obso1337.org

Google’s Gmail chat interface was recently made public. Justin and I tried it out Friday while he was at work. It is certainly fun to use and convenient if you cant use an instant messenger on the network you are on, however it is no replacement for a robust IM client.

There are two options for the interface, you can either have a little widget sitting in the corner of your screen where you can chat back and forth, or you can pop-out the widget in to a separate window. There are no bells and whistles with the functionality of the application but it does have some nice features. If you type several messages in quick succession it appends it to your original NAME label instead of adding new messages on top of each other (so it looks like one big message instead of a bunch of little messages). It shows the other user’s typing status and when they go idle.

Obviously you have to be constantly logged in to GMail to be available for chat (this might not matter if you always have an email window open) and it is difficult to notice when you have notifications (of friend status or incoming message). It would be interesting to see how network admins would block this kind of client (AFAIK its some sort of AJAX application) where instant messaging is prohibited (some for good and some for not so reasonable reasons). Its not a IM client replacement but something you can use when youre in a bind (and you have friends who are constantly monitoring GMail).

This weekend was pretty uneventful and relaxing. The beautiful weather we had last week turned to bitter cold (with no precipitation luckily). The on-and-off cold is more than annoying, I noticed Thursday one of my tires were getting low, and it became significantly lower once the temperature dropped. I’m hoping I dont have a flat and the weather just did a number on the pressure in my tire, but it may be time to get two new tires and a rotate anyway.

I played more World of Warcraft this weeken than I have in a few weeks. Playing a horde character opens up a lot of quests and areas I never quested in before (it also helps to be playing a matured game than when it first was released). I also managed to hit level 40 and Justin helped me out with buying a mount (re: giv me teh gold)

We also are in the process of watching all the Harry Potter movies (Justin has never seen them). The first episode of the second season of 24 also arrived from Netflix, but we opted to go see Munich instead. Very good movie by the way, however I do agree with critics about its over objectiveness. The characters are presented so objectivly it is difficult to find a ’side’ to sympathise and relate to (thus involving the audience member and making the movie meaningful to them). It was full of Jewish culture and phrases so tiny details might go unnoticed if you dont understand what a kabutz is or what the Jewish idea of the afterlife is.

Luckily I never think of Monday as the stepping stone for the rest of the week, or else I’d be in trouble. There was some miscommunication with a client I am working with. I didnt realise I had a meeting until she called me to ask if I was stuck in the cluster-fuck of traffic due to a major accident on the outer-loop of the beltway (it took a friend of mine who lives nearby 3.5 hours to go to work which is about 20 miles away). That’s D.C. for you. Traffic at any time, any place, often for no reason at all.

But hey, after figuring out that I had both the Sun SDK and GCJ installed, not knowing GCJ was installed and that is why the Sun binaries wern’t globally linked and that is why none of my homework was running, I think I’m finally ready to start the week.

Is it Friday yet?

seele :: Feb.20.2006 :: General, Movies, Technology, Work :: 2 Comments »

Although earlier this year I had hoped to get the reports up by the end of January, that they got up by mid-February isn’t too bad. The 2005 reports page is here.

Reports were added for: KBruch, KMail Recipients, Koffice Startup, Kopete, KOrganizer, KPrinter.

There have been more reports than this, particularly through OpenUsability.org. These were just the ones which were specifically sent to me to get posted to the site. Also, much of our contribution is through talking and working with the developers and not necessarily preparing web-ready deliverables.

I also cleaned up some of the links to the XML contribution style we dont really use (OpenUsability.org however does, and reports can be submitted through them). I also removed some of the links to the older reports while I clean up the structure, and I will eventually add them to the archives.

BTW, I also have a Jabber account on kdetalk.net (celeste at kde dot org). I have never used Jabber before, so I’m still figuring out what this is about.

seele :: Feb.19.2006 :: General, KDE Dev Blog :: Comments Off

So I finally made the switch to wordpress 2.0.1. It was really the laziness factor which kept me from doing it.

I also apologize if you got a mass of ‘updated’ feeds if you syndicate this site; I found a cool plugin called FeedWordPress which allows me to syndicate my KDE Developers blog. I just thought it would be nice to be able to get all of my posts from one source. Its funny when you syndicate yourself :)

Thanks Olaf for the plugin link.

Next step is to fix my style. Unfortunatly I forgot to back up some of the image files so no more Cyberpunk theme :( . Dont worry Ill come up with something cool, I promise.

Which reminds me, I have a few stories left in “Drafts” I still havnt finished. And I have homework and those KDE reports to post *sigh*

seele :: Feb.16.2006 :: Admin, General :: 3 Comments »

According to a recent C-Net Police Blotter, email surveillance without any evidence of criminal behavior has been approved. The new law only allows monitoring of email headers (hence justifies as ‘constitutional’), but the fact that they can freely monitor and log email traffic is alarming.

Also, our president seems to think its ok to monitor phone telecommunications in the name of ‘fighting the war on terror’. My question is how do they get through all the datanoise to find these ‘terrists’ without violating regular citizen’s privacy?

Remember Cindy Sheehan at the state of the union address? Now it seems as if protesting is an act of terrorism.

Where was that logic on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade a few weeks ago when we had thousands of pro-life protestors waving full-colored posters of dead fetuses in D.C? They’ll blur out a boob on T.V. but its ok to wave pictures of dead, mangled corpses in public. If I were protesting rape and incest of children, would I be able to carry a poster of an dead, 11-year-old boy who was sexually molested? I’m not suggesting it is in good taste (I certainly wouldn’t do this, but follow my logic here). Your first argument would be that dead boy is someone’s child. According to pro-life advocates so is that fetus, yet that hasn’t stopped them.

Free country to do what now?

Sometimes this place is ass-backwards. You can sue someone for almost anything in this country. The freedom of speech only applies if its pro-government or else youre a terrorist. If you dont support the war you dont support the troops. A computer is a tool only to steal media, look at porn, or hack in to another computer. You can murder someone on T.V. but ’suggestive’ sexual acts get censored.

We’re a nation of prudes in love with war. We are with war with cancer, sex, drugs, terrorism, obesity, iraq, nature, and our neighbors. Bush claims a terrorist plot on LA was thwarted yet there is no way of proving this. This constant manipulation by the government is making me think twice about our recent history. What if we really didnt go to the moon in 1969? I wouldnt be suprised.

What’s next? A tinfoil hat.

seele :: Feb.10.2006 :: General, KDE Dev Blog :: Comments Off

Friday is my last day at .gov where I will be moving on the bigger and better things. For the past 14 months Ive been through three natural disasters (Indian Ocean tsunami, Katrina/Rita hurricanes, Pakistani/Indian earthquake), watched a few funerals on TV (Pope John Paul II, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King) and scandal galore (too many to list).

I can’t say I’ll miss the job very much, but I will miss my coworkers. They were really the ones who made the job interesting, and while being a consultant I wont get that same ‘Office’ atmosphere.

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There needs to be a better solution for syndicating my blog. I have two active blogs, this one and my personal one. The difficulty with this is that I often cross blog because I have the same interesting things to say to both audiences. The KDE developers blog is the account which gets syndicated to Planet and LinuxChix, but it misses a lot of the random usability and interaction design rants I write. Although Planet reaches a lot of people, not everyone reads/syndicates it so I would be missing people who read only KDEDevelopers. But I’ve also had my personal blog for many years. What a dilemma, because one will have to go.

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I will be doing some interesting work in the upcoming weeks in which I should be able to donate some of the materials to the KDE-EDU project (I still have to work out the details to see what deliverables I can release from the contract). I will be conducting in some in-depth requirements research for education software for children from Kindergarten to 12th grade. Non-proprietary materials such as personas, survey results, usability studies, and style guides could greatly help the KDE-EDU project in creating better educational software. I’m excited for the project mostly because I’ll be able to give some of my daily work back to KDE.

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For those of you who play WoW (world of warcraft): an addiction test

Well on your way!
You are 73% Addicted!
You play a lot, and you’re starting to get hooked. Keep it up and soon you too will be part of the ever-growing group that is totally addicted. Or, see the warning signs now and get out while you still can!

Truthfully, if I took this test a few months ago I probably would have been 90-95% addicted. I’ve been very busy lately and havn’t had the time/opportunity to sit and play for hours on end because of homework, housework, and other random things. My second character (undead rogue) is slowly leveling up, so I think once she gets to 45/50 I’ll be in get-to-60 mode.

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El mentioned in her recent blog entry about an issue with the Defaults button in many of the application configuration UIs. She also posted this thread (list membership required for archive) about this issue, which led to a discussion about it in #openusability.

A preliminary solution would be to create ‘[Reset all defaults] [Reset (Fonts) defaults]’ buttons to better save the user from accidently resetting ALL defaults instead of just the current tab defaults. In the end we’ll just have to test it and see if it is a better solution and by how much.

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I will be in Las Vegas March 17-20 if anyone is going to be in the area. Also, there were some small talks about having a Usabiltiy/HCI-WG meeting in Washington, D.C. in the beginning of April before a meeting in Georgia. If there is any interest in this, drop me a line so I can work something out.

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And finally, a funny story:

This morning, I bought a banana from the cafe in my building. The only bananas they had were green, and I tried to pick the ripest one. When I got to my desk, I thought about my banana and said ‘I wonder if it would riped if I put it on my laptop?’. Fruit, afterall, ripens with the help of heat not time, and my laptop runs very hot. And so I put this banana on my laptop (I use an external keyboard and mouse) and told my friends about it. ‘Do you think this will work?’, I ask my coworker as he looks at me with a strange look. ‘Guess what I did!’, I tell a friend who proceeds to laugh at my silly idea.

Well guess what. Four hours later my banana no longer has green spots, so by the time I leave for class I should have a nice ripe snack for the drive. Whoo!

seele :: Feb.08.2006 :: General, KDE Dev Blog :: Comments Off