Havoc's Blog

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Month: May, 2005

Elektra

According to Comcast On Demand, “Elektra is an assassin always on a mission to kill, but when forced to decide between good and evil she finds herself fighting mystical and relentless ninja assassins.” (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005-05.html#25)

D-BUS and ISVs

D-BUS seems to be getting adopted by third parties more quickly than by the original intended audience. First Skype and now Maemo. Maemo looks like a really interesting project, I clearly need the Nokia thingy to run it on. Pete, it’s not just for ads. Even nonprofit or ad-free sites will have either whitespace or […]

Screen real estate

Dom, you’re making a screen-real-estate-based usability/design argument. If I ever wrote down a Havoc’s Guide to Software it would include “design arguments based on real estate are totally weak.” In this specific case, text filled across a whole screen or page is hard to read. That’s why newspapers have columns and most online magazines restrict […]

Coordinated security

Slashdot comments are even dumber than usual when discussing coordinated security updates. I guess I’d expect that if they know nothing else, at least many Slashdot posters work in IT and understand security patches! For those who don’t know: in most cases, a not-yet-public security flaw has a public announcement date coordinated among all the […]

Subtext

Alex Graveley links to subtext, I think this thing looks awesome. A perfect place to experiment with it would be something like GNOME panel applets, Apple Dashboard, or Second Life objects. All these are limited programming domains where making programming easy would be high-value. I guess any sort of plugin/extension system might be a good […]

Yay, language debates

Better judgment > /dev/null Sorry to see this come up again, but I guess it will be a hot topic at GUADEC, so I may as well lay out the current status as I see it. (Summary: not much has changed…) It won’t show on Planet GNOME, so here is Mark Wielaard following up on […]

Platform

Mikael, I would have said exactly the opposite. You can build all the platform you want and nobody is going to care. What they care about is apps. Good apps will drag along the worst platform imaginable. In fact, the major apps mostly have lame custom cross-platform toolkits as their platform, and nobody cares. GTK+ […]