana has failed.

Let me reiterate. All this fuss over the button order placement that ended with the bug being stamped as “Opinion(*)” (read: feel free to continue your discussion but we’re ignoring you) could have been avoided if only an option existed in the UI to configure button placement. No, I don’t mean descending into the depths of gconf and changing the option there. I can understand not exposing settings that actually have the potential to leave the user with an unusable system; but seriously, window buttons? There is another well-known desktop environment that allows the user to do that, and it’s completely harmless.

So the user, disgruntled, downloaded a third-party application that was rejected from the Ubuntu archive on the grounds of inherent security issues, like Automatix before it. In doing so, they created a bigger problem than hiding the preference was supposed to solve in the first place—not to mention, possibly left the user disgruntled with their own system for treating them like a child that needs to be kept away from dangerous toys.

Ultimately, the problem with software like Automatix and Ubuntu Tweak is that it exists—or rather, that users feel they have the need to exist, that there is a genuine need they solve. Fortunately, the need for Automatix (which was the more dangerous of the two) was more or less removed by the introduction of the restricted extras packages and the spread of the PPA culture, but Ubuntu Tweak combines its own independent package and package source manager (dangerous) with minor UI preferences that should have been in their corresponding configuration utilities in the first place (completely harmless). Ubuntu has the power to make that second part redundant by putting their preferences where they belong: into configuration windows for these programs themselves.

If this was being done out of fear of diverging too far from upstream GNOME (perhaps I should do a separate post on that), I’d at least semi-understand. But this applies to Ayatana’s original initiatives too. Notify OSD was introduced in Jaunty. That’s a year and a half ago. Since then, Ubuntu has got indicators, and Unity and the global menu were written from scratch in the span of a single release cycle. And yet Notify OSD remains completely unconfigurable, with all its preferences hardcoded. There are no technical reasons for not making it configurable. Third-party enthusiasts have done so. The first links a typical user will find in Google for “configure notify-osd” will point to PPAs, to a third-party application that configures a patched non-standard version.

In short, when the user faces a desktop feature they wish to configure but can’t, they won’t just give up—they’ll turn to the Internet for information on how to do so. And more often they not, the advice they’ll get will be dubious or dangerous. Third-party software, manually tweaking gconf (which gives users unpleasant memories of the dreaded Windows registry), hackish shell scripts, manually editing text configuration files, executing commands as root… These solutions have far worse possible repercussions than just introducing one stupid little checkbox ever would.

This is a case where technical issues are overblown, and people switch distributions and desktop environments out of perceived “we know better than you” developer mentality. Put the users in control; they deserve that much.

(*) I find it enlightening that Launchpad worked perfectly well without yet another “won’t fix” status until an evident shift developed in the developer attitude. Incidentally, for my little personal project (Steadyflow), I wanted a bug status that would mean “I have a different opinion than the users, but I’ll leave this bug open and change my mind if enough people are in favor of this change.” Turned out there wasn’t one.

I read it in my childhood in some fairy tale book.

Once upon a time there lived a prince—who, despite having a kingdom and loyal subjects, and everything he wanted, just couldn’t find happiness. He sook an oracle, who prophesized to him that he’ll become happy when he dons the shirt of a happy man.

And so our prince began traveling around the world. He tried on shirts of kings and noblemen, wealthy bankers and traders, yet he found no success in his quest. With every shirt he tried, he felt no different from before.

Finally, on the road back, just as he was approaching his castle, he saw a peasant resting near his plowed field. The peasant seemed so blissful that the prince couldn’t help but to call him…

“You there! Are you happy?”
“Extremely so!”
“And you wouldn’t even exchange your fate for that of a king?”
“Never!”
“Please… sell me your shirt!”
“Shirt? I don’t have one.”

What’s going on here?

Let’s elaborate. A “bug” was filed asking to add a “Sent using Ubuntu” signature by default to Evolution. How did this happen and who decided it was a bug? Judging by the way it was so quickly responded to, it seems like a decision made in Canonical behind closed doors and filed on Launchpad as a mere formality, with no input from users. The “bug” was then “fixed” by making Evolution copy the behavior of proprietary email interfaces like Microsoft Hotmail or Windows Live Foo or whatever its latest rebranding is called.

I won’t repeat again why I consider such a change bad. Once again, this was something forced on users with no public input. The discussion is happening in the bug report now, and the users are evidently less than pleased.

Meanwhile, the bug report stays as “Fix Released” (where “fix” means “make Evolution obnoxious”). A different bug was filed asking for this behavior to be reverted. It was closed as a duplicate of the original bug, despite being its exact opposite.

First the font, then the wallpaper, now this. What is going on with this release cycle?

This blog post is written using Ubuntu 10.10 and Epiphany 2.30.2–1ubuntu6.

Three weeks from idea to implementation, and the first release of the Steadyflow download manager is now available on Launchpad!

PPA packages for Lucid and Maverick will be available in the newly opened Steadyflow stable build PPA as soon as they finish building.

This release features:

• A basic GNOME download manager, supporting all URL protocols known by GIO/GVFS. This includes, among others, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and SMB.
• Pausing, resuming, and restarting downloads upon application restart.
• An application indicator, or a notification area icon for platforms without Ayatana libraries.
• An instant search/filter box.
• Ability to add downloads via the command line and D-Bus, for browser extension writers.
• Notification bubbles upon starting and finishing downloads (can be disabled).

What it does not feature (yet):

• A monochrome icon (planned for 0.2).
• Filter by file types.
• Different download folders for different file types.
• Limiting download speed and number of files downloaded simultaneously.
• Multiple download streams per file.

I’m actually not personally interested in implementing that last one, as I have a fast enough connection to render it irrelevant, so unless someone else gets to implement that, tough cookies.

I would like to thank:

• The Vala developers, for patiently answering my questions about the language.
• Everyone who gave feedback on earlier snapshots—in particularly the OMG! Ubuntu! users for testing and suggestions, and the GNOME design team for UI feedback.
• Translators from Launchpad, for making Steadyflow multilingual right from the first release.
• My beloved Alice, for inspiring me to start this whole project as a quirky expression of my feelings for her.

(Crossposted here)

I don’t get all this buzz. If setting it up is any harder than typing a website address in your browser, the casual user just isn’t going to bother, and it’s going to remain a “geeky thing” like the GPG web of trust.

In the end, I think the Facebook privacy scandals miss the point, and deal with the symptom rather than the disease. Social Media® (tm) are designed for people who don’t care about privacy—because if you cared about your privacy, you wouldn’t spend your day documenting your life in minute detail 140-character messages. Pitching privacy controls to Facebook’s target audience is like trying to sell clothes to nudists. If you don’t want your private information to be public knowledge, there’s only one real solution: don’t post it on the Internet.

I don’t like the sound of this at all, but what struck me as insightful was…

Secondly, the modern security problem isn’t people downloading infected applications with old school viruses. It’s people installing Adobe Acrobat which in turn decides it’s a good idea to executable code found in a document.

For the last two weeks, in my spare time, I’ve been working on a small personal project. I noticed that my desktop lacked a good standalone download manager.

But what about gwget? Well, I found gwget’s UI quite rough and lacking polish, and upon looking at its code, I decided that it would be easier to just write a new one from scratch—and that it would be a standalone application integrating with modern desktop technologies, not a wget wrapper. And now that I actually have a working download manager, it’s time to present Steadyflow.

Yes, the UI is inspired by Transmission. This was my idea: to have, basically, a Transmission for HTTP/FTP. The application is written in Vala, which serves two purposes: one, it ensures a relatively small memory footprint not dependent on the Python or Mono runtime, and two, it lets me write object-oriented code that Just Works, in a modern, strongly-typed language. I hope interested contributors will find the code clean and easy to understand.

What currently works:
* Basic download manager functionality: starting and finishing downloads.
* Panel indicator and minimizing to it.
* Notification popups.
* Preferences.
* Translations.

What is there yet to implement:
* Advanced control over downloads: pausing, resuming, saving and restoring the session.
* Controlling from the command line.
* Epiphany extension.
* D-Bus API (maybe not for the 0.1 release).

Translations are open on Launchpad, and I would appreciate code contributions as well—the code is in Bazaar on Launchpad. It should build and run on Lucid and Maverick, although on Lucid, you’ll need to install the Vala compiler version 0.9.8 from the Vala team PPA to build it.

I’m planning to release version 0.1 the coming week; in the meantime, I welcome your contributions, bug reports, and comments over here!

What’s with the tendency of Russian tabloids to attribute dubious (putting it mildly) research to delightfully unspecified and unnamed “British scientists”?

Yesterday I was driving home in a taxi, and the radio started reporting on how British scientists had discovered advice for men to be successful with women, which were so cringeworthy and generalizing that I wanted to exit the car right then and there while it was still driving.

Once upon a time, there were two houses standing across a street. They looked quite different, and their residents didn’t meet each other much—only a few times a year did they meet on the Freedom Square to discuss things like maybe painting entrances the same color, so passers-by don’t get confused about the different looks. Sometimes those discussions actually led somewhere.

One resident, whose name isn’t important to our tale, once lived in house one for a few years, and a year ago she went to house two. She heard, of course, that this old crumbling house on the other end of the town was recently renovated with blue glossy walls and all-new windows, but she left that particular one years ago and had no intention of going back. (And the last time she went there to visit her parents, she found out that on the inside it was mostly the same old smelly stuff, just hastily swept under the carpet in most places.) One day, after a vacation, our resident returned to house two to find out it was torn down and rebuilt, and now looked promising both on the outside and on the inside—however, she also saw that most of its rooms sported nothing but bare walls, so, joining a pack of similarly minded residents, she packed her belongings and went back to house one, where her heart always belonged anyway.

And thus, another year has passed. One day, however, after returning from work, she suddenly found the house surrounded with yellow tape and “Under Construction” signs. The chief architect gathered the residents and explained that they learned from the history of house two, and so they were going to renovate this house one patch at a time. He showed some mockups, which most people agreed looked promising, and so they went their own ways, careful not to trip over newly dug pits in the ground.

Since then, our resident grew more and more confused with every passing month. Everywhere she went, she saw builders bickering about the direction of the effort, with everyone insisting on things being done their way. One day, when passing through the house’s garden, she overheard the following conversation:

Designer #1: [Wearing an orange shirt] Look at this garden—it’s grown old and unattended. The bushes are all different, some have overgrown, some look sickly. I say we demolish this garden and make another one on the same spot, give each plant a strict square spot, and my gardeners would tend to them.
Designer #2: Actually, on our New and Improved plan, it clearly shows that after the garden is destroyed, this spot is going to be cobbled with flat black bricks. We’re planning to make an all-new different garden on the other side of the house, so we have to reject your plan.

Six months passed, however, and the renovation was nowhere near finished, so the chief architect announced it was going to be delayed for another six months (and showed a different design for the final look, completely different from before). In the meantime, our resident thought she sort of liked the orange-shirted designer’s idea of bringing the old garden into shape, and went to ask what a well-known news announcer who lived in the same house thought of the idea. The response was:

“Pah! The only people who care about the new garden now are those wearing orange like you! Clearly, if I supported the idea I’d have to dress the same, and I like my grey and blue, so for now I’ll stick with the old garden.”

So our resident decided to wait again until the house was finished. However, a month before its new deadline, the chief architect gathered everyone yet again and said it was going to be delayed for six more months—and showed yet a third mockup, completely different from the other two, yet curiously similar to what the orange-shirted team was building a street away. Meanwhile, the construction effort continued to deteriorate. Keeping along with the “one patch at a time” motto, some floors of the house switched to using a newly-built different elevator, which was like the old one but different (and its cabin evidently had less attention put into decorations). So whenever she wanted to go to a floor, she had to learn, often by trial and error, which of the two elevators to use.

Finally, she decided that while the construction effort was still underway, she could as well redesign her own apartment to go along with the times. Seeing how her bedroom looked especially messy, she threw together a mockup for a new arrangement and wondered whom she could discuss it with. She was pointed to some big-name professional designers who helped renovate the exterior of the house, so she went to them with her plan. The following discussion ensued.

Resident: Look, I’ve got some plans for a new bedroom, and they’re shaping up nicely, so I wondered if maybe you could offer some suggestions to tweak it before I go along with it? I know you people are big on minimalism, so I kept it reasonably simple. Look, here’s a bed, a TV, a computer desk, and a closet. I tried to keep it in accordance to your Design Guidelines, but maybe I’ve missed something?
Designer: Well… [looks] First of all, do you really need a bedroom?
Resident: ?!
Designer: Many people don’t have a standalone bedroom, they just put the bed in one of the other rooms.
Resident: Well, as it stands, I like to sometimes keep the bedroom’s door closed when people are visiting, but it’s not like this is an issue—I can easily find my way there from anywhere in the apartment.
Designer: You could actually get rid of the TV.
Resident: Uh… as it stands I do watch TV, not often, but occasionally.
Designer: It’s extra clutter, and more electronics to take care of. You could just buy a bigger monitor and connect it to your computer.
Resident: Er… okay. Well, many people I know of have TVs in their rooms, but maybe it’s redunant in my case indeed.
Designer: And the computer desk can be merged with the closet.
Resident: What?!
Designer: Just make a shelf in the middle and put the computer on there, and keep your clothes and bedsheets in the compartments above and below.
Resident: [scratches head] Maybe…
Designer: You don’t need two doors, by the way. Scrap this one and reroute this other one to exit into your hallway.
Resident: Actually, that other door leads to the balcony, so I could breathe fresh air from that new garden.
Designer: Exiting from bedrooms directly to balconies is a bad paradigm, we discourage it. It confuses the residents—bedrooms are for sleeping.
Resident: But wait, all these people have balconies connected to their bedrooms… [lists a few big-name, well-respected residents]
Designer: Balconies will go away in the New and Improved house, to be replaced with slick smooth walls. We’ve talked to the guys in orange about this, and they agree with the change. They won’t be in the new edition of the Design Guidelines either.
Resident: [sigh]

At this point, a different designer starts talking about a mockup he has prepared for a new library room. Our resident, interested (she likes reading books), asks to see it. The mockup is on one half on the page, and shows one huge shelf stretched across the entire wall, with all the books on it. The other half has text about how having multiple shelves apparently interferes with the new planned “teleport around the house in two foot taps” feature. The design of yours shows that only a small portion of this new ubershelf is going to be shown at a time, and the user will have to press a button to make the slit slide and stop over books they want.

Resident: Why not just use multiple shelves like every other library out there? I use your current design exactly because it’s a traditional library with none of those newfangled ‘chromey’ features that all the libraries are adopting now.
Designer: Our research indicates that the frames of the shelves take valuable space that people would prefer to use for books.
Resident: I guess I’ll have to stick with my old library, then, or ask someone else to renovate it.

At this point, designer #2 turns around to show text written on the back of his blue shirt: “The construction industry is just a bunch of idiots hating each other”.

Resident: Erm… I realize it’s a joke, but that’s because I’ve grown thick enough skin over the years around you to let it pass. But imagine if someone completely new comes here and sees this—is it the impression we want to be promoting? Many neighbors give us weird looks as it is.
Designer: Well, that text is true.

Frustrated, the resident turns away and leaves, deciding to make her room over however she sees fit, and just let her guests judge.

The moral of this parable is left as an exercise to the reader.

…who commented on my previous post.

I know we use the same ISP, which means we’re at most within 30 minutes of driving from each other. On the tiny chance you’re following this blog, please mail me—you’ll find the address at the bottom of the page. I’d really like to talk to you, and it seems we have a lot to discuss!

If your male protagonist stuck in a female body against his will falls in love with a man, that doesn’t make him “more of a woman”.

It makes him a gay man.

This is my second time now—writing from my netbook. Last time, in March, I was invited to make a presentation about the Ubuntu developer community, process, and technical details of packaging. (Incidentally, this upload was made from there when I was showing the process of fixing a bug in a package.)

The atmosphere is not very different—perhaps more summery, though, as back then it was cold like it always is in early March, and now it’s +30 Celsius outside. There are about 17 people in a local university, most of whom look like your average geeks.

This time, technical details of packaging were explained right before me, allowing me to jump straight to the matter when the time came for practice session. Unfortunately, it turned out wireless wasn’t working on my Eee PC 1000H when I arrived (even though it always worked out of the box here, under Karmic, Lucid and Maverick), but downloading 300 MB worth of Maverick updates fixed that. The attenders were pleasantly impressed with Unity, although it took some time to explain what was “that network thing that replaced Network Manager), and how indicators were better than the notification area.

My presentation was about the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian. I explained the difference in release cycles and the processes by which packages and patches are exchanged between the two distributions. I cited the recent statistics on people who are both Ubuntu and Debian developers, stressing that they can help Ubuntu contributors share their changes with Debian, and get started with Debian developer teams.

Finally, as the second part of my topic, I demonstrated merging package changes with Debian and Ubuntu in the case of a VCS-maintained package, by using xvidcore and git-buildpackage as an example.

I hope that these presentations running together got people interested, if not about joining the Ubuntu and Debian development teams (although one was curious how long it took for me to become a MOTU), then at least about contributing to their packages.

I cannot stand questions like “How are you?” and “What’s up?” Please do not approach me with them. If you have no concrete topic to talk about, starting with a generic conversation-starter won’t score you points. Especially since you’re usually not interested in the real answer—namely, in hearing me rant about my recent problems, or on the contrary, singing praises detailing all the good happenings. You just expect to hear a stock non-answer. Hint: you won’t.

So, please, don’t do that.

Especially when I’m at work.

Because inviting me to type a two-paragraph-long summary of the events in my life for the past few days when my brain is full of Java code and Eclipse RCP documentation is beyond rude.