My solicitation for themes for the GNOME 2.4 release notes has yielded a singularly lackluster discussion, which in and of itself is illustrative. But a few possible slogans have emerged from the hurly-burly:
- GNOME 2.4: Closer to Being Ready for the Enterprise
- GNOME 2.4: Accessibility Support Has Improved
- GNOME 2.4: We Fixed a Lot of Bugs
But perhaps I'm just feeling cynical.
Driving to work the other day, I saw a cleanly dressed young man panhandling by the freeway onramp with a hand-lettered cardboard sign. I was going by too quickly to be sure I read it right, but I think it said:
Need help with paintball expenses
Again, I'm not sure that's what it said.
Starting to work in earnest on the GNOME 2.4 release notes, I sent the following note to the desktop-devel list:
Last time 'round, the main theme of the release notes was "usability,
performance, appearance, and accessibility support". If we had a slogan,
it was a desktop that "just works". What is the dominant theme of the
2.4? What should we be pimping here?
Some answers:
- Sucks less
- Multimedia, Usability, Accessability, and the Web
- Usable, accessible, simple.
Simplicity works. - Just works -> Just rocks
- "The Caring Desktop
- The desktop that cares
- A Nice Desktop
- A Desktop With Certain Qualities
- Something Nice
- Some Stuff With Certain Qualities
- GNOME 2.4 -- the Family-Sized Desktop
- The desktop with a heart
- Enterprise Ready
- Enterprise Friendly
Sally Jenkins, the Washington Post sportswriter who ghosted Lance Armstrong's two autobiographical books, offers a useful explanation of our fascination:
One minute, after nearly a month of suffering, decided who won this Tour. Lance's ride into the history books was an essay in overcoming a succession of miseries and setbacks. He says he knew it was going to be a hard race when, the day before it began, a bird soiled the shoulder of his jersey. He got a stomach virus from his small son. He developed tendinitis in his hip. He rode a climb called the Galibier with his back brake dragging against the wheel because of a mechanical problem. He crashed twice. He got back up and rode through it all, while his competitors crashed and faded around him. What it may have amounted to in the end is that Lance felt, as race announcer Phil Liggett said, "The magnetism of a finish line."It's in this respect that the best qualities of Lance Armstrong are available to you and me. Lance serves no purpose if people think that he survived cancer or wins races solely through some specialness, some rare gift. The most useful purpose he can serve is to tell people it's an absolutely universal human experience to be tired and ill.
Remember my mention the other day of Sam Abt? Read on.
These favorable comments recall the day back in 1993 when Armstrong, then 21 and in his first Tour de France, was relaxing out of uniform before a stage. Because of his youth and inexperience, his Motorola team had him withdraw about halfway through the race, and he had rejoined his teammates just before they reached the finale in Paris, at a party in a Tex-Mex restaurant in Montparnasse.Armstrong mused about Miguel Indurain, the Spaniard who was winning the third of his five successive Tours. "Indurain," he said, "I admire him as much as a person as a bike rider.
"He's a lord - gracious, generous, cool, always in control. He's the kind of guy I'd like to grow up to be."
No doubt about it, in the judgment of the French and everyone else, he has.
What I did on my summer vacation
After two travel-intensive vacations in June, I took the past week off work and just hung around. Here is what I did:
- Watched the Tour de France[1]
- Rode my bike in the bosque[2]
- Took Nora out for our very first driving practice[3]
- Rode in the Sunshine Spin fund-raising bike ride for the Lance Armstrong Foundation
- Watched the Tour de France
- Watched the Tour de France ("Armstrong is down!" "It looks like Ullrich and Hamilton are waiting!" "Armstrong attacks!")
- Rode my bike in the neighborhood
- Took Nora driving
- Rode my bike in the bosque
- Went thrift store shopping with Lissa. Found a nice Hawaiian shirt and my first silk shirt.
- Watched the Tour de France ("It looks like Hamilton will be able to stay away!")
- Rode bikes in the bosque with Lissa
- Updated my libxml tutorial
- Rode real fast in the bosque with Jaime et. al. ("Richard attacks!" "Fleck can't go with him!"
- Watched the Tour de France ("Ullrich is down!")
- Rode my bike in the neighborhood, finding a lovely new east-west route up through the heights.
- Spent hours wandering Lowes hardware and appliance store with Lissa[4]
- Ate lots of pasta
- Saw Pirates of the Caribbean with Lissa ("Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.")
- Rode my bike in the bosque for a very very long time
- Went shopping at Costco with Lissa[4]
[1] Mom and Dad have cable. Watching the Tour has become a family thing
[2] "Bosque" is a Spanish word that translates as "forest" or "woods". We use it here to describe the riparian woods along the Rio Grande. There is an excellent paved bicycle trail that runs about 20 miles from the Albuquerque metro area's north edge to its south.
[3] Nora just finished drivers' ed and has her provisional permit. It has been decided that Dad's temperament is best suited to the complex demands of driving practice.
[4] OK, these prolly sound like odd places to go on a vacation outing. But such is our marriage that Lissa and I love to go do simple things like that together. Shopping at Costco or wandering the aisles of a hardware store, done properly, can be a gas.
There is Velonews and Cyclingnews.com, and the Daily Peleton. And then there is Sam Abt. He notices the little things:
For some who drop out of the race, it is welcome relief after two weeks of riding at a punishing pace, often in blistering temperatures.
For others, who are left trailing so
badly that they are picked up by the Tour's "broom wagon," it is downright humiliation. Pierrick Fedrigo, a 24-year-old Frenchman who rides with the Credit Agricole team, held his head in his hands and tried to hide from the roadside spectators when he was collected by the dreaded broom wagon on Sunday."When you start your first Tour, that's the only thing you really worry about," said Fedrigo referring to a symbol of failure in the eyes of riders - and some unforgiving spectators.
"When I got inside it was worse than I had imagined. I could see people looking in through the windows and all I wanted to do was hide."
Posted by John Fleck at 09:34 PM
With the silvery minnow on the knife's edge, rain wet the Rio Grande through Albuquerque this week, turning it a muddy reddish and making it look a little less anemic than usual. I rode yesterday across a couple of different bridges where the bike paths give a view of the river, just to see it flow. The thunderstorms have been building afternoons the past few days, and the runoff must be making the little fish happy.
Down through the bosque, the ravages of last month's bosque fires are not as bad as I expected. Like most wildfires, they hopped around, mixed patches of black and green (well brown, really, it's a drought).
Crews were out repaiting the levee, which was torn up by the fire trucks. It was always sandy to begin with, lots of soft patches, and apparently it's in pretty bad shape now.
I stopped to talk to two city open space rangers, who were doing crosswalk duty for the heavy equipment working on the levee and seemed happy for the chance to talk to relieve their boredom. They said rews will begin marking the cottonwoods soon, figuring out which ones can survive and which need to be taken down. It's going to be a lot of work. Nature used to do this all for us with the big spring floods, but Cochiti Dam ended that back in 1973. Now if anything's going to be cleared out, it's going to require fossile fuels and human muscle. Or, come to think of it, wildfire.
Tomorrow morning Lissa and I are going back down. Saturday was my first visit since the fire, and she hasn't been yet, so it'll be nice to take a nice slow pass and a careful look.
Seemingly within moments* of sending a note to the docs list itemizing holes in our GNOME 2.4 documentation, Chee Bin HOH arrived with updated docs for the modemlights applet, adding that he's looking for more to do. Have I mentioned that I love free software?
* OK, it really was 45 hours, but it seemed quick.
I was having a hard time understanding how to think about today's Sunshine Spin, a bike ride to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation for Cancer Survivorship.
The organizers had set up two courses - a flat, pleasant 22 miles along the riverside trail, or a 50-plus miler that burned up our long Tramway climb into the foothills. I'd been planning on doing the long one. I'm in great shape, and I really wanted to burn it up, kinda see what I had.
It was about the bike.
And then I got sick two weeks ago, and when I finally got back on the bike I felt flat and weak and I figured there was no way I was gonna hammer up a big climb with the macho boys all around me. So I switched to the short ride. My friends Nancy and Charlie were going to do the short one pulling their three-year-old daughter Katie on a third wheel, and I figured it'd be fun to join 'em.
I got to the start late, right as the "peleton" was leaving, so I humped up through the group looking for Nancy and Charlie. I was hammering trying to get to the front of the bunch, looking for them, somehow missed them, doubled back and eventually we hooked up.
At the turnaround, Charlie started talking to a guy riding this beautiful old Schwinn beach cruiser. The guy was big and bulky, had a cast on his arm from some recent mishap, but he looked happy.
On the ride back, we picked up a fourth for our little caravan, Mark, who was riding a beautiful old restored Centurion. Mark and I took turns pulling into the headwind for Charlie, who was pulling Katie, while Nancy hung at the back and kept Katie amused.
I don't think about cancer very often any more. Lissa and Dad are both nearly 15 years out now, and it's just a distant and painful memory. But there was a moment during the ride, when I was hammering up through the bunch looking for Nancy and Charlie, that I stopped thinking about the bike and thought instead about what this whole thing is about. I choked up for a minute, because surviving cancer is about something really important. It's about not being dead, which is simple and straightforward, but it's about bonus time that is all good. We don't need to think about it all the time, but it's good to think about it now and then.
They've stopped talking about Lance Armstrong the cancer survivor lately. It's all about the bike again. In a sense, that's what you'd expect, it's healthy. But let's never forget what that boy stands for, OK?
Back at the finish, we sat around on the lawn in the shade of a big tree for a while. The guy on the beach cruiser was there, grinning, and Charlie and Katie rolled in the grass.
Later in the afternoon, everbody got back together at the park for drawings for a bunch of swag. Barbara, the organizer, called bib numbers and if we were there, prize action ensued. There were bike tires and Harley Davidson beer glasses and water bottles and all manner of goods donated by the event's sponsors. I won a helmet and explained to Barbara that it was destined for the head of my cancer survivor wife.
The guy on the old beach cruiser came up to collect a prize - I wish I remembered what - and Barbara pointed out that he is a cancer survivor, one year out. So now I understand the grin, and the fealty to a beautiful old Schwinn beach cruiser and the way he didn't seem to care about the discomfort of riding with a big cast on his arm. This guy is on bonus time.
Jaime had to leave, so he stuck his bib number and one of his friends' into my hand. One of Jaime's numbers won a CO2 tire pump goober, and the other won a $15 gift certificate to Manny's, a local coffee shop.
When I called Jaime, he was jazzed about the pump, but didn't really care about Manny's. So I'm giving it to Dad, the cancer survivor, and I'll take him and Mom there for breakfast.
It's not about the bike. That's just a way to get there.
FInally felt good on the bike today, first time in two weeks after my brush with bronchitis or whatever the hell it was I had. Rode for an hour and a half, including a spell with racer-boy Juan, one of those accidental buddy rides that are such a pleasure.
Juan, like me, left late for his ride, trading away the cool of the morning for the Tour on telly. So we had a grand chat about the big race as we rolled very hard and very fast (for me at least) along the riverside trail. Juan kept doing a fake German accent, immitating Ullrich, something about streudel. For the first time since my sickness I was able to push the tempo and drive my heart rate up without collapsing. But I'm still coughing, and the streudel schtick didn't help.
Juan, who lives just down the street from me, also showed me a new route back into town. It rolls up through the industrial neighborhood south of downtown, past the old rail yard and the beautiful but very battered engine shop. By the time we hit the hill back up into our neighborhood, we had hooked up with two more spandex-clad idiots who were out riding in the heat of the day because they stayed in early to watch Le Tour. At least tomorrow OLN isn't broadcasting the stage live in the states, which means we can all go out and ride first thing like a good cyclist should.
So there's this one story I never heard, where Lowell George is with the Mothers and Frank hears "Willin'" and tells him he should start a band. I don't know if I believe it. Lowell tells it different:
Russ Titelman was starting a publishing company and he asked me if I wanted to co-publish the tune ("Willin'") with him and see what he could do with it. So I recorded it and went on the road the same day with The Mothers and was gone for about five weeks I guess. Then I came back and nothing happened, but somehow a demo of the tape got out and it was the rage of the Troubadour. People like Linda Ronstadt heard it and The Sunshine Company. All these people heard the tune and cut it. Then we did "Truck Stop Girl" at some sessions, and Clarence White covered that, and I thought he did a fantastic job. And so from some of those demos we got signed to Warner Brothers and went and did the first album.
And there's this other story where Jimmy Carl Black - he's the drummer for the Mothers - makes a wise-ass comment about the size of Lowell's feet, and that's where the name of the band came from or something. Dunno. I still don't get the spelling. "Feat"?
But the whole point of this is different, about the way the word "bogart" has crept into the English language.
From the new 11th Edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary:
bogart • \BOH-gart\ • verb
1: bully, intimidate
*2: to use or consume without sharingExample sentence:
"[The dog] lay dazed on her side on the kitchen floor, bogarting a bone, dozens more scattered around her like some dog play set she'd grown bored with." (Douglas Bauer, The Boston Globe, July 25, 2001)
The word comes to common English by way of the movies, the way Humphrey Bogart's tough-guy characters would hang a cigarette off their lip and smoke it down until you winced thinking the guy is gonna burn himself. But he never did. He was too cool.
Dopers adopted it for the guy who hung onto the joint rather than passing it around, and now it's in the friggin' Boston Globe. How quickly postmodern language moves. Which brings us full circle to Lowell George and Warner Brothers.
When they repackaged "Waiting for Columbus" on CD - "SPECIALLY-PRICED 2-LP SET ON 1 COMPACT DISC" - they had to cut something:
The tracks "Don't Bogart That Joint" and "A Apolitical Blues" which appear on the double album and cassette have been omitted so as to facilitate a single specially-priced compact disc.
Bastards.
Roll, another one, just like the other one
Cause this ones burned about, to the end
So come on and be a real friend.Don't Bogart that joint my friend, pass it over to me....
See, I knew I could get there eventually. Just took a little wigglin'.
Reader Michael Hudson points out that my July 5 post about owning Bowie Poag is now the top-ranked Google result when one searches for information on the life and times of the inestimable Mr. Poag. Noted Mr. Hudson:
Gotta lova google juice.
You may recall that post was about how something else I had written topped the Bowie Poag rankings. One wonders how this one will fare.
I'll reiterate that it's Zach Beane's Bowie Poag time line that deserves the real Google Juice here, and y'all should read it and link to it as often as you can, because it's really funny.
If I was truly a leet haxor I would know how to properly spell "leat hacksor", but at the very least I now know how to do a module release. Mikael Hallendal is otherwise occupied, and Shaun realized last night we really need to do a release of Yelp, what with Shaun having done a metric buttload of work on it that deserves testing. So after whining a bit in an unsuccessful attempt to get someone else to do a release, I found Mark Mc's guide to how to do a release, poked Jeff Waugh a few times on the tricky bits, and did it. I am 1337. Or something.
The most amazing bit? I actually had an account already on widget. And I actually remembered my password.
It was another one of those little moments in Monday's Tour de France.
If you're paying attention, you've no doubt seen the remarkable photo on Velonews of Beloki sliding on the pavement as Armstrong veers around him. Look at three things - the tension in Armstrong's jaw, in his forearms as he grips the brakes. And look at the girl on the right in the sun bonnet.
No doubt you've also seen the video of Armstrong going cyclocross across the field, too, carrying his bike down the hill and remounting as the little peloton whips by him. But there's a little moment there that I almost missed, save for looking closely at the replay, as Tyler Hamilton reaches out to his old team leader as he rolls past. Here's how Hamilton explained it:
I've never seen anything like what he did. The guy just keeps making bike racing history. We could see him crossing the field as we made our way around the switch back. When he darted back into the road I couldn't believe what I was watching him do.I instinctively threw out my arm to try and give him a push to help get him up to speed, but then I realized I had reached out with my right arm, which is the side with my collarbone fractures. At the last second, I pulled my hand away. I don't think I would have been much help to him anyway. He seemed to have the situation under control.
Pretty great sport, no?
Droughts are such uncertain things that it is folly to be too precise when saying when one starts or ends. But I will entertain the folly by being extremely precise. The southwest's first great drought of the 21st century began Sept. 1, 1999.
I know because that is the day I put up a rain gauge in my backyard. I was doing a story for the newspaper about an extraordinarily wet August that year when I made the acquaintence of Robert DeBlassie, who lives in Albuquerque's south valley and keeps rainfall stats as a volunteer for the National Weather Service. In the course of the conversation, DeBlassie asked where I lived. When I told him, he pointed out that the weather service didn't have a volunteer observer in that neighborhood, and asked if I'd be interested. When I said yes, he didn't hesitate, driving out that afternoon to the newspaper with a rain gauge.
I mounted it out in the backyard, got my booklet of official U.S. Department of Commerce form WS B-91's, and waited.
I got rain the first three days, but September 1999 was a little below average. October was a lot below average. During November, not a drop fell.
In the nearly four years since I started keeping track, we've had seven months with significantly above-average precipitation and 24 months with significantly below-average precipitation.
So for my money, the drought starts there.
I was in search of more about the world's tallest thermometer when I came upon this. I believe I can say without hesitation that World's Largest Roadside Atractions is the finest and most important thing I have ever seen on the Internet. The world's largest cuckoo clock? Or these guys. (As seen in Peewee's Big Adventure!)
While the rest of us are off madly hacking away on GNOME 2.4, the remarkable Kjartan Maraas once again seems to be cheerfully minding the store on our behalf. I think this bears some praise. He did a GNOME 2.2 bugfix release last week, wiping the dust off of the old code to ensure that the things that are fixed in cvs get to travel out unto the world and live among real people. This is not glamorous work, but Kjartan has been doing it for years. Yo.
Trying to make the most of my sick days, I've been poking around in the GNOME 2.4 docs build infrastructure. Gedit is done, I took a look around gnome-session and figured out what old cruft can be removed, and I'm now in the midst of gnome-applets. They're the cruftiest of all, which is why I've procrastinated so long. If my quick automated analysis is correct, there are 138 docs in the package (including translations), and each has a Makefile.am that needs updating. I'm working on a script now that should do it all in bulk, though given my modest skills it's always a tradeoff - how long does it take to figure out how to make the script work, versus how long it takes to do it all by hand.
I suppose no matter what, script is still cooler, and the Right Way(tm).
Where does that cliche come from? My dog never gets particularly sick, and least not like I feel now.
I've had this fantasy for a number of years that all the exercise I do keeps my immune system in tip-top shape. That's why, the theory goes, when I get a cold it's always mild and quick. I don't remember the last time I've missed work - maybe that memorable evening during the 1998 election season when we all got food poisoning at work from the take-out-meal they brought in to the newsroom. That was hilarious. Election feed Tuesday, and half the staff was out by Thursday.
Today I had to kill a trip to Phoenix I'd been really looking forward to for a workshop tomorrow on communicating about climate. I waited until the last minute to pull the plug on the trip, hoping I would recover. Oh well. Sometimes you've gotta just suck it up and admit you're sick.
L's taking good care of me. Gotta love love at time like this.
The great bicycle race has started again, and I will be at least a little distracted by it for the next three weeks.
This has become one of my favorite times of year, each morning a little adventure as I live vicariously through the boys riding the roads of France. Mom and Dad have cable, so I watch with them, carefully picking the days likely to be the most important.
It is the mountains that matter, both because that is where the Tour de France is won and lost, and also because that is where the human drama lies, as the boys push their bikes up impossible slopes through tunnels of wild fans.
That is where we first really met young Lance in the summer of 1999, when the fresh and endearing novelty of a plucky cancer survivor survivor turned into something else on the slopes of the Galibier, high in the Alps.
''I think before today there were some questions about my abilities in the mountains, so I think it was important to show that the team and I are strong in the mountains,'' he said after his easy victory over five climbs and 213.5 kilometers (132.5 miles) from France to Sestriere, Italy.The American leader of the U.S. Postal Service team said he had surprised even himself with his show of strength. Not an overwhelming climber in earlier years, he has worked at his power and lost a few pounds to help get over peaks.
I wrote a couple of years ago about what that tour meant to me. I have talked before about why I am a cycling fan, about the dignity and elegance of the sport, but I was forever bonded to the thing when cancer boy rolled off the line at the 1999 prologue and showed us all something deeply special. Apologies for redundancy, but it bears repeating:
survivalIf I were a sportswriter, here is what I would write.
I got interested in cycling during the 1995 Tour de France. Jimmie, a crusty old-fashioned road bike rider, sat next to me at work, and began teaching me the lore of the race, the tactics and the strategy. 1995 was the year Fabio Casartelli died in a wicked descent, and I came to understand the Tour's grace and elegance the following day, when the Tour's riders rode the stage silently together, eschewing racing in Casartelli's honor. They allowed Casartelli's teammates to ride to the front for each of the stage's bonuses, collecting the prize money for his family.
And then the following day, a young rider named Lance Armstrong, a teammate of Casartelli's, rode a ferocious sprint victory for the win, raising his arms and his face to the sky as he crossed the line.
I lost track of young Lance, and paid little attention in the following years as he battled cancer.
And then, on the day of the 1999 prologue at Puy du Fou, Lissa and Nora were travelling and I sat alone at home watching the Tour on television.
I had no notion of Armstrong as a contender. I cared about names like Zulle, people I'd grown to understand as the great champions of the stage race. Armstrong I understood simply as the man who had survived cancer, not as a sporting figure.
When he won, I wept.
"It's a long way from Indianapolis to Puy du Fou," Armstrong said after the race. Indianapolis is where he endured the ugliness and devastation that is the best medical science can offer cancer patients today. That became my email signoff quote.
I wept because he stood there at the start line for my wife Lissa, who survived cancer. When I saw the pictures they showed on TV of a wasted Lance Armstrong in a hospital bed, I saw my Lissa. Every time I see those pictures of him (they show them again and again, year after year now) I clutch. I took no picture of Lissa in that hospital bed.
Surviving cancer requires no courage and yet all courage. One has no choice. One simply does what one must do. Lissa survived it with all the courage she had, much she did not know she had, and all life after it is, for us, icing. She now can see Nora grow up.
Whatever Lance Armstrong has done since is icing. Winning that dinky little prologue at Puy du Fou - no, simply riding in it - will always stand for me as the towering achievement, just as every birthday for Lissa is.
I imagine him able to power up the climbs of Sestriere or L'Alpe d'Huez beyond anything Ullrich or the others can do because he is not riding against them. He is riding to beat back something bigger. Perhaps this is a romantic notion, or me projecting, but that is what I see when I see him jump out of the saddle and fly up the hills.
Armstrong passes five years of survival this year, one of the statistically arbitrary markers of "cure" the doctors give patients.
Lissa has passed 10 years, and I rarely think about her cancer any more, except to occasionally thank her for not dying.
But every summer now, the Tour reminds me of the power of survival.
I wrote that two years ago. It seems as though they don't show the old pictures of Cancer Lance very often any more, and they don't talk about the cancer, but the bike. In many ways it now is about the bike. But I will never forget. I had that emotional clutch again this year as I saw him roll out of the start house under the Eiffel tower yesterday, cancer boy in the yellow jersey.
I no longer idolize Armstrong. He seems in many ways an unpleasant man. But he is a great bike rider and his committment to cancer survivorship makes me willing to forgive much. There are other voices to be answered in the bike race this year, Ullrich especially, and the brash Simoni and the impishly enthusiastic Hamilton. I hope they give the Texan pause.
So I will be perched in front of Mom and Dad's television set many days over the next three weeks, but especially on Sunday, as the boys push their bikes up the Galibier and L'Alpe d'Huez.
I'll admit I was a little nervous about Martin and Lynn's annual Fourth of July party this year, what with Martin being dead and all.
See, it was really Martin'a party, and the man lived - and died - large and majestic, a big funny charming guy who dominated the little shaded patio every Fourth of July, overseeng barbecue and telling his stories and being the sort of lovable human glue that made people return to his party on the Fourth year after year.
The last couple of years were tough for Martin - his heart slowly failing him, an oxygen line trailing him around the garden - but he was still the same commanding presence at his parties. Only he would sit in one spot, and we would come to him, and his friends took up the solemn task of barbecue while he continued to hold court.
Martin died this spring, and Lynn's been having a tough time, but she decided about a week ago to go ahead with the barbecue. All the same faces were there, people I don't really know except for once a year. There was the usual big spread of food - Larry's salsa, a big fruit salad, deviled eggs, chips and diet Coke and I even ate a hamburger. It's a Fourth of July barbecue! It was good. I'm glad Lynn decided to continue.
There's something vaguely satisfying about owning a Google topic. So it was with some pride that I discovered I own Bowie Poag. Poag, for those not familiar with his exploits, could not possibly be real. I am convinced he is the creation of a cabal of giggling free software hackers who cook up his latest exploits and unleash them on the world.
Zach Beane has chronicled Bowie's travels through the on line world on the Bowie J. Poag timeline, from Bowie's early banishment from from the Amiga network through his recent visits to GNOMEland last fall, where I made the acquaintence of his revolutionary ideas on rewindable desktops, wherein he insults his readers immediately, avoiding any polite conversation that might mistakenly encourage people to take him seriously.
It's a little embarassing, frankly, to have my one attempt at Poag humor at the top of the Google listings, an honor that rightly ought to belong instead to Zach's timeline. I hadn't seen it in a while, which is why I was Googling the esteemed Mr. Poag this afternoon, looking for amusement. Imagine my surprise.
(Updated 7/10 with the correct spelling of Zach's name - sorry Zach.)
So I finally seem to have overcome whatever auto* voodoo was standing in the way of my GNOME 2.3.x build. My solution was thus:
- Try many random solutions with no real idea of what I'm doing.
- Whine about how I don't wanna be a hacker, I just wanna work on docs.
- Ignore the problem for weeks.
- Panic when I realize the release date is so close.
- Find that in the interim, my problem has magically gone.
This doesn't mean I've got a working setup yet, but I've now got a terminal window open and building stuff at all times, and I'm in that state where I'll leave it running churning through the build scripts when I go out, hoping the magic will be done when I get back.
I got the "here's what we need to do" mail out to the list Tuesday, hinting broadly at the grunt work required. Little useful response so far, except the usual "I'd like to do docs for the flubberwidget" from a newcomer, followed by the, "We're already doing them, sorry," from the Sun people. And now that I can (sorta) build stuff, I got started redoing the docs build infrastructure using Malcolm's new white magic.
Update:
Got a working G2.3.x to show y'all:
Ben Fritz over at Spinsanity wrote an excellent piece last week about the frustrating nature of the ongoing national debate over weapons of mass destruction and the war in Iraq. He points out how each side in this feud is essentially sidestepping the important questions raised by the other:
Did the president lie? Was the war unjustified? These two questions are both in play right now, but many conservatives are ignoring the first question and many liberals are ignoring the second, leaving the public with a confusing set of mismatched arguments to decipher.
So I'm reading Clay Shirky's intriguing essay about social software, and a thought occurs to me about a telephone conversation I was having today.
Shirky:
It's very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can't see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi's conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type "Hand," and the moderator of the conference call will then type "You're speaking next," in the chat. So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.Meanwhile, in the chat, people are annotating what people are saying. "Oh, that reminds me of So-and-so's work." Or "You should look at this URL...you should look at that ISBN number." In a conference call, to read out a URL, you have to spell it out -- "No, no, no, it's w w w dot net dash..." In a chat window, you get it and you can click on it right there. You can say, in the conference call or the chat: "Go over to the wiki and look at this."
This is a broadband conference call, but it isn't a giant thing. It's just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue. This is an incredibly powerful pattern. It's different from: Let's take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.
When I was on the GNOME release team, we used to do these Friday morning conference calls, and at the same time we'd be talking on the phone we'd all be in the IRC channel. Mostly people just made jokes, but occasionally some useful piece of information would change hands, without interrupting.
Which made me think about an increasingly common phenomenon when I'm interviewing people on the phone. They'll look something up on the web or their hard drive as we're talking, or email a document that comes through while we're still talking. But what if, in a takeoff on the Ito example above, we were on the phone and had an AIM window open at the same time? Tom could have pasted a URL that I could have clicked on as we spoke. He could have pasted the precise quote for me. This is powerful stuff if/when we figure out how to use it.
I am a happy new Palm pilot user (the low-end Zire), and I'm particularly impressed with the thoughtfulness they apply to usability issues. But that thoughtfulness does not necessarily extend to their marketing efforts. In today's inbox was the company's monthly Palm newsletter, with a distinctly Fourt of July theme:
You can bet your britches that if Palm had a time machine, Thomas
Jefferson would scoop up the Palm™ Tungsten™ W handheld faster
than you can say "Declaration of Independence".
What did Moon Unit Zappa so eloquently say? "Gag me with a spoon."
And upon my return from vacation, I see the prolific Telsa has posted her account of the docs talk at GUADEC along with much more.
Joel Spolsky in his blog today links to a devastating critique of that annoying help setup wizard you get in Windows every time you start up an application's help for the first time:
The first problem with this dialog is that it's distracting. You are trying to find help in the help file. You do not, at that particular moment, give a hoot whether the database is small, big, customized, or chocolate-covered. In the meanwhile, this wicked, wicked dialog is giving you little pedantic lectures that it must create a list (or database). There are about three paragraphs there, most of which are completely confusing. There's the painfully awkward phrase "your help file(s)". You see, you may have one or more files. As if you cared at this point that there could be more than one. As if it made the slightest amount of difference. But the programmer who worked on that dialog was obviously distressed beyond belief at the possibility that there might be more than one help file(s) and it would be incorrect to say help file, now, wouldn't it?
Spolsky's rant is right on track with Havoc Pennington's "Free software and good user interfaces", which much influenced me on these issues. From Pennington:
A traditional free software application is configurable so that it has the union of all features anyone's ever seen in any equivalent application on any other historical platform. Or even configurable to be the union of all applications that anyone's ever seen on any historical platform (Emacs *cough*).Does this hurt anything? Yes it does. It turns out that preferences have a cost. Of course, some preferences also have important benefits - and can be crucial interface features. But each one has a price, and you have to carefully consider its value. Many users and developers don't understand this, and end up with a lot of cost and little value for their preferences dollar.
Now Spolsky:
It has been said that design is the art of making choices. When you design a trash can for the corner, you have to make choices between conflicting requirements. It needs to be heavy so it won't blow away. It needs to be light so the trash collector can dump it out. It needs to be large so it can hold a lot of trash. It needs to be small so it doesn't get in peoples' way on the sidewalk. When you are designing, and you try to abdicate your responsibility by forcing the user to decide something, you're probably not doing your job. Someone else will make an easier program that accomplishes the same task with less intrusions, and most users will love it.
To my Canadian friends, happy Canada Day.
If the first of July it be rainy weather,
'twill rain more or less for four weeks together.
Looks like we're screwed here in the desert.