Archive for November, 2005

Miguel has just blogged about the web desktop. It is a very interesting vision for me. It's rare to see leaders talking about new major architectural designs and improvements. I was thinking why this idea hasn't been implemented earlier, but thinking more on this topic one can realize that CORBA aimed the same goal, which is pusing application interoperability to the next level.

However CORBA have issues. It was implemented in GNOME as Bonobo, but CORBA is really heavyweight, robust and hard to grasp, so it had no real chance to dominate. However REST is more popular, accessible and supported than ever and hosts now have the processing power to easily parse structural markup. Bandwith is also plenty, so the binary nature of CORBA doesn't mean a significant advantage anymore.

I'm keenly looking forward to the future of the web desktop.

Internet Explorer is a Funny Piece of Software

IE has a lot of interesting features. Well, these "features" are called security holes by professionals, but calling them features is much more funny, I think. The first such feature I know about makes one able to execute remotely any code (s)he wants and using the second one the clipboard of the poor IE user can be easily read by curious sites.

In one of the earlier articles of Seth Nickell, titled "Experimental Culture", he writes about how GNOME became more traditional while KDE became more innovative. It seems to me that a new generation of Gtk# applications may turn this situation upside down.

There are several apps that really stand out. Most notably they are Beagle and F-Spot. F-Spot has a new tag management interface which is very revolutionary in terms of user interaction. It's a really original idea recently implemented by Nat Friedman which makes one's productivity fly. You gotta watch the screen capture.

Another useful application – although not so innovative – is Audio Tag Tool. I haven't tried it yet, but I will.

I've just released Coder Keymaps 0.4.1. and Power 0.2.1. These are small bugfix releases and I probably won't really work on these projects in the future.

Lesbian GNU/Linux

I'm seriously considering moving to Lesbian. It's so hot.

I've written yet another PyGTK application in the near past for the Digital Image Segmentation course of the university.

You ask me what it really is?

Edge Detector Dude is a simple image manipulation application written in Python using PyGTK. It presents you the Sobel edge-detected and the gradient-directed versions of the input image. The pixels of the gradient-directed image is computed by denoting the angle of the gradient of the pixel and mapping this value as a grayscale color.

Edge Detector Dude is more accurately a front end that uses the accompanying gradient utility to process the input image and visualize its result images.

gradient is written in C using the Allegro game programming library.

Let's see this dude:

I'm proud of this GUI design because I think it's very usable, however there are several things that could be improved:

• Add a "View" button to view images. Currently the statausbar mentions that images can be viewed by double clicking on their names, but it's not very eye-catching and novices may miss it.
• Add support for other file formats. For some strange reason Allegro only handled BMPs, however according to the documentation it should handle a wide variety of image formats.
• Replace the gradient-directed image with something nicer. It's really ugly, no questions, but I had no choice because that was the exact task to be done.

Don't forget to check out the project page and download this babe.

Update: MediaWiki can be installed on SourceForge. See my post "MediaWiki on SourceForge, Part 2" for more informations.

Wanna know how to setup MediaWiki on SourceForge?

Here is my answer: Don't try it!

As a matter of fact, you probably cannot even setup a decent wiki on SourceForge. I've been trying to install MediaWiki to the project web space of Ultimate Commander and I sucked hours and hours with it, hardcore. The most serious limitation that makes it impossible is the read-only policy of SourceForge regarding the project web space. They probably call it secure, but I'd rather call it paranoid. I'm sure they have good reasons to do so, but it's still very annoying.

Read-only access means that wikis can't upload files and I don't know about a wiki that saves everything purely into MySQL, so I installed DokuWiki on my site for this purpose.
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I heard about Scott first on OSNews. There was an article about him mentioning that he left Microsoft and that he has worked on Internet Explorer in the past. At that time I didn't really care. I was too busy.

A few days ago I read some articles on OSNews and one of these was his writing, titled "Why software sucks (And what to do about it)". Since I'm genuinely interested in software usability I read that article.

It was the best article I ever read on the topic. It makes you think in new ways in terms of philosophy, engineering and in relation to your users and yourself. I was thinking which pieces of it should I blog on, but It'd be a sin quoting parts of it, because it makes a coherent whole that should be read by everyone interested in the topic.

I think I don't exaggerate if I say Scott is one of the sharpest writers that I ever had the priviliege to read from and I'm looking forward to his future essays and will definitely read some (if not all) of his older ones.

Microsoft is working on his new shell, called MSH. Ars Technica has just made an extremely well-written, quality article on it. It's a big shift seeing Microsoft really caring with their power users and system administrators, because in the past they primarily created front-ends which served the average users well, but not the advanced ones.

Honestly I envy at MSH, because it's powerful. I'm especially impressed by its object-oriented approach, its close integration with the .NET API and its import/export capabilities. Providers also seem to be very usable and the security features are well-thought too.

What I'm less impressed about is its syntax which resembles Bash in many places which I think is hardly readable and not really intuitive. This is especially true in case of comparison constructs. The SQL syntax is also a good idea, but compared to Python, it's functionally is the same as list comprehensions which I find more appealing.

I must say that Bash-scripting is lagging far behind MSH. Our whole set of command line tools are loosely integrated and purely textual which makes them very hard to use effectively in a lots of scenarios. Unix bigots would argue me, of course, but Microsoft shouldn't be blamed all the time. The should be watched and their good ideas should be embraced and improved to build a better free platform.

Ajax and PHP

A new developerWorks article has been written on the topic.

Ajax is an extremely exciting technology for me because it makes developers able to build thin client applications that feel like rich client. Using Ajax one can make really smooth and powerful applications. The best example that comes into my mind is Gmail's autosave feature. As you compose your mail Gmail autosaves your email regularly and you won't loose your content if something wicked happens.

If I had more time, I'd create an application which I would call AjaxWikiBoard. The name is quite intuitive for technical folks I believe. It'd be a web application empowered by a wikilanguage, preferrably with DokuWiki or MediaWiki markup, using Ajax and featuring frequent autosaves. That could be used as a personal note-taking application, just like Tomboy, but on the web.

Linux 2.6.14 is Out

The new release is here. Contains some inotify fixes so it's worth upgrading.