Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

Hrm… link in that previous post is broken, but you can just search for ‘gtk’ in their job listing and find it pretty easily :)

Adobe has a very interesting job position open for someone who is willing to go through the challenge of being ‘the open source guy’ in a closed-source company. Looks like knowing GTK is a plus, which is nice to see. Hope a regular reader of the Planet can pick this up- would be great to see us spreading.

The sox are still going to lose. But man, are they making it a much more fun ride that it looked like on Saturday night.

Read resumes and such during the game- have lined up some phone numbers and such to start making calls to. And attended to some other tasks as well. Still, made for a long day- started with email before 8, first meeting at 9 and am still waiting for some work things to wrap up now, 15 hours later :/ I guess I can’t complain too much, most people can’t watch a ball game in the middle of their 15 hour work days.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better, both work and play-wise.

fafblog, as usual, captures things better than I can. But damn. The Sox pitching… just abysmal. I guess as a sports fan I’ve been spoiled, going from growing up a Dolphins and Hurricane fan, to Duke basketball (men’s and women’s) with a nice icing of Marlins, and then came to Boston, where within a few months of getting here the city won a Super Bowl (I loathe the Patriots, unfortunately) and a Stanley Cup-by-proxy. And then I got another Marlin’s series win. So I’m spoiled. But… damn. Tonight still sucked. Objectively.

Mike: realistically; I’d hope most people aren’t writing merely for ‘enterprise’ distros, since that’s not what the vast majority of linux users are running. (And the serious enterprise distros will all have 2.4 within a matter of a few months, anyway.)

Bryan: Nutshell of the Bonds/Suzuki issue is that for most intents and purposes, particularly for a leadoff hitter, a single is the same as a walk. So, sure, we can completely ignore power, as you ask. But if you do ignore power, the right stat to look at is on-base percentage, not hits. And in that category, not only was Bonds 50% better than Suzuki (.609 v. .414), he had the greatest year of any player, ever. Better than Ruth, better than Williams (who holds the best non-Bonds season of all time at .553). He didn’t beat the previous record-holder by a couple percent, in a couple percent-longer season. He crushed the record by just a shade under 10%. So, sure… Suzuki had a great season, and it should be recognized. But by a more important statistic, not only did Bonds have the greatest season of all time, but the next best seasons aren’t close. Oh, and if you factor in power, using OPS, you’ll note that Bonds is 40% better than the next best player in the league, and Suzuki is 42nd. And if you think that these new-fangled stats are too complicated… Suzuki was the best hitter in MLB this year, I’ll grant, but only by .010… over Bonds. So it isn’t exactly like Bonds was a slouch who only hits for power- he hits for average nearly exactly as well as Suzuki does. If people actually pitched to Bonds as many times as Suzuki was pitched to, he’d have had around 85 home runs, and in the neighborhood of 250 hits. So, I sort of rest my case. If you think Bonds is only a power hitter, you’re not paying attention.

Had another fairly heated conversation yesterday with Dave about firefox and other apps who want to be more gnome-y, and I thought I’d rant on a bit about it here. Bottom line for me is that I want to match OS/X, and that means an integrated desktop, where apps all strive to look, feel, and behave the same. I had a franken-desktop before I installed evo and galeon back in 2001, with apps in gtk, motif, and even raw X. Frankly, when I install stock firefox and stock open office, that’s what I feel like I have again- the dialogs don’t match, the icons don’t match, the behavior doesn’t match. Some people seem OK with this, but I don’t think the linux desktop can win (or frankly even compete) if that’s the road we want to go down.

Now, maybe GNOME’s standards are not the right ones to follow. Almost definitely we’ve made it technically too hard to follow them. And we’re often not incredibly cooperative about working with outside parties on them, which is something we absolutely must fix- I want to be cc’d on relevant bugzilla.[mozilla|ooo|helix|.org bugs, and I’m very happy to do my constructive best to persuade folks of the importance of working with GNOME’s standards. (Though admittedly I think Shaver is a bit sick of me at this point ;) But the bottom line, I think, is that if we want to compete, we must pick a design and usability and integration standard, and at this point GNOME’s standards are the only ones we’ve got, and I think they are generally damn good ones. Until that changes, and we have a better standard that is a real usability standard and not just ‘write whatever you want’, I’ll unabashedly push hard for other groups to follow GNOME’s standards when writing apps for Linux.

Before this comes off as an anti-firefox rant, I’m using it as my workhorse browser right now, and it has made huge strides in the right direction. It is doing some very innovative stuff, and provides a pretty decent out-of-box experience in terms of performance and ease-of-use- in contrast, with, say, open office, which is still failing on all three of those counts. I just think firefox still has a ways to go before (out of the box, unpatched, which must be the goal) it provides the right experience on Linux. And that’s where I’d like to see all apps (Firefox, Real, OpenOffice, etc.) going- again, not specific to firefox. We should applaud firefox for having done the difficult work of innovating and the possibly even harder work of tearing up a huge codebase and starting from (UI) scratch. But just because that is impressive- and it is- doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to push it towards becoming a better, more integrated part of the linux desktop.

It’s been pointed out that in my last post I mentioned interviews, without pointing out that I was the interviewer and not the interviewee :) Hope that clarifies…

Yargh. Sox game last night was frustrating; nearly gave up, decided to stick it out one more inning, and watched the Sox get within six inches of tying it up. And then blow two more runs. And then get the tying run at the plate again. ARRGGH. (Bryan, I still owe you a post ;)

Even before the game, yesterday was long- did my first serious job interview, ever. Went well, but I felt underprepared, and I’m sure it showed. Followed that up with several meetings, none of which went poorly, but all of which were more draining than they should have been, can’t put my finger on why. And I worked myself up over some work issues on the way home- you know, where you start thinking about a problem in solitude, and the more you think about it, the worse your mood gets, even though it started off as a fairly benign train of thought. Blah.

JP: I don’t think he’ll start next week, let’s put it that way. But really, I expected inconsistency from Vick; it’s Stephen Davis, Fred Taylor, and Santana Moss, who I expected to be reliable studs this year, who are killing me.

Sri: I’m not sure we have to go the ‘we’re the linux desktop’ route, but realistically, ‘we’re a good linux desktop’ is a hard message to pull off. And frankly, if we start planning our marketing around what Slashdot will think, we’re hosed- there is a bigger, better world out there (both in terms of potential users and potential developers) that we need to think about.

As an aside on the marketing thing, I forgot last night to upload this venn diagram, which shows three potential groupings of product/market pairs, and suggests that GNOME should understand what we market in these terms- in other words, to help us understand what we’re doing better, we need to think of ourselves as more than just a desktop. I think this will help us think more clearly about what kinds of materials and stories we need. Thanks to pzb for this idea. Given our limited resources right now, I believe we have to focus (for now) on the overlapping area between these three groups of product/market pairs. Hopefully I’ll get myself subscribed to marketing-list tonight and this discussion can continue there- blogs aren’t the right place for it, I’ve just thrown things up for now because I’m still list-unsubscribed ATM.

Good to see this morning that the fixes Malcolm did to make the tree green have been committed. Yay for green :) I look forward to 2.9.1 in a couple weeks. Now we just need someone to start collecting notes for the changelog ;)

I ended up taking a lot of notes at the late, great summit, mostly in tomboy, which was fun and for the marketing stuff very useful as I interlinked, edited, and moved around. Anyway, I’ve done a (very, very rough) export to HTML. For those who are interested, the marketing talk stuff is here or in tarball form if you want to edit/polish locally.

More fun for most people, probably, is the summit recap notes I took- the list of what people thought was Cool is here. I’m still waiting for someone to step forward and get their first GNOME Journal out of the summit :)

Anyway, besides taking notes, I had a good time this weekend, with some good conversations and some fun talks. I’m looking forward to getting more actively involved again, and maybe applying my energy to different parts of GNOME than I have in the past. In the mean time, though, I think I’m going to collapse into a deep sleep. I can’t power through a conference like I could even a few years ago… maybe has something to do with the fact that I came home last night and did dishes during the conference ;)

Had a good time at the summit yesterday; we had some interesting talks about marketing (more tonight on that, I’m sure) and the Speed Talks were a great success, it seemed. Look for them soon at a GUADEC near you.

While we were sitting around, Malcolm suggest I have a LATEST link in the tinderbox- so now we do. Go here to see the latest sexy build results. Having Malcolm around always seems to generate interesting, or at least useful, ideas…

It looks like Owen Williams whipped me up a Tomboy export script last night, so perhaps I’ll get the marketing talk out even faster than I thought. Cool, thanks, Owen…