The Gist

Silke will be presenting at the SIOP conference this year in New York. I’m tagging along, because I love visiting New York.

We’ll arrive Thursday, April 26th and leave Sunday, April 30th. Since Silke will have to be at the conference much of the time, I’ll have lots of time to roam the city on my own.

If any of my NY Gnomies want to grab a drink, shoot me an email at shaunm at gnome dot org. Luis, I’m looking at you.

SVN continues to annoy me. The only thing it’s allowed me to do that CVS didn’t is move files. The cost of this convenience has been a massive loss of productivity, because it doesn’t allow me to easily perform the actions that I need to do frequently.

Last time I complained about SVN, it had to do with the fact that SVN doesn’t actually have branches or tags. Today’s annoyance boils down to the same basic problem, though it’s manifested differently.

This is what I would do in CVS to start preparing a NEWS entry for gnome-user-docs:

cvs diff -r GNOME_USER_DOCS_2_15_1 `find . -name ChangeLog`

But with SVN, I have to give it two obnoxiously long URLs to diff. There doesn’t seem to be any way to say, “compare the versions of these files from this branch/tag and that branch/tag”, short of some fancy ‘find -exec’ shenanigans.

Silke has put up pictures of our house on her Yahoo! Photos account. There are pictures of how it looked when we bought it, and how it looks now that we ripped off all the wallpaper and painted it. It’s a huge difference.

Here’s a small sample:

Kristian writes about the lack of annotate in our installation of viewcvs for SVN. I complained about this the other day on IRC, along with another thing that’s been annoying me. Compare the following:

Looking at the SVN page, you can’t tell me which version of yelp-db-pager.c was included in Yelp 2.15.1. But with CVS, you can see that it’s revision 1.61. (Yeah, it’s hidden inside a drop-down box, which is mildly annoying, but the information is there.)

SVN, of course, doesn’t actually have tags, which I consider to be a design flaw. That’s the sort of implementation-centric design that we usually eschew in Gnome. But we have to work with what we have.

I’ve just filed bug #405436 in the hopes that somebody will be ambitious enough to make tags and branch points visible. From my understanding, there’s no way to get that information directly from SVN, so we’d need a server-side process that collects and stores that information, and then viewcvs could just read from a database.

Somebody please be my hero.

For those wondering about my general inactivity recently, this is why:

Almost two weeks ago, Silke and I became the owners of this wonderful 80-plus-year-old house. Since then, I’ve been spending my evenings and weekends stripping wallpaper and being a general handyman. I’ll post some photos of the work when I have time, which probably won’t be any time soon.

Since timing was never my strong suit, Silke and I are leaving for Germany on Wednesday and staying there for a full two weeks. We’ll be staying in Heidelberg, her home town, but we’ll probably travel around a bit and enjoy the various Christmas markets. We’ll get back to our house on the 28th. Then my brother and his family will come to town to help us move over New Years weekend. I really wish I had more of the rooms painted and finished by now, but so it goes.

I probably won’t get back to any Gnome stuff until after feature freeze. So unless Don or Brent have any plans, what you see is what you get for Yelp this time around. (But next time around, we’re going to hit you with the Spoon-Mallard double whammy!) When I do jump back in, I’ll probably just be a non-hacker and work on our documentation.

So merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, joyous solstice, and look out for the wall.

Silke and I took a trip to St. Louis over the weekend. We went to see Mingo Fishtrap play. But I’d never been to St. Louis, so we did some touristy stuff as well.

Those of you who know me will know that, although I enjoy many genres of music, I consider funk to be mankind’s crowning accomplishment of musical genius. I’m talking big-band horns-wailing funk. Tower of Power funk. James “Holy Shit It’s James Brown” Brown funk. It doesn’t just move your booty, it moves your soul.

Those of you who know me will know that I love a good jam. Where you throw away your sheet music and all the stuff you’ve memorized. Where the band members hear each other and play off of each other. Where the band isn’t just playing the music, they’re breathing it. A good jam is an amazing thing to see and hear. I’ve seen some damn good jams in my life (Tea Leaf Green, Groovatron, Garaj Mahal), but Mingo Fishtrap takes the cake. Eight band members. Four horns. Sweet, delicious, funkarific jams.

As much as I love a good show (and I love a good show), that wasn’t even close to the best moment of the weekend. After the concert, Silke and I went for a walk. And that’s when this happened:

And she said yes. I love you, Silke.

Silke finished her last exam today, earning a perfect 1.0 once again. After years and years of hard work, she’s earned the title of Diplom Psychologist. It’s been a very stressful six months of exams for her, and I’m very proud of all she’s done. I sure as hell don’t have that kind of self-discipline.

Now on to the PhD program…

Recently, the US House of Representatives rejected
Net Neutrality.
I’m not going to go on about the dangers of this, because
there are already plenty of good resources on the web that
cover that. Instead, I’m going to talk about the
the free
market, and why it doesn’t apply here. From the linked-to
post:

Good thing this idiocy was rejected. Let the market decide. That works every time it’s tried.

The would be a fine sentiment in a true free market, but we
don’t have one of those. To explain why, I want to talk a bit
about smoking.

Smoking Market

Recently, the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana, IL, passed
an ordinance to
ban
smoking in pretty much all indoor public establishments.
Among other effects, this will shut down the two hookah bars
in town, which were not exempted.

Now, if there are really a sufficient number of non-smokers
(or even smokers who like smoke-free bars, like me), then market
forces should be able to handle this. There were a lot
of people behind the C-U
Smokefree Alliance. Not a majority by any means, but a lot.
Enough people that, if all of the vocal members were to regularly
patronize non-smoking bars, their business could support at least
three bars that are voluntarily smoke-free.

In Champaign/Urbana right now, there are very few restaurants
that allow smoking. This is without a ban. Restaurants have become
smoke-free because the market has demanded it. Travel back to the
70s and early 80s and look at the coffee house phenomenon. You
couldn’t find a smoke-free coffee house in those days. Today,
there is exactly one (to my knowledge) coffee house in
Champaign/Urbana that allows smoking, leaving at least 20 or so
that don’t. No laws, just the market at work for you.

Tollopoly

Last Fall, I was driving up I-294 to visit my girlfriend Silke
in the Chicago area. I-294 is a toll road, and at the time, they
had massive construction going on to implement the new Open
Road Tolling. I waited over half an hour to pay a toll, because
there were no automatic lanes anymore, and they only had two manual
lanes open.

I asked the toll booth attendant why they hadn’t left a couple
of automatic lanes open. Sure, that’s not her job, and my voice
probably had an annoyed edge to it. But she told me to “shut the
fuck up”. Seriously. If she were a waitress at a restaurant,
I can guarantee that restaurant would never see my dollar again.

But it wasn’t a restaurant. It was a toll booth on the only
road that could get me where I wanted to be in a reasonable amount
of time, even with the congestion. Two weeks later, when I went
to see Silke again, I took the same road, and went through the
same toll booth. The invisible hand of the free market was
nowhere to be found.

Back to Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is, to be sure, the government interfering with
the market for the benefit of the consumer. But when people argue
against government interference, they seem to fail to realize how
much the government already interferes for the benefit of
business. Four salient points:

• Publically-traded corporations exist only because
  we’ve defined them to exist, and we’ve set up laws to make them
  legally-recognized entities. They are all in the exact same
  business: selling money to their shareholders. They can outgrow
  and outlive their founders and founding vision in ways that no
  private company could ever do.
• Copyrights grant all sorts of monopoly powers on various
  types of content. Acts like the DMCA have turned copyrights from
  a pretty good idea (limited monopoly so that more works will end
  up in the public domain) into a pretty bad one (not-so-limited
  monopoly with protections to ensure that the works can never be
  effectively used once they are in the public domain). Ouch.
• Patents have a bad habit of preventing entry to the
  market, even though the original intent was to help innovative
  people get into a saturated market. These days, they’re mostly
  used to enforce oligopolies.
• Trademarks create strong brand recognition. And brand
  recognition does not belong in a pure free market. Your local
  farmer’s market is a pure free market. The produce is competing
  on quality and price alone. The clothing stores at the mall aren’t
  quite so pure. In fact, effective advertising often creates the
  market trends, rather than the market dictating the products.

I am not saying we should abolish all of these things. I can’t
even imagine a modern world without publically-traded corporations,
for instance. What I am saying is that, as long as the government
interferes with the market to benefit business, it must also
interfere to benefit consumers. We need balance.

In the case of broadband Internet providers, we absolutely do
not have a free market. Most areas are served by no more than
three or four broadband providers, and many areas see an absolute
monopoly. Telcos and cable companies are granted, by the government,
the right to dig in my back yard to lay infrastructure. That’s a
pretty strong market advantage.

The free market is not going to fix this, exactly because the
government has interfered on the side of big business. We need
consumer protection laws. We need balance.

Strasbourg is beautiful:

Silke and I kiss in Heidelberg:

Silke and I also dance:

Dance, Shaun. Dance:

Also, Fred is cute:

I’m inviting all web and graphic designers to send me mockups for our help pages. I have generally good knowledge of proper page layout, but that doesn’t always translate to good-looking web pages. I’m certainly not the best person to be selecting colors, as I have red-green color deficiency.

Use my BeanStalk mockups as a starting point. These contain most of the block-level components that we really care about, although they don’t have any tables or figures. Feel free to work tables and figures into your mockups, bearing in mind DocBook’s model for them.

There’s an about page, which Yelp/gdu makes for every DocBook document. The contents of these pages are mostly generated on the fly from informational markup in the Docbook.

Introduction to BeanStalk shows a block quote. Purchasing Beans shows an admonition. Bean Storage and Care shows a program listing.

Some things to keep in mind:

• I’m a sucker for watermarks.
• Be careful with colors, and understand we can’t guarantee that your exact color palette will be used. In Yelp, we generate all the colors we need from the current theme.
• You can change the HTML, but the HTML needs to be clean and to degrade well without CSS. In particular, avoid tables for layout. This is an accessibility requirement.
• We want to use the same design, give or take some tweaks, for both Yelp and for the web. Yelp is far more restrictive. A big web page with sidebars and banners would look dumb in Yelp.
• Note the existing navigational aids on the pages: the link trail (list of ancestor sections), and the previous and next links. These mockups show the previous and next links at both the top and bottom, although Yelp/gdu currently only puts them at the bottom. I think having them at the top as well is far more important on the web than in Yelp. That might be one of those tweaks I mentioned.
• I am pretty consistent about using a scale factor of 1.2 throughout all of my page layouts. This means you can work with these relative sizes: 0.69, 0.83, 1.0, 1.2, 1.44, 1.73. Note that there are times where you need to break from the scale. In particular, I’ve been known to use 0.2, 0.5, 2.0, and 2.4.
• New images for previous/next links, admonitions, program listings, etc. are perfectly fine. DocBook has five admonition types: caution, important, note, tip, and warning. I have no idea what the difference between caution and warning is, and neither does anybody else. I used a Tango icon in the BeanStalk markup for important, but that’s not the icon currently used in Yelp. Flatter images that work well in print are a plus. Keep in mind that many people will print help pages in black and white.
• All of my XSLT is released under the LGPL. Any copyrightable material you submit needs to be releasable under the LGPL.

Send your submissions to gnome-doc-devel-list.