Ionrock Dot Org

So, I was given the excellent opportunity to order a laptop for work. Having always used rather less expensive hardware (to say the least), this was very very exciting. The process is kind of interesting. My work has a store that I go to and purchase something. That item then gets approved by my manager and then moves on to a secondary approval. I had gotten an email from my manager very quickly regarding her approval. The secondary approval was a little slow to happen. In fact I had really thought that I was probably going to have to wait until after tour to get my laptop. Not a big deal but it would kind of feel like having to wait until January 25th for Christmas...

Anyway, to my surprise a friend of mine comes by the office and mentions that I have a package. My manager asks where it is from and says, "That is your laptop! Go check out!" Not wanting to disappoint, I head out and grab it. I open it as fast as I can, trying not to just freak out and break something. I was also trying to be calm and collected about the whole thing so I didn't look like I never get stuff like this, even though I never get stuff like this.

The laptop is a thinkpad t42p and totally rocks. It has a gig of ram and 2ghz pentium mobile processor. The video card is a ati fire gl mobility 128 (128 Mb of ram) which should do pretty well when I get our new xgl guy to install the new hip xcomposite manager. In a word, I am excited. Maybe I will get pictures or something. In the mean time I will be staying up really late every nite to "configure" it and generally enjoy my new toy ;)

This past weekend I visited my parents and sister. My parents were visiting my sister and wanted to see Lauren and I since it has been a year or more since we saw them last. Lauren and I thought that it was too much for both of us to go so I went by myself and was forced to miss her like crazy. It was really good to see my family. I don't get to see them much so I really enjoyed having a bit of time with them. My nephews and niece are also cute as anything. Preston, my brother-in-law, was also getting ordained in the Southern Baptist Church. Southern Baptists don't have the best reputation for ordination (from what I am told) so I didn't expect too much of a ceremony. Everything ended up being very powerful and moving. I have even more respect now piled on my brother in law, who is a truly amazing person. They will be moving to Texas soon and I wish them the best as they certainly deserve it.

The world is a funny place. No matter what kind of organization or group, the larger it becomes the less it addresses individual needs of its members. This speaks volumes regarding the individuality of the human race, which is truly amazing on a variety of planes. Unfortunately, this individuality leaves behind quite a bit of trash as it moves on toward creating the future. At my work, I have the rare opportunity to voice my opinion regarding the future of the GNOME desktop. I feel truly honored to be a part of this, yet, it is also huge burden. I would hate a huge failure to be placed on my head. My intentions and desire to something great will definitely fall by the wayside in the light of mistake that can be seen from the perfect vision known as hindsight. My resolve then is to stick to my guns on some issues to see how they all work out. I cannot please the world as a whole so I will merely try to please my own intuition and see how it plans out. Wish me luck!

Today I took a look at the apple student blog. It was pretty hokey. It reads like a group of silly kids whose lives revolve around why Apple is so amazing and why everything they want in life revolves around their lives on their Macs. Pretty sick. I can't say that I am fan of Apple beyond they do hire good designers. The thing that Apple does better than anyone is marketing. I agree they have some good usable designs, but I would argue that it is not because of the design alone. I do not think they have found the absolutely most usable path for things as much as they have introduced an interface that people want to work with, and more importantly, learn. A good example can even be seen in the student blog.

The menu at the top (of the blog, not the standard apple.com header), looks very clean and interesting. I moused over the links to see a submenu come up which also looked very clean. There was an smooth animation that slowly brought the submenu to view, increasing it opacity at an extremely well thought out pace. The problem is, when I tried to click on a submenu link, the menu crept back into obscurity as it appeared. Given this looked great, and dog gone it, I hovered again, but the same thing happened. I gave it two more tries before getting my mouse above a submenu link and it not disappearing. After that much effort, I didn't have the desire to give them another click.

This kind of flash is really nice and while my example is probably not the best, I think it is still important. If a person takes the time to learn the system as the designer intended what does that say about the "raw" usability? It seems that it would skew the results from a scientific standpoint, but let's be realistic. We live in the real world, so when someone learns to use a system it is perfectly valid to say that the system they are now an expert in is usable. I think Linux has this problem in an extreme way. People should see it and think to themselves how they would love to spend the weekend seeing how it all worked. Some people do and they enjoy Linux a great deal. It is the masses that need to get the same passion and I think that it may be alright to let go of a little scientific usablity in favor of creating something georgeous folks want to spend way to much time looking at.

This weekend was a lot of fun thanks to my amazing wife. I am convinced that the scientists are correct in saying that men and women are very different. I have little to no ability to do more than one thing at a time and Lauren seems to always pick up on everything I can't seem to pay attention to. What's more is she does all of those things better than I could ever hope, so kudos go to Lauren for making my life great!

On Friday we went to see Dinosaur Jr. This was a truly great show. Dinosaur Jr. is one of those legend type bands that never seem to be someones favorite band, yet everyone likes them. I felt honored to see them play as J. Mascis amazes me to no end with his songwriting abilities.

Saturday, we got up a hair late and decided to go to the cape. We were pretty nervous about the crowds since every single tourism site and article we read said the cape is super crowded so go as early as possible. While I am sure it has its days, this was not one of them. The cape is a pretty crazy place. We were really surprised because it is really cold. I was under the assumption that it would be warm. Afterall, who likes to go to a cold beach and freeze in the water? Sure enough, no one seemed to be swimming at all and of the people that were there, most just sat around trying to soak up as much sun as possible. I think we were a bit unprepared because it would have been much nicer had we packed a bunch of firewood, a grill and some warm clothes. We did have a very good time seeing the water, a mass of seals, a moquito swamp, Province Town, Plymouth Rock, Race Beach, Herron Cove, and Corn Hill beach where we saw the sunset. To top things off, we had some lobster rolls on the way home.

Yesterday, the girls went shopping while I stayed at the office for a bit working on some projects. I later found out they had a streak of patriotism and walked quite a bit of the freedom trail sites and even got patriot hats. No patriot is complete without a few beers and lobster so I met up with them and we went to Paddy Burkes pub for a pint. I had a guiness that was poured correctly (first time for me). After Paddy Burkes, we headed over towards Duirgen Park (spelling?). I had a $12 lobster (again a first) while Lauren had the worst beer ever, a Sam Adams Lite. With my belly full of lobster and a need for a better drink, we went over to house to park and check out a local pub. We went to Tir Na Nog which is right by our house. I had a drink and headed home to rest while the ladies stuck around enjoying each others company in a genuine irish pub. Being the worry wart I am, I stayed up for them anyway but I did get to spend a little time reading which was nice.

Overall a really great weekend. Lauren and I will need to go to Durgen Park this week and hopefully we will also get a lobster as well. I also need to catch a Red Sox game so with time running out, I need to get this stuff done.

I have been hacking together the user test site and man am I frustrated. It is funny b/c I became somewhat accustomed to designing systems using UML and everything in my classes but when it gets down to actually programming something, I feel like I can't do anything right. I have written a bunch of code and I am constantly wanting to refactor and clean things up. I don't think this is anything too telling other than I really am not that great of a programmer. In any case, I am pretty frustrated and I just want to get something working so I can start over :/

I read this article about why Apple switched to Intel. The overall conclusion is that, because of the iPod, Apple has decided to switch to Intel in order to get a better price on processors in the same way Dell does. This makes a lot of sense.

Having just watched the keynote the other day (it was raining and I had to take a break from work somehow), the thing that stuck out most was Job's comment about the heart of a Mac being the OS. I thought this was extremely telling. The iPod has done very well and has impacted Windows quite a bit. I think this move to Intel could also mean Apple allowing folks like Dell to license their OS as an extension of their iTunes strategy. Instead of just pushing iTunes, they can push OS X. Afterall, the person just spent $300 on a new iPod, why not just give them the OS too at a large discount (or free). Just a thought ;)

I was reading planet gnome today for a second and Todd Kulesza mentioned he had just been added to planet gnome. I saw that he had written drivel, a live-journa blogging program. Having had little luck with gnome-blog-poster recently, I decided I would try it out. The nicest thing about it that I can see is the spell checker. I am a horrible speller so this is a great feature for me. Other than that it seems pretty small and simple so thst is good.

On the usability front, I have been also taking some looks at Sonance. I have been talking to Aaron about the user interface and I think I have some ideas about that I might send him. He said he was interested in my input so we'll see what he thinks. In any sense, he has done a great job with it so far and I am very interested in seeing how things come out. I have been using muine for a while and I have found it to be a really great player, so sonance has got some stiff competition for my own music player vote. Time will tell ;)

I am stealing this link from Garrett because I love cats. So without further ado... cats jumping.

So, I was just taking a quick break from work and was reading some GNOME mailing lists and it hit me. I am a little burned out. I am definitely enjoying coding and working but little details regarding organization are just getting me down. It is tough to explain but there are some things that are really just a waste of time at the moment. There was a discussion regarding putting two administration dialogs together. Now I totally agree the devil is in the details and that taking time with all these sorts of things does push people to make an argument regarding these kinds of decisions. The problem is that there are some overarching issues that don't seem to be addressed.

The largest is how can we make GNOME the desktop that everyone wants to use. It is important to make GNOME usable. We want users to enjoy working on their computers and if they can get things done faster or with more precision then this is good. The problem I see here is that there seems to be less of a push to make people want to try GNOME in the first place. Where is the slick eye candy? Where are the innovative apps? I know we have some great things in the wings and this is not meant as a bash at any developer. My point here is that we waste time by dealing with silly administration capplets instead of just going with the competition. These are mundane details that people usually never truly understand in the first place. At least by copying Windows, we get a bunch of pseudo gurus who are able to troubleshoot their family members computers because it is an identical interface. All the while we change the way people think about their information and what they use a computer for. I know of no person who switched to OS X because of the truly awesome means of changing the screen resolution. It was the stupid dock or expose that made them drool. Linux and specifically GNOME has an opportunity to make clear it is not what it looks like but what it does that makes it special.

My primary example is Beagle. I have seen some amazing things here at Novell and one of them is Beagle. I had used it before but the possibilities of what Beagle offers the desktop is just amazing. What Beagle needs is an interface that organizes the data. I don't think people realize that half the time they are one their computer they are merely looking at lists of things. Whether is it music, documents, pictures, spreadsheets, emails, etc., it is all just lists of things. We can sort and in some cases search but the problem is the aggregation is weak. Beagle allows a fast way to search and organize that when coupled good decisions a regarding unexplored paradigms and models, offers a new experience for users that doesn't need flashy graphics or animations. If a user can learn new things from his or her data then that is exciting. If a user can conceptualize new ideas because the data makes it clear then we are on to something.

My main point here is lets leave the copying to the mundane. Lets offer the user innovation where they need it. The more people learn to use computers the more they produce. Whether it is simple documents or playlists to works art, the fact is they are still creating. The desktop of the future is not OpenGL or 3D graphics but a dewey decimal system for your life.