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

Stefan: Awesome to hear you were pushing GNOME at Linuxtag. For what it is worth, the answer I usually give when asked the difference between GNOME and KDE (for users) is simplicity- compare, for example, nautilus’s right-click ‘burn to CD’ for an iso with the incredibly powerful but difficult to use k3b, some simple preferences menus (like nautilus’s v. konqueror’s), or the necessity for search functionality in the KDE control center, or GNOME’s leadership in developing desktop software that Just Works, like hal and network manager or tomboy and muine. When giving this answer, it is always important to stress that this isn’t for everyone- I think this makes GNOME clearly better for me, and for my mom (and hence in the long term for hundreds of millions of people), but we should be honest and up front that this approach is not necessarily for the average hacker or admin who likes to tweak every little setting.

For developers, of course, the answer is LGPL and language support- python, C++, and C# are first-class languages for us, not just C, and Java is catching up, which means you can do work in just about any language you might want. Again, it is worthwhile to admit that right now have better tools for development, but hopefully we’re catching up in that area as well.

For businesses and big deployments, the answer is ease of use/simplicity, which means cheaper support and lower training costs, and corporate support- Sun, Novell, Red Hat, Nokia, and perhaps now Palm are all helping develop our software, which improves the experience for everyone, and providing support for customers who want that level of expertise.

Spent the weekend in Miami, talking over my future with my parents (who despite it all are pretty decent advisors) and getting a touch of a sunburn. The biggest goal of the weekend was to de-stress- so I continued to read Getting Things Done, which so far has just been really dead on about my problems, if not necessarily all of the solutions- mostly the suggested solutions seem right, but the constant prattling about paper and file folders, when I have search tools galore in front of me, seems odd. Anyway, I was inspired to start cleaning up my desktop on the flight back. Because of the lack of network, I wasn’t able to actually remove too many things from my action list, but I was able to review some things and clean some old things out. Felt really good, for example, to delete all my old LSAT and GMAT notes, and delete a slew of other stuff out of my home directory and my Desktop. And I’ve bitten the bullet and completely rearranged my desktop- I’m running gimmie, tomboy, and deskbar as my only real interfaces right now. I’ve even turned off nautilus rendering the desktop so there are no distractions visible when I’m trying to focus. (I would love to run gdesklets on a layer so that I could nuke the weather and clock applets, but I need to file a slew of bugs first.)

GTD is going to be slightly frustrating software-wise- tomboy is almost perfect for it, but not quite (because it has no categories), and a perfect Getting Things Done desktop would allow you to use the same tags across basically all objects in your life- my files, my tomboy notes, my emails, and the people in my life would all (ideally) use the same tags so that when I wanted to find information relevant to what I’m doing right now it would be trivial. That isn’t coming any time soon, it looks like, though who knows, stranger things have happened :) If I could even just get it consistent between evo and tomboy, that would be the feature that would make me take my personal mail back out of gmail and into evo.

(Of course, I appear to have left Getting Things Done on the plane, the same thing I did with Effective Executive. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something.)

In other news… this is a really nice example of effective open source development.

Good things:

• Getting a totally surprise birthday gift from a good friend.
• Krissa’s mom gave me a great-looking book for my birthday, which I expect perhaps I’ll send it to Todd when I’m done.
• When I get off the plane tomorrow night, it’ll be 70-some degrees, instead of the teens it has been all week.

General gripes:

• My computer was turned off for a while this evening, so I missed an offer of ACC tournament tickets. I’m never turning off my computer again.
• Networking in dapper regressed seriously a week or two ago; despite the fact that I never have eth0 plugged in, it gets brought up every time I boot now, which breaks all kinds of things. And when I upgraded my desktop from breezy to dapper my network card disappeared, with no way that I can find to bring it back. Grr.

Wish I’d had this article my senior year, when I went AWOL on my thesis and didn’t have the guts to come back.

A brutally long day today. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday were great days- I was on a productive roll, and I knew it, so I did more and for longer than I should have, because, well, dammit, it felt good. I woke up today sort of tired already, and then, well, then webmail was down. And then virtually every webservice was down. And then databases were corrupted. And partitions were full. So messing with that blew a big chunk of my morning. (Though of course it was way worse for Danny.)

Then meetings.

The day got capped with the list server beginning to spew literally a couple thousand h2o error messages at me. I of course start frantically reading logs, poking things, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong. Spent 45 minutes this way. Got pretty panicy by the end, because they just wouldn’t stop coming, but the app looked fine. I then finally noticed the time the mails were sent- i.e., all this morning. The mail server had been overwhelmed (or whatever) and sat on them all morning, so I was seeing error messages that were several hours old. Nothing like an hour of that to shorten your life.

Blah. Anyway. Hopefully tomorrow I get back on track, and I survive through to a weekend with the parents in sunny Miami. Right now I’m definitely going to need a breather…

Tessstting….

Said to me at dinner last night: “There is a fine line between cynicism and bitching- you’re staying north of it.” — Rekha Murthy

Kathy Sierra is, as usual, dead on, this time talking about how dignity is overrated. I can’t wait to see her talk at GUADEC.

Spent a big chunk of yesterday at the first peer to patent workshop, which focused on issues of quality and reputation. Really fascinating technical and social design challenge- how to build a tool that can grow and harness patent-interested semi-expert communities without driving already stressed patent examiners out of their minds, or overly biasing them. Discovered that there aren’t that many key patent filings per year- it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility to organize a small team to read every incoming software patent application and do a brief analysis for interest, broadness, possibility of existence of prior art, etc.