After almost 9 years, today was my last day at Red Hat. I’ll miss it, and all the great people there. It’s not time yet to say what I’m working on now, and may not be time for a while. In the meantime, I’ll be around in all the usual places you might expect to […]
For years now I’ve complained about the term “desktop” – an evil word that blinds us to more interesting opportunities to use free software in consumer-facing products. Look at all the recent examples. Built on GNOME technology, we’ve had Maemo from Nokia and OpenMoko for a while, and One Laptop Per Child. More recently, we […]
I wrote a short Red Hat Magazine article, complete with screenshots, touring online desktop in Fedora 8. (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2007-11.html#13)
Apparently someone has decided to be pedantic and set my font DPI to 50 by default. Without changing some number of other things, this is a regression, and broken. To avoid the many problems this creates the decision was made long ago to simply make the DPI always 96. This is also what Windows does, […]
For a long time people have talked about an LDAP or other network-located backend for GConf. Unfortunately writing GConf backends is painful and in some ways not really possible, for example the backend interface does not support change notifications originating from the backend. Presumably Ryan’s dconf will address some of this. In the meantime, we […]
I don’t think John Markoff at the New York Times knows about the GNOME Online Desktop effort, but Owen noticed this blog post where Markoff works around a hard drive crash with a Linux LiveCD and web-based apps, just as we’ve proposed. He calls it Computing in the Cloud. What I discovered was that – […]
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)