Ninkendo dot org

Gnome-Do Development

After continual attempts from Jorge to persuade me to get off my ass and start contributing, I finally decided to help him out and write a Launchpad plugin for gnome-do. He put a spec together on the Ubuntu wiki and I started developing off it.

The whole experience has been delightful. Most of the gnome-do development is aggregated by launchpad (The project page for gnome-do is here), which is what mirrors all the contributed branches, stores all the bug reports, keeps blueprints on file... pretty much everything you need to manage an open source project. It's very well integrated into bzr as well, which is a fine version control system, and project management integration is something missing from my more preferred VCS, git.

That point bears repeating: It's good to have a quality project management site along with distributed version control. I'm beginning to think that it's the best way to do DVC: the whole point of which is for each contributor to have his or her own branch, and pushing and pulling, rather than checking into a master tree, is the way to share code. It seems so obvious, but without a heavyweight repository site like Launchpad, the process of finding other branches and developers is much more difficult, and the very purpose of distributed development is made less effective. If anyone knows of a similar system for git, I'd like to know it. Yes, git.kernel.org has a lot of code branches, but it's nowhere near as simple to find and associate contributors to projects and see at a glance what contributors are doing. And even if gitweb improved, no individual gitweb site has approached the kind of center of gravity of something like launchpad.

Tangent aside, the homepage for my plugin branch is here, and from there you can browse the source and track my commits. Gnome-do is written in C#, and is very enjoyable to write plugins for. I spent a day or so learning the architecture (I could've saved time by reading the wiki page), then it only took a few hours to get the plugin into a working state. It really seems like the author (Dave Siegel) knew what he was doing when development started.

The plugin itself contains a handful of useful shortcuts for launchpad navigation, like finding users, tracking bugs buy number, browsing blueprints, and much more.

Here's an obligatory screenshot:

Development's mostly complete except for any bugs I may find, and barring any feature creep I let slip in. :-P

If you want to test it, go ahead and snag my bzr branch with

and compile, install, run. See the documentation for details. This is just a plugins tree, so you need to have gnome-do installed already to run it.

I, Homeowner

Ain't she beautiful? Image courtesy Google Street View:

After wrestling with the mortgage company for a good two months trying to get a proper loan for it, it's finally ours. First they accepted our offer, then the mortgage company said it appraised for less than we paid, then we redid our offer, then the sellers rejected it, then they changed their minds, then the mortgage company said it's a condo, then they said it wasn't, ad nauseum. We worked through it all though, and ended up paying less because of the whole mess, so I guess that's a good thing.

It's 1500 square ft plus a full finished basement that has carpet, drywall, etc. The basement has a wet bar (wooo!) with dishwasher and sink, and some side-rooms we'll end up using as offices/storage. It's got a beautiful cedar deck in back with a nice sized lawn with an enclosed privacy fence, an outdoor gas firepit (!), and a jacuzzi (double woo!) They're even throwing in their Washer/dryer, fridge, stove, microwave, etc. All for a very nice michigan-market price (rock bottom.)

We move in in a month. Let's hope the sellers don't trash it before then.

Why Can't Computers Just Trust Me?

Rant follows.

My Dad guilted me into fixing his computer today, which meant reloading Windows. And reloading Windows means sifting through all the bullshit Windows puts you through when you first run it.

Honestly, any time someone tells you Vista sucks because UAC prompts are annoying isn't looking at the bigger picture. The only time users really will have any issues with UAC in windows is during a fresh install of the OS, when things aren't configured yet and there's a lot of administrative utilities that need to be run.

But the bigger picture is that all software has trouble shutting the hell up the first time it's run. Take Internet Explorer for instance. The very first time you launch it, it's highly unlikely you're just merrily going about some internet browsing. You more likely just want to get on google real quick to find some software that needs to be downloaded. Or you need to grab Firefox. Or you just want to get to gmail. But upon launch, that horrid first time launch window comes up in IE.

Thank you for "choosing" internet explorer 7. Ha. As if I had a choice. Can I search the internet now? Well, you could, but if you don't click through this god awful dialog, you'll never get your home page, or even about:blank to show up when you launch IE. You have to take the time to tell it "No thanks, I'd like to use then internet, please." And even when you try and just use the search bar, first it has to ask you if you'd like to turn autocomplete on. Then it needs to make sure you're ok with sending information over the internet. Whoa! Sending information over the internet? That sounds waaay dangerous. Thanks for making sure I really want to do it!

Then if I want to go to an https site, it warns me that I'm being too secure, or something. Then if I want to go back to a normal site, it has to remind me of that as well.

And don't act like Firefox is any better. It has just as many dialogs for the same crap. At least in version 3 they're finally putting it on the top bar so you can just get to the page you wanted to get to without having to answer the dialog first:

Finally, a step in the right direction.

And don't try to close the browser with more than one tab open, because it'll nag you that you may be trying to close the browser with more than one tab open. Why did I press the close window button again? Oh yeah, so you'd close the browser.

I know I'm a bit biased, in that my job entails a lot of setting up new OS installs (Linux and Windows) and logging in for the first time, but in this day and age, a browser shouldn't warn you about sending information over the internet.

It doesn't even stop at software. I still maintain that one of the worst industry decisions in computers was to make you hold the fucking power button down for ten seconds before the computer agrees to let you turn it off. Whenever I'm pressing the power button, it's not because I have time to wait 10 seconds. Usually it's because the computer booted to hard disk when I wanted it to boot to CD, or something bad is happening and I need to cut the power before it continues, or because the damn thing locked up and I can't shut it down normally. I can understand having the power button initiate a software shutdown rather than straight-up powering it down, but if I want to, it should let me. I think a happy compromise would be to hold the button down for 1 or 2 seconds, but even that's a stretch. The honest truth is if it's a normal use case, and I just want to shut down the computer, I'd use the OS's shutdown function. If I'm hitting the power button, I just want the computer off. Now.

Hello World!

Ok, I admit this is a little dumb, but I've decided to get back into blogging again, and to do so I've decided to write my own blog engine entirely from scratch. It's done in mod_perl on apache2, with postgresql as the database backend.

Time will tell whether I really have the initiative to actually add content to this blog.

Go ahead and post a comment if you'd like to make fun of me for reinventing the wheel. Be careful though, because I have a cool AJAX-ey moderation system in place and I can always report your comment as spam. :)