Install Gnome Global Menu on Karmic

Mac-style menubar for Ubuntu

November 30, 2009 | 4 Comments

The Gnome Global Menu is an applet for the Gnome panel that func­tions like the menu bar on Mac: it removes the menu from GTK win­dows and dis­plays it in panel. I love the global menu for a cou­ple rea­sons, and had a hard time fig­ur­ing out how to get it on Karmic.

Why Use the Global Menu

I’m no Mac fan boy, but the global menu is clearly a supe­rior way of deal­ing with menus. Rather than each win­dow hav­ing its own menu, one spot is reserved for the active win­dow and dynam­i­cally changes its con­tents based on what­ever win­dow is active.

This makes sense for sev­eral reasons:

  1. It saves screen space. Rather than a lot of wasted space in the panel and a lot of wasted space at the top of each win­dow, you put all that infor­ma­tion in one place.
  2. Because you can only access the menu on one win­dow (namely the active one) at a time, it makes rea­son­able sense to only show one menu at a time
  3. Fitts law, mouse usabil­ity and what­not (most of which I don’t pre­tend to really under­stand) says you get a big­ger, eas­ier to hit, tar­get for mouse clicks if you put stuff on the screen edge. More­over, you always know where your menu is, mak­ing every­thing cleaner and sim­pli­fy­ing where to look.

While I almost always use the key­board to access menus, I find the screen space gains together with the sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of a global menu makes a lot of sense to me.

How to Get The Global Menu in Karmic

In past Ubuntu releases, installing the global menu was as sim­ple as adding the global menu team ppa, installing gnome-global-menu and adding the applet to your panel.

Unfor­tu­nately, for rea­sons I don’t quite under­stand, builds for Karmic have not been released on the nor­mal ppa. Accord­ing to the project web­site, they’re look­ing for some­one who can head up pack­ag­ing for Karmic (I tried build­ing it from source last night and ended up with some mys­te­ri­ous error, mak­ing me rather unqualified).

For­tu­natley, Abhishek Das­gupta has a gnome global menu ppa for Karmic. The ppa info is: ppa:abhidg/ppa.

Add that ppa to your sources, update your pack­ages and install gnome-globalmenu. Add the applet to your panel, and you should be golden.

Posted in linux | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Review of New Distros

Karmic, Mandriva 2010, Fedora 12, OpenSUSE 11.2

November 27, 2009 | 6 Comments

When the new ver­sion of Ubuntu comes out, I tend to install it right away, but always seper­ate, never over the old install (I’ve been burned too many times by try­ing to upgrade in place). But when Karmic came out, I found it seri­ously wanting.

So I decided to go dis­tro hop­ping to see what else I could find. Three other major dis­tros released new verisons recently, so I thought I’d give them a go. I tried out:

After spend­ing a week or so hop­ping between the three, I decided Ubuntu’s set the bar so high for Linux desk­top dis­tros that I might not have a choice but go back to the Krappy Koala–even with its bugs, Ubuntu is the best desk­top dis­tro out there.

Man­driva 2010

I enjoyed my time in Man­driva. I rememe­ber when I first got into Linux, Man­driva was one of the few dis­tros I had heard about, or rather, its for­mer incar­na­tion, Man­drake. With a new ver­sion just released, I thought it was worth a go. Over­all, it seemed like a nice, well-put together dis­tro with the best hard­ware sup­port of any­thing I tried. But being RPM-based, the pack­age man­age­ment tools just didn’t feel right to me.

Good

Per­for­mance on Man­driva was very snappy. The default art­work was very nice, and the installer han­dled my nVidia card very well: as I booted, it threw up the nVidia splash to let me know the card was loaded (which it did w/o me hav­ing to fight to get it to work)

Bad

Text ren­der­ing sucked, par­tic­u­larly in Fire­fox. This seemed to be a com­mon thread among all the distros–fonts in Fire­fox look like crap and mak­ing changes in the Gnome appear­ance dia­log to sub­hint­ing, etc, seemed to have no affect what­so­ever on any­thing dis­played in Firefox.

Pack­age man­age­ment was mysterious–the GUI installer searched poorly and didn’t seem to be able to show me what repos I had installed. Installing codecs, etc, was opaque–I don’t know if I ever installed xvid prop­erly. Too, the com­mu­nity and doc­u­men­ta­tion was small and not par­tic­u­larly up to date. I could find infor­ma­tion about old ver­sions of Man­driva, but now new.

Open­SUSE

I spent a lot of time in Open­SUSE as well. I was look­ing for­ward to try­ing it–I had heard their imple­men­ta­tion of KDE4 was the best. The first time I tried it, I only installed KDE4 and ended up hav­ing some strange prob­lems with my wire­less. I could con­nect to the AP and ping my LAN, but I couldn’t hit the internet.

Later I installed Gnome and added KDE4 later–networking seemed to work fine.

Open­SUSE seems like a good dis­tro, but as one of the biggest dis­tros, it has to stack up to Ubuntu, and while there’s clearly some thought put towards design in Open­SUSE, the tools aren’t pol­ished enough from a user perspective.

Good

The over­all theme for Open­SUSE 11.2’s brand­ing looks cool. The ten­drils might be a lit­tle 2007, but in their defense, they’re try­ing some­thing new and cool, and they get kudos for tak­ing the risk. Also, the included sounds are very ele­gant. Most supris­ing to me is that press­ing the win­dows key actu­ally brings up the menu (tell me again why I can’t do this in Ubuntu?)

Bad

Like in Man­driva, text ren­der­ing sucked–antialiasing just looked weird and didn’t seem to have any affect on text fire­fox, which is a jag­gie night­maer. Pack­age man­age­ment is also a bit weird. The one-click-to-install-from-web thing is cool, but I like the idea of adding a repos­i­tory so much.

Their imple­men­ta­tion of KDE4 is cool-it looks great and runs snap­pily. But while the KDE4 devs might have a really inter­est­ing new metaphor to replace the desk­top metaphor we’ve been stuck with for the last 20 years, it’s really hard to tell because KDE4 is still bro­ken in lots of lit­tle ways (two exam­ples: the twit­ter wid­get never showed any tweets and Fire­fox wouldn’t load gmail or twit­ter in KDE (worked fine in Gnome)). I’m just not going to stick around to try to fig­ure out the metaphor when my browser won’t load my email.

The main menu thing in Gnome is just as bad–it seems to offer to search for you, but launch­ing appli­ca­tions via it is vir­tu­ally impossible–instead of launch­ing an ap, it brings up a search of lots of eso­teric con­fig files. The installer wasn’t bad, but the par­ti­tioner could only be described as cryp­tic. Also, set­ting the root pass­word in the installer was weird–I some­how set my user and root pass­words to the same thing.

Fedora 12

I down­loaded Fedora 12 before I knew it was out. To be hon­est, I mis­read the release date some­where, assumed it was already out and down­loaded it the day it released.

Fedora was the clean­est, most pro­fes­sional of all the dis­tos I tried. Whereas Man­driva feels very slick and friendly the same way KDE 3.5 used to, and Open­SUSE feels quirky, classy yet unpol­ished, Fedora feels very lean and Gnome-esque. That lean Gnome phi­los­o­phy isn’t quite my style, but I can appre­ci­ate the idea and Fedora pulls it off well.

Unfor­tu­natley, my expe­ri­ence with Fedora ended in dis­as­ter rather quickly. Unlike the other dis­tros, Fedora didn’t seem to have any good way to install my nVidia card. I fol­lowed some instruc­tions I found on a forum. Upon reboot, X wouldn’t start. Next dis­tro please.

Good

The installer was nice, as was the out of the box expe­ri­ence. Very clean/lean system.

Bad

Fedora’s installer found/installed Win­dows 7 in grub, but not Jaunty? Explain to me again why a one Linux sys­tem can’t see another? This kind of stuff has been work­ing great in Ubuntu for at least a year now, prob­a­bly longer, and Fedora can’t inte­grate some­thing sim­liar and a bit for stable/solid? Of course, not too long later, cryp­tic online instruci­tons about installing the nVidia dri­vers borked my bango, so I called it quits.

Karmic Koala

All this dis­tro hop­ping was kicked off by the bad taste Karmic left in my mouth. I’ll say this, after this expe­ri­ence, I’ve found I’m an Ubuntu fan boy. Karmic was (is?) a buggy pile of crap. But the tools Ubuntu has put together for desk­top man­age­ment put every­body else to shame. The jockey-gtk tool, ie. Restricted Dri­ver Man­ager, alone makes most other dis­tros look bad.

On top of that, the com­mu­nity, doc­u­men­ta­tion and sup­port behind Ubuntu is so much stronger than any of the other dis­tros. When you google for help on Linux, most often, you find infor­ma­tion about solv­ing the prob­lem on Ubuntu. You don’t find that for the other distros–nobody offers solu­tions that say “su -” and “urpmi install conky”.

The depth of the Ubuntu repos­i­to­ries kicks the other dis­tros in the can, and what’s not in the repos­i­to­ries, or what isn’t up to date, prob­a­bly has a PPA, where you can always get the most up to date ver­sion of a package.

Good

The new PPA sup­port is genius. The doc­u­men­ta­tion and devel­op­ment behind Ubuntu is also great. Text looks good and things are inte­grated well.

Bad

Gwib­ber was bro­ken. Flash was bro­ken. OSD-notify was bro­ken. That’s a good chunk of every­thing I use on a daily basis. That was enough to kick me on this big adven­ture in the first place.

Final Sum­mary

After a week or two on other dis­tros, I’m just about ready to give Karmic another try. Maybe by now, they’ve ironed some of the bugs out. Even if they haven’t, it just might be worth it.

Clearly, this isn’t a fair review–I began biased toward Ubuntu (although hat­ing Karmic) and my frus­tra­tion with other dis­tros might have some­thing to do with their refusal to act exactly the way I expected them to (ie. the Ubuntu way).

Still, while Ubuntu has a long way to go to catch up with Mac’s pol­ish and inte­gra­tion and Win­dows’ ubiq­uity and breadth of soft­ware, they’ve taken Linux a long way and set the bar pretty dang high for the other dis­tros. Fedora, Nov­ell and every­one else have a lot to live up to.

Posted in linux | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

10 Free Christmas Albums

for your holiday pleasure

November 24, 2009 | 2 Comments

To kick off the hol­i­days, I’m post­ing a list of free Christ­mas albums, all of which are free or ‘pay what you want’. Most of these are cour­tesy of Noise­trade, which offers you the option of telling 5 friends or pay­ing what you want for an album.

With my apolo­gies to your 5 friends you’ll be spam­ming to get much of this music, here’s the list:

  1. Marry Ellen Kirk’s Do You Hear What I Hear
  2. Justin McRobert’s Christ­mas Songs
  3. So Elated’s The Bewil­der­ing Light
  4. Sojourn’s Advent Songs
  5. This Side of Eve’s Emmanuel, God with Us
  6. David Story’s Christ­mas Card vol 2
  7. JJ Heller’s Wake Up the World EP
  8. Matt Litzinger’s Christ­mas EP
  9. my friend T-rev’s The Bells
  10. My album of acoustic car­ols (licensed under CC-BY-SA and with indi­vid­ual tracks avail­able)
Posted in links, music, web | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

What Makes Stereotype Offensive?

and why do we people take offense?

November 24, 2009 | Leave a comment

A few days ago, Ben­son Hines posted about some hubaloo about a book (Deadly Vipers) being mar­keted with offen­sive Asian stereo­types, nin­jas, Japan­ese gar­dens, etc.

I’ll be the first to say that I’m a white male and that as such, it’s awful hard to make me feel like a minor­ity. So please under­stand I mean this is in the most hon­est of ways:

What makes the mar­ket­ing for Deadly Vipers offen­sive to Asians but the ad below not offen­sive to Rus­sians (or is it offensive)?

stoli-russion

Or for that mat­ter, what makes Deadly vipers offen­sive, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles not offensive?

I know this can eas­ily come out dis­mis­sive, like I’m mak­ing fun of the peo­ple who are tak­ing offense.

I’m not. I’m on the out­side look­ing in on this on and am try­ing to under­stand it. Where’s the line between using offen­sive stereo­types and appro­pri­at­ing a style? What’s at the root of the offense, ie. what makes Deadly Vipers (or any other sim­i­lar use of a racial stereo­type, Chief Illini­wek, for exam­ple) offensive?

Ask­ing this ques­tion on my blog prob­a­bly isn’t the most effec­tive forum for this question–I’d be will­ing to wager that my reg­u­lar read­ers are pre­dom­i­nately white and male, the his­tor­i­cal major­ity, and I’m mostly inter­ested in the opin­ions, or more accu­rately, the feel­ings, of peo­ple who aren’t in that minor­ity, the peo­ple who feel mar­gin­al­ized, and who find these things offensive.

What makes them offen­sive? And what’s the dif­fer­ence between some­one using an offen­sive stereo­type and some of those influ­ences per­me­at­ing and becom­ing influ­en­tial parts of the larger cul­ture? Or is the lat­ter offen­sive some­how as well?

This is a pretty com­plex issue–I’m not nec­es­sar­ily inter­ested in fig­ur­ing out the ‘solu­tion’ per se, as much as I am inter­ested in what it is that makes peo­ple feel offended and why.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Thinking About Simplicity

November 23, 2009 | 5 Comments

Wick has been blog­ging about Into the Silence, a movie about life in a silent monastery. At the same time, after a rec­om­men­da­tion by Jonathan, I’ve started read­ing Eric Brende’s Bet­ter Off: Flip­ping the Switch on Tech­nol­ogy, about liv­ing for a year in an Amish community.

This life of sim­plic­ity is pretty dang appeal­ing, honestly–I’ve felt over­crowded for years now, first by all my reli­gious com­mit­ments (which were, at the time, inseper­a­ble from work com­mit­ments), and now from the tech­no­log­i­cal com­mit­ments, blog­ging, learn­ing web design, all the other projects I want to do, never mind the crazi­ness of ordi­nary life, fam­ily, etc, plus the bur­den of all the stuff I own or want to own.

In the last cou­ple years, I’ve made a seri­ous effort to pare those com­mit­ments back, to refuse to be con­trolled by them, and to enjoy life more sim­ply, but I tend to find that I fill up the space I make, both in my time and with regard to phys­i­cal pos­ses­sions, as fast as I empty it.

That dilemma makes me want to dump it all, to pull a stunt like Brende’s year with the Amish or some­thing else equally drastic.

And maybe it’s not a bad idea–what’s hold­ing me back from mak­ing that kind of dras­tic change besides a bit of fear and the imag­i­na­tion to make it hap­pen? Why shouldn’t I try some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent in the name of strip­ping the unnec­es­sary stuff out of my life?

But today Wick writes this:

But we…we are not called to by monks. We are not called to sit and stare at video of a sim­pler life and drool over such freedom.

I agree. Star­ing at a video and drool­ing over it isn’t our call. And cer­tainly, we’re not called to sequester our­selves in the name of simplicity.

But I’m not sure that we can give up imag­in­ing a new, sim­ple way of life in the name of not seques­ter­ing our­selves. I want to imag­ine some­thing dif­fer­ent, I want to DO some­thing different.

I want to find a new bal­ance between sim­plic­ity and life in the world.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Owning Digital Media

or Hoarding the Bits

November 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

Today, I was read­ing an explo­ration of solu­tions to the prob­lem of infinetly repro­ducible con­tent, and hap­pened onto an inter­est­ing paragraph.

Tycho, the author writes:

I said, a few weeks ago of the whole DRM issue, that I thought “we needed to get away from the whole ‘own­ing bits’ metaphor for con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion.” The whole DRM thing that so many of us find so oner­ous would be mostly become a non issue if we dropped the pre­tense that when you down­load a song or a book or a movie that you’re “buy­ing them.” If you’re just watch­ing the bits for a while, who cares what the dig­i­tal restric­tions are? If prices are rea­son­able for con­tent, who cares if you can only “have” a half dozen books at once? I think it would all work out. But maybe that’s just me.

This really an inter­est­ing idea, mostly because I don’t think it sup­ports his point as well has he would like.

To illus­trate, let me point out that I always have been a fan of the library sys­tem. With a library card, I have in both essence and lit­er­ally, an entire library at my disposal.

This is why I’m not crazy for own­ing books. Who cares about own­ing books and spend­ing money (that I could be spend­ing on some­thing else) on them, when I can get almost any book I want within 2 or 3 days?

How­ever, I have friends who think this is insane (sev­eral friends, actu­ally). They like own­ing books, even though they have library cards, too. This is a phe­nom­e­non I don’t under­stand and have given up try­ing to get my mind around.

The truth is, there are peo­ple who feel the same way about dig­i­tal media, about the music they down­load and (I’ve seen this lat­ter one a lot in recent years) the movies they down­load. They enjoy acquir­ing a giant (ter­abytes!) col­lec­tion of dig­i­tal movies.

Again, this seems insane to me. Not only do you not get the enjoy­ment of the phys­i­cal media, but you have to spend money on giant hard dri­ves (Moore’s law not with­stand­ing) to store infor­ma­tion that you have almost unlim­ited access to any way. I can under­stand col­lect­ing rare and obscure movies/music/etc in this way; but the major­ity of the peo­ple I know who col­lect media like this aren’t afi­ciona­dos inter­ested in rar­ity or quality–they’re hoard­ers inter­ested in quan­tity and take some sort enjoy­ment in being able to brag about their 2TB movie drive.

These peo­ple very good at downloading–they have more access to more dig­i­tal media than most peo­ple (legal or not), mean­ing they don’t have any need to hoard this media. They could very eas­ily just down­load movies on demand, just down­load the bits they want to watch and delete the local copy after they’re fin­ished watching.

But they’re not inter­ested in watch­ing bits for a lit­tle while, they’re inter­ested in stor­ing as many of those bits on their com­puter as possible.

Like book own­ers, I find these peo­ple incom­pre­hen­si­ble. This is why I don’t mind hulu–I’m happy to watch a few com­meri­cials in exchange for them stor­ing dig­i­tal media and giv­ing me easy access to it. That’s a fair trade-off.

But the truth is, these hoard­ers exist, deter­mined to make the most out of their almost infi­nite access to “the bits,” to “own” as much of it as pos­si­ble (to make this atti­tude more mind-boggling, these peo­ple are often shar­ing this media more than most, “own­ing” the data while giv­ing away as many copies as possible).

All this means that despite how appeal­ing Tycho’s argu­ment is to ME, for what are appar­ently incom­pre­hen­si­ble rea­sons, some peo­ple will always want to “own” bits regard­less of infi­nite access.

Which seems like a shame to me, because it ratch­ets up the com­plex­ity of the prob­lem he’s explor­ing solu­tions to, namely:

Cre­ators of con­tent (music, lit­er­a­ture, soft­ware) should be reim­bursed for their work, and there should be busi­ness mod­els that sup­port these kinds of pur­suits. In other words peo­ple should be com­pen­sated for the cre­ation of con­tent in a viable and sus­tain­able manner.

Find­ing the solu­tion to that prob­lem is no small thing.

Posted in art, web | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Drama Around the GPL

in the Wordpress Community

November 17, 2009 | 2 Comments

There’s a bunch of drama going on in the Word­press com­mu­nity right now over the GPL.

I’ll be hon­est, I don’t under­stand the whole story–I only live at the fringe of the Word­press world. But I fol­low a cou­ple Word­press rock­stars on Twit­ter: GPL advo­cate Ian Stew­art and GPL opposer Nathan Rice (hon­estly, Nathan’s posi­tion is sub­stan­tially more com­plex than that–I’m sim­pli­fy­ing for the sake of argument).

A few days ago, they had a bat­tle royale on Twit­ter over the GPL, and later some brief dis­cus­sion over this article’s claim that the GPL is bad for Wordpress.

Two inter­est­ing things strike me here:

  1. This whole debate hasn’t been picked up by Slash­dot and the peo­ple oppos­ing the GPL (because peo­ple could take their pre­mium, pay-to-play, themes and redis­trib­ute them for free) mocked for not under­stand­ing the GPL in the first place.I’m not argu­ing that they should be mocked, just that’s its supris­ing it hasn’t happened.I will say, though, that I don’t under­stand what theme cre­ators and sell­ers expected to hap­pen as they move towards the GPL–the GPL has always been about giv­ing the peo­ple with your code the free­dom to do what they want with it (as long as they don’t lock it up).
  2. I’m suprised at how valu­able the com­mu­nity is to these peo­ple. In fact, I can’t help but won­der if it’s not more impor­tant than the code itself.When I read the arti­cle I linked to above, my first gut response was “If you don’t like the way things are, just fork it–it’s GPL’ed!“But the more I thought about it, the more I real­ized that fork­ing isn’t nec­es­sar­ily an option–the issue isn’t a dis­sat­i­fac­tion with the code; it’s a dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the com­mu­nity around the code, and the way that com­mu­nity is being forced to use the GPL for everything.This slides pretty quickly into the clas­sic BSD vs. GPL argu­ment, ie. which is more free, a licesnse that pre­serves free­dom indef­i­nitely or a license that gives indef­i­nite free­dom (includ­ing the free­dom to end freedom).

    I have no desire to weigh in on that debate, nor do I think I have any author­ity to sug­gest which is more appro­pri­ate for Word­press (I tend to think that a BSD-style would be bet­ter, but things get murky really fast when you’re talk­ing about web appli­ca­tions, so I don’t really know).

In any case, I’ll give kudos to Ian Stew­art and his The­matic project, which posi­tions itself pretty clearly as theme built on the ideas behind the GPL. The­matic is a theme designed to built upon, as a sort of library that new themes can link in, some­thing that will do a lot of the heavy (and bor­ing) lift­ing free­ing up the author of the new theme to work on the fun stuff.

In so doing, Ian has cre­ated not a new theme, but a new mar­ket with him­self as the market-share holder: the cus­tom The­matic theme cre­ation and sup­port mar­ket. It might not (yet) be as lucra­tive as sim­ply sell­ing themes for $50/pop, but he’s cer­tainly the per­son I’d try to hire if I had the bud­get to build an impor­tant blog on Wordpress.

A few days ago, I read this blog entry by a soft­ware devel­oper. He writes:

To be totally hon­est I don’t have a lot of sym­pa­thy for cap­i­tal­ists who say “you’re doing some­thing that makes it hard for me to make money in the way that I’ve grown used to mak­ing money.” Cap­i­tal­ist’ lack of cre­ativ­ity is not a flaw in the Free Soft­ware movement.

This is the prob­lem with using the GPL for Wordpress–it puts a big dent in a busi­ness model built around the project in the name of pre­serv­ing inno­va­tion.

Ian under­stands this and is build­ing his lively hood and rep­u­ta­tion online around this idea–he’s mak­ing money in a new way, pre­serv­ing his live­ly­hood and the cul­ture of free­dom and inno­va­tion that the GPL demands. That’s the kind of new busi­ness mod­els we need.

Posted in web | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Doing Design in Open Source

November 11, 2009 | 3 Comments

Mark Boul­ton did the redesign of Drupal’s web­site and posted recently on the rela­tion­ship between design (both aethes­tic and UX) and devel­op­ment (pure coding).

I’m going to bypass his main point (I’m not sure I under­stood it) and focus on my dis­ap­point­ment with one of his points, namely that “Great design requires a sin­gu­lar vision.”

One of his com­menters sums up my dis­ap­point­ment nicely:

You say design needs a uni­fied vis­ion and can­not use the same com­munity approach that soft­ware devel­op­ment does. And you may be right. But I don’t think you can say that with cer­tainty, yet. Some peo­ple used and still do say the same thing about code. And they’re obvi­ously wrong. Community-​​based Open Source code devel­op­ment has been done for about 15–20 years now. Design has come into this arena only rel­at­ively recently (say 5 years) and in my view hasn’t tried hard enough to find the right meta­phor for itself to fit with the com­munity model…

Note this: open source is just now at the point where it’s really begin­ning to attract design­ers, where design­ers (who aren’t really devel­op­ers with a strong aes­thetic sense, but are peo­ple who are pas­sion­ate about design REGARDLESS of much or lit­tle they can code) are WANTING and feel able to contribute.

This goes back to the argu­ment I made a while ago about how the entry to the bazaar has to be low­ered to non-​​developers for open source to take the next big step (namely, pol­ish). That bar is cer­tainly lowering–the ques­tion is whether or not it’s low enough yet.

Peo­ple say that good design can’t come from an open source model. I’ll agree only that good great design hasn’t YET come from an open source model. But that’s because we haven’t seen the kind of per­fect storm that gave us the Linux kernel.

The com­menter goes on to write:

[Y]ou can only [become a mean­ing­ful part of the community]if you stay with the com­munity long enough (not for­ever, but longer than 2 years). And being a mem­ber of a com­munity (just like with fam­il­ies) is 2 parts frus­tra­tion and 1 part sat­is­fac­tion. Can you stay through peri­ods when your design vis­ion is being man­gled to try another day? Can you find a way of mod­u­lar­iz­ing your design so that enough can be pre­served, even if not of all of it is? Can you fig­ure out a way (a meta­phor really) of hav­ing a design API so that even new peo­ple can con­trib­ute to it (the sort of thing that hap­pens auto­mat­ic­ally in the small pro­ject teams you mention).

Design­ers com­plain that their ideas aren’t lis­tened to. But I don’t know that it’s true. They’re just not lis­tened to always or not accep­ted in full. Exactly the same thing hap­pens to developers.

In my hum­ble opin­ion, THIS is the real issue. Design­ers (like devel­op­ers) love their work. But open source demands com­pro­mise, or at least inte­gra­tion. And design­ers and artists’ work is tied too tightly to their egos–they’re not used to hav­ing their work man­gled by integration.

There’s a few say­ings I use as a poet to remind me how to be a write well:

* Can you pour gravy on it? (ie. is it con­crete?)
* Is it too showy? (or more often “show, don’t tell”)
* Why’d you use that? (ie. every­thing in a poem means some­thing)
* Some­times you gotta kill your babies (ie. some­times to get the poem right, you’ve got to edit out your favorite lines)

A good great poet knows how to sep­a­rate the work that’s being cre­ated from the work that your most proud of, from the work your ego’s tied to because the work your ego loves may or may not be the poem you’re try­ing to write. Some­times, you’ve got to kill your babies.

(Although, to be more hon­est, if you’re doing it right, you’re not killing those lines–you just slip them in a folder of ideas you’re sure are bril­liant that you’ll return to and mine later.)

In any case, the point here is that the cre­ation of great design, like great poetry, shouldn’t be tied to the design­ers ego.

The ques­tion the com­menter pro­poses is how can design­ers learn a new model for design, an open model, in which the work is per­ma­nently decou­pled from the con­tribut­ing design­ers’ (plural!) indi­vid­ual egos? It’s not impossible–it just hasn’t been done yet.

Posted in art | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Blog Fixed

for the most part

November 11, 2009 | 1 Comment

Well, I’ve got my blog back up and run­ning. There’s still a few minor prob­lems, not the least of which is that a whole crapload of my con­tent is gone and that my posts, which were metic­u­lously cat­e­go­rized are once again a wreck.

Still, at least it’s run­ning. I think I’m still hav­ing RSS prob­lems, but I’m hop­ing to sort those out over the next cou­ple days. Hope­fully, if you’re a sub­scriber, you’ll hit the site soon out of curios­ity and grab the new RSS link. Until then, I’ve got some work to do.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Reconstructing the Blog

November 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

I’ve been in the process, over the last cou­ple nights, of recon­struct­ing what I can of my blog, mostly by sav­ing pages from Google’s cached files.

This has involved writ­ing a lot of sed-based bash scripts, some­thing I’m not really any good at.

That said, it’s defi­nately been a learn­ing process, which is, I sup­pose, the best I can hope for.

Hope­fully, over the next cou­ple days, I’ll be able to get at least the most pop­u­lar con­tent back up on the site. Until then, please bear with me.

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