To me open source vs. proprietary isn’t a good vs. evil question, simply two different things with different costs and benefits. That said, open source tilts the benefits toward users over software companies, all else being equal. That’s why open source evangelism makes sense. Since the Internet appeared, a trend in the software industry has […]
To save people time, here is some already-known info on D-Bus performance. Please read this post and a short followup about the new recursive type marshaling stuff slowing down those numbers a bit. I think there may be a couple other relevant mails in the archives, but not finding them right now. Be sure the […]
Several great posts from Luis. I mentioned it in passing a few posts ago, but I still think the “what is gnome?” on www.gnome.org could use a lot of work: “GNOME offers an easy to understand desktop for your Linux or UNIX computer.” I’d kill the words “desktop”, “easy”, “Linux/UNIX”, and “computer” for starters. What […]
Good comments from Joe, inspiring me to ramble a bit in a loosely-related way… I haven’t really written my “personal thoughts” blog about Mugshot yet. First, let’s not overcomplicate things by thinking there’s more to “get” than there is… our goal was to get something out as quickly as we could that showed the kind […]
Luis, a couple quick fixes I can think of would be: add “swarm” notification to the group chat (see “Join Chat” on group pages), right now if you join there’s no way for other people to know there’s a conversation happening display AIM and other type of IM links on people’s /person pages, possibly also […]
Long time no blog! I’ve been pretty busy coding for the last few months. Just finished my Red Hat Summit keynote segment announcing our new project, Mugshot. Been working on this with Owen, Colin, and Bryan (all of GNOME fame) and a couple newcomers Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Mike Langlie. So much to talk about here […]
According to an an article in today’s paper Clayton Christensen took a stand for design over megapixel in last month’s Harvard Business Review. I’ll have to find a copy. Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen is trying to shake up the marketing establishment with a deceptively simple proposition that flies in the face of […]
Miguel, that’s cool, I know SOAP (with a library) doesn’t involve a ton of application code. My point is more that (to me) it’s just not worth learning about for this sort of thing. If you want to get a couple of pieces of data on an Amazon product you just do “get url contents” […]
Regarding GTK+ themes, I think the metacity approach to themes worked out pretty well. You could definitely improve on the details (inventing my own little expression language was kinda weird, and there are lots of feature requests for the format). But metacity themes are “just data” rather than code while remaining reasonably flexible. Arguably you […]
Over the holidays I thought I’d play with the Amazon and eBay web services APIs. What a contrast! I got Amazon working in a couple of hours, and eBay… well, it’s two days later and I’m starting to feel stupid. For Amazon, to get information on a product you just register to get an ID […]