No, I don’t have millions of worshippers. Yet.

Bugger the Melbourne Cup, this is where the betting action is:

Thanks to Alex for the tip.

As a GNOMEy person, I read Planet GNOME (also known as p.g.o) - a collection of GNOMEy people’s blogs - a lot. Using Google’s Custom Search Engine (roll-your-own-search-engine thingy), I took Planet GNOME’s OPML file and made a search engine over just those websites that are p.g.o’s blogs. As an example, compare Google’s regular results page for cairo (which is dominated by Cairo the Egyptian city), with the Bloggers of Planet GNOME results page for cairo (which is Cairo the graphics library, and its GNOME-related adventures).

Enjoy (but don’t pronounce) BoPG:CSE - the Bloggers of Planet GNOME custom search engine. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it will only get better.

Update (2006-11-09): It looks like jdub has embedded the searchbox at planet.gnome.org.

1. Take an unofficial anthem.
2. Chuck out the boring chords and revise history with some 7ths, since they have more Star Power. Shorten it for fashionable attention spans.
3. Plug a guitar into a cheap ‘n’ nasty laptop sound card, and play like your mother (country) just died. If you are an ordinary guitarist and need 30 takes, then play like your entire extended family just died.

Listen (mp3 or ogg, about 1MB large and exactly 1 minute long), or read the score (PDF for printing, or PNG image for imagining, or Lilypond source for the hard-core). Everything’s CC-SA licensed.

On another note (haha), it’s been a year-ish since my first post (I’d link to it, but it’s crap). All up, 37 posts and 6,600 words, with a three month hiatus in the middle. In comparison, my buddy Wes has just squeezed out his 100th blog post since starting 10 months ago. I think the man has found his calling. There are some choice quotes there, bro.

Update (2006-10-23): For search engines’ sake, I really should mention the words Waltzing Matilda, tablature (not just chords) and arranged for classical guitar.

My grandma doesn’t particularly like computers (she’s always afraid that she’ll accidentally break something, having previously been caught in the crossfire of Media Player, iTunes, RealPlayer and WinAmp all squabbling about who “owns” .mp3 files) but she loves the internet and e-mail. Again and again, people have mused that all they needed from their computer was a web browser (and web-mail like GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or whatever) and an internet connection. Now, what if you designed a user interface for those people, rather than copying the traditional “desktop” metaphor?

This is what I’d do: there wouldn’t be a Start Menu, but only two buttons - one for the web browser, and one to log out. And the browser itself would be simpler. A common Firefox setup has www.google.com as the home page. This gives me three text boxes - Firefox has the Location bar and the Search bar, and Google gives me a third one. If I installed the Yahoo toolbar, I’d have yet another. This is crazy! There should just be one place to type stuff in. If it looks like you entered a URL, it would take you there. If it looked like you were entering search terms, it would search. Enter an e-mail address - it will compose an e-mail. Users of GNOME’s Deskbar would know what I’m talking about.

This magic text box would take pride of place - it would be big and central. It’s the most important part of the UI, and it’s also all you need. Under that, for convenience, I’d sprinkle half a dozen links, with nice big icons. E-mail, obviously, and one or two nifty web apps - writely, tadalist, whatever webbly calendar and blog-reader are flavors-of-the-month. And that’s it. All very simple, clean, and (hopefully) unbreakable. My Grandma might never have to see “the file system” ever again.

How would I implement this? Well, we already have a light-weight “desktop” in XFCE, and a light-weight Gecko-backed browser in GNOME’s Epiphany. I don’t need big apps like OpenOffice.org, Evolution, or even a file manager like Nautilus. What’s missing? Photos and music, I guess. Maybe I’d concede some specialist apps like F-Spot and Rhythmbox (or Songbird??), if I was going to do this properly. But as far as making a mere prototype, it was no effort at all. Oh, I need a sexy project name, so let’s take two of the biggest brands in the Linux community and mash them together. Voila: Foxybuntu. Enjoy the 3.5MB screencast (mirror). Yeah, the image quality is lousy, since it’s a 256-color GIF and hence dithery, but you should be able to get the idea.

The (A for Australian) ABC’s current affairs show, “The 7:30 Report”, interviewed his mathjesty a couple of days ago, and
the video is now online (yay Auntie), as well as the transcript.
Yours truly makes a cameo at around the 4:15 mark, exposing our dark and violent past. Hi, mum! I’m on the telly. Do I really sound like that? Strewth!

Linux munchkins that want [1] to pull down the 18MB .wmv should do something like this:

mimms "mms://media3.abc.net.au/winlibrary/730report/200609/20060927-730-tao_16_9_bband.wmv"

[1] Why would they want to do that? I dunno. But then again, I don’t know the 12 year old nameless fangirl gushing over “meeting the smartest guy, practically, in the world… wow!”

P.S. I love Nautilus’ cute thumbnail, complete with sprocket holes. Yeah, every decent OS does it, but it’s still pretty sweet.

Half a year ago, before its first stable release, the Deskbar shed its icon du jour, a shiny, blue arrow pointing into a bar thingamajig. Oddly enough, it appears to have re-surfaced as a proposal (in the blog post’s comments) for a new ’save’ icon, given that the, uh, iconic floppy disk doesn’t reflect real life these days.

Gee that Onion Guy gets around.

Not content with ‘just’ a Fields Medal, it looks like my bro has just picked up a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: nice one, brother!

Even more spectacular was that he made the front spot of the (online) Sydney Morning Herald on a day when the most popular story was about the perils of modern day medical procedures. It’s a poignant window into the Australian psyche…

It’s been a quite a few months where nothing happened with superswitcher (or actually anything at all from me on the OSS front), but my eleventy-half loyal users will be happy to know that it now has a subversion repository and issue/bug tracker, thanks to code.google.com. Already, a bug (Doesn’t work when Num-Lock is on) has been filed and the one-liner fix has been committed.

Ah baby steps, back on the path to world domination. Now to contemplate my massive deskbar to-do (or at least, to-look-at) backlog…

Dusting off my archives of the last millenium, I came across the records of my old comrade and El-Presidente-in-Exile, “Big Sexy” Ryan M (not to be confused with “Sexual Life” Catherine M). This is his story.

My brother, Terry Tao (he’s the one stuffing his face; no, the other one; the other other one), has just been awarded a Fields Medal. Smart cookie, that kid. I tried to read his thesis once, and gave up around page 7. But really, his best achievement is fathering my favorite nephew, which got my folks off my back about getting married / having kids. For now.

Ladies, form an orderly queue…

Update (2006-09-12): Terry is also known as 陶哲軒. Theoretically, I am also known as 陶哲仁, but I don’t actually read or speak Chinese (I think my name loosely translates to something like Top Aussie Bloke). What this does mean is that there’s a bunch of blogs that mention my name and I don’t know what they’re saying. Creepy.