xan Xan Lopez
Jaikus from xan
Monday, 2 March 2009
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Suggestion: make the images a link to the full size image file.
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the stock icon for GNOME these days has a HDD instead of a floppy, and that will be obsolete too RSN. We should probably just stop using technology representations in the images.
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@qgil: sure, wasn't directed specifically towards maemopad. Just realized the world advances much more quickly than our metaphors.
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- Daddy, what is this?
- What?
- This picture.
- A floppy disk.
- A what?
- A "floppy disk". An ancient storage device.
- And what happens if I click on it?
- Your data is stored on the Cloud(tm).
- And why do they use a flippy disk for that?
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Random thought: it's funny that a lot of the icons in the Maemopad toolbar use as metaphor for the action something that's obsolete/no one uses anymore. Floppies? An actual clipboard? An actual Folder? :)
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
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sonar.es page without flash is hilarious. 10 white "Click here to download plugin" rectangles.
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
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My own name is three characters long. Thankfully I've never got any problem yet because of that (and I was able to put my actual name in arcade machines hi-scores as opposed to everyone else I knew).
Friday, 16 January 2009
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@segphault: precisely my point is that cool things like Plasma or Nepomuk could have been in the hands of users a long time ago if they hadn't been mixed with rewriting everything from scratch. I think in this regard GNOME got it very right with its incremental approach to everything.
About WebKit/GTK+, well... my hope is to try to make Epiphany 2.28 usable (ie, 'stable' and 'feature complete') and have some kind of alpha/beta by 2.26. But predicting the progress of volunteer-based projects is even harder than predicting the progress of normal software projects, so take that with a grain of salt. (That being said, I'm happy with the progress in the past two months or so, and I think ephy trunk is coming along nicely).
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gnome shell uses already existing gnome technologies and it's basically a replacement for the wm and the panel. It certainly can serve as a model for further changes, but it's by no means as drastic as porting all of gnome to Qt.
And maybe gnome needs a new vision, but porting everything to a new toolkit is exactly the wrong kind of "revolution": you rewrite everything, spending years in the process, to end up exactly in the same place where you started. FWIW I think KDE has fallen in a minor version of this, where they don't have time to talk about decadende because they are too busy rewriting everything from scratch for the nth time to get marginal gains in end-user results. I think our time would be better spent hacking on truly new things that matter to people instead of starting from scratch, dumping years of work, because our free version of motif is not as good as the other guy's free version of motif ;)
Besides, in 5 years everyone will be using web apps exclusively, haven't you got the memo.
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Saying that it's in the best interest of GNOME 3 to use Qt is like saying to all europeans that it's in their best interest to teach the next generation to speak Mandaring as their first language. Is it true? Well, maybe. Is it an attempt to impose an abstraction into a society/community without any consideration about what it would actually mean, what would be the consequences, what it would actually take to do it...? I think so. That's why no one is talking about it, it's a futile exercise.
(Another analogy is that you'd be better off if you had a brain transplant. Ok, maybe it's true, but then I'd be no longer myself, so it'd be just as good (and easier) to start from scratch with a new person)
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Do you really think Qt will get a boost of application developers? I'm sure it will get more people doing closed apps due to it being LGPL, but there has never been a huge intersection between those guys and the free software guys. And anyone really willing to do closed applications and not caring about developing the platform (ie, most of them) were already paying the Qt license anyway. So, yes, maybe Qt will get a huge boost, but I'm not 100% sure. (For example, I think Nokia making a succesful platform with Qt would be much much more relevant, because it would open Qt to a new universe of people. And here Qt being LGPL really would count. But without that?...)
About GNOME somehow using Qt or GNOME giving up completely because of Qt being LGPL (as I've heard): I think people thinking these things just don't get how free software in general works, and the reasons or motivations people have to do things. Hackers are not "individual units of work" you can shuffle around due to changes in the environment, and expecting all, or most, GNOME hackers to stop using their technology and move to something completely different is just an abstraction with no basis in the real world IMHO. Besides, projects exist in some sort of "ecological equilibrium", and even if you somehow convinced all GNOME hackers to move to KDE you wouldn't give the project a 2x boost in development speed: there's always a core team of people that do most of the work, and dumping a zillion newcomers into any project will usually do more harm than good (even in the long term if you dump too much people I'd say) because of personal tensions, disputes over the ownership of code or direction of the project...
My personal opinion is that GTK+ has been failing to catch up with Qt in "classic" toolkit technology since pretty much forever, so I can't really see how it could get much worse in this regard. I think GNOME still has some strengths, like its binding technology (gobject-introspection is only stretching the gap), and with things like gnome shell (core written in C, bulk of the project in javascript, extensive use of opengl/clutter) it's starting to move away from traditional conceptions and possibly making GTK+ less relevant in the not so far future.
So, yes, dunno, things are surely going to get interesting, that's for sure :)
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What is there to wonder about GNOME/Qt exactly?
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
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@murphy: nobody writes it by hand though, there's a gazillion scripts, emacs macros, etc to generate it from the type name and its parent type.
Other than that, yes, C + an OO library is verbose :]
Saturday, 10 January 2009
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Well, I was randomly stopped at the station, they checked my bag, asked me where I live, and told me that if I didn't cooperate they had the right to take me into custody. All for my protection of course.
Saturday, 3 January 2009
Friday, 19 December 2008
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@yerga: I think people's lack of interest for "ideologies" and their rights is generalized and has nothing to do with the youth. Probably as we dive deeper into a recession and some people in the West start to suffer really badly some ideologies will make a comeback, but only temporarily until they have their food and entertainment secured again. Or maybe not and I'm just particurarly cynical today.
In any case, my point is that the perception that the current generation is particurarly hedonistic, ignorant and careless about the "important things in life" is something a lot of people tend to think about their generation or the generation right next to theirs, so I tend to take those comments with a grain of salt. Could it be really true now? Sure. I still think we are better off now than we have been for most (if not all) of History, so I wouldn't despair about it. I mean, just look at the 60s. Those people gave up their ideas completely, kept the drugs, and grew up to be the good respectable citizens that fucked up things in their lifetime. Just like everyone else before them :)
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@yerga: you're 50 year late for the 60s "OMG the young people are crazy and take new and strange drugs". Just saying ;)
Monday, 15 December 2008
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I guess you were born when Franco was still alive (or shortly after he died)? My name is a short form and it's my official name, and I think these days in Spain you can name your child pretty much anything you like as long as it's not "offensive" for him/her.
Jaikus from xan