Interesting to see that Novell have bought SuSE. Good times for GNOME it seems. Wonder where that will leave the rest of us. I figure the organizational headaches involved must be pretty scarey, since Ximian are quite new to the fold, and now SuSE. Interesting times for the Linux Desktop as the movers and shakers reveal their hands.
It’s amazing how life goes from really productive cycles to completely wasted ones. I think I had one of my wasted cycle days. I probably shouldn’t have gotten up. Still, all that said, I had some pretty interesting discussions with Havoc, Nat and Dave all on completely different topics. So nice to feel activity around you 😉
Did some mockups for the sound capplet, neither of which I’m entirely happy with. Found out that the poor results in the usability study were probably due to Sun changing the default panel setup. Oh well, you live and learn.
One of the good parts of today, was finding a nice park to run in and even a children’s playground to monkey around on the bars.
I started to briefly look at sound in the GNOME Desktop. It’s nice to see that good progress seems to be made with GStreamer, but we’re still kind of sucking at a desktop level. Sure, we have some nice apps with Rhythmbox, Jamboree, Totem and others but some of the more simple tasks that user might do involves the current sound capplet. The user interface is pretty dreadful, and although we have a ‘Sound Events’ tab in, gnome-audio isn’t even part of the desktop release.
I took a few screenshots of XP and OSX for comparison purposes. I think it’s pretty easy to see which one is more favourable. A simple set of tasks might be something like
I’m not convinced that we need sound themes, especially given the few sound files we current have for the desktop. Hopefully we’ll be finally able to re-use the work that Ronald, Ted, Christian & Co. have been doing on the current mixer and get some of this work rolled into gnome-control-center. Would be also nice to sit down and figure out the API to replace the libgnome stuff.
Well, I can hope. Meanwhile, Jonathan pointed me to the AT&T Natural Voices text-to-speech engine. Audrey saying ‘Welcome to the G’NOME Desktop’ sounds very well.
I just registered. Have you? However, I will not be taking part in this.
Dawn and Martina have been staying the last few days as a stop off on a 6 month round the world trip. Last night we went out in Christchurch to watch the Ireland/Australia rugby match. Initially we thought there would be a great atmosphere in town, as the match was late enough on a Saturday night. There are a few Irish pubs in town, so we headed in with the expectation of finding a big screen. We were pretty disappointed with the Irish pubs – they seemed pretty quiet. After wandering around for a bit, we ended up in The Holy Grail, a sports bar with the biggest screen I have seen. It was pretty awesome, and luckily most of the Irish contingent had found there too, so it created a pretty excellent atmosphere.
Many beers later. Many many beers later, the sports bar turned into a nightclub. Night clubs aren’t really my scene. I think you have to be outgoing and, um, rather forward. Very definitely survival of the fitest. At about 5:30am I wandered out and walked home. The place had no indication it was closing in the very near future.
Today I have a hangover and a sore throat.
Delighted to hear that Maeve got her driving test. This will make things easier when they arrive next week.
I am now eating breakfast and eating fruit. All extremely shocking information for my mum.
Okay, so maybe not all the time. Since moving to New Zealand I’ve definitely had more free time – I’m not quite sure what this is, but it’s good and I want more!
Been spending some more time getting the Foundation website in shape – with the help of Jeff and Vincent. It’s definitely ready to rock, so we should have it online soon. It’s nice to see all the web infrastructure in place – Developer, User, Foundation, GUADEC, CVS and Bugzilla. Haven’t made any more progress on the ‘Joining GNOME’ stuff yet, but there is time!
Unusually even managed to find time to go through some of the video from my time in the US, including that awesome drive through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California. And found time to read.
So the Foundation board are beginning to rock. Shame it’s almost time for elections. It’s been my first year on the board, and I’ve actually enjoyed it heaps, more so than being on the release team. It’s pretty cool when people just do stuff, and yet some amazingly frustrating when they don’t. I think we’ve had a pretty excellent team this year and definitely the right balance of people. We always keep saying ‘We have so much to do, and so little time’. Let’s just make the time, eh?
We kicked off the next round of GUADEC with a pretty awesome meeting last night. The team seem like an excellent and enthusiastic group of people and I’m pretty psyched about GUADEC heading there next year. It’s already shaping up as an excellent conference. The only trouble is that the meetings are likely to take place at 5am my time which probably means that I won’t be attending too many, but it really seems like they have a good solid idea of what needs to be done, and have already got most of the infrastructure in place already! If you have any specific complaints about GUADEC last year, or suggestions that you’d like to throw into the fray, now would be a pretty good time to email guadec-list@gnome.org. Stay tuned for an announcement soon!
So, after posting my ‘Joining GNOME’ plea for help I got a grand total of zero patches back [although I did get some grammar and spelling help from Erwann and Eric, and some comments from Graham]. I guess everyone is busy off doing something entirely more attractive. It’s kinda funny…months ago hundreds of people were complaining to Jeff that the current website was crap, and that he should get his arse into gear and put up *whatever* he had at the time. Now that he’s finally gotten something up, something that everyone can easily work to, I’ve seen a pretty small amount of people actually contributing back content. It’s all terribly sad and pathetic. Graphics and layout can’t make a good website on their own. We need content. WHERE IS THE LOVE?
I went for a 12km run down to Hagley Park and back. I think it almost killed me. Definitely need to improve on my general level of fitness over the coming weeks.
I guess I’ve always been the impatient type, getting frustrated, yet expecting things to happen. Just like that. It seems all too easy to forget how GNOME works, and how that it relies on the JFDI principle. I was casually browsing developer.gnome.org and www.gnome.org with a view to finish off the contacts page on foundation.gnome.org. Even with our lovely new look, it’s easy to forget how much our content really sucks. It’s not badly written, it’s just old. Real old.
Suddenly I found myself taking a page at a time, gradually trying to improve the content. I just wonder how effective it would be if we all grouped together and spent a week concentrating on that effort. I guess it’s a thankless task, and a rather frustrating one trying to figure out the tangled mess of links, articles, tutorials, whitepapers and guides. With a few updates here and there, all a bit too random, I decided to concentrate on ‘Joining the GNOME Project’ – it certainly seems one of the more important documents that we have online.
So now I have this grand vision – that I will go to sleep, and people will read this blog, and see this link that I have started on, and send me patches. It’s not there yet, but it can be. You decide.
This weekend is Labour weekend in New Zealand, sharing a public holiday with many countries around the world. Awoke unusually early due to heavy rain hitting the corragated tin roof and decided that I couldn’t possibly waste the day. The International Antarctic Visitors Center is about a 10 minute walk away from the house, so it seemed like the perfect destination on a rainy day. It actually proved to be a pretty interesting visit, having an in depth look at how the bearded scientists survive during the 6 months of darkness winter. Despite the hardships they faced, and the huge swings of morale, I came away feeling only envy. Could I possibly survive such an environment? I couldn’t say, but I know there must be something to bring so many people back year after year. I am sure it is one of the few continents that I will probably not visit in my lifetime and yet seemingly, 1000’s of tourists visit the place every summer. They even have a Lonely Planet guidebook for the place, which amusingly asks all people travelling by ship, to make sure that they have reinforced ice breaks, an emergency helicopter and a few other random checklist items. It’s a different world, for sure.
It seems a good refelection of today that ‘hands on’ museums are more popular than the antiquated trip through dead animals and dusty books. It was pretty cool to be put in a freeze box, to watch how a typical Antarctic storm would feel. With the temperature lowing out at -20 degrees, you could imagine why this lonely place isn’t for everyone. Decided not to take a trip on the Haagelunds, although it was very tempting. Apparently they take you through an assault course, set to prove the worth of the machines in a barren environment like the Antarctic. It didn’t really seem like the real thing, so I left it at that.
After a quick lunch, I headed out towards the beach. Cycling east, I passed many of the suburbs left undiscovered after my week of house hunting. Christchuch gets a lot of winds, although perhaps not as much as Wellington, and today was a struggle of man versus machine [and nature]. When I found the sea, I was a little bit disappointed. I found a beach, empty and void of sunshine with pipes running out to sea at regular intervals. Decided that the sand was compact enough to cycle along the beach for a while. It was tough work, but totally enjoyable. Christchuch is an amazingly flat place, and today I was glad of that fact. After 3 hours on the bike, you legs fade, your will depleted and you casually lose interest.
Laca and family returned from their adventures in Dunedin, and now faces an interesting dilema of where to move. From his stories, Dunedin sounds like a pretty excellent place to visit.
