There’s some talk on desktop-devel-list about exactly what “online desktop” means, and in private mail I got a good suggestion to focus it such that end users would understand. “Online Desktop” is an abstraction. First, let me try to convince you that it’s more specific than what GNOME purports to be about right now. Then […]
Talking to lots of developers at GUADEC about their designs, I’m reminded of the hardest thing to get right in software engineering: when are you doing too much of it? The “agile development” model is to always do as little as possible, adding code and design complexity only as needed. I’m a big fan of […]
Lost my voice last night talking to people about our GNOME Online Desktop keynote. I’ll try to remember some interesting things people brought up. Some commenters thought the talk wasn’t alarmist enough and should have more strongly stressed the urgency of the situation. I don’t think we need to panic but I do think a […]
For those not at GUADEC, we put up some slides and screencasts from our talk about GNOME Online Desktop. (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2007–07.html#17)
Since it’s come up at GUADEC, I wanted to post a bit about D‑Bus licensing. D‑Bus is dual licensed under your choice of the GPL or the Academic Free License 2.1. The AFL is essentially an MIT/X11 style license, i.e. “you can do almost anything” — however, it has the following patent clause: This License […]
When I set up the Mugshot client build I noticed that the automake manual suggests a non-recursive setup, so I thought I’d try it. I’ve used a non-recursive setup for every project since. The automake manual points to the classic 1997 paper, Recursive Make Considered Harmful, if you want the detailed rationale. My first attempt […]
I added a jhbuild moduleset for online desktop related modules such as the canvas, local-export-daemon, bigboard, etc. (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2007–07.html#5)
gnomedesktop.org linked to a VentureCake article on ways to improve GNOME. While the article covers a lot of ground, as a kind of aside it brings up the age-old “X would be faster if it knew about widgets and not just drawing” theory. I wonder why this theory comes up repeatedly — it is one […]
If you haven’t seen Marc Andreessen’s new blog, it is very worthwhile. (2015 update: Marc’s blog doesn’t exist anymore except as an ebook, so all links to it below are 404, don’t try to click them. Other than adding this note, this post is the same as it was written in 2007.) Among others I […]
Apress sent me a free copy of Foundations of GTK+ Development by Andrew Krause. On gtkbook.com, Andrew has some sample chapters, supplementary articles, and an eBook version. As far as I know, this is the only up-to-date GTK+ book. It’s introductory-level and strikes a nice balance of tutorial and reference. It goes through the major […]