This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Jensen Harris, on the MS Office 12 weblog, talks about the "why" of the new Office UI, and in a section harking back to Xerox PARC inventing the graphical interface, includes this great line:

[T]oday many technology historians point out that Xerox did not do very much to protect the intellectual property they created.

I wonder if we'd have a world run by GUIs now if Xerox had "protected" their "intellectual property".

Luis Villa complains about there being no really decent Gnome weblog posting program, and he's not wrong. Personally, i use the web UI for Wordpress, but I used to use both gnome-blog and BloGTK. I thought that I might hack category support into gnome-blog, because it's in Python and ought to be pretty trivial to do. However, it seems to be rather difficult to hack on a panel applet. For a start, it has to be installed into /usr (or at least the .server file has to be). So that needs to be done as root. Secondly, the configure file for gnome-blog seems to want the pygtk development files, which I don't understand; it's all Python! The development files are for compiling C against the pygtk headers, aren't they? Thirdly, in order to test a change I'd made I'd need to remove the applet, install my new version, and re-add it to the panel. That seems really hard to me; it enforces a C-ish "make a change, run a script to 'compile' it, restart" sort of workflow on me, and not having to do that with Python is one of the reasons I like Python. Why can't I install an applet somewhere in my home directory? (answer, according to #gnome: bonobo.) That would make things much easier. Apparently there may be a configuration option or compile-option to pass to bonobo that will make it look in other places for .server files, but that sort of low-level tweaking scares me. If it's that easy, I'd love to see distros incorporate that little switch as a matter of course, so that the panel will be able to load applets with their .server files in $HOME/.local/servers or similar. Anyway, I won't be hacking gnome-blog any time soon. Deskbar is also an applet, and presumably suffers the same problem, but it has a -w option to run it in a window. It would be great if other applets supported that. Failing that: what's the workflow for trying out an applet? I can't see any way of making it easy...

More from Stuart's House Of Deskbar Stuff: Gmail Deskbar. A Gnome deskbar plugin to search all your mail at Gmail. Grab Gmail Deskbar for yourself now! Edit (as described below) and save into .gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers. Notes: The plugin requires libgmail: install from your distribution (it's python-libgmail in Ubuntu) or from libgmail.sf.net. You will need to edit the plugin and hardcode your Gmail username and password into it; look at the file and edit the part at the top where username and password are specified. Yes, this is not good. I would like to use the Gnome keyring to store the username and password, but it's restricted to internal use for the Gnome desktop and not for applications, and it's not available for Python anyway. As soon as it's a public API and wrapped for Python I'll be happy to use it. If you're not happy with hardcoding your password, and I don't blame you, then feel free to not use it. Like Delicious Deskbar, it demonstrates how to embed your own custom icon in a plugin rather than depending on an external file; convert it to an XPM with the Gimp and then embed in the file. Let me know if it works for you. Update: licenced under the GNU GPL version 2.0.

I really like marius's Subversion scripts for Nautilus; they're not quite TortoiseSVN for Linux, but they're good. I'm trying hard to use Subversion properly, and one thing to do that's proper is to tag releases. There is no tagging script, however, so I've written one. Grab my Tag Nautilus script from my repository. Update: it now automatically creates a LATEST tag pointing at the tag you've just created. I want this, which is why it's in my script, but not everyone will. Creating a new tag overwrites LATEST to point at the new tag. Update: now suggests a new tag ID by adding 0.01 to the last tag id.

Lots of people use delicious for bookmarking, including me. So I've written a plugin for the Gnome deskbar applet that searches your del.icio.us bookmarks. Download Delicious Deskbar below and drop the file in the .gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers/ folder in your home directory. By default it will search all of del.icio.us for the tag you enter, but you can configure it to search just your bookmarks through the Preferences window. Deskbar's a nice thing to work with, in case I haven't mentioned this. I think it could do with some more visual flashiness, myself, and I also wish that stuff like this went in Library/Deskbar Applet/Handlers rather than the hidden .gnome2 folder -- that's one thing that the Mac people definitely got right! Update: fixed a bug when using multiple search terms in deskbar. Update: licenced under the GNU GPL 2.0. Download the latest version.

Talking to Sam earlier, she wondered why the Times Educational Supplement here in the UK can still sell newspapers every week. For Americans, non-teachers, and other aliens, everyone who buys the TES in the UK is a teacher, and the reason they buy it is because that's where all the teacher jobs are advertised. The TES people might believe that everyone buys it for the quality journalism, but they're kidding themselves; most (or possibly just some) of its readers do read the articles, but everyone buys it for the job ads. And all the jobs in the TES are also available online, for free. So why do people buy the newspaper? There are three reasons why.

1. It's easy to read and understand a newspaper. Websites are more difficult to find things in. This is 30% of the reason.
2. Newspapers are a lot more convenient; you can read them over breakfast, or roll them up and throw them in your bag, or read them on the train, and you can write on them, and take just the bit you want, and they never run out of batteries. This is another 30% of the reason.
3. Newspapers aren't a computer. Computers are basically bad things that annoy you and break a lot. Computers are not useful and not fun. This is the last 40%.

All the work that all the web people are doing goes to fix point 1 only. Point 2 may go away with magical new technology like RadioPaper or similar, but not for ages. Point 3 will go away twenty years from now when my daughters' children don't find computers weird. But remember when the next big web thing comes along -- Ajax, Firefox, Opera Mini, CSS -- that it's only fixing a third of the problem.

A while back I provided instructions on setting up LinPhone to use SipGate UK for Voice Over IP. Now, Ubuntu 6.04 Dapper is out, and comes with the all-new Ekiga softphone! Here's how to set it up to use SipGate.

1. Sign up for a SipGate account.
2. Once you’ve got one, sign into the SipGate website and click "My Account".
3. Under “Connection Information”, it will list your SIP-ID (a 7-digit number) and password, which you need for the next steps.
4. Start Ekiga, and go through the configuration wizard. Don't sign up for an ekiga.net account.
5. Say Edit > Accounts, and then Add.
6. In Account Name, enter Sipgate.
7. Leave Protocol as SIP.
8. In Registrar, put sipgate.co.uk.
9. In User and Password, put your SIP-ID and password from step 3 above and say OK.

That's it. No port-forwarding required, no complex setup. Well done the Ekiga people! To test your new setup, call sip:613@fwd.pulver.com, which is an echo test.

There's a post supposedly explaining why I should use Epiphany with Gnome 2.14. I shall not now or ever be using Epiphany, because you have to write extensions in C. They took away my ability to fix my browser by writing JavaScript, which lots of people can do, and instead made it all C again, so only Real Programmers are allowed. Fuck that. You probably find that you can write extensions in Python, but so what? What was wrong with the way the previous ones worked? Or is JavaScript just not a real enough language?

There aren't many good pictures of me in general, and the ones taken at SxSW are no exception. There were a few decent ones, though:

Just had an entertaining lunch with Steve Chipman and Kevin Smith and Travis. I need to write down all the people I've met since otherwise I'll forget that I've met them, which would be a bit bad. Good fun lunch, considering we drank about five beers: that's a proper lunch. Yes indeed. They've all gone off to buy cowboy hats, but I already have a cowboy hat and so am now back at the SxSW venue. Thirsty for more beer, mind, but I probably ought to dial back until this evening. The three of them reaffirmed my contention that no Americans that I know support Bush. We talked politics for a bit; about ten people I've met since coming here have said "please don't judge us by our leaders". What I don't understand is that I know plenty of Americans, and they all seem decent literate clever people, and not one of them votes Republican. So where are all the Republican voters? I should stay out of arguments I know nothing about. I did find out that you're allowed to pay waitresses less than the minimum wage here on the assumption that they'll make it up in tips. Astounding.

Here I am at SxSW. Austin's nicer than I was expecting, I have to say. We went down by the river yesterday and saw turtles sunbathing on the rocks. Wasn't imagining that a scene like that would be in a city in Texas. There's beauty in all sorts of odd places if you look for it. I'm sitting in the day cafe in the Austin Convention Centre, and a chap here was singing a country song about his poodle. He's now singing a song called "I wish I had a beer sponsorship". Madness. Although I do now have wireless working. I have been subject to much puzzlement from Mac people here (that is, everyone here) who do not understand why I spend time fucking about with Linux when Macs just work. It's a pretty compelling argument; I did try explaining about open source, but I was quite drunk. I'm debating putting together an argument around Adobe's declaration of not bringing current Photoshop to the MacBook Pro (so you have to run it in emulation slow mode). The Gimp will work on both, I shall say. I'm not convinced that this argument is any good, but it may help to illustrate the point. Right, off to see if I can find some of the rest of the gang.

One of the problems is that you can't enshrine, 'don't be a tool' in a code of conduct. Daniel Stone hits the nail completely on the head there.

Behdad shows in detail why I personally voted for GStreamer as the biggest disappointment of 2005 in the LugRadio awards. There's so much power there, but it's really hard to get your hands on at the moment. Every time I have a little epiphany and work out what something does I immediately think of nineteen things to do with it, and we're using it for Jokosher, but it isn't half hard to do stuff with.

These are dishwasher tablets: These are dishwasher cleaner tablets: The first ones are the ones you put in the dishwasher along with all the dirty crockery to clean that crockery. The second ones, although they're in a pretty similar box, in identical individual packaging, and look very similar once unwrapped, go in the dishwasher when it's empty in order to clean the dishwasher itself. They are not the same thing. I have just had a very stern talking to about this!

I've been hacking a bit on Jokosher, the audio application formerly known as JonoEdit, so that we can have a proper free software editor for LugRadio rather than using Cubase. I'd forgotten how much fun it is just hacking on a project with a bunch of cool people; most of my recent stuff has been me on my own or small code contributions to larger projects. And I dig the Cairo, yes I do, despite giving it a shoeing in the past. Looks like I was wrong about that. I need to write up some of the stuff I've been looking at, but I need to get more of it done first.

Naked Law notes that the UK government's IP review, set up to look at how to handle intellectual property issues and so on in the UK, has now issued a call for evidence. This is your chance to tell the government how you think copyrights and so on ought to work. I intend to draft a response, which I'll post here when I do it; responses are to be in by April 21st, which gives you nearly two months.