obso1337.org

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

sorry for the caps, but i *am* yelling

this weekend justin and i went home and watched (and later celebrated) the steelers play in the super bowl.

for those of you who are not familiar with the super bowl, it is the championship game for american football (you know that weird game that is nothing like soccer). for those of you who are not familiar with me or the steelers, you should know that i am from pittsburgh and so are they

saturday night in the south side (one of the bar districts) reminded me of mardi gras. people dressed up in black and gold, drunk in the streets singing “Here we go STEEEEEELERS, HERE WE GO!”, cars blasting steelers polka (yes polka, dont ask) and blaring horns down carson street, and almost every store/bar/restaurant/house decorated in black and gold for the Big Game.

why was it such a Big Game (other than it being the championship of course). well, the super bowl is a big deal to pittsburgh for many reasons. *) it is a family owned team (which is getting rarer these days) of which the father of the current owner won 4 superbowls with. *) jerome ‘the bus’ bettis has been inducted in to the hall of fame, yet had not won a super bowl AND has been hanging in with the team for 2 years trying to get a ring (he is a broken man) AND is from detroit (he is from detroit). *) ben roethlesberger is the second youngest starting quarterback (and now youngest winning quarterback) *) bill cowher has been coaching the steelers for something like 15 years and has taken them to the playoffs something like 9 or 10 times with only 1 other appearance (loss) in the superbowl (1996).

so it was time for ‘one for the thumb’ (the super bowl prize is a ring and trophy for the team)

oh and strangely condoleeza rice (U.S. secretary of state) was at the game and publicly picked the steelers to win (this is strange in part because a) she was at the super bowl and b) public figures do not usually publicly pick sides in sports unless they are a hometown team and she is from Alabama).

anyway.. being more interested in getting drunk and staying warm to watch the game than ‘freezing our nuts off’ (as justin would put it), we watched the game from the comfort of a house party in north pittsburgh rather than going down town in the craziness. popular bar districts in pittsburgh were closed for the game (south side, strip district, station square, oakland..) to allow people to wander the streets and celebrate (or riot) after the game.

people from all around the country came in to pittsburgh just to watch the game here. pittsburgh has a great following, once from pittsburgh, always from pittsburgh. i have friends in California who have found a steelers bar, a friend in Boston who has found one, and Justin and i know of at least three in DC/Balitmore. (as for stats, i think Florida is the #1 place for pittsburghers to move to, DC-Metro #2)

the game was full of ups and down, ill let you read commentary to see the close calls and bad plays from both sides, but overall it was a great game to watch.

the street scene broadcasted to the post-game news was insane. the streets were littered with cheering fans, far from sober but all smiles. luckily most of the streets around the districts were closed as well and would not be opened until 3am, which gave people plenty of time to party (er.. sober up).

im afraid to know what the scene would have been like if we lost. something would have been torn down, set afire, blown up, who knows. but who cares, bettis has a fairy tale ending, the rooney’s have one for the thumb, pittsburgh native coach cowher has a superbowl win, ben is the youngest winning qb in superbowl history, and pittsburgh will be a very happy place to be for a long time.

GO STILLERS! (I is an intentional accent )

seele :: Feb.06.2006 :: General, KDE Dev Blog :: Comments Off

Since I havn’t posted in a while, a quick QOTD:

kawakokappa (10:55:29 AM): could you imagine reproducing a series of steps with half of them missing?

seele varcuzzo (10:56:15 AM): no, and youre going to make me core dump if you make me

seele :: Jan.26.2006 :: General, KDE Dev Blog :: Comments Off

Oh hell.. why not. Maybe if I say I’m going to do something on public forum, I’ll actually get it done

Of course, I shouldn’t give myself the entire year to do some of these things, so maybe I should set an expiration on each item.

Put up the KDE Usability Project tests and reports I gathered in December

I think December was a month off for everyone. I did get a little work done here and there, but one thing I started and didn’t get a chance to finish was reorganization of usability.kde.org. Many of you provided me documents or links to usability tests and reports from 2005, I just need to put them up.

Let’s try to do this (or at least get started putting documents up) by the end of January

Start organizing and writing conference submissions now

Alas, I think there were 6 conferences I wanted to write submissions for and I only got to two of them. Part of the problem was lack of time, and lack of time yielded the problem of lack of material composed, and lack of material composed yielded the problem of lack of submission. I need to plan and manage my time better.

Start scanning deadlines and planning reports now. Annual conferences are typically held around the same time of the year with the same deadlines, so I should know most of them by now

Start gathering and organizing tests, references, notes, etc. for my thesis

Although my thesis is probably another year away, I seriously doubt three or four months will be enough time to test and analyze data, collect and evaluate references, and write a 50-100+ page graduate thesis. I’m in the data everyday anyway, so I might as well start taking notes.

This doesn’t have a solid expiration, but I should start as soon as tomorrow with bookmarking possible references and thinking about user test design.

Get back in to KDE-Edu

The Edutainment Project was one of the first projects I got involved with when I joined the KDE development community. Sporadically over the past year or so I provided them with some feedback about their interfaces and a few reports. They are a wonderful group to work with and very welcome to feedback which is going to help improve children’s success and acceptance of the software.

Ideally, I would like to have another interface and contextual evaluation done by the end of March.

…and then there’s the HIG

Poor El, I think she’s done the most work on the HIG without much help (from me included). I wish I had a solution for the lack of participation. I thought maybe putting it on a wiki and making it more accessible for people to edit would help — I think I edited it for about a month before I stopped. We really need to get a move on the thing, at least get a draft out the door by the end of the year.

We need to make some serious progress in the next 6 months. In particular I will take responsibility for the Toolbars, Menus, and Labeling sections, and try to have at least debatable information by the end of March with a preliminary draft by the end of June.

Overall, I think this is a pretty ambitious list of things to get done this year (mostly in the first half). Cheers to motivation!

seele :: Jan.07.2006 :: General, KDE Dev Blog :: Comments Off