Fri, 29 Aug 2003
Finally Blogger applet has the much anticipated styled text support. While I've only currently done bold and italic, the individual code for each is two lines. Adding more attributes that follow this basic pattern (i.e. don't require any properties) such as title, and font sizes (small, medium, large) should be extremely easy. Other things (links and images) will be harder, but still should share most of the infrastructure.
Also added a preferences page, so you can finally change username and stuff w/o gconf-editor. After a few kinks are worked out of styled text support, I think this will be ready for more general use. Which brings me to my next point...
Testers Wanted! Applet should work with any bloggerAPI compatible blog including pybloxsom, movabletype, and blogger.com. If you want to try it email me [seth@gnome.org].
I love you all. Thank you and good night.
At 3am yesterday, in a fit of creativity after watching Queer eye for a straight guy (a show which far exceeded my admittedly low expectations) decided to drive to Stanford to walk, think, and play around in my design log (sketch, doodle, write, diagram, reason, colour outside the lines). I can't quite explain why the show made me want to do this, but I'm sure the two are not unrelated.
Anyway, after the 45 minute drive spent only an hour being creative and fell asleep in the car. But.... spent today fufilling my creative destiny instead. Felt really good, and I even produced what I think will turn out to be a useful "philosophical" insight into the overall design of desktop software that will spawn a lot of fresh designs. My muse will receive a good report in this month's performance review.
Usually I give short shrift to this important design practice, alloting no time whatsoever. Typically there's something with tangible benifits to be doing, so I never get around to my poor neglected design log. Fortunately my mind has a mind of its own and I usually spend a half hour or more each night while trying to fall sleep extending and ruminating over the ideas of the day...
The stanford campus is an amazing place for this activity. I move every hour or so to a new stimulating/beautiful/comfortable enivornment. Helps keep me focused w/o forcing the thinking.
The other advantage is of course visiting friends...a worthwhile distraction. Having dinner w/ Jamie Fitz in 10 minutes... So better start walking down to the dining hall.
For kicks and giggles, have been playing with making a design for a homebrew app of jrb. He's making a database entry tool for cataloging his (pretty large!) book collection. Its really refreshing to work on a design with a clear target audience, no "noisy power users" complaining on mailing lists pushing the developer around (that should be my exclusive perogative of course), and a small problem domain. Handling the convincing and politics of a typical GNOME design swamps the actual design work; so its nice to be able to just knuckle down and do the thing you're nominally supposed to be doing anyway. I wonder if I should just make designs, throw them out there, and let people do what they want? It might be a lot less stressful for me. It'd certainely be more in line with what I want to do.
Brushed off my Italian book and dictionary. I figured if I don't start excercising my Italian soon I'm going to lose it for sure. I'm not very good at learning foreign languages so it'd be a real shame to lose what little Italian I've acquired in the past year of schooling. Anyway, Marco has obliged me in speaking Italian and I plan to start hanging out on Italian Linux mailing lists or IRC channels: offering support in exchange for having to deal w/ my attempts to speak :-) Anyone know of an Italian speaking GNOME-related IRC channel?
Had an interesting discussion today with campd, alex, and luis. Started off with talking with luis about programmers and how much they're giving up by letting somebody else do interface design. We started off talking about the Cooperesque dictatorial designer world: I think Cooper provides an interesting if extreme take on the importance of power structure in producing software.
Anyway, something I think Cooper misses addressing is that just because designers can be compared to architects doesn't mean programmers are construction workers. If that were true, as a programmer I would fight like hell to keep designers from "taking over". I feel like many programmers latently fear (well, at least their actions might be explained by this fear) that they will give up the fun, creative, intellectually stimulating parts of programming when they pass off responsibility for interaction design to somebody else... but in reality 90% of programming time (depends wholly on the person of course) is spent on other very interesting problems like architecture, backend implementation, getting the perfect algorithm for keeping the fidget in state Y whenever the foobar thread is terminating, etc.
I think at a conscious level most programmers would take offense at the idea that programming is just construction work + interaction design ;-) And rightfully so. Programming, at least today, is intellectually stimulating and difficult (at least the sort we do in GNOME). You have to be really good at thinking abstractly, but at the same time track hundreds of little details... you have to be some sort of super-human combination of both ends of the meyers-briggs N (intuitive) / S (sensory) axis ;-) So what am I saying? I wonder if many programmers are acting out of concern over an issue that they'd consciously (and correctly imo) dismiss.
I can imagine a Cooperesque world in which there are three classes of people "designers", "code architects" (smart programmers), and "construction workers" (dumb programmers), but currently programming takes waaaaay too much skill and smarts for that to really work out. And all the GNOME programmers I know would definitely fall into the "code architects" category.
Well... I'm back in the "real" world. (Actually, hard to tell which world is the real world, lets call them competing realities). Shaw was great, but I did miss having a real keyboard instead of the little thumb thingy, and hot running water is a luxury not quickly forgotten.
Did the first public release of Storage... mostly because it looks like I might be working with Marco and Curtis on making Sutra with it. This makes sense because Sutra requires this sort of capabilities and is a "kluge" around the evils of the filesystem. So Sutra is a milestone bridging between complete Storage use and the status quo. It'll also provide a great opportunity to work bugs and API needs out better. I'm really happy about this!
Promised jrb I'd work on HIG stuff for assistants this weekend, but didn't get back until past midnight last night... and played with getting the new blog stuff running most of today. Sorry jrb :-P Hopefully tomorrow... being unemployed means there's always tomorrow :-)
Left Shaw by the 11pm ferry last night. Boarding the ferry from shaw is clearly an activity designed for "those who already know how to do it". I was the only car boarding at shaw, so I had no example to follow... But when I drove onto the ferry I found myself facing a whole mess of cars pointing the other way. They apparently exit on the next stop, orcas is. and I had to figure out (actually eventually get yelled at) to back out and exit on orcas too. But I want to go to Anacortes not Orcas! So I had to get out and find help... Turns out I'm supposed to drive through the town quickly to the "now loading" line for getting right back on. Barely made it. Then headed south (it was midnight-thirty when I got off the ferry). Driving alone at night is lame unless you roll down the windows, open the sun roof, and sing at the top of your lungs ;-)
Slept in a rest area south of olympia... People kept letting their dogs get near my sleeping bag...and in the morning light I discovered I had slept over a blackberry (? Some thorny vine anyway) patch. Luckily I had not rolled off or something.
All this .... To visit w/ Kenny (dekar) and Greg Leblanc (greg) in Portland! Got into Portland and got to meet Kenny after chatting much w/ him for the past 4 years on IRC. The 3 of us had lunch and talked for a while, then headed to a huge bookstore. A bad man in the bookstore cafe rudely informed us that it was a "reading area" (BS, it sure wasn't marked as one) and to take our "blabbering to a restaurant or something". *sigh* Of course we left not wanting confrontation... But it cut the visit shorter because we dispersed soon after.
Now I'm in Corvallis, OR to visit my uncle and aunt. The rest of my immediate family should be arriving any hour now. I'm going to check if Duncan's in town, but he's probably already in the east.
More berry picking => more blackberry cobbler
Bought food at the little island store run by nuns. The nun at the register was old... Maybe in her 80s? Made me think about how young people retire.... I guess I could find a million things to fill my time with, but in some ways they seem less fufilling than being a part of something, even as a corporate whore :-) I guess I'm a pack animal at heart.
Speaking of pack animals... The dog howled today when left alone in the cabin. She also moves her legs when dreaming as if running, snores, and rolls in dirt after getting wet. Mad beast.
I've been wondering if the most effective way to be involved w/ gnome is to code or list jockey. I thought, about 8 mo ago, I didn't do enough "real work" and swore off lists. Well.... W/o the social glue I don't feel motivated to work on gnome and just watch tivo (infernal device). I need other people working on projects w/ me.... Excited people. Otherwise I'm not anchored and switch projects every 2 days when another idea comes along.
Anywho, back to mailing lists... I feel like the cost of communication in projects like gnome is terribly high. Ultra-formalization sucks, mailing lists get dragged into argumentative minutia.... There's just little room for brainstorming, watercoolering, togetherness stuff.
Did I mention (handpicked) blackberry pie cooked in an improvised "oven" made of a skillet and a sheet of metal held over a wood fire? No? Well it was fantastic.
Chapter 1, wherein our hero resettles a shower, takes a rowboat for a spin, jaunts around the woods and learns the true meaning of friendship.
Moved the shower curtain frame to a new location at the behest of my mother. Its basically a freestanding outside showering platform constructed by my grandparents. Anyway, mia madre had a good point... It was occupying a very nice spot and blocked the view of the ocean. The procedure was considerably more involved than planned, requiring new strips of tar paper, levelling, trench digging and a half dozen buckets of beach gravel. Hard to explain. Need photograph. But ima cheapskate so no camera "on board".
Rowboat was recomissioned and took it out for the better part of two hours. It doesn't seem as long as its sibling boats, is considerably lighter, lacks cleats (brace your feet against them while rowing) and the oarlocks jangle. So much for my plans to row across the san juan channel to friday harbour and back (about 6 mi?). The sisters to this boat (at least I assume they are all siblings... Lovely wooden row boats built by my uncle during his ship building "phase") are wonderful sleek machines with a lot of momenttum and good directional stability. This one turns quickly and is easy to get moving at "full speed" (light), but it also decelerates between strokes considerably, and I don't feel comfortable pulling my full wieght against the oars.... So it goes slower.
Water is very clear compared to the Sound around Bainbridge. Lots of starfish...mostly purple and orange. Also anenomes and large crabs. I want a wetsuit; water is C-O-L-D.
Woods are lovely... Followed dear little deer trails. The "woods" range from rocky cliffs covered in velvet golden-green moss to thick brown brush covered by a dark high canopy of trees. I looked like a caveman by the end becauseI have frizzy hair that combed the woods for every stray stick, spider and shrub. The dog barked at me. I'm wearing a ponytail through the rest of the week. Looks dumb with my shorter hair, but who's to see (and who'd care anyway? Not like I'm fighting off admirers as it is).
Please don't turn on me beloved reader, but that thing about the meaning of friendship was a ploy to draw you in.
Forgive my (charming?) abbrv. of grammar.
Here is a rocky point: Couched in a semi-circle of gurgling wavelets, beset by a forest of whispering evergreens, ensconsed in a patchwork canopy of stars.
Upon this craig he lies a boy, perhaps a man; gazing at the lights permanent, the lights passing, and those precious few lights ephemeral: bursting into sight and out of the world in the thin cold upper atmosphere... Each passing minute of darkness calls forth a thousand more lights in the precious slivers of an angle between the last moment's revelation until the sky is emblazoned with a tapestry both structured and delicate. And yet even in this prescence the sky retains a consuming dark, so deep it swallows the stars whole.
A truer silence cannot be found, an unimposing silence so perfect you cannot hear yourself think but that you draw your mind out onto a page. It is not such a hush as the systematic elimination of sound carelessly invented in recording studios erected by what are otherwise shreaking hairless apes. In these the noise of a thousand fears and and a dozen ideas splatter across his mind.... Even as his ears strain tangibly to detect even the blood rushing to warm a furious brain. This point, his rock, wafts in an easy quiet.
His self-indulgent reverie is shattered by an otter (pesky animals) who breaches the water (showing no consideration for personal space), hisses with the venom of a cat, and slides away. The possesion of the boy's point must be a matter of contention, at least the otter thinks so. The boy must too because after a few quick breaths he raises himself to his full height and scrambles in a half panic for his flashlight.
"Would the otter be so foolish as to force confrontation? Surely it would not venture to attack an opponent showing a one metre size advantage? But what if it does? What if its babies lie on this rock? What if it bites me? Maybe if I can shine the flashlight at it she will go away."
But by the time our cowardly ape has fumbled up his light the otter has slipped into the waves. But the damage is done. He is struck blind by his own electric fire, deaf by his pounding heart, and is forced to speak to calm the hubub inside....so he reconciles himself to his loss, draws his cellphone from his pocket and begins to transcribe into its goulish glow.
Well.... The verdict soon will be in: will I be connected to the world for the next week or will I be forced to focus my attentions on the world outdoors.
A ferry apparently had trouble and required a diver's services to mend. The loss of such a mammoth has not had a positive effect on traffic, travel and the line to get on ferries. Consequently I am sitting in an A&W awaiting the next ferry in 2 hrs. The rootbeer is fairly warm and the charmingly throwback environment harkens back to a time w/o air conditioning. Ugh.
Computer sound effects (windows sound schemes and the like) are at best annoying. They provide minimal feedback, seem to have little relation to the event that triggered them... And worst of all imo they demand your attention. Now the scuffling of gravel beneath my shoes or the click of a door when the latch closes.... These are subtle sounds. Ambient. I can derive information or ignore them as I see fit. Better yet, I can do both. They are proportional to action, positioned, and varying. how would more ambient computer sound work out? Would it still be annoying?
In an act of great responsibility I have embarked on a week-long trip to the lovely secluded san juan islands w/ my family. My grandparents of a maternal disposition have a fairly generous plot of land on shaw island upon which they constructed a number of cabins. No electricity (except what you generate w/ your car or drag along as batteries), no running water (except what you hand pump)....."t-mobile service?" you inquire... "I do not know," says I. But there be ocean and trees, stars (visible stars!) and crashing waves aplenty.
Now why, you wonder, should I *not* be heading up to the great white north? To answer, I must call you back to friday aug 15, 2003... To an age seething with hunger, war and malcontent and even.... Yes even *unemployment*... To a time when even the aspiring Stanford CS graduate might find it a trifle tricky to take a job. And where was I on this breezy summer afternoon? Interviewing at Google (after a grueling 2 prior phone interviews, a few essay questions, and a portfolio). And since they move slow as molasses I chose to return the favour and disappear for a week.
Perhaps they will want another interview... Perhaps they will offer me a programming job. Perhaps they will offer me a design job. And... Yes.... Perhaps they shall turn their faces from the plight of yours truly and require not my services. :-P
But back to that bleak friday. Well, primarily I feel I was tested prodded poked and baited as a programmer. One interview went really well and helped me understand both how google works and what I want out of a job (as well as making what I think was a good impression...). One interview was.... Sort of argumentative. If I was an interviewer and had such a interview I'm not sure what I would think of the candidate. Unfortunately in this case I fear I would think they were full of shit and not nearly as competent as their resume might suggest....
I ended up discussung parts of gnome and linux I'm not especially familiar w/, and didn't really talk about things I'm really comfortable with. In short: it could have really sucked. I hope the interviewer was looking for my speculative reasoning skillz ;-) (I am an expert bullshitter, I do have a college degree after all! Not that I was bs'ing, but it was definitely on the fringe of what I know)
Anyway, the other 3 interviews went w/o much to report.
So now I await the verdict.
My palms are sweaty.
