Havoc's Blog

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Month: August, 2005

AND not OR

The book Built to Last has a famous discussion of the “Tyranny of the OR,” pointing out that mediocre companies force themselves to choose short vs. long term, or values vs. profit, or whatever; while great companies find a way to do both things at the same time. The desired state isn’t balance (some values, […]

Italian soda

Sign in Oakland airport: Attention customers: Our Italian sodas are made with Sprite. (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005-08.html#22)

Ctrl+N in IE

Occasionally I check in on Internet Explorer, and I always notice that when you open a new window it displays the same page in the new window that you had open in the previous window. I’m pretty sure this is the only page on the Internet that I could not possibly want to see in […]

Canvas widget

I haven’t thought about a canvas widget too often in the last couple years, but when I did it was along the lines of “well, most apps stopped using GnomeCanvas, so I’m not sure an official GTK+ canvas is important.” This weekend I looked into it a bit and wrote up some notes. Now I […]

Design process/team

Jeff, what isn’t clear to me I guess is what structure or process do you want? As I see it, it isn’t very complicated; there are designers, and you work with them collaboratively to figure out how to approach a problem and implement it. A variety of apps and features have been approached this way, […]

Geez

Jeff, Bryan and Seth were both at least a “design team” prior to working at Red Hat and have continued to work in the same way while working at Red Hat, so my view is you should leave corporate names out of it and just talk about people if you want to talk about people. […]

Gazpacho hacking

Led by the fearless jrb and the Gazpacho team, a bunch of us sat down to hack on Gazpacho today. My only useful accomplishment was a hack to allow toplevel windows to be displayed on a “work table,” like so, rather than the old Glade-style standalone windows. It shows how mature pygtk is that you […]

top-down version control design

A while back I posted some thoughts about version control, I feel like these posts get at the same point. People are artificially restricting the design by accepting the same “boundaries” as CVS, leaving bugzilla, email, an IDE, mailing lists, etc. all out of scope and with a fixed relationship to the version control system. […]