Archive for September, 2005

Posted on September 26, 2005 - by jono

Boo yeah

Today I headed over to Coventry to do a talk for the brand new undergraduates on a multimedia and creative computing course. It was their first day today and it was decided they should be plonked in front of me for an hour, poor bastards. I gave them my opensource cool talk, and it went down pretty well. After the talk I had a beer with the lecturers – nice bunch of people who are really committed to their students. It was also great to have a discussion with James about Linux and Audio Production: Simplicity Required. James has an opposing view to some of the points I make in the article, and its always much more fun to debate issues over a beer rather than via email.

Speaking of articles, last night I knocked up a quick article called Hindsight is Always 20/20. The piece is intended to outline how experience really paves the way to understanding the Open Source community. I make this point by using myself as a case study of how not to do it. I am a firm believer that if you screw up you should take a step back, identify why you did it and poke fun at yourself. This article is a testament to that philosophy.

Tomorrow I head down to Bedford and then to London for the C|NET Technology Awards. I love awards. As you can imagine, I don’t wear a dinner jacket all that often, so its good fun to stick one on. Its going to be a nice swanky evening with a hotel in Mayfair, the awards on Park Lane and plenty of wine and good food. OpenAdvantage is up for most innovative Open Source project. Keep those fingers crossed…

Oh, and OSDir have asked me to submit my favourite less well-known applications. Go and check it out – I think this is updated over the coming weeks as I sent them five applications.

Posted on September 24, 2005 - by jono

I just wish it worked

The hectic week continues, and some good and bad things have happened. Being the optimist that I am, lets start with the bad thing. This specific bad thing lies in the form of pure, unadulterated incompetence from amazon.co.uk. Deep breath Jono…deep breath…

As many of you will be aware, I have an Amazon Wish List. Before I published the wish list, I wanted to double check that my address was correct as I had moved house. I logged into amazon.co.uk and there was only one link that had the word address in it. I clicked the Manage your address book link and there were two addresses there, my old address and my parent’s address. To be totally sure, I deleted both addresses and added my current address. I was now set, so I published my wish list and begged like a cheap tramp to readers of jonobacon.org for presents.

Some of you kind individuals were nice enough to buy some things from the list and I had a big grin on my face like some sort of idiot. A few days later nothing had arrived and I got an email from someone who bought something from the list saying that item was returned with an UNDELIVERABLE state. After poking around amazon.co.uk for ages trying to find a phone number, I eventually found one by going to Yell. I called them, explained the situation and the chap there called the Royal Mail to find out what was wrong. He called me back and shared the wonderful truth from the Royal Mail that it was delayed but they didn’t really know why. Thats right, the Royal Mail could not determine the progress of of one their own packages. Astonished, I wanted to call Royal Mail myself and give them a rollocking. The guy from Amazon said I could just quote the Amazon order number and they could track it. I called Royal Mail and discovered that the guy at Amazon was a total liar and you could not specify such a number. So, I rung back Amazon and spoke to someone else. He was unsure what the problem was and checked all of my account settings.

Here it gets juicy…prepare yourself. It seems that my old address was still the address for my wish list. My natural assumption that changing addresses in your address book will change…er…addresses, was obviously wrong. No, I needed to go into the address book, add the new address, and then go to my wish list, click on the tiny link about delivery options and then select the new address. This is totally, utterly, unforgivably unusable for three reasons:

• Why on earth do I need to go somewhere else to change wish list addresses? The term Management infers that the page will look after all processes relative to the subject in hand, in this case, addresses. [mentally hear the Family Fortunes uhh-errr! sound]
• If you do need to add this extra process for the wish list, why not at least inform the user that they should go to this separate page. There is simply no visibility for this process requirement. [uhh-errr!]
• How, in the name of buggery can an address that I deleted from the account still be valid for the wish list? Why on earth does the site not inform you that you are deleting an address used for your wish list? Wait for it…wait…[uhh-errr!]

To be fair to Amazon, they are generally pretty decent when it comes to usability, but this is a travesty of design. They could fix this problem by simply adding a link inside the address book management page with something like Make this my Wish List delivery address. They should also add error checking for when you delete the wish list address and when there is no address currently set.

I reported these concerns to the chap on the phone, but I will be very, very surprised if this gets fixed anytime soon. The result of this mess is that six wish list purchases were sent to my old address which in turn returned them to the sender. This means that everyone who purchased an item will need to re-purchase it when they get an email indicating that the item was undeliverable. Could anyone who purchased something from the list send me an email to indicate they bought something and what it was – I may be able to chase Amazon to send it to the right address.

In other news, I went out last night to see the superb Decapitated in Birmingham. Support included Gorerotted (awesome), Detonation (awesome) and another band that I think were called The Damned (pretty darned good). Great night!

This coming week is pretty busy. On Monday I am into work and doing a talk in Coventry to some students, then on Tuesday I drive to Bedford and jump on a train to London to attend the C|NET Awards. I then get the train back to Bedford on Wednesday morning, work there all day and then drive to Middlesex in the evening for a few beers with the IBM guys. Thursday I keynote at the IBM event then head back that evening to Bedford to get an early night before we jet off to Florida. Phew!

In a final bit of good news, there is a good likelihood that the XAMPP Control Panel will make it into the next official version of XAMPP. There are a few things to fix such as removing its GConf dependency and adding some better error checking, and Kai has implemented the statusraw feature in XAMPP to help the control panel better track the status of running components.

Posted on September 21, 2005 - by jono

Lots on

The WMITA talk yesterday went well and it was great to see such a positive reaction to Open Source. I am sure that I will be hearing from a number of the delegates in the coming months.

After the event in the morning, I headed back to Birmingham to have a birthday lunch with my colleagues at OpenAdvantage, and then headed back out to have a meeting with Andy from Project Splinescan. He is doing some utterly fantastic work with his 3D scanner, and the entire project is rooted in Open Source technology. Andy is also keen to hook his scanner up to Blender to make scanning objects into a Blender a piece of cake. I am going to try and secure some opportunities for him to further his efforts and research.

Last night I went to JB’s in Dudley with Sooz and a couple of guys in the band to see Nevermore and Dew Scented. Utterly, utterly brilliant bands, and Nevermore were as incredible as ever in their live performance. Superb gig.

This morning I had a conference call with IBM about the Developing Software for an Open Source Environment event that I am keynoting at. The event takes place on Thursday 29th September 2005 at IBM Bedfont Lakes, Feltham, Middlesex. It looks a pretty exciting agenda and I will also be chairing the panel discussion in which three iPod Nano prizes can be won. Be sure to go and register and come down to what promises to be a very interesting day.

Today we booked our EuroOSCON tickets, and I am looking forward to heading over there. It will be good to meet up with some other folks who are going, and I will see if I can drop in on the Blender guys to say hi. If you are going and fancy a beer, do let me know.

Oh, while I am here, I may as well formally introduce you to a little chap who will become the fourth member of Castle Bacon (ignore Sooz about this Castle Curtis-Bacon nonsense ):

His name is Frankie, and he is Banger’s new pal. He is currently about a month old and he is a chocolate tan mini dachshund. He will enter the Castle in about a month.

Posted on September 20, 2005 - by jono

Heck

Sheesh its early. I got up today at 5.20am to head over to a WMITA event to talk about Open Source and how it can help businesses. At the event I will be demoing XAMPP, Mambo/Joomla! and Wordpress on Windows. Windows is the chosen OS as most of the delegates will be Windows bods.

Well, it seems that Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org is doing well. After its appearance on Slashdot and and OSNews, the piece has gone on to inspire plenty of discussion, including in the article comments itself. Thanks so much to everyone who has commented, and also thanks to everyone to send me emails about the piece. I genuinely hope it can help bring some more people to the project.

Yesterday we had a meeting about some new events that we are running at OpenAdvantage. I will be doing some more PHP/MySQL courses, and I will also be doing a course about voice over IP. In terms of seminars, I also do a voice over IP seminar and interestingly, a seminar on usability and better web design. This usability seminar will talk about how Open Source software can inspire better design skills in both Open Source and proprietary applications. I suspect I will be using a certain bank’s online banking system as an example of bad design.

Got in last night, had a conference call with the other judges to decide the winners of the UK Linux and Open Source Awards 2005. I then used my fancy-schmancy-pants SIP phone to give a publisher in the US a call to discuss a new project. Finally, went to bed, watching a bit more of RAW and zonked out.

Right best leg it out to Stone for this talk…

Posted on September 18, 2005 - by jono

OpenOffice.org

Had a superb birthday yesterday; thanks for all of your birthday wishes. I am pleased to report that with the help of the bald, I got my SIP phone plugged in and working. It is all working a treat.

I have just written and released a new O’Reilly Weblog article entitled Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org. The aim of the article is to stress the sheer importance of OpenOffice.org for further adoption of Open Source on the desktop. The article also aims to encourage more contributors to OpenOffice.org and outline problems with the current release process; an issue which a number of developers take issue with. This article itself is an example of the intention of the piece – anyone can contribute to OpenOffice.org and my contribution was to write an article to raise awareness of these issues. I hope it helps – go and blog about it if you can. The more eyes on it might encourage more people to contribute.

Posted on September 17, 2005 - by jono

26 Today

Wow, 26 years old. This one crept around a bit quicker than usual; I think this happens when you start the process of old-fartification.

The mystery present from Sooz was a suberb VoIP phone. Sooz always gets me cool presents – I had not been asking for a VoIP phone, but she thought of it (not really knowing much about what VoIP is) with the help of a Ginger and Bald loving couple that I know of. Banger got me RAW by Eddie Murphy on DVD.

In an extra twist, it seems Sooz has booked a meeting with the new dog, Frankie, today at 11.30am. He is only three weeks old.

Thanks for the birthday wishes folks!

Posted on September 16, 2005 - by jono

Make it better

Kat, I do think formalised education does have a place, but I think your comments are really taking about the huge benefits of mentoring. I am a big fan of mentoring, and anyone who was lucky enough to have a good lecturer benefits greatly working with an inspirational teacher. My cynicism is that as university has become more accessible to more people, the quality has dropped in some parts of the country due to more students but not necessarily more lecturers. The point is that there are many great mentors available outside of a formalised university system. With Open Source every project has community leaders who act as informal mentors to enthusiastic newcomers to the project. My experience and contributions to Open Source were certainly not driven or propagated by university.

Today I cancelled my Live365 subscription. Their claims of CD quality only apply to a Windows only player that you download from their site. This is no good for me, and the player doesn’t run under Wine. After some googling it seems no Open Source implementation of the mp3pro codec is available. Then I thought, hang on…I haven’t used StreamTuner for a while, lets give that a go. I now remember why I thought it rocked so hard the last time. I choose StreamTuner over Live365. This picture will be perfect when StreamTuner is better integrated with Rhythmbox.

Its good to see The Orange Project getting going. I mailed Ton to see if there is anything I can help with. You can pre-order the DVD that will be released at the end of the project and the money from the pre-orders helps fund the project. I bought mine today. Go and buy yours as this is a really important project. The Orange Project is not only going to help refine and stress test Blender but it is also going to provide one hell of a showcase for computer graphics in Open Source. With all the work going on with PiTiVi, DIVA, Cinelerra, GIMP, Inkscape and more, multimedia is becoming a reality on Open Source systems.

I also sent a mail to Paul Davis, the guy behind Ardour to see if some usability comments and critique would be useful for him. Some of you may have read my article about Linux audio software usability (Linux and Audio Production: Simplicity Required). Although Ardour is not intended in the same way as the design for a tracker that Aq and I came up with, I think some simple usability love could be good for it. With Ardour 1.0 due in the next couple of months, focus will then switch to version 2.x which intends to port Ardour to GTK2. This is a great opportunity for some usability improvements. Even simple things such as dialog boxes could be greatly simplified.

Posted on September 15, 2005 - by jono

Can it be done?

Good night last night. Luckily woke up this morning without too much of a hangover. Props to Ron for a great talk about Asterisk.

Donald Norman speaks the truth. I am also getting a little tired of the fanfare pushed towards Google regarding usability. There is no doubt that Google were pioneers in providing a clutter-less interface to their primary service, but yes, it don’t take a genius to provide good usability for a single function.

Had a meeting today with a chap who has been forced to change careers due to a medical injury. He has had a keen interest in Open Source and he wants to turn his interest into a career. He came in today to get some advice about how to get started, and to explore ways in which we can help. I love cases like this. This guy is showing a keen interest and commitment to further his education and career, and Open Source provides a superb incubator for new skills. I always find it exciting what can be achieved with a motivated person, a computer, a net connection and some ideas. This is the very essence of Open Source. As some of you will know, I think this homegrown method of learning is in many ways, an improvement of the traditional University approach of learning skills relevant to the workplace. I do accept however that this probably only applies to highly motivated people. I suspect Johnny No Stars would have as rough a time at University as he would at home with a browser full of HOWTOs.

Today I was thinking about the structural limitations of usability for creative people. Most creative types think of computers as a tool to get the creative visions in their minds onto the screen and then onto a poster, flyer or other media. The problem with this approach is that the tool has no logic to improve the actual creative process that goes on in the brain. I am not suggesting we try to implement a fully autonomous creative computer, but I am curious to determine how much the tool could assist with the actual creative process as opposed to just copying the creative product from the mind to the computer. Hey, I know this is pretty abstract, but thats what happens in my had sometimes. I would love to hear what you all think. Can a tool understand how creativity works and help refine and improve that creativity?

After listening to Brutality Radio for a few years, I figured I should invest in a VIP account at Live365. Its nice having less ads, but the promised CD quality is bull – Brutality Radio still runs at FM quality. Some others claim CD quality, but I have my doubts. I am currently on a free trial, so if its crap I will cancel it.

Only two shopping days until the big day people! Get your derrieres over my wishlist and do your good deed for today. Go on, get over there…come on…quickly quickly…

Posted on September 14, 2005 - by jono

Writing

This morning I did a presentation about building dynamic websites with the LAMP platform. The seminar was well attended and the response was positive. We also managed to unload a load of Ubuntu Hoary CDs onto the unwitting delegates. One of the slides in the presentation also discussed XAMPP and it never ceases to stop astounding people. People dig the idea of XAMPP big time, and so they should.

As I am sure many of you are well aware, I tend to be quite busy most of the time. I like to keep myself occupied. Aside from general work and family/leisure commitments, I am also writing my book. The book writing time naturally impacts the time I have available to write other articles, and this has resulted in a backlog of ideas in my brain. O’Reilly and Linux User have successfully squeezed me for a couple of articles in the mean time, but my articles have dropped since I started on the book. This is frustrating. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing the book, but I really love writing articles too. I have a bunch of article ideas stacked up, and as many meatier blog articles too. I think that when the book is complete there will be a long and possibly violent brain dump on the Internet. I will try to warn you all to keep pets safely indoors when this happens.

Good to see some comments about the Microsoft usability. Thanks folks. It should be interesting to see what the final incarnation of Office will look like. It will be interesting to see if Windows Vista will be buffed to look more like Office or vice versa. I can’t believe that Microsoft are going to implement such a radically different UI for basic UI elements such as menus and toolbars. Given the amount of flak the Blender dudes get for having such a drastically different interface, I hope they are prepared for the onslaught.

Tonight is the traditional Wolves LUG big drinking night. About three years back there was one hell of a blow out around the time of my birthday that involved Aftershock, copious amounts of lager, Aq kissing Sparkes right on the smacker (ugh) and a vicious rumour beating Peter Oliver’s homepage in the Google search rankings. This meet and the Christmas bash have gone down in Wolves LUG legend as proper bo nights. Tonight is that night. Don’t expect much from Aq, Ade or myself tomorrow morning…

Posted on September 13, 2005 - by jono

Office 12 Usability

Seems to be an interesting day for usability. With the unveiling of the Office 12 interface, its balance of aesthetics and usability seems rather contrived. Taking a look at the shots, it seems like a step back in usability in some areas. Take a look at the following shot:

The first thing that strikes me is that the interface for Office seems radically different to other Windows applications. For a document centric application such as word to step away from established user interface elements, this will cite views of inconsistency in both Windows and Office. The other problem seems to be the visibility of the different zones in the application. When I was looking at the shots, the menus don’t appear very obvious at all. This then spurs your mind into asking where the menus live. To make matters worse, it seems that when you click on a menu option, a strange little orange coloured box pops up. As such, the menu stops becoming the traditional menu and instead becomes a this-looks-like-a-menu-but-works-slightly different menu. The only purpose of a menu is to provide a series of options to the user. I don’t see any radical usability benefits from the new design. Maybe the shots don’t transmit it sufficiently.

The file selector also seems interesting:

This seems to steal the VFS feature from the GNOME file picker, and it is also interesting to see the search box in there; a feature also coming to a GNOME VFS near you soon. The thing that first struck me about the file picker is just how complex it looks. I can imagine that a new user who is confronted with that lot when they just want to open/save a file will get quite lost.

I am really quite interested in giving Office 12 a whirl. It is good that MS are taking some interest in usability, but I am not convinced from the shots that this is for much more than marketing effect. Sometimes good design is achieved by leaving be those things that do actually work. Saying that however, it is good to see the bigger toolbars, less clutter and better visibility (such as toolbar naming) being rolled in.