Sorry to say this, but i think the GNOME Shell (short: GS) looks totally senseless to me. There is not much you can do with it, it reminds me a bit on a mix of the Windows Start button and the Exposé from Macos X. Or add Novells “great” idea of a new Windows XP like menu.

It make me a bit angry to see intelligent people put together so much crap – overloaded menus, lists of applications or lists of recent documents. And then add to all this some animated smooth switching, which eats up some working time.

I am not at all impressed of GS. The opposit. i dnt get the point where it helps me. Similar thought as with GNOME DO. I always used Alt+F2 if I wanted to quick start an application without the terminal. I am not against making that kond of starter better – or if you add that somehow also in the panel. But the gnome shell adds a lot of things to the screen which I never used.

Has starting an application ever been a problem to one of you? Or opening a file? Or moving windows between workspaces?

Maybe I am noit the typical user, but when it comes to what I do often I could not comprehend this to one document or one application. I will try to compile what is important from my viewpoint:

1. Integration of applications. So like lets assume GNOME is a desktop – I dont want to waste my time knowing about applications. I expect the desktop to know which applications to know for what I plan to do. This is also true for actions like attaching files to mails or saving attachments  (which is a real pain)
2. I do get messages. And I like the desktop to save and sort them from me and allow me to manage them, copy them, add notes to them, move them from one application to the other (add a link from jabber to my bookmarks or to a mail) Messages for me are
   • Emails, Jabber-Messages, forum posts, RSS Feeds
   • System Messages, Application Messages
   • System protocols,…
3. What is a task? This is like visitting a website or checking my mail, or sending a mail – or working on some documents. There are documents that I do read often and some I only write once – and others I need ot send often. There is no such thing as “Recent Documentes”. What is this? Recently read, recently written or recently sent? Like you have a protocol that you want to send to a bunch of people.
4. Another problem is finding documents. This is a problem of the place or also the keyword. It would be necessary to be able to tag documents or even categorize them -  making the location secondary. Do I need to know where a document is saved? No – I can leave it to the system where a document resided. What I need is to find it, when I need it. Beagle a s a desktop search also needs some functionality – but sure its as well important to find bookmarks and contents of web pages. Sometimes I need to find a web page where I have read some stuff. Integrating a web based search might help – but my desktop needs to save some search results as I dont want to use Google or Yahoo more than needed.
5. Essentially there is Reading, Writing/Editing , Receiving, Sending of documents and messages. My take on this is, that with the classical object oriented model put into place into a desktop this would be a great thing. If you ask me why I would not have that much of an idea – I really think we do not start with a new GUI. What we would want is a combined effort to redefine the underlying structure and to work out new models of interaction between applications. And we would also need some serious applications which allow navigation into their functions from outside. I mean it must be possible to start an office application with the exact task that I am planing to do. It cant be the way that you start an appication and then need to find out yourself. The desktop should provide an interface to do what you want – and the applications should be the working horses. Right now applications like Firefox or OpenOffice.org are dominating everything and you need to do everything inside of them.

I dont think we will see such things from classical desktops. The GNOME shell is nothing new – its because people still think in the same categories. If GS is what GNOME 3.0 (Topaz) will be I sure will leave GNOME behind.

I have see that Windows XP now sells a tabbed interface as their own invention. Bravo GNOME – leave it to Microsoft to integrate that. I am sure now GNOME will try to copy – because before nobody at GNOME really cared to make applications ready for tabbed interfaces. I have used some tabbed window managers in the past and found the whole idea great – just that I dod not want to switch to tabbed only – and did not want to configure those managers by hand. Regards to Microsoft who just did, what GNOME thought was too innovative for their users. When MS does it, or Apple GNOME follows, but never leads the way. Just my impression. I still love my current interface because it remindes me still (but less and less) of my old Mac OS 7.x interface. I hat that they removed the application switcher applet at the default place on the right side of the panel (just where it was in the Mac Finder). Now what is dominant is that I need to shut down the computer, switch users or change my status. I really do all those things not more than 1-2 times a day – so I have removed Ubuntus “great” FUSA (fast user switch applet). And I constantly ask myself why all the things I need are removed while at the same time more and ore crap is added.

Sorry for not sounding nice. You see I have not written a lot of stuff in this blog for a while. I have watched things develop and have written more  in german in other blogs about other stuff.

I am in the mood to switch to a distribution with  a clean layout – that does not do experiments (hey, where did they dump the whole default desktop search thing?) other than Ubuntu. I need a work environment right now. Fedora is trying to be innovative too – there is currently no distributions which tries to bring you the best of open source on a stable basis. Maybe there is some Ubuntu clone I havent tried yet? I am ok if a distribution adds some innovative new desktop as an option and allows me to test it. But what I hate is when GNOME and Ubuntu make experiments and use us users as a testbed.

And I would love to have a defauilt mail program based on GNOME which does not such. Currently Evolutions sucks big time. Its absolutely unusable – I am currently using Thunderbird 3 beta4 and its really, really nice. Why does Ubuntu continue to suggest Evolution as the default option? At the same time I currently do not use Epiphany instead of Firefox because I always had some stability issues in the Ubuntu packages – and I was waiting for Epiphany-Webkit becoming ready. Currently that did not work out for me and I also found out that Firefox was not a second slower than Epiphany.

I still think Epi is the cooles browser, but it lacks integration and support from GNOME, same is still true for Gnumeric and Abiword. Some days ago I witnessed how Gnumeric taking just a few seconds opening a 1.5 MB Excel file, while OO.orgs calc took 4 minutes.

There is so much good in GNOME, but thinks do not work out well. Other applications do get more money and attention and now get more ahead of GNOMEs applications. There comes the day where OO.orgs Calc will open that file faster than Gnumeric. And then having GNOME not supporting Gnumeric because of it lacks behind OO.org will become the self fulfilling prophecy.

What I would like to see is a new GNOME initiative outside the old GNOME community but which like to bring money and attention back to all the good GNOME stuff – and not running after some mobile devices and the newest hype.

Just watching an interview with Naomi Klein on Democracy Now about the protests of the Toronto Film Festival (TIFF).

She says that the focus on Tel Aviv, which is 100 years old this year is an attempt to redraw the bad image of Israel.

I think this sound ridiculous. It is obvious, that states like the USA, Russia, Germany, etc. etc. do much worse. But no one would suggest not doing a dedication to New York, Moscow or Berlin. To paint a picture of Tel Aviv in a movie sense should be ok for every state. To think that Israel should be judged differently jsut because it is a jewish state is antisemetic in my view.

Israel has fewer inhabitants as New York, but still it is judged as it would be larger as the USA.

BTW. the TIFF has released a statement underlining that it sticks to its positions.

I never understood, why GNOME switched to yet another client/server based revision control (SVN) back then. But who was I to tell them that much more is possible. I aint the coder.

Anyway if I reas this from the new F-Spot:

This is the first release where we all used Git and it has massively paid off. Contributions are flowing in at a massive rate, from lots of people. See for yourself on Gitorious. Now that the release is out, it’s time to go over merge requests. It’s hard to keep up with them.

… I am happy that they did indeed switch to a distributed mechanism. Especially because it has always been hard to get any write access to some archives at GNOME. So it is going to be interesting what other effects this might have in the near future if people get comfortable with the new development style. Thumbs up!

I like to provide some basic translations for MoinMoin, which does not have a translation to Luxembourgish language . If somebody likes to help out, I here have a list of the most central pages, where we would want to start. As you can see I have tried myself on two page names. Please give me feedback or if ou can provide some translations (thanx in advance) :

If you are smart you can also join the efforts of MoinMoin directly. Here is the raw gettext page. Visit http://moinmo.in/MoinDev/Translation to get informations on how translations are handled in MoinMoin.

In the German Pirate Party there is a case of somebody (“Bodo Thiesen”) who was voted to as a replacement party judge who in the past has talked like he would deny the holocaust. The board of directors was yet not willing to exclude him from party, although he had been warned to say such shit again. On the party convention in july he was voted by members to his office. Somebody questioned his political views but he was laughed at na people voted for “Bodo” anyway. Now the media has taken this story and the pirate party, instead of being able to prepare for national vote in september has to defend itself. This is very unfortunate and will cost a lot of votes and possible members.

I can report that running VMware server 2 on a Debian system and a OpenBSD guest system does work. I had not updated for VMware 2 although its out for a while. I now did it by deinstalling the old Server Version 1 and then installing from tarball to /usr/local/*.

I have used the proxy settings once. I used the Ubuntu/GNOME tools and then also made the mark for “set the proxy system wide”.

Now I realized I could not do any bittorent or downloading from FTP. http and https worked. I had already disabled the proxy again.

I then did a grep “proxy /etc/*” and found that Ubuntu had written the proxy into /etc/environment. This was not visible for the general user. I only saw that Transmission told be that the port that I wanted to open was closed. But I knew from testing from external that it was indeed open. So somehow Transmission read /etc/environment and ignores all user settings once you have set the proxy systemwide. Removing the entry in /etc/enviroment and logging in again did the job.

I have looked at the Screencasts for GnomeShell. I like the idea that seems to drive GNOME shell, but I dont like how it was done. I think the main problem is that it is based on the old concepts of working with the mouse, instead of a more text based approach:

1. You can create new views. But those do not have names, neither are they somehow optimized for some work.
2. The whole approach is more application centric than work centric.
3. You still have desktop icons in the background which are covered by application windows

To revolutionize the desktop much more would have to be done. I dont think GNOME 3 will do this at all. I think if it is a first step it should focus on:

1. Redesign the desktop background to be more active as a frame for the work. Don’t just put some icons on the desktop which then show files named foo.desktop.
2. Try to include more concepts from Plan9: Store information in hierarchical directories and files.
3. Help people to recreate a session like they can do when they send a laptop to hiberantion mode – but with many different options. A desktop session with some window positions and started applications should be saveable. This might depend on applications allowing to save more settings.

The current GNOMEshell seems to make things just more complicated. It has soem nice features but it also reduces the size of a screen a lot and you have to do a lot with the mouse.

I was hopeful to see some major changes in GNOME Topaz (3.0). But now I have quickly viewed the discussions on the marketing list. Especially those threads:

1. GNOME Marketing Strategy (Was Audiences), Paul Cutler
2. GNOME 3.0 slogans, Michael Hasselmann

PLEASE DONT (do it again)

Dont waste your time thinking again about target audiences and slogans. Some say the real target audience are distributions. But distributions care for whatever their users care. You have users – a desktop is something universal.

It doesnt work that way, that a handful of coders and other geeks randomly gather virtually and every 6 months think about some new marketing stuff. The GNOME 3.0 goals were some good direction. The problem now is to get this ideas done. I dont think GNOME will be able to do it all in one step. The problems and solutions are on the table, already. There are GNOME users – you need to communicate with them. Dont let such stuff happen like Ubuntu did with the FUSA applet.

Those discussions are fruitless and have been talked about every once in a while. They never led to anywhere. This is partly because GNOME is controlled by the coders and some major corporations like Nokia, Canonical, Red Hat or Novell, who do finance some projects and pay some high profile developers. So those two groups do set the agenda. GNOME does not and will not have any marketing of its own. It does have some accidental marketing, but this is never tough through. Who should deliver such messages? If any slogan is chosen, you really think any distributor cares about slogans?

In the past marketing has been called propaganda. Its a matter to manipulate the human mind – its neither a development model nor an organizational model.  GNOMEs organization is not very well stuffed. There is not a lot of money and there are only a handful of people doing stuff. he GNOME Board does not have a lot of power and the developers not necessrily listen to what they say. Even less is true for the GNOME marketing team. No developer really cares about what they think or write. Fact.

I think from the birth GNOME tries to be user focused, but it still struggles with this goal and if people draw a picture of GNOME the users still do not appear. Developers are important, but without the users, nobody would use the software. And GNOME is unlike OpenBSD not a project which is mainly used only by experts, but very broadly.  But this is not reflected in the development proces. I think the best thing would be to integrate the users more into development decisions. The answer is not to let some geeks define goals for the users. The users have to do that themselves. The only possibility to give feedback is the GNOME Bugzilla. But this is mostly also not very user friendly. There is no option for users to give simple feedback. A user submitting a bug report often gets a reply to try out alpha or beta versions of the software package. This cant be true! Those geeks are just way too far away of genera users to be able to feel what those might want ot need. Even worse: Why should any developer be motivated to solve any issue a user has?

I recently discovered the EU parliament life video stream. But I found that there is no open standard. They only provide WMV and MPEG4. This sounds weird, because the EU ist struggling for year against Microsofts monopoles in different sectors. But when it comes to the coverage of the heart of the EU they depend on Microsoft technology without alternative.

One technology that should be used ist OGG Theora. It would allow everybody, even with free software to watch the debates. It cant be that you are forced to use Windows, just to participate as a citizen of the european union!?

A quote from their website:

What formats are available and why?

Two video formats are available:

• WMV (Windows Media Video)
• MPEG-4 (Moving Picture Experts Group)

These two formats both meet the following requirements:

• Streaming: Each event is broadcast in real time, which requires the use of Streaming. Progressive downloading, often used for broadcasting videos on the web, is not sufficient.
• Multilingualism: Each event is broadcast in all the official languages of the European Union (when interpretation is available).
• Simultaneity: Parliament currently broadcasts up to 6 events simultaneously and will soon be able to broadcast up to 13.
• Multi-bitrate: Each event is broadcast in three different qualities to allow access by the largest possible number of citizens, depending on their internet infrastructure.