We’re looking for operating system developers near the Red Hat office
in Brno, Czech,
including some to be part of the desktop development team. If you’re
interested, send an introduction and resume to Jay Turner (jkt redhat
com). You must live in Czech for these jobs, please don’t apply
otherwise.
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–01.html#11)
Luis linked to this Joel article which says:
No matter how debunked Whorf is, I’m still convinced that Israelis are more likely to do things דווקא, simply because they have a word for it.
Lots of people say Whorf was debunked because they read The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. A professor of mine in college pointed out that while Pinker debunks a strawman hypothesis that language determines thought, Whorf never said that.
At the start of his essay,
“The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language,” Whorf quotes Sapir as saying:
We see and hear and experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our
community predispose certain choices of interpretation.
Note the word habitual in the title of Whorf’s essay, and the word predispose
in the Sapir quote. The rest of the essay is consistent with those words.
Read the chapter on “Mentalese” in the Pinker book where he goes on a big rant about Whorf. It’s an attack on “linguistic determinism.” He quotes this passage:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds — and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, BUT ITS TERMS ARE ABSOLUTELY OBLIGATORY; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.
This is from the Whorf essay “Science and Linguistics” which is about the process of reaching scientific agreement through discussion. A conversation has to use language, and some things are easier and more natural to express than others. That’s why jargon exists. As new concepts are invented, whether in science or business, people invent words suitable to discuss the concepts. Sometimes they skip words entirely and use pictures, mathematics, or even computer code.
To me the Pinker way of thinking is sort of like what Alan Cooper calls “Homo Logicus”; someone who ignores the difference between what is possible and what is likely.
The Wikipedia entry on Sapir-Whorf is interesting.
I recently read the book On Intelligence,
essentially a description of how the brain works. I’m not qualified to say whether this is an accurate book, but if so it would certainly debunk Pinker’s “mentalese” claim that everyone thinks
in a universal language of thought. Pinker argues that the brain works like the Common Language Runtime, compiling your language to intermediate language. On Intelligence sounds a lot more plausible than that, at least.
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–01.html#7)
Christian,
use APNG. MNG is seriously flawed. (We tried to do GdkPixbuf support
for it back in the day.)
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–01.html#7.2)
Elijah keeps
Metacity respectable. Christian, you may beat us on bug numbers,
but can you completely obliterate an entire class of
bugs in true Elijah style?
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–12.html#20)
There’s a bunch of really good stuff in Red Hat Magazine that should
have gotten more attention. It really is good stuff, I’m not just
saying that. 😉 The things I thought were most interesting from a
desktop developer point of view:
Seth’s
article can address a couple audiences; for GNOME, it’s a good
introduction to what we can do to improve usability beyond HIG
compliance. Our development process doesn’t always include the design
steps right now. For the non-desktop-developer crowd, it’s a good
introduction to “what is up with those crazy UI programmers?”
You can also learn how
gcc works though I’m not yet convinced that I want to know this…
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–12.html#20.2)
The Register has its issues, but I did appreciate the
title of this article. At least with Yahoo! you can sort of see
how the name makes sense; unlike this competitor for a “worst product name ever”
award.
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–12.html#12)
In case you had any doubts about how much David Zeuthen rocks, check
this out, standing on the shoulders of Owen and Ziga Mahkovec. As
I think Owen intended, this shows how important profiling before
optimizing really is. Now we understand the issues and a 40-second
boot (including GNOME login) is a simple matter of
programming. I’m looking forward to FC4.
In the boot
chart, it looks like David has gnome-session launching at about 22
seconds, so I have my hopes up that we can run gdm at that point when
using gdm instead of autologin, and have a username/password prompt in
under 30 seconds.
It does look like getting below the times David is posting will
involve simply loading less junk off the disk. It’d be interesting to
start analyzing what said junk includes and whether there’s any
low-hanging fruit.
A useful lesson also demonstrated by my D‑BUS hacking: a wall-clock
sampling profiler is essential to figure out the high level areas to
optimize. Something like callgrind can be useful once you’re
optimizing a specific CPU-bound function or loop, but callgrind is
the wrong place to start.
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–11.html#29)
Amusing myself with profilers the last few days, with moderate
success. This was probably a waste of time; I don’t think IPC is
likely to be a bottleneck or performance issue for the desktop as a
whole. (Despite the occasional Slashdot kid speculating that stuff is
slow “because of CORBA” or “because of X” as if anything that opens a
UNIX domain socket is automatically to blame for all performance
issues…) But, it was a good way to procrastinate the more useful
stuff I should be doing. And I found a few real bugs while I was
fooling with the code.
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–11.html#28)
I should have mentioned in my last post, Planet Classpath is well worth
checking out; for example right now it has Tom
on Monotone,
IKVM
status update,
Swing
on GTK+ screenshots.
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–11.html#28.2)
Gotta reply to the
questions I guess 😉 Or at least some of them.
Why Red Hat is not making any Java-GNOME application?
We’ve been reluctant to start competing with Novell to see who can
write the most code in their favorite language, eventually leading to
two different desktop codebases. Instead there are quiet efforts to
find other solutions.
Coincidentally, Graydon (who has implemented much of Swing on top of
the GTK+-based AWT in Classpath)
posted this
analysis comparing Java-GNOME and GTK#. Basically he ports a GNOME
applet from C# to Java and lines up the code side-by-side to
demonstrate how similar it is. A nice bit of perspective.
Why all of us are not using Eclipse instead of Emacs or vi for
developing GNOME?
Last I tried it (some time ago) the C/C++ support wasn’t good
enough. One of the Eclipse developers tells me that I should try again
when 2.1 comes out and that it’s much better. If I can do this
(and also use a gcj-compiled 100% open source Eclipse) then I would
definitely like to switch to Eclipse.
OK, I’ll let someone else answer the other questions 😉
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2004–11.html#24)
