As a Baby Gnome He Had So Much Potential

(Originally written April 9, 2004)

Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.

- Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 13:47:53 -0500 (EST)
From: Adrian Hosey
To: Thomas R. Hall
Subject: Re: good article

On Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Thomas R. Hall wrote:
: On Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Adrian Hosey wrote:
: >
: > http://mozillazine.org/articles/article4584.html
:
: That is a good article. How do you feel about the role that Mono may play
: in all of this?

I despair of any of it coming together at all. cf. our conversation yesterday about GNOME's failure to produce a scriptable desktop.[1] Granted that hasn't even been a stated goal of GNOME for years, but I hold it up as an example of the amount of energy lost from lack of unified vision and the amount of time spent dorking around with the core components and less time making stuff people can _use._ See also here

http://cinepaint.bigasterisk.com/WhyMigrateFromGTKToFLTK

I think the desktop battle has been lost for at least one more generation. i.e. FOSS guys aren't going to get their shit together in time to defray the market dominance of Longhorn. However I also don't believe that Longhorn will somehow signal the end of the contest the way Brendan Eich thinks it will. The current set of tensions will continue on into another round.

If someone is going to unhorse Microsoft on the desktop I don't think it will be FOSS as we know it. It may be Apple (wishful thinking) it may be Novell/Ximian - in which case Mono would play a big part in the new architecture. It may be someone we haven't met yet. I don't think there's room to bring a whole new closed-source OS to the marketplace right now (witness BeOS) but there's no reason someone can't deliver a quality desktop OS on a Linux kernel, if the project is executed with some focus. Ironically this may put Novell in the best position. They should break with GNOME and just do their own thing the way they think it should be done. Do it open source, do it closed source, but do it with hierarchical leadership and not design by committee.


If you're thinking that Mono will bring home the promise of write once run anywhere between Linux and Microsoft platforms, I don't think that's going to fly. Microsoft will make sure it doesn't. Look at SMB. Look at W2k's broken Kerberos. Look at the history of Java. Look at per-processor licensing. It is not the nature of that corporation under its current leadership to play on an open field.

---

 [1] This is alluding to an earlier conversation of which I don't have a transcript. But recently I've been learning about Apple Events, Applescript, and the ability of other scripting languages to substitute for Applescript via OSA. When I started using GNOME in 1998 I was drawn to it by a post from Miguel de Icaza that described GNOME's goal to be a scriptable, network-transparent desktop environment. I can't find a record of that post but there is this article. Skip down to the question "What differentiates Gnome from other window managers?" to read Miguel describing the vision he had for GNOME back in 1998.

I was really excited by his vision. He was describing a Linux desktop that would not just equal other desktop systems but leapfrog them in features and power. The closest thing on a Unix desktop might have been NeWS - and NeWS is long gone. It was going to have embeddable components and network transparency via CORBA. It was going to support bindings for multiple scripting languages which would drive the components via their CORBA interfaces. It was going to kick ass.


If you get on Google you can find posts I made to the GNOME mailing lists. You can find a few small patches I submitted, those patches now gone because their code bases have long since been rewritten. I was excited and I wanted to be involved in whatever small way I could. That was six years ago.

I'm bummed that in six years GNOME has not yet become a scriptable network-transparent desktop. What bums me the most is that it never will be. GNOME no longer even aspires to those things. Read contemporary editorials about the future of GNOME and you'll hear about things like HAL and DBUS and transparent windows via OpenGL. Nothing that other desktops aren't already doing. At the best one could say that GNOME aspires to be a best-of-breed hybrid from among the current desktop systems. At the worst one could accuse it of being a knock-off.

What happened? I'm not sure. My first thought was that GNOME needed a benevolent dictator and it never really had one. On the other hand there are many open source projects that run based on a "foundation" that do okay, like Apache. Is there some set of criteria that determines what kind of projects need a benevolent dictator?

Some of the language in that email is probably harsher than is fair, but I wanted to repost it verbatim because it conveys a certain amount of frustration. I'm sure most of the contributing programmers to GNOME have their shit together as people, because finding the time to do free software is hard. However if we speak of the GNOME project as if it were a person, I don't think the GNOME project has its shit together, citing the many fickle changes in direction over the years regarding various components. That's why I think the project could have benefited more from the benevolent dictator model. Or maybe the GNOME project does have its shit together and it just didn't put its shit in the basket where I wanted it to. I do feel confident that the GNOME that exists today is not the GNOME put forward in 1998.

Anyway that's why I suggested above that Novell "should break with GNOME and just do their own thing the way they think it should be done." I don't know if Miguel still has his sights set on the vision he described in 1998. If he does he should just do it and not worry anymore about playing nice with the other programmers.

Update 2006-02-08: I'm not saying anyone heard me in particular, but just check it out.

In My Defense, The Broiler Pan Was Dirty

1 oven on broil + 1 top rack + 1 quarter-sheet pan + 2 raw steaks = 2 delicious steaks + 1 ruined quarter-sheet pan.

The Digital Devil Made Me Do It

(Originally written December 4, 2003)

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

- H. L. Mencken

Most of what you can find on the Net about how to make a bomb is available somewhere in a library and, candidly, if your child is down in the basement making bombs, the Internet is probably not the biggest contributor to that problem.

- Larry Irving, Asst. Secretary, NTIA

Last night I was flipping channels on the TV and I saw the news headline "Video game inspired warehouse robbery?" I didn't bother to unmute the TV or stop changing channels because (a) I already know what they would have said and (2) it just pisses me off. I know that this isn't new - many media and subgenres of media have been blamed for many things over the years. The Beatles were blamed for Charles Manson. AC/DC was blamed for Richard Ramirez, Catcher in the Rye was considered subversive, etc. And in my generation, Quake is blamed for Columbine and Flight Simulator is blamed for the World Trade Center strike.

The thing that kills me about the whole phenomenon is that the news outlets display such a blatant bias about the angle of the stories. Violent criminals are morally adrift to begin with. Anything could inspire them to do anything, but only the magic combination of "video game inspires violent crime" becomes a headline item on the newswires. If the crime is "inspired" by something else, that motivation doesn't make it into the headline. When a group of white men pummel a lone Arab on the street you don't see the headline "War on Terror inspires hate crime." And why don't we ever see the headline "News report on violent crime inspires man to commit violent crime?" I'd love to see the interview with the defendant:

"I knew I wanted to lash out at the world but I wasn't sure how. Then I saw an MSNBC report on arson, and I knew that arson was my ticket to manifest aggression."

I wonder if that quote would make it past the newsroom editor?

Time passes...

Just a couple days later, I found this tidbit on CNN:

Issuing its eighth annual MediaWise Video Game Report Card, the [National Institute on Media and the Family] listed games parents should avoid for their children, led by "Manhunt."

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/fun.games/12/09/warning.videogames.reut/index.html

Taken independently, that sentence is just ridiculous on its face. Then consider that the sentence is part of a "news item" from a major reporter and we're approaching ludicrous speed. Why is it ludicrous? Because, why would a parent buy a game for their child called "Manhunt" and not be concerned about the content? Never mind that the box for Manhunt has an ESRB "M" stamped on it, the NAME ALONE should be the tipoff! Allow me to create a parallel example:

Issuing its eighth annual MediaWise Video Game Report Card, the institute listed games parents should avoid for their children, led by "Orgy."

See what I mean? If I substitute sex for violence does it become more apparent? Do we need "institutes" issuing "report cards" advising parents not to do obviously dumb shit? Is this the world we live in? God help us all.

I have nothing against having watchdog groups monitor the video game industry per se. If one of these groups were to find, for example, that companies are using thirteen-year-old kids in focus groups testing M rated games, that would be great work. Go team. But instead they're wasting their time cranking out self-important obvious crap, and overlooking the notion that if parents don't read the box title and don't read the ESRB label, they're not going to read the institute's report either.

I want to found an institute that issues the annual "Report Card for Physical Safety" advising parents not to "shoot selves in the head" and not to "leap bodily into open flames."

Wishlist: more efficient scrolling for the iPhone

I've had an iPod Touch for about a month now, and I love it to death. But as humans tend to do, I'm going to be general in my praise and detailed in my gripes. But wait! because I have a proposed solution to my gripe.

My praise: it's awesome. It's still not my perfect iTablet, but I'm using it for the same reasons - I can access the net, in comfort, without using a keyboard.

My gripe: there is no way to jump to the bottom of a web page in Mobile Safari, or to quickly scroll through a very vertical page. This recently got especially tedious for me while I was skimming some archives of Daring Fireball, because some of his essays are rather long, and the link to the next article is always at the bottom. Flick, flick, flick, flick, flick, flick, to get to the bottom of the page. Link to next page, repeat.

Now when you put your finger on a page and start to drag it, a translucent scrollbar appears in the margin to give you a sense of where you are in the page. But you can't grab that scrollbar and use it for anything. It's more of a "scroll indicator."

So my proposed solution: why not let me grab it? If I put one finger on the page, the scrollbar appears, and then I can "pin it" under another finger (probably a finger of the opposite hand) and as long as I have it pinned, moving my finger to the bottom of the screen takes me to the absolute bottom of the web page, and the top of the screen, vice versa. The rate of the scrolling would be relative to the size of the page, just like a windowed app on a desktop computer. I'll be the first to say this isn't intuitive or even convenient - it's actually a little awkward. But dammit, it would work and it would be there for people who know about it.

My other gripe: there's no "Find in Page" with Mobile Safari. What's up with that? For about the first week I kept going to the magnifying glass when I wanted to find a word on the page. Even though I knew that button brings up Google, my brain kept trying to map my ⌘-F reflex to something. I don't have a solution for that, except - add it!

A Nutshell: The Matrix Reloaded

(Originally written June 10, 2003)

As the lights came up on The Matrix Reloaded, I already knew what I thought of it. I was curious what my wife would think. I didn't have to wait long. "That sucked" she said.

"Really?" I said. "I thought it was pretty damned all right."

"Really?" she asked.

"You didn't like the ending." I asserted.

"No, I didn't."

"He was saying things I think a programmer would understand best."

By now we're in the parking lot. "Explain it to me then."

My wife and I met while doing the same job, computer support at a university. But she doesn't hack for a living at this point in her life and she doesn't want to. Point being, she has enough technical background so I think I can sum this up quickly:

"You're a programmer. You're working on a pretty big, pretty important program. And it works, mostly, 99 times out of a hundred. But you can't nail down that last corner case and it's driving you crazy. So there's this girl, let's say she's your girlfriend-"

"Programmers don't have girlfriends," my wife interrupts.

"Some do. Some even get married. Bear with me. Your girlfriend is also a programmer-"

"Ah. That explains why she would date a programmer."

"Fair enough. Your girlfriend is looking over your shoulder and says 'So what? Just let the 100th case fail.'

"'That's no good,' you say. 'First it's 1 bug in 100, then it's 2 in 200, then 3 in 300, then eventually we'll have a quarter of a million bugs.'

"'Big deal,' she says. If it gets that bad we'll reboot.' You don't like her solution, because you're a perfectionist. But you've got a deadline, you need to get this thing in the can. And you really don't have a better idea anyway. 'Okay fine,' you say. 'If it comes to that we'll have to reboot.'"

"So they destroy Zion, and that's like a reboot?"

"Right. They take 16 women and 7 men and restart the human race, inside the Matrix again."

"But why do they need Neo for that?"

"Well, there was some handwaving about that. They may or may not explain it sufficiently in the last movie. We'll see."

"But then Neo took the other door, so now everyone dies."

"Right. The machines are in trouble because they can't restart the Matrix. The humans are screwed because there's like 12 of them left."

We're in the car pulling out into the street. "So when the Matrix gets messed up they reboot. So... the Matrix is like Windows."

"Exactly."

Project Dresden

I know we're not supposed to laugh at our own jokes, but once in a while I find something I forgot I had written, and if it makes me laugh to see it again, I feel like I must have done something right.

Project Dresden

Heroes

(Originally written July 27, 2000)

My son, almost 4 years old, has developed an interest in Batman and Spiderman. He's starting to have heroes. I think that's neat. I started thinking about my childhood heroes - Batman and Spiderman being two of them - and then I started to wonder about people who for some reason maybe didn't have heroes as children. My first thought from there was those teenagers who shot up their schools. Did those kids have heroes?

See, I was exposed to violent media as a child. Lots of violent media, probably way too much violent media. That's why I don't buy the argument that video violence drives these kids. If that were true, I'd be hiding in Canada right now with a 12 body count on my record. So what made me different? Why didn't I snap?

Let's see. I was exposed to video violence, I hated high school, I thought there were plenty of people there who deserved to "be taken down a notch." But I never did it. Never even considered it. I think the difference was, I also had heroes from an early age. Even though my heroes were "action heroes" and sometimes did their own violent acts, there was always a code of conduct driving the heroes, determining when it was time for them to use violent force.

I don't consider myself a hero, but I have always considered myself one of the good guys because I admired my heroes and wanted to emulate them. My heroes gave me a belief that even in dark times, the good guys win in the end. My heroes gave me hope.

The good guys don't inflict themselves on the innocent. Even the not-so-innocent ones that torment the hero. There was a scene that ended up being cut from Star Wars, where Luke's "friends" at Toshi Station were mean as shit to him. He did not blow them away. The good guys only use deadly force when the bad guys use it first. Even the heroes with a "black streak" in them, like Han Solo or Batman, still answer to a code of morality. Han Solo is a particularly good example because his moral code became stronger as the story went on, until at the end he's volunteering to sacrifice himself for something other than a profit motive.

(As an aside, I was really irritated when Star Wars Special Edition changed the film so that Greedo shot first. Even as a kid, I knew Han Solo's life was on the line and he had reason to shoot first.)

So, did those Columbine kids have heroes? I'd like to know, but I would guess they didn't. They obviously felt unhappy and tormented, and without heroes to anchor them to the good guys and give them hope, they did whatever they felt they wanted, or needed. They didn't have the tools to withstand and control the darkness inside us - yeah, all of us - and ultimately it got them.

Make sure your kids have heroes. Make sure you have heroes. Be one of the good guys.

Tonight's homework: choose the future of computing

Compare and contrast:

The Web's The Place by Tim Bray

iPhone's AJAX SDK: No, thank you by Wil Shipley