Seth Nickell

Congrats to Havoc. It was really fun at the guadec party last night (after he’d had a few beers *cough*) when Havoc announced the release of Havoc v 2.0. Everyone was gathered around and slapping him on the back and stuff… moments like this we just feel like a bunch of friends (gathered in some random Commodore 64 bar in Germany, sure).

Gman comments on the discussion between the Mono and Java camps. Just to clarify, I’m not in either camp. I’m in the “lets get gnome moving / language discussions are stupid” camp. If I was in any language camp, it’d probably be the “PyGTK is awesome and mature and has existed for a long time and is uncontroversial, lets use it” camp.

Graydon’s c#/java post, I think rightfully, mostly concludes that Java and C# are more or less same-ish. Dare’s C# for Java programmers document, which Miguel linked to as a more rigorous technical comparison, says roughly the same thing in its “Conclusion” section. I’d paraphrase it roughly as “Java programmers will probably find that C# has more nice extras available than vice versa. Java and C# are similar enough though that useful code has been, and probably will continue to be continue to be ported back and forth between them.“.

Looking through that (old) list of things C# has that Java doesn’t, most of the major ones are now present in Java 5: varargs, generics, foreach, metadata. Most of the rest of them are things that are arguable back and forth as to whether they’re a good idea (I hope everyone learned from C++ that more features != better) such as having a pre-processor. Delegates and Structs stand out as exceptions to this. Structs can, I think, be argued back and forth. Java is in certain ways more determinedly high level than C#, this would be an example of that (not exposing a distinction between stack adn heap). But, on the whole, there have been enough cases where I really do damn well want to allocate things quickly on the heap that this feature seems to be a win for C#. Delegates are quite a bit cleaner than the equivalent Java idiom and very nice. But neither of these is world changing features. Really.

On the flip-side Java has checked and unchecked exceptions. It was an intentional language decision to not include these in C#, I’m sure (just as, say, not including pre-processor in Java was almost certainely discussed and rejected). Some people hate having to catch all the exceptions. Personally, I think it makes code better. I’d trade structs for Java’s declared exceptions any day (perhaps not for delgates through). Java can also, e.g. dynamically instantiate classes from byte streams. But who really cares?

Probably the most practically important difference doesn’t seem to be mentioned in Dare’s analysis, which is the ease with which Mono code will be able to avail of existing C libraries. I think this is very important, and shame on Sun for making this such a PITA with JNI. Unlike this and that language construct I think this will have significant impact on how the language is actually used.

Java and C# remain the most similar major languages evar (that I know of at least). C# is pretty damn clearly an iteration of Java. Its a good improvement, and in turn Java picked up a number of the best improvements and integrated them into its next release. But the differences are not earth shaking.

My personal suspicion is that Eclipse makes a bigger difference (both in terms of productivity and in terms of how clean the codebase is since it makes all sorts of refactoring so easy) than the language construct differences. But then, I am a known IDE junkie.

Oh, I should add that Miguel is absolutely right that JDK 5 has not been replicated in the free software context, and, IMO, shame on the classpath developers for that being true. It was clear which of the JSR bits would be included in JDK 5 long before it was released. ecj, Eclipse’s built in Java compiler which we’ve now extracted as a standalone thing does support JDK 5 stuff, but the class libraries still need to be genericized and such. So you can already do varargs and stuff like that. The main thing that’s missing from the free java stack right now, wrt to JDK 5, is that the standard libraries don’t come in genericized versions so you can’t do List yet. That’s pretty important obviously, though you can write your own genericized classes already.

As I mentioned, there’s a lot of stuff we’re still working on wrt to blogs.gnome.org.

• One obvious issue is that individual entries, when linked to, don’t show up with the general theme. Also, the blog links to itself in non-”portal” mode by default so it looks like this rather than this.
• There’s no preview button on the “post to blog” page.
• The themes aren’t quite as nice as we’d like them to be and have some annoying bugs (like, try hovering over a link that’s already been clicked on, and it goes bold reflowing the text).
• Image posting from gnome blog. This would be cool.

jrb added blogs.g.o support to gnome blog so I’ll be doing a release of that pretty soon.

Its been a long time coming, but we’re happy to announce a standard site-wide mechanism for hosting your blog on gnome.org. We’re using the excellent NewsBruiser blog software. blogs.gnome.org comes in three delicious flavors, with more to come. You can also design your own template and CSS rather than using one of our stock themes.

Autumn
Black and White
Blue and Green

If you’re currently hosting your blog on gnome.org using software installed in your user account (such as pyblosxom), we would strongly encourage you to move your blog over. Its very easy to import an existing blog, and it will reduce the opportunities for gnome.org to be craxzor3d.

1. Who can get one? Anyone with a GNOME cvs account can request a blog.
2. Why does blogs.gnome.org redirect to planet.gnome.org? Individual’s blogs can be found at http://blogs.gnome.org/username . We decided not to provide an aggregator for blogs.gnome.org blogs since its pretty much an arbitrary set (unlike planet gnome which in theory aggregates the most interesting gnome related blogs).
3. _______ doesn’t work Please e-mail seth@gnome.org and jrb@redhat.com or talk to us on IRC.
4. Why’d you use NewsBruiser?

   NewsBruiser is a bit of a dark horse, but it matched our needs most closely:

   • Supports multi-user site installs
   • Is straightforward and focused on letting people write and read blog entries
   • Makes it very easy to import entries from an existing blog (it has a few different types of importer, including a bloxsom importer, but we’ve found the RSS importer works best and should work with the most blogs)
   • Has a reasonable web-based per user setting system
   • Can be arbitrarily themed / templated by users, but also allows for stock site-wide themes
   • Has a web form for posting entries
   • Supports MetaWeblog for posting entries using tools like gnome blog
   • Is written in a language we can reasonably extend and maintain ourselves, if necessary (Python)
   • Has a helpful and responsive maintainer
   • Did not require per-user SQL accounts (NB doesn’t use SQL at all)
   • Stores blogs in a simple format so we aren’t necessarily tied to the software, say, 4 years down the road (NB also allows users to download all their entries as a tarball w/o sysadmin intervention, a nice bonus)

   Actually, if you look through this list its not a particularly exotic list of features, and its really a shame that given how much blog software has been written NewsBruiser is the only one (we could find) that supports these features.

Getting a blogs.gnome.org account

1. In the next week or so, just pester either jrb or I on IRC (or by e-mail, though I personally prefer IRC). We’ll need your gnome.org username. Long term, people can email accounts@gnome.org instead. Anyone with a CVS account can request a blog.
2. Visit http://blogs.gnome.org/yourusername and login using the password we provide to you.
3. Click import to import from an existing blog (if you have one). We’ve found the RSS importer to work best.
4. Click configure (should be one of the links replacing the login box after you’ve logged in).
5. Setup your blog information on the first page. We recommend you use your name for the “Notebook Title” so that its easy for people to tell who’s blog they’re reading. Click the submit button at the bottom of the page when you’re done.
6. You can change the theme (or define your own theme/template using the “no theme” option) from the “Look and Feel” configuration page.

Post

Its rough, its dirty, its still pretty cool. Diana and I originally put together a mockup for the RH blog aggregator, to replace the existing monstrosity:

It sounds like the RH blog aggregator will be moving to Planet soon anyway, so I thought I’d get an early start on the template/CSS munging. And since I was already doing it for Planet, I figured, why not take a whirl at the Planet I know and love?

Here’s Planet Gnome with the new template/css. Obviously I’m not running the planet.py updater periodically, so its fixed where I left it last night. Lots of little cleanups left to do, like using day names instead of dates, hardcoding the little image sizes to improve render speed, making it work at narrower sizes, make titles link, etc. There’s also a couple visual details off relative to the mockup (some of the spacing, the blog entry titles should be darker which looks better and is easier to read). I chose the colors 10 seconds ago, so they suck

This design isn’t just purty, its designed to improve reading too.

• The primary contextual information used for orienting the conent of a blog entry is “who”. I think most regular readers are picking up the “who” from photos, so those are visually distinct off to the left.
• The name and face are also grouped closely together, which should help people build the association.
• Your eye can skim down the un-noisy left hand side (also note that we break days using a color band with the day name, so the lightly coloured bar at the left is basically the orientation/skimming bar) to find entries
• Once you’ve located the start of an entry (this isn’t just for “searching” through the page, its a frequent orientation procedure while you read), your eye shifts over to the text in a familiar left-to-right reading direction (compare with the existing layout where people’s eyes tend to try and scan on the right which is mixed with noisy text, then once they are oriented/context loaded as to the person, have to scan left and find the start of the text line to read… the little bits of extra work add up .
• Most of the white on the page is inside the actual blog entry content boxes (in the word balloons). Restricting white like this draws your eye into the boxes. This reduces some of the visual overload problems in the existing pgo (its even worse in the RH blog aggregator right now). In other words, the layout draws your eye into the text, which is what the blog is really about, and also keeps the amount of text from seeming overwhelming (which is what “wandering eye with no strong visual reference” tends to do to people). The existing pgo has a strong wandering eye effect, which seriously discourages people from actually reading, whereas if the text seems more managable people are more likely to dive in.
• I think the titles of blog entries are usually useless, so I almost dropped them altogether, but didn’t, as you can tell.
• We avoided strong visual lines and dividers to make it easier to pleasantly “read through” the whole page. Lines get in the way of your eye, so they should only be used when you actually want to disrupt or control the eye’s flow.
• As far as high level design goals, I think the “word balloon” increases the feeling of attribution. Its suggestive that there’s a real person saying these things. I think its less of an issue for pgo, but for Red Hat that both improves the humanness of the blogs (the main reason companies are starting to have them, I think), and it makes it clear that the statements are individual opinions. Its subtle, but I think it has impact on how people interpret the information.
• The width of text is restricted. Its easier to read relatively narrow text columns.